Featuring wonderful illustrations, engaging prose, and a deep knowledge of the craft, this is a study in art history and...
A painter of still life and landscape shares her theories and re-creations of Johannes Vermeer’s artistic methods, primarily whether or not he used a camera obscura.
Vermeer’s paintings have been meticulously studied and analyzed with inconclusive results; facts about Vermeer the man are equally elusive. The lack of information about the man of Delft who lived in his mother-in-law’s house with his wife and more than a dozen children might indicate a man of little import. However, his work was appreciated during his (relatively short) life; only hard economic times dried up his customer base. Any artist will love this book because it shows that art is not just the process of putting paint on a surface. Vermeer used many steps to ready his canvas, from hemming the linen to sizing, stretching, smoothing, and priming, followed by a three-month drying period before creating an image. Grinding paints from natural materials and making only enough for a day’s painting before they dried up further elongated the process. The author is justifiably enthralled with Vermeer’s ability to capture light, how he draws us in to the action, as well as his perfection of composition. Most curiously, there appears to be no drawing in his paintings, only his tonal plan that constituted the “inventing” of the subject. Thus, the possibility of Vermeer using a lens or a camera obscura develops. The projected image would have been perfect to create the tonal makeup that every picture requires. Jelley makes a convincing case that this was only the first step in his creation, and his glazing of multiple colors atop the tonal invention makes perfect sense. The debate will continue, but the more we learn of Vermeer’s masterful use of color and light, the more we can love them.
Featuring wonderful illustrations, engaging prose, and a deep knowledge of the craft, this is a study in art history and methodology to delight an audience beyond just visual artists.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-878972-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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