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
On assignment from Life in 1966, Loengard shot this austere and powerful group of black-and-white photographs of O'Keeffe (18871986) amidst her daily rituals at her New Mexico ranch home. Loengard's Life photo essay on O'Keeffe helped to forge a popular image of the modern painter in American society. Here we see O'Keeffe at age 79, having exiled herself from New York City in 1949 to her stark Ghost Ranch home near Abiquiu, N.M. Capturing the spartan lifestyle O'Keeffe followed after the death of her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Loengard presents a woman of striking physical beauty alone with her work, garden, and dogs. An image of O'Keeffe on her morning walk shows the artist's peasant- frocked body from the rear, in purposeful stride with her snake- killing stick, her dog keeping pace beside her. Indoors, Loengard captures O'Keeffe in a pensive moment, seated at the foot of her white linen bed, wearing a dark robe with her white hair drawn back. Her eyes are closed, her deeply etched face seemingly in mournful prayer, as she clasps a book in her gracefully outstretched fingers. Other shots focus on tools of the painting trade or on O'Keeffe's hands, juxtaposed against her collections of rounded stones and bleached white skulls and pelvis bones. These images quote directly from O'Keeffe's own well-known painting iconography. Moreover, they are directly influenced by, and bring full circle, a famous series of pictures, begun in 1918, that Stieglitz took of O'Keeffe, which eroticized the details of her voluptuous hands and torso. In a brief introduction, Loengard describes himself as a youthful interloper willfully intruding into O'Keeffe's private world. Quotes by O'Keeffe, reinforcing her matter-of-fact life philosophies, are interspersed throughout, to dramatic effect. O'Keeffe, as much as Loengard, seems to have shaped this powerfully mythologizing portrait of herself.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55670-423-2
Page Count: 80
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
A heart-stopping study of the infamous Stephanie Bryan murder trial, four decades after the crime. Farrell, an Edgar Award winner (Swift Justice, 1992), was a rewrite man at the San Jose Mercury News when word broke of the Bryan kidnapping, a case that shocked the sleepy Berkeley community. Stephanie was the pretty, brainy teenage daughter of a doctor who had recently moved to California from Massachusetts. Her mother had shown her a shortcut from school, and when Stephanie was walking home one September afternoon, tragedy struck in the form of Burton Abbott, a married 27-year-old studying to be an accountant. Stephanie apparently got into Abbott's car, and her family never saw her again. Farrell makes excellent use of newspaper accounts of the mounting horror throughout California as it became clear that Stephanie had been kidnapped. When her body was found in a shallow grave near Abbott's mountain home, the case was sealed against him. Farrell chooses to focus on the Abbott family and on Burton in particular, a man so emotionally distant that the doctor who administered a lie detector test to him said that of all the men he had ever examined, ``Herman Goering and Burton Abbott were the most self-centered.'' While Stephanie never fully comes alive to the reader, the description of the singular Abbott family and the trial is as compelling as it is unnerving. Abbott never admits his guilt, despite such evidence as Stephanie's purse and muddy bra buried in his basement. After little more than a year on death row, Abbott was put to death in the gas chamber. Two years later, emotionally devastated, Stephanie's father died of a sudden heart attack. A chilling look at an old crime that seems sadly modern; true-crime buffs won't want to miss it. (For another look at this case, as well as other kidnappings in America, see below, Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped.)
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-17009-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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