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
Novelist and essayist Indiana (Resentment, 1997; Rent Boy, 1994; etc.) combines fictional and journalistic techniques in this true crime “hybrid of narration and reflection,” which is, in his words, “a pastiche” that is “fact-based, but with no pretense to journalistic “objectivity.” Andrew Cunanan caught the media’s full attention with the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, an act that was the culmination of a rampage in which Cunanan apparently killed four other men before Versace and himself afterward. Indiana dismisses the media’s hypercoverage at the time as largely fanciful: —Cunanan’s life was transformed from the somewhat poignant and depressing but fairly ordinary thing it was into a narrative overripe with tabloid evil.— Indiana bases his own portrait on interviews with Cunanan’s childhood friends, school reports, numerous of his acquaintances in San Diego, and FBI and local police reports. The portrait that emerges from this in-depth probe is of a smooth, clever pathological liar, a well-known, well-dressed, but not especially well-liked member of San Diego’s gay subculture. Indiana portrays Cunanan as having a penchant for sadomasochistic sex in which he was the dominating figure. Sometimes kept by an older man, sometimes peddling prescription drugs, Cunanan generally lived well, but in 1997, things took a turn for the worse. With his credit maxed out, he headed for Minnesota to visit two former colleagues, Jeff Trail and David Madson, neither of whom was pleased to see him. Indiana lets his imagination loose on the known forensic data to create the ghastly scenes in which Cunanan murders first Trail (furiously) and then Madson (cold-bloodedly); his brutal S&M slaying of Lee Miglin, a wealthy older man; and his shooting of a cemetery caretaker whose truck he stole. As Cunanan’s life spirals downward, Indiana portrays his psyche taking a nosedive, too. In his version of Versace’s shooting, he has the fugitive Cunanan hearing voices that direct his actions. It may not be the truth, but it all seems quite plausible. A vivid and gripping account. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019145-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This collection of essays and reviews from the New Criterion's last six years represents both the best and the worst that ideologically charged criticism has to offer. For 12 years now, the New Criterion has manned the neoconservative barricades in America's culture wars. The clumsily written introduction by the editors refers rather cryptically to the absence of Bruce Bawer, whose scintillating literary essays were once the high point of almost every issue. He and Jed Perl (whose dissenting pieces on Anselm Kiefer and Mike Kelly are included here) were the two true discoveries of the magazine. Bawer's withdrawal corresponds to cultural forces now splitting conservative thought between those willing and those not willing to appease the radical right. Kramer and Kimball, two of the more ham- fisted authors here, echo the bellicose rhetoric that was once the province of the intellectual left, spewing screeds as ineffectual as the drivel of the most rabble-rousing neo-Stalinoids. To their credit, these embittered critics on the right have functioned as public intellectuals, writing for common readers and not just one another. At their best, they have debunked some of the worst trends within the university today, from the inanities of Afrocentrism (Terry Teachout on Houston Baker) to the cult of those French intellectual high priests, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard (Kimball and Richard Vine, respectively). That political correctness pervades the cultural elite is a given among these writers, and many essays demonstrate its corrosive effect on contemporary art (essays by New Criterion stalwarts Perl, Karen Wilkin, and Eric Gibson), music (work by the late publisher Samuel Lipman), and theater (Donald Lyons on Angels in America). Not all the career assessments are negative: Included are definitive essays on Frederick Douglass, T.E. Lawrence, and Max Beerbohm—all of which cut through the obfuscations of academic critics. The worst note is struck by the editors, who would do well to subject their work to someone else's editorial scrutiny. Otherwise, an invaluable introduction to this most necessary of journals.
Pub Date: March 3, 1995
ISBN: 1-56663-069-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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