Thoughtful, incisive perspectives.
A clear eye on contemporary arts.
Selected and introduced by Schambelan, this collection gathers nearly 70 essays by award-winning novelist and cultural critic Tillman, embracing her wide-ranging interests in the arts from 1973 to 2025. Visual art, film, literature, and pop culture all come within her purview; her subjects include artists Etel Adnan, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Anderson, Hilary Harkness, and Andy Warhol; writers Jane Bowles, Dennis Cooper, Craig Owens, and Gertrude Stein; and filmmakers Clint Eastwood and Chantal Akerman. Tillman’s “Homage to Homage” reflects some recurring themes: “modernism, abstraction, appropriation, and freedom,” and how “nationality, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender influence and shape behavior, rights, and possibilities—the futures for bodies.” While keeping her focus on art and artists, she reveals autobiographical details: her childhood obsession with Marilyn Monroe, growing up the youngest of three sisters with a “not quite a good-enough mother,” her father’s death, and a teaching stint in England. Her voice throughout is cool and limpid; Schambelan describes that detachment as a “stylistic signature of critical distance,” consistent whether she’s writing about natural disasters, drone strikes, or mass shootings. Although the volume is appended with a bibliography of essays, providing the years and outlets where the pieces were published, it would have been helpful if the provenance had been indicated throughout. Schambelan notes that Tillman called her essays “occasional pieces”—that is, “works of criticism undertaken in and for an occasion, a moment. They’re compositions in time—this time, now. But they bespeak awareness that now becomes then at every instant, and that history is ephemeral and fungible.”
Thoughtful, incisive perspectives.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781644231746
Page Count: 480
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.
Celebrating a beloved artist.
Published to coincide with a major exhibition of works by British-born artist David Hockney (b. 1937) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, this lushly illustrated volume offers a detailed overview of the artist’s life and work, along with chapters focused on his various styles and subject matter, a chronology, and a glossary of the many techniques he employed in his art, including camera lucida, computer, and video. Contributors of essays include noted art historians and curators, such as Norman Rosenthal, who edited the volume; Simon Schama; Anne Lyles; James Cahill; and François Michaud. Growing up in the north of England, Hockney was drawn to the light and sparkle that he found in Hollywood movies. When he finally arrived in Los Angeles, the sunlit landscapes inspired him, and his new sense of artistic freedom concurred with sexual freedom: As a gay man, he felt liberated from the constraints that had weighed on him in Britain, even in the “relative Bohemia” of the Royal College of Art. Essayists reflect on his artistic interests, such as landscapes, portraiture, flowers, and the opera—for which he created boldly exuberant sets—as well as on his influences and experimentation. Michaud examines the impact on Hockney of a visit to Paris in the 1970s, where he became familiar with Henri Matisse and his contemporaries from museum exhibitions. In the 1990s, visiting his mother and friends in Yorkshire, Hockney painted both outdoors and in the studio, experimenting with various media—including the photocopier and fax machine—as he worked to render the woodsy landscape. As a companion to the exhibition, the volume offers stunning reproductions of Hockney’s prolific works. Enormously popular with museumgoers, Hockney, Rosenthal exults, “transforms the ordinary and the everyday into the remarkable.”
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780500029527
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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