Even those who don’t especially care for Benton’s work might agree that an artist whose work is so enduringly popular merits...
Judgmental biography of the controversial American painter.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) was controversial because he was a realist in an age when artists and curators, though not necessarily the general public, considered abstraction the most advanced, exciting form of art. He also vigorously defended himself and fellow regionalists like his friend Grant Wood by attacking the elitist art world in terms that even at the time were judged homophobic and jingoistic. Yet, as Wolff (Art History/Univ. of Maine; Richard Caton Woodville, 2002) demonstrates, Benton was no ignorant philistine. Born into a prominent Missouri political family, he studied in Paris, was affiliated (albeit uneasily) with Alfred Stieglitz’s circle in New York and grappled for many years with abstraction before turning to the muscular, writhing figures that impart dynamism—and occasionally stereotypes—to such famous murals as The Arts of Life in America and A Social History of the State of Missouri. Benton’s best work did not airbrush American history; he had read Marx in his youth and remained influenced by Marxist analysis long after he turned to the right politically. In the 1930s, when he was at the height of his fame, his art and opinions fit comfortably under the umbrella of New Deal liberalism. Wolff does a decent job of explicating Benton’s belief that art had a public purpose and should be accessible to the common people, but his distaste for the vast majority of the artist’s work is so plain that readers may wonder why he chose to write this biography—particularly after reading the final chapter’s closing lines, in which the author speculates on what this convinced realist might have achieved as an abstract painter. It’s jarring, as is Wolff’s habit of jumping decades ahead in chronology within a single paragraph.
Even those who don’t especially care for Benton’s work might agree that an artist whose work is so enduringly popular merits a more sympathetic assessment.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-19987-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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