A rich trove of insights for art lovers of all stripes.
Final musings on mostly modern art by the prolific lion of American letters.
This posthumous collection of essays by Updike (Higher Gossip, 2011, etc.) has been gorgeously collected and edited by Carduff and elevated by reproductions of the artwork under review. The author was an infamous gallery-crawler with a sensitive eye for American art, and his scrupulous aestheticism is on full display here. The book opens with a sad preface in the wake of the author’s death in 2009; Updike offers a full and honest remembrance of a photo of himself reading a Mickey Mouse comic at the age of 9. What follows are 13 richly illustrated essays on various art exhibitions ranging from the opening salvo, “The Clarity of Things,” deconstructing the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Picturing America collection, to “The Art of our Disorder,” a look at a 2005 exhibition of American surrealists. But Updike reserves his most acute analysis for collections by individual artists, including Claude Monet, Joan Miró and others. These essays, like those in his earlier collections, Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), are incisive in their examinations of individual artwork but don’t carry the self-conscious or cynical air that accompanies much postmodern art criticism. One exemplary essay, “Degas Out-of-Doors,” takes the great French impressionist out of his traditional context: “His eccentric perspectives, his truncated compositions, his increasingly daring juxtapositions of color make us reflect, in modern style, upon the operations of perception—or, more precisely, upon the synthetic tensions that occur when a vision in three dimensions is reduced to a two-dimensional colored surface.” In “Bridges to the Invisible,” Updike delves into the New Objectivism of Max Beckmann, but also gives a rich description of descending into the Guggenheim’s Soho cousin, which inhabited a converted warehouse rather than its celebrated main emporium on the Upper East Side.
A rich trove of insights for art lovers of all stripes.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0307957306
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
An epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek.
With a hoarder’s zeal, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) collected objects he liked until shopping bags filled entire rooms of his New York town house. Rising to equal that, Gopnik’s dictionary-sized biography has more than 7,000 endnotes in its e-book edition and drew on some 100,000 documents, including datebooks, tax returns, and letters to lovers and dealers. With the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the author serves up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol’s life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist’s influences and techniques. Warhol exploded into view in his mid-40s with his pop art paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silkscreens of Elvis and Marilyn. However, fame didn’t banish lifelong anxieties heightened by an assassination attempt that left him so fearful he bought bulletproof eyeglasses. After the pop successes, Gopnik writes, Warhol’s life was shaped by a consuming desire “to climb back onto that cutting edge,” which led him to make experimental films, launch Interview magazine, and promote the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Warhol yearned “for fine, old-fashioned love and coupledom,” a desire thwarted by his shyness and his awkward stance toward his sexuality—“almost but never quite out,” as Gopnik puts it. Although insightful in its interpretations of Warhol’s art, this biography is sure to make waves with its easily challenged claims that Warhol revealed himself early on “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before” and that he and Picasso may now occupy “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.” Any controversy will certainly befit a lodestar of 20th-century art who believed that “you weren’t doing much of anything as an artist if you weren’t questioning the most fundamental tenets of what art is and what artists can do.”
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-229839-3
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.
A Los Angeles–based photographer pays tribute to a legendary musician with anecdotes and previously unseen images collected from their 25-year collaboration.
St. Nicholas (co-author: Whitney: Tribute to an Icon, 2012, etc.) first met Prince in 1991 at a prearranged photo shoot. “The dance between photographer and subject carried us away into hours of inspired photographs…and the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime.” In this book, the author fondly remembers their many professional encounters in the 25 years that followed. Many would be portrait sessions but done on impulse, like those in a burned-out Los Angeles building in 1994 and on the Charles Bridge in Prague in 2007. Both times, the author and Prince came together through serendipity to create playfully expressive images that came to represent the singer’s “unorthodox ability to truly live life in the moment.” Other encounters took place while Prince was performing at Paisley Park, his Minneapolis studio, or at venues in LA, New York, Tokyo, and London. One in particular came about after the 1991 release of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls album and led to the start of St. Nicholas’ career as a video director. Prince, who nurtured young artists throughout his career, pushed the author to “trust my instincts…expand myself creatively.” What is most striking about even the most intimate of these photographs—even those shot with Mayte Garcia, the fan-turned–backup dancer who became Prince’s wife in 1996—is the brilliantly theatrical quality of the images. As the author observes, the singer was never not the self-conscious artist: “Prince was Prince 24/7.” Nostalgic and reverential, this book—the second St. Nicholas produced with/for Prince—is a celebration of friendship and artistry. Prince fans are sure to appreciate the book, and those interested in art photography will also find the collection highly appealing.
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293923-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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