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
This sprawling narrative of Paul Gauguin's messy life provides new insights, despite its lack of formal coherence. Sweetman (Mary Renault, 1993; Van Gogh, 1990) names the three sections of his book after the three questions posed by a late Gauguin masterpiece's title: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Gauguin's origins make for a fascinating story. His mother, born into French feminist and radical circles, was for a time cared for by George Sand. Family connections led Gauguin's parents to emigrate to Peru; his father didn't survive the trip. Gauguin soon returned to France with his mother; Sweetman shows how the Peruvian experience would nevertheless inform the artist's aesthetic sensibility. Gauguin came late to painting as a career. He worked as a sailor before making, and then losing, a great deal of money in investment banking. The latter enterprise, provided Gauguin with an entrÇe to the Impressionist circles where he would serve his apprenticeship; Pissarro, in particular, became a mentor. Sweetman exhaustively details Gauguin's associations with CÇzanne, MallarmÇ, Seurat, and Van Gogh. Gauguin's Danish wife, from whom he became estranged, and his many mistresses also find illumination. Sweetman explores at length the degraded physical condition, confused philosophizing, and glorious artistic productions that characterized Gauguin's visionary last years in the South Pacific. The significance of the expatriate's work remained in dispute until the results of his famous late-life relocation to Tahiti were exhibited in France. Sweetman suggests, in his last section, that the ``we'' whom Gauguin invoked in his painting's title includes us. We follow Gauguin in our ambivalence toward the modern vices- -money worship, misogyny, and colonialism. If Gauguin did not succeed in getting beyond these vices, neither have we, Sweetman suggests. And if Sweetman doesn't entirely succeed in maintaining his narrative focus, he does provide a biography that brings our own time into clearer view along with that of his subject. (color and b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80941-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic account of a young immigrant, who in 1895 slit her lover's throat and became the first woman sentenced to the recently invented electric chair. Pucci (Bhima Swarga: The Balinese Divine Comedy, not reviewed) became interested in this story when she learned that her American-born grandmother, Cora Slocomb, Countess di BrazzÖ, was one of Maria Barbella's staunchest advocates, traveling from her Italian estate to New York City to directly assist and use her influential social connections to benefit a woman she saw as ``another poor Italian immigrant at the mercy of the American courts.'' Barbella, a seamstress who worked grueling hours for eight dollars a week, believed Domenico Cataldo when he lured her from her parents' home by promising marriage. Finally rejected by him, Barbella murdered Cataldo in front of witnesses; a biased judge and entirely non-Italian jury readily discounted the lame defense, which Barbella herself, who was bewildered by events and spoke little English, could not even understand. Convicted of first- degree murder, she was sentenced to die at Sing Sing Prison. While she learned English in prison, advocates wrote and petitioned on her behalf; the public devoured her story in the newspapers; and almost a year after her arrest, the state Court of Appeals ordered a retrial in which she was acquitted. Pucci's own fascination with the story's characters gives the account considerable life and immediacy. However, one senses that Pucci is less determined to peel back the layers of the story than simply to tell it well—which she does. But Barbella's conflicting explanations for her actions are unreconciled and there is no modern assessment of the medical arguments regarding her epilepsy (apparently important to her acquittal). An intriguing story, but don't count on being able to render a verdict on Barbella's case at the end of it. (12 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 2, 1996
ISBN: 1-56858-061-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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