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PATRON SAINTS

FIVE REBEL PATRONS WHO OPENED AMERICA TO A NEW ART (1928-1943)

Art critic Weber (The Drawings of Josef Albers, etc.—not reviewed) offers vivid, laudatory portraits of five individuals who helped revolutionize American artistic sensibilities in the 1920's and 30's. The best-known figure here is Lincoln Kirstein, prolific author and a founder of the New York City Ballet, who, as an undergraduate in 1928, started, along with the ``animated,'' well- connected Edward M.M. Warburg, the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. Kirstein and Warburg showed staid New England the wonders of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, Calder's Circus, and design from the Bauhaus. They regularly had lunch with Agnes Mongan, who, at the Fogg Museum, was beginning the scholarship that ``fostered an unprecedented appreciation of drawings.'' In Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum director A. Everett Austin was picking up some of the Harvard group's avant-garde shows, while James Thrall Soby began collecting modern paintings and shocked the insurance city with a living-room showing of Bu§uel and Dali's film, L'Age d'Or. In 1933, Kirstein enlisted Austin, Soby, and especially Warburg to bring choreographer George Balanchine to this country. Certainly Weber achieves his stated purpose of conveying ``something of the spirit'' of these privileged and complicated five, but it's hard not to want even more on Kirstein and Warburg—who both became disillusioned with the art world—and, above all, on Mongan, not a modernist yet in some ways the most pioneering. We get a glimpse of the passions that drove this distinguished woman (who finally became head of the Fogg in her 60s) when she writes to Bernard Berenson of ``the magic and unearthly beauty which you led me into when we emerged from the grove in darkness.'' A welcome inside look at a loose circle of patrons in an era when money, taste, and risk-taking could steer the progress of art in America. (Seventy-seven illustrations.)ica. (Seventy-seven illustrations.)

Pub Date: June 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-394-57854-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992

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TALKING PICTURES

PEOPLE SPEAK ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS THAT SPEAK TO THEM

An ambitious, glossy, consumer-friendly package that has a wide range of people commenting on photographs that have affected their lives. Heiferman and Kismaric run Lookout Books, a producer of popular photography titles (notably, William Wegman's children's series). Here, they interview some 69 individuals—celebrities, artists, laypeople—after having asked each to choose an image he or she finds powerful. Works of photojournalism, from the old Life magazine in particular, awoke feelings in many. G. Gordon Liddy tells of having a gut reaction at age 11 to a stark WW II image of dead Marines washed up on a New Guinea beach. Benjamin Spock speaks of being shocked to pacifist activism by Nick Ut's 1972 shot of children fleeing a napalm strike in Vietnam. From the other side of the camera, lensman Eddie Adams walks readers through a graphic account of how he happened upon his Vietnam-era picture of the execution of a Vietcong lieutenant. Elsewhere, art photographers such as Bruce Weber, Duane Michals, and Mary Ellen Mark weigh in, personalizing aspects of their craft. Celebrities contribute also, and strive not to sound vapid. These include: Ginger Rogers, Joan Rivers, Tony Bennett, Dennis Hopper, and Naomi Campbell. More lively are the views of everyday folks. Rock fan Gina Greco nimbly explains the ``wild monster'' appeal she finds in a portrait of Guns N' Roses lead singer Axl Rose. For some, family snapshots are the most emotionally loaded, as with convict Aida Rivera, whose HIV-positive sister Yvette poses proudly with her children, presaging her death. Other inclusions run the gamut—high-tech scientific studies, snapshots, advertising imagery, film stills, pornography. The book will accompany a traveling exhibition, which opens at New York's International Center of Photography this fall. Its contents are also being issued on CD-ROM. A slick and calculated crowd-pleaser of a project that ably pits fine art against popular culture.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1994

ISBN: 0-8118-0382-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994

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ODILON REDON

PRINCE OF DREAMS

Meticulous research by an international team of scholars, complemented by magnificently reproduced illustrations, creates an impressive portrait of the fin-de-siäcle French artist Odilon Redon (18401916). Although Redon was once ranked with artists like Seurat and Gauguin, he has lately received less attention than his peers—a situation that the current retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, which this volume explicates, should help redress. Redon is best remembered today for his visionary monochromatic prints and drawings. Among his most frequently exhibited pictures are such fantastic dream images as an eye set within an ascending balloon and a giant smiling spider poised at a jaunty angle. Many public collections also display colorful pastel drawings of flower bouquets from the latter part of his career. It has proven difficult to explain his work according to the grand narratives of art history. Redon was neither an impressionist nor a modernist; even the label of symbolist threatens to assimilate his works to literature and philosophy rather than grant them the independence that their singularity demands. The authors, led by the Art Institute's Druick, recontextualize Redon by carefully unraveling his relationship to the romantic esthetics, spiritualist theologies, and art-market imperatives of his time, while offering a convincing psychoanalytic account of how his art reflects his unhappy childhood, his difficult apprenticeship, and his struggle to emerge from the shadow of his talented elder brother. Dark clouds and landscapes from his early life mark his noirs, they argue, but dissolve to reveal the no less mysterious, but finally joyous, light and color of his last decades. Many heretofore unknown full-color images brought to light by their investigations give a fuller sense of the development of themes in this late period. A superb art book for aficionados of occult ideas, of the graphic arts, or simply of striking images and effusive colors.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8109-3769-7

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Abrams

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994

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