A well-informed, spirited cultural history.
The shock of the new.
Art historian Falconer charts the atmosphere of disillusion, anger, and restlessness that gave rise to avant-garde art, disparate movements that swept across Europe and Russia, beginning around 1910 and continuing for decades. Futurists, Dadists, Surrealists, Russian constructivists, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Situationists were bound together by their rebellion against the academy as gatekeepers for artists and against stultifying bourgeois values. They were intent on creating shocking, disorienting works “that defied all the prior categories of art,” such as multimedia performances featuring a rowdy mix of poetry, orations, and music. Some anointed everyday objects as art—such as Marcel Duchamp’s urinal titled Fountain; others insisted that art must evolve into architectural structures. Although some avant-garde artists railed against conventional forms of writing, they produced their own manifestos: The bombastic Filippo Tomasso Martinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909. André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924. Some were drawn to the occult, the unconscious, and dreams; many harbored utopian visions, especially after World War I. Dada, Falconer asserts, arose from the trenches: “anarchic, acidic, preoccupied with a violent, politically turbulent, mechanized world.” Falconer creates lively capsule biographies of idiosyncratic characters in his well-populated history, including Guillaume Apollinaire, who invented new “isms” to describe the new art; Duchamp, “a prankster without a program”; Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings; Tristan Tzara, Dada’s chief publicist; the Russians Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko; Theo van Doesburg, leader of De Stijl, whose aim was to connect with the universal; Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. With entertaining asides about his own experiences as critic, scholar, and maker of art, Falconer offers a vivid picture of the fervent efforts of artists questioning the meaning of art itself.
A well-informed, spirited cultural history.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781324051428
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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
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