Assiduous research underlies a text that will appeal principally to art historians and devotees of Asian art.
Two journalists explore the allure of Asian art for museum directors, collectors, archaeologists and others.
World Policy Journal editor Meyer and documentary producer Brysac have collaborated before (Kingmakers: The Invention of the Middle East, 2008, etc.). Here, they shift their focus to the Far East to pursue a story they stumbled across in the archives at Harvard University. Their discovery of some key letters propelled them into a scholar’s adventure—visits to libraries, museums, archives and relevant sites—and the result is a well-organized, if sometimes-dense, description of a passion shared by some fascinating figures throughout the past century. Some of the names are well-known (J. Pierpont Morgan, Joseph Alsop and Avery Brundage, for example), but others will be familiar only to art historians—e.g., Laurence Sickman, Denman Ross, Charles Lang Freer, George Crofts and Alan Priest. The authors float along on a fairly steady chronological stream, although they sometimes pause for some back story and context (we learn about the Manchus’ sumptuary laws, for example). They also consider the moral and ethical aspects of the removing-art-from-China enterprise. (Lord Elgin emerges as a touchstone.) It’s the old debate: Is it better to remove treasures from an unstable society and deny them to looters or leave them to face an uncertain, and probably dire, fate? Some of the authors’ collectors embraced the latter position, but most did not. The authors also explore various varieties of art—bronze works, sculpture, porcelain and paintings. We learn some personal tidbits about some of the principals, as well. Sickman (of Harvard’s Fogg Museum) collected first editions of Charles Dickens’ works; Lucy Calhoun, wife of William James Calhoun (envoy to China), was the sister of Poetry Magazine’s Harriet Monroe.
Assiduous research underlies a text that will appeal principally to art historians and devotees of Asian art.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-137-27976-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Popular greeting-card illustrator Stine (Off to Sea, not reviewed) showcases his seductive full-color drawings and pithy texts, which give the subject of metaphysical angst in the '90s a decidedly mass-market spin. Stine's graphically striking style represents an eclectic inventory of au courant illustration techniques: meticulous and mellifluous inked line, scratchy pencil line, scumbled painted backgrounds, pasty pastel surfaces, complex webs of crosshatching, digitized computer imagery, photocopied pictorial manipulations, collage, and photo montage. Augmenting this are hand-lettered and typeset texts, which run the gamut from simple caption to poetic truism to diaristic vignette. The cover illustration sets the book's tone. In it, a thin male figure—presumably Stine—teeters atop a spirelike mountain, reaching for a single white star against a wash of azure sky. Inside, in ``Face to Face With The Second Step,'' a black dog rests on the step of an oversize blue geometric staircase, its panting red tongue playfully activating the composition. In many inclusions, lone figures are placed in psychologically charged landscapes, facing floating hearts that seem to represent love, hope, and loss. Texts—such as ``Even Lies Are Part of The Truth''—accompany some of the art. Occasionally Stine speaks of his own life: ``I think the next phase...is going to be the poet phase.'' Like illustrators Saul Steinberg, Robert Osborn, and Ralph Steadman before him, Stine has freely borrowed from the conventions of contemporary art to bring a level of perceived seriousness to his work. The plates have the look of greeting cards designed for yet-unnamed existentialist holidays. Poetic, pained, at times downright sappy, Stine's visual candy goes for the consumer jugular. Casting himself as a sensitive hero, he comes across like ``Jonathan Livingston Illustrator.'' (Book-of- the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1994
ISBN: 1-55670-375-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
Gauguin may have been guilty of buying into the myth of the ``noble savage,'' but his Romantic quest seems almost contemporary today. In his own post-Rousseau, premulticultural time, however, his Tahitian escapade was viewed less sanguinely. On his return to France, unable to find a publisher, Gauguin himself published his diary, Noa Noa, minus the accompanying woodblock illustrations. Now the journal and art are reunited in this verbal and visual ode to Tahiti. The black-and-white woodblock prints present a spare contrast to the usual wash of colors in Gauguin's paintings, but they retain the pacific sensuality that permeates his work. The color here comes from the sketches Gauguin made in the margins of his diary, and from the writing itself: ``Silence? I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.... The rays of the moon play through the bamboo reeds.... Between me and the sky there was nothing except the high frail roof of pandanus leaves, where the lizards have their nests.''
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0366-X
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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