Someone, at some time, must have told Berger he was sensitive. Now in this latest collection of the British critic/novelist's essays, poems, tales and reminiscences, readers are being forced to pay the price for that misdirected compliment. No subject, it seems, from peasants' eating habits to the rumpled sheet in a Frans Hals painting is safe from Berger's "sensitivity." He is like the unwanted dinner partner, secure in the murky subtleties of his own perceptions, while we try to catch the host's eye in a desperate plea for relief. The "host" in this case is Spencer, but expect no relief from him; he finds Berger's "concentration. . .a kind of instantaneous instruction." Never has "instantaneous instruction" (whatever it may be) been so muddled, so inconsequential, so long-winded. After 10 years as art critic of the New Statesman, Berger left England in the 1960's and settled in a small French Alpine village. Many of the pieces here concern their lives and Berger's tortured analyses of their thoughts and emotions. All his perceptions have a strongly Marxist slant and rely on fairly formulaic leftist principles. In this area, Berger also recounts meetings with a number of his socialist confreres, most from Eastern Europe, most little known. In between, the reader is treated to a few poems, a dissertation on Berger's reactions to his father's death, a critique of the works of Garcia Marquez, among other topics. All are needlessly opaque. The miasma clears somewhat when Berger turns his attention to the world of art. His essay on the sadness inherent in Monet's Impressionism and his speculations on Goya's reasons for painting the nude Maja are of passing interest. Too, his treatment of Cubism, its origins and objectives, one of the longer pieces in the book, is coherent and sometimes even perceptive. The occasional pleasures to be found in The Sense of Sight cannot, however, outweigh the tedium and air of self-congratulation to be found on almost every page.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1985
ISBN: 0679737227
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1985
A brisk and intriguing, if rather slight, tale of art-world skulduggery before the Iron Curtain was brought down. Under Stalin, any artist who challenged the prevailing Socialist Realist orthodoxy guaranteed himself a bleak and brutally foreshortened future. Under the equally philistine Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes, however, while abstractionists and other "deviationists" remained subject to the constantly refined black arts of harassment, the Gulag and the bullet in the back of the head became increasingly remote prospects. This relative relaxation bred an initially cautious, then increasingly confident, artistic subculture of satirists, pop artists, and other "parasites." The gradual awareness of artists like Evgeny Rukhin and Vasily Sitnikov in the West owed much to the covert activities of an unlikely hero, Univ. of Maryland economics professor Norton Dodge. Over the course of three decades and some 20 visits to the USSR beginning in the early 1950s, Dodge, first under academic cover and later going AWOL from tour groups, sought out the artistic pariahs. He acquired and smuggled out a collection of dissident art now valued at several million dollars. Dodge's success was spectacular; his motives and methods were mysterious; and his personality was pleasingly eccentric. (Though he stalked the back streets of Leningrad and Kiev, according to his wife, "he couldn't find his way out of St. Louis airport.") McPhee (Assembling California, 1993, etc.) paints his protagonist and the artists themselves — a colorful, vodka-guzzling crew to a man (and very occasional woman) — with enthusiasm and brings to the telling his customary conversational style and alert reporter's eye. However, the anecdotal tone and McPhee's tendency to dwell on personalities rather than on the artworks themselves, ultimately gives this more the air of an overgrown magazine piece than a full-fledged book. A picturesque ramble through the margins of the Cold War.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-24682-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Before Toni Frissell (190788) became the first woman staff photographer for Sports Illustrated (which was long before the first swimsuit issue), she had already revolutionized fashion photography by shooting models outdoors for such magazines as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. She'd also followed American troops through Europe in WW II, slogging through the mud and having her jeep hit by shell fragments. In addition to her mother's fashion and war photos, Stafford includes a lot of portraits of the rich and famous—a pensive, liver-spotted Konrad Adenauer; a glowering Churchill; a cocky young Kirk Douglas; William Styron sitting in a graveyard; JFK and Jacqueline Bouvier (who edited the book, and to whom it is dedicated) at their wedding. There are also some standard photojournalism shots chronicling black life in the South at the beginning of the civil rights movement. By far the most lively pictures, however, fall under the heading, ``Sport.'' Sport, in this case, might as well be a patrician synonym for hunting. Frissell's shots of horses, hunters at rest, and the eager snouts of hounds suggest that in hunting she found one of the few social activities that sanctioned the kind of avidness she brought to her work behind the lens. (First serial to Town and Country)
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47188-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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