The charisma that charged Schapiro's (Words, Scripts, and Pictures, 1996, etc.) legendary lectures on art history unfortunately doesn't translate to these expanded but cardboard- textured essays about Impressionism. A scholar's scholar, Schapiro (190496) applied himself to all possible angles and gradations of the subject of Impressionism, including different elements of subject matter (the city, nature, portraiture), different disciplines (science, history, literature), as well as the overall historical matrix that spawned the new artistic vision. ``Impression'' had already been a buzzword in the French press and culture in the 19th century; Impressionniste was coined by a writer who extrapolated the adjective from Impression Sunrise, one of Monet's paintings. Although science was still at odds with Impressionism's ideas about perception, which favored sensations over objects, the moment had arrived for subjectivity to saturate representation, supplanting the ``then-current official taste for history, myth, and imagined worlds.'' A number of painters shared the ideas and formal aspirations of Impressionism, but Schapiro elevates Monet above the rest for his innovation, impressionability, and versatility, and devotes a lengthy chapter to him. While Schapiro is thorough (the book can't be blamed for overlooking anything), he's rarely exciting—only a little verve might have served to better illuminate what was, after all, a pivotal moment in art history and the foundation of Modernism. Tentative in tone and slow in transition, these essays are, sadly, pale remnants of a great mind and an illustrious scholar. (100 color plates, 38 black and white illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1997
ISBN: 0-8076-1420-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
A vital, visually stunning photographic volume.
A conservationist and art photographer explores the erotic aspects of trees.
For more than 20 years, Arbor has been creating intimate photos of trees and people together. The humans, which include herself and others, are nearly always nude, and the folds and curves of their bodies harmonize with the sinew of the trees. In one, the author prostrates herself, as if on an altar, along a platform at the base of a 285-foot mountain ash; in others, she reclines on a willow that appears as though it’s bending to drink at a nearby pool or nestles in the crook of a windblown Cyprus, the curve of her back in perfect accord with the outermost bough’s lurch to the left. In one black-and-white photo, she molds herself to the basal furl of an enormous fig tree, pressing her palms and her cheek against its bark, looking like something from the pages of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. “For tens of thousands of years,” she writes, “people took refuge under trees, held council under trees, and depended upon trees for survival.” Indeed, from even earlier. Anyone perusing Arbor’s book can’t help but feel eerily reminded of humanity’s distant ancestors—the earliest hominids—and how some of them would have lived nearly their whole lives in the vanished oaks and beeches of the Pliocene (“we lived in kinship with them,” she achingly writes of that forgotten past). Sometimes the models’ fetal poses in the trees drift toward the sentimental, à la Anne Geddes’ work, and some readers may be amused by the fact that sometimes the models are difficult to locate, bringing to mind Where’s Waldo? But such levity isn’t unwelcome, and it serves only to intensify the fact that humans can appear eerily camouflaged in nature. Fortunately, Arbor has a remarkable eye for how light and shadow shape the viewer’s experience of texture, and some pictures are every bit as powerful and haunting as Edward Weston’s images of bell peppers—or, for that matter, of trees. Forest giants from Tasmania to South Africa to Anatolia have never seemed so alive.
A vital, visually stunning photographic volume.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-72604-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: TreeGirl Studios LLC
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dead white male George Santayana finds himself quoted more than once in this comprehensive record of feminist art and politics since the '70s. Painfully aware that feminism as an idea has arisen periodically since the Middle Ages but has until now never managed to last for more than a generation, the authors hope that, armed with a knowledge of feminist ``herstory,'' future artists will expand on rather than repeat the work of their predecessors. Representing a wide spectrum of feminist artists and thinkers, the 18 contributors to this impressive historical reference book include prominent women such as art historians Linda Nochlin and Arlene Raven and painter Miriam Schapiro. The book, edited by Broude and Garrard (both Art History/American Univ.), covers both art and politics, discussing such internationally famous projects as the CalArts student installation Womanhouse, as well as the contemporary activist groups WAC (the Women's Action Coalition) and the Guerrilla Girls. The authors analyze art ranging from Judy Chicago's ``central core'' imagery to lesbian performance pieces, ``great goddess'' imagery, and the pattern and decoration movement. (Le Corbusier once stated, ``There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art at the bottom, human form at the top. Because we are men.'') While the work represented here varies greatly in content and quality, all of it stems from what the artists often describe as ``coming to consciousness'' about their oppressed condition. For some artists this seems to have been a powerful, almost ``born again'' experience; for others it was a gradual reorientation of perspective. As this book makes clear, the collective impact of feminist thought on contemporary society has also been significant- -in the early '70s, young art historians studying past women artists discovered that slides of their work did not even exist. However, discrimination still exists: As the Guerrilla Girls' posters reproduced here show, despite a roughly equal gender mix in art schools over the past 20 years, most major galleries still show mostly men. Essential reading for any woman in the arts. (245 illustrations, 118 in color)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8109-3732-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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