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IN SEARCH OF GAUGUIN

Moving and enlightening.

Tracing the world’s most famous midlife crisis.

Paul Gauguin’s self-imposed exile from France to Tahiti is one of the more celebrated events in the history of art. French travel writer and journalist Coatalem follows the artist’s footsteps from his childhood voyage to Peru through his career in Brittany, Paris and two separate residences in French Polynesia. The author’s purchase of a vintage photograph, probably owned by Gauguin, was the spur for the search, and the book is essentially Coatalem’s journal. Gauguin’s paintings are like living beings to the author, and he conveys their mystical qualities so much better than he is able to do for the artist, who from his own letters, comes across as unpleasant and unreliable (in particular regarding his Danish wife, who Went Home to Mother with the children). Coatalem’s accounts are vivid when he describing his own on-site research, less when he’s conveying the facts of Gauguin’s life. The narrative truly blossoms when he arrives in Tahiti, where he spent part of his childhood. By conjuring up his own memories, he relays the islands through Gauguin’s eyes and elevates our own understanding of what this Westerner encountered when he arrived. Coatalem maps out the sites of Gauguin’s paintings, reads his letters at the Gauguin Museum and effectively conveys the influence his abject poverty had on his extraordinarily searching late Polynesian works after Gauguin moved to Hiva Oa, a distant island. While the last years of Gauguin’s life produced masterpieces (illustrations of which are few), they began with a failed attempt to raise money by an auction of his newly popular paintings (which took place in Paris on a day in 1895 that was a political and emotional equivalent of September 12, 2001), and ended in a morphine-hazed gangrenous pain as he was shunned by almost everyone. Coatalem ends with a visit to the artist’s now-overgrown plot of land, a look at items dredged up from his well, where they were thrown after his demise, and finally a dawn visit to Gauguin’s grave.

Moving and enlightening.

Pub Date: June 15, 2005

ISBN: 0-297-82968-8

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005

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INSIDE THE DREAM PALACE

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF NEW YORK'S LEGENDARY CHELSEA HOTEL

A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.

A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.

Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.

A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.

Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013

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HUMANS OF NEW YORK

STORIES

A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.

Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.

Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.

A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.

Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4

Page Count: 432

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015

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