A fine, if familiar, portrayal of a bold, vulnerable, questing artist.
Pablo Picasso’s artistic evolution culminated in one huge, irreverent, iconoclastic painting.
Economist contributor Unger (Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces, 2014, etc.), former managing editor of Art New England, focuses on Picasso’s masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to examine the artist’s early career. This period of Picasso’s life has been recounted in detail in memoirs (by his mistress Fernande Olivier, for example, and his friends André Salmon and Gertrude Stein), histories (Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years stands out), and biographies by art historians and scholars. Unger synthesizes this material into a graceful narrative but offers little new. He has uncovered, however, an unpleasant episode in Picasso’s life when he and Fernande adopted a 13-year-old orphan, perhaps because Fernande “thought that a child in their life would bring them closer together.” The project failed: after four months, it became clear that the girl’s presence “was putting unbearable strains on an already strained situation,” and the girl was sent back to the orphanage, escorted by their ever patient and loyal friend Max Jacob. Unger’s Picasso is intense, brilliant—exuding “a dangerous charisma”—and selfish: his ability to compartmentalize “often amounted to callousness, particularly when an emotional entanglement threatened to interfere with his work.” He was superstitious, seeing “magic in form and meaning in coincidence.” For Picasso, Unger asserts, “art was not primarily a visual language but a method of manipulating unseen forces. Cubism was an attempt to invest the image with a potency greater than mere illusion.” His belief in magical forces attracted him to African art, especially fetishes, and to “worn, rubbed, threadbare objects that carry the marks of human usage.” He was a hoarder, as well, and many of his “humble scraps” made their ways into his paintings and sculptures. Unger offers perceptive descriptions of many of Picasso’s major works, not least Les Demoiselles, a painting “too desperate, too restless, too multivalent, to serve as the manifesto of any movement.”
A fine, if familiar, portrayal of a bold, vulnerable, questing artist.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9421-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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