A brisk tale of true-life heroism, villainy, artistry and passion.
Charney (Art History/American Univ. of Rome; The Art Thief, 2007, etc.) unsnarls the tangled history of Jan van Eyck’s 15th-century The Ghent Altarpiece (aka The Mystic Lamb), “the most desired and victimized object of all time.”
With a novelist’s sense of structure and tension, the author adds an easy familiarity with the techniques of oil painting and with the intertwining vines of art and political and religious history. He begins near the end of World War II. As the Reich’s military fortunes crumbled, the Allies scrambled to find where the Nazis concealed their tens of thousands of stolen artworks, many slated for Hitler’s proposed “super museum.” Among them was the Altarpiece. Charney pauses to describe the large work, which comprises 20 individual painted panels, hinged together. Art historians admire it not just for its supreme craftsmanship—described clearly by the author—but also for its historical significance as the world’s first major oil painting. Charney also lists a number of “firsts” that the work represents (e.g., the first to use directed spotlighting) and sketches the biography of van Eyck, which makes Shakespeare’s seem richly detailed by comparison. Commissioned to create the altarpiece for the Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, van Eyck took some six years to complete it. As religious and political strife waxed and waned, the painting was always in danger. The Calvinists didn’t like it (the Catholics promptly hid it); Napoleon, perhaps history’s greatest art thief, craved it; a cathedral fire threatened it; the Germans came for it in WWI and again in WWII. Even now, one panel remains at large, though some argue that the replacement copy is actually the original.
A brisk tale of true-life heroism, villainy, artistry and passion.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58648-800-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A veteran photojournalist raids a lifetime's trove of powerful images to illustrate the ticklish subject of how men and women relate to each other—or don't. Erwitt (To the Dogs, not reviewed) explains in an amiably rambling introduction that the impetus for this book came from a chance assignment to do ``photos of couples'' for a Japanese magazine. Looking back over his oeuvre, he found the theme a constant and powerful one. All the pictures, sumptuously reproduced here in black and white, are technically accomplished. Most are pointed, emotionally loaded, and charged with a dry sense of narrative wit. Graphically striking, the book uses left- and right- page image counterposings to ironic effect. Logically, Erwitt opens with shots of children, then moves on to adult lovers, and closes with elderly pairs. A grainy and light-infused 1972 shot from Rio de Janeiro shows a young boy and girl meeting conspiratorially under a tree: He sits atop a tricycle brandishing a toy pistol as she eyes him with gravity—a miniature Bonnie and Clyde. A 1952 photo from Valencia, Spain, shows a young couple seen through a kitchen doorway in a dance-step embrace, their faces obscured, she with her apron on. In Krak¢w, Poland, in 1972, Erwitt captured a middle-aged woman in a garish striped frock offering her hand to be kissed by a drab-looking businessman. Towards the end, aged couples argue in Saint-Tropez, fill a car with gas in Iowa, dance on a Manhattan rooftop. Erwitt presents himself as a voyeur with a purpose, a lensman dedicated to capturing glimpses of our shared, international human condition. From stagy set-up to candid ditty, this selection shows off Erwitt's skills as a master of the modern photographic idiom, one with a clear idea of what he wants his work to say.
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03676-6
Page Count: 127
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Stiff and hobbled by its own exhaustiveness, this biography of Paris's tiny painter/provocateur (18641901) takes lively material and renders it lifeless. Frey (French/Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) raided a trove of newly released Toulouse-Lautrec family letters for this life study. Writing to his dear ``Maman'' and other dotty family members, the painter reveals himself only in the most guarded terms. He presents a foppish self-caricature, one that pokes fun at his own dwarfism, aristocratic background, and artistic pretensions. Frey provides more than ample surrounding historical context. She discusses thoroughly the wealthy Toulouse-Lautrec bloodline, its possible genetic inbreeding, and prickly family dynamic. Lively illustrations throughout enrich the text, and in art historical matters Frey, who has training as a printmaker, is most solid. Paris's period atelier system is depicted with some color. A sensible account of Toulouse-Lautrec's technical development follows, particularly strong in its analysis of the liberating effect that lithography had on the artist's work and its role in propagating his public image. Examined at length are Toulouse- Lautrec's possible influences: the formidable shadow of Edgar Degas, the development of still photography, the radical perspectival schemes introduced to Westerners by Japanese prints, and the philosophical convictions of the social realist and art nouveau movements. Less convincing are the author's constant attempts to second-guess Toulouse-Lautrec's psychological motivations for depicting his chosen subjects—the performers and prostitutes of Paris's bohemian Montmartre—and her ceaseless harping on his chronic alcoholism, possible sex life, and probable syphilitic condition. Frey includes extraneous detail to the point of annoyance. No true sense of Toulouse-Lautrec the person emerges. Painstaking and scrupulously scholarly without managing to be evocative. (84 b&w illustrations; 24 pages color illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-80844-X
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
