Ebullient brightness permeates these pages, illuminating even the darkest corners. (Illustrations throughout)
The chief art critic for the New York Times offers an amiable, even breezy discussion the about the ways various artists transform their circumstances into works that can inform and enrich the rest of us.
Kimmelman’s overall take can be ascertained from the fact that beautiful is the second word in the first chapter, delicious the last one before the bibliography. Beauty and deliciousness fill the pages in between, as do numerous anecdotes about artists (noted and otherwise), descriptions and analyses of individual works, conversations with creators, bons mots and clichés, wisdom and waggery. Strolling through life and galleries with Kimmelman (Portraits, 1998) is a bit like an afternoon with a loquacious, jovial uncle whose ceaseless river of words doesn’t always feature fresh water. Still, the overall experience remains memorable. The author writes with consummate ease and lucidity about a world he knows intimately. He wants to show us that the struggles and obsessions of artists parallel our own—and that the glories they create can be ours both directly and vicariously. We hear about Bonnard’s long obsession with his model and lover, Marthe, and we’re invited to see that solitude and private passion can stimulate our own creativity. Kimmelman climbs two mountains and considers the experience only diverting, thus confirming his notion that, unlike our ancestors, we find it difficult to see the sublime in nature. He goes on to craft fine chapters about the art of photography; about a Baltimore dentist who collected 75,000 light bulbs, including some from the Enola Gay; about Jay DeFeo, who spent 11 years working on a single massive piece, The Rose; about the use of nudes. This latter chapter contains a terrific running account of Philip Pearlstein at work with his models. Kimmelman also takes us along on his personal pilgrimage to New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Texas to see large, site-specific works.
Ebullient brightness permeates these pages, illuminating even the darkest corners. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-055-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A succinct, passionate guide to fostering creativity.
A noted critic advises us to dance to the music of art.
Senior art critic at New York Magazine and winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, Saltz (Seeing Out Louder, 2009, etc.) became a writer only after a decadeslong battle with “demons who preached defeat.” Hoping to spare others the struggle that he experienced, he offers ebullient, practical, and wise counsel to those who wonder, “How can I be an artist?” and who “take that leap of faith to rise above the cacophony of external messages and internal fears.” In a slim volume profusely illustrated with works by a wide range of artists, Saltz encourages readers to think, work, and see like an artist. He urges would-be artists to hone their power of perception: “Looking hard isn’t just about looking long; it’s about allowing yourself to be rapt.” Looking hard yields rich sources of visual interest and also illuminates “the mysteries of your taste and eye.” The author urges artists to work consistently and early, “within the first two hours of the day,” before “the pesky demons of daily life” exert their negative influence. Thoughtful exercises underscore his assertions. To get readers thinking about genre and convention, for example, Saltz presents illustrations of nudes by artists including Goya, Matisse, Florine Stettheimer, and Manet. “Forget the subject matter,” he writes, “what is each of these paintings actually saying?” One exercise instructs readers to make a simple drawing and then remake it in an entirely different style: Egyptian, Chinese ink-drawing, cave painting, and the styles of other artists, like Keith Haring and Georgia O’Keeffe. Freely experiment with “different sizes, tools, materials, subjects, anything,” he writes. “Don’t resist something if you’re afraid it’s taking you far afield of your usual direction. That’s the wild animal in you, feeding.” Although much of his advice is pertinent to amateur artists, Saltz also rings in on how to navigate the art world, compose an artist’s statement, deal with rejection, find a community of artists, and beat back demons. Above all, he advises, “Work, Work, Work.”
A succinct, passionate guide to fostering creativity.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08646-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.
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. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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