Two dogged essays (one not previously published) on the illustration of text and the appearance of script within images, by the late, seminal art historian. Focusing on images from late antiquity to the 18th century, ``Words and Pictures'' challenges the notion that illustrations were fixed mirrors for the stories they sought to elucidate. While an artist might not even read the story but rather copy an existing illustration of the passage, Schapiro points out that images were often altered due to the ``changes in meaning of a text'' and ``the changes in style of representation.'' Moreover, the terrain between the metaphorical and literal has always been fluid. To support his discussion, he dissects various biblical passages and their corresponding images to outline the shifting set of historical factors that lead to the production of any image. In ``Script in Pictures,'' Schapiro turns his attention to actual text, from signs of speech to the artist's signature, within the frame—the way script disrupts the picture's grid of perspective and how various artists have dealt with the issue. The device of inverting text for a viewer within the painting had been around for centuries but was used self-consciously by both Goya and Manet. Ultimately, text in the form of newspaper clippings appeared in Cubist paintings without any heed at all to perspective, and in our own era script became an ``object of art in itself'' in the work of conceptual artists. Schapiro's writing is focused and thorough but also broad- minded, and the concepts in these essays could easily be applied to the study of contemporary media, ranging from the news to feature films. (85 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8076-1416-5
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
Categories: ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
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A quiet meditation on art and life.
Matar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Return (2016), was about his Libyan father who was kidnapped in Cairo and taken back, imprisoned, and “gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish.” His father’s presence reverberates throughout this thoughtful, sensitive extended essay about the author’s visit to Siena, where he ruminates and reflects on paintings, faith, love, and his wife, Diana. Matar focuses on the 13th- to 15th-century Sienese School of paintings which “stood alone, neither Byzantine nor of the Renaissance, an anomaly between chapters, like the orchestra tuning its strings in the interval,” but he discusses others as well. First, he explores the town, “as intimate as a locket you could wear around your neck and yet as complex as a maze.” Day or night, the “city seemed to be the one determining the pace and direction of my walks.” In the Palazzo Pubblico, Matar scrutinized a series of frescos the “size of a tennis court” painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. As the author writes, his Allegory of Good Government is a “hymn to justice.” Matar astutely describes it in great detail, as he does with all the paintings he viewed. When one is in a despondent mood, paintings, Matar writes, seem to “articulate a feeling of hope.” He also visited a vast cemetery, a “glimpse [of] death’s endless appetite.” Over the month, he talked with a variety of Sienese people, including a Jordanian man whom he befriended. One by one, paintings flow by: Caravaggio’s “curiously tragic” David With the Head of Goliath, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “epic altarpiece,” Maestà. Mounted onto a cart in 1311, it was paraded through Siena. Along the way, Matar also ponders the metaphysics of rooms and offers a luminous, historical assessment of the Black Death.
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-12913-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
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American Lawyer deputy editor Anderson chronicles the legal contests over the administration of America’s largest private art collection.
The author begins with a fair portrait of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, amasser of the famous Barnes Collection and creator of the eponymous foundation charged with its preservation. Barnes received his medical degree at 20 and went on to wrest control of a pharmaceutical company that owned exclusive rights to manufacture an internationally prescribed gonorrhea medicine. (His signature style throughout his life was to hire first-rate legal counsel and pursue his litigious course until he got what he wanted.) Barnes’s fortune, preserved through the Depression, permitted the assembly of a fabulous collection that included 180 Renoirs; it’s currently valued at six billion dollars. Just before his death in 1951, the doctor changed the terms of the foundation’s indenture, granting control to the trustees of Lincoln College, the oldest black college in America, setting the stage for a long round of disputes. While the collection gained tremendously in value over the next four decades, the size of the endowment that paid for the upkeep of the French Renaissance palace that housed it dwindled through mismanagement. In the 1990s, foundation president Richard H. Glanton, a high-profile African-American lawyer, oversaw the galleries’ renovation and undertook the expensive litigation responsible for bringing the foundation to the edge of ruin. Anderson describes these conflicts in a work that by his own admission is “a legal tale” rather than a scholarly biography or a work of art history. The absence of footnotes, he explains, springs from the desire of his best sources to remain anonymous. That’s not surprising, considering the rancor all this legal wrangling has generated, including a lawsuit over a parking lot instituted in federal court that invoked the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Clear journalistic prose makes sense of the befuddling legal entanglements in an ongoing battle that has become notorious in the art world and beyond. (16 illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-04889-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
Categories: ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
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