As a painter, abstract expressionist Schueler fought to translate his vision to canvas; as a writer, he struggled just as hard to describe the difficulty of leading a creative life. A newcomer who quickly found his way into the center of the prevailing art scene in the 1950s, Schueler began his career in the shadow of such artists as Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. Years younger than those first-generation abstract expressionists, however, he had to fight to assert his place in the pantheon. It was a fight that drained him, and as much as he longed to be in the midst of “the glory,” he also longed to escape it. This volume, a collection of the artist’s letters and journal entries, begins with his decision to leave New York in search of a landscape that would inform his work; under the quick-changing skies of Mallaig, Scotland, he found it. The wild, stormy weather of Scotland’s West Coast mirrored his own emotional struggle: insecure and ambitious, driven and desiring, Schueler ricocheted between countries, dealers, and women. Judging by this book, the greatest constant in his life was his devotion to his art, and his book reflects his dedication to it with a loose, engaging fluency. He was a fearless documentarian, and The Sound of Sleat fascinates—not only for its studio-eye view of the epochal New York art scene of the ’50s and ’60s, but also for its archetypal quality. Schueler was nothing if not self-aware, and in spite of occasional self-aggrandizing, he had a very clear understanding of the cost of leading a creative life. Although he suffered greatly for his art—and put the women who loved him though hell—his story remains oddly uplifting; he chose to live as close to his dream as possible. An insider’s outsider, Schueler had a unique perspective on the raging art world of the ’50s and ’60s; his book is both a personal testament and a riveting account of American painting at that time. (16 pages color, 32 b&w photos)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20015-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
A lively essay in cultural geography that delves into the question of how tourist attractions are invented and sold. There’s something about the phenomenon of “rubbernecking,” scorned by literary travel writers, that appeals to art critic Lippard (The Lure of the Local, 1997); rubbernecking, the evil opposite of sophisticated travel, “implies a willingness or desire on the part of the tourist to stretch, literally, past her own experience, to lean forward in anticipation, engagement, amazement, or horror.” Amazement and horror are key words, for, Lippard continues, domestic tourists like nothing quite so much as to visit the sites of massacres or bloody battles, to say nothing of strip mines, Wild West cemeteries, alligator farms, and other monuments to violence and mayhem. They come to the west, Lippard writes with inspired overstatement, “looking for places destroyed by shifting economies: Indian ruins, ghost towns, abandoned farms, deserted mines, and nineteenth-century spaces frozen in the governmentally managed wildernesses”; they go (or went, before the cleanup) to New York to gawk at the city’s bad seed in Times Square; they go to popular museums across the land to take in weird dioramas and improbable interpretations of history. Lippard gets a little scattershot at times, spending much of her narrative on performance and plastic art that few domestic tourists would ever care to see; but she has a fine, irreverent style and an eye for the bizarre, complemented by dozens of well-chosen photographs to back her points. Above all, she has fun with her subject, as when she writes of an Armageddon theme park now under construction outside Tel Aviv and slated to be finished in 2000. The park, she says, “is aimed at fundamentalist Christians who believe Christ will arrive for his second coming in the year 2007—a lot of work for a park that will last only seven years.” Lippard’s leisurely stroll through some of the wackier venues of our day makes for enjoyable reading.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56584-454-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Massive, admiring biography of the controversial American sculptor of, among other works, Oscar Wilde's tomb; the W.H. Hudson Memorial in London; and figures of Churchill, Nehru, H.G. Wells, et al. Gardiner (Le Corbusier, 1988—not reviewed) knew Epstein, as well as his family, and has had access to his subject's archive. Born in 1880 to Jewish immigrant parents on New York's Lower East Side, Jacob Epstein manifested unusual talent as a youth, producing precociously accomplished sketches of his neighbors while in his early teenage years. As a young man, he studied in Paris, where Modigliani, Utrillo, and Brancusi numbered among his acquaintances. Concerned that he might be corrupted by Montparnasse bohemianism, however, he crossed the Channel to London, where, contentious and abrasively self-assured, he made powerful enemies even as he attracted commissions—as well as influential patrons. Epstein married a Scotswoman of extraordinary tolerance: During their 40-year marriage, the artist fathered five children by various mistresses, and, always on the brink of a poverty created mostly by his freewheeling ways, he never hesitated to dun friends and patrons for money. During WW I, he pulled every string to avoid military service; later, as the fascists became more vocal, he was targeted for anti-Semitic remarks. Nonetheless, his reputation grew, and he was sought after for important commissions until his death in 1959. Here, Gardiner, while not overlooking Epstein's character flaws, seeks to excuse them throughout—explaining the sculptor's endemic ingratitude, for instance, by stating that Epstein ``hadn't time for conventional pleasantries.'' Overall, though, Gardiner's efforts to soften the outlines of Epstein's bristly personality are unconvincing: The sculptor comes off as a gifted but exceptionally unpleasant figure. Hagiographic but largely disappointing. (Thirty-three pages of b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-670-81558-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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