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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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