A beautifully produced introduction to a celebrated artist.
Norway's most lauded modernist reinvented his aesthetic aims throughout his long career.
Edvard Munch (1863-1944), famous for his haunting work The Scream, produced nearly 1,800 paintings and thousands of drawings, etchings, prints, sculpture, and photographs. In the 1950s, New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted an extensive traveling exhibition of his works, and in 1963, the Munch Museum in Oslo opened on the centennial of his birth. Although Munch has been the subject of much scholarship, art historian and museum curator Ustvedt saw the need for an introduction addressed to general readers. He amply succeeds in this insightful, vibrant overview of Munch’s life and prolific oeuvre, deftly translated by McCullough and illustrated with a wealth of images. The author traces Munch’s development beginning in the 1880s, when he broke with past traditions and “successfully positioned himself as a radical revolutionary.” Munch identified an early painting, The Sick Child, as an artistic breakthrough: an effort to capture “the fleeting mood” of the sickroom with bold, layered brush strokes, streaming light, and blurred details. Throughout the 1890s, Munch became part of a circle of bohemian intellectuals in Paris and Berlin. An Artists’ Association exhibition in Berlin, however, scandalized some critics, who derided his paintings as “sloppy and unfinished” and not “morally edifying.” Munch welcomed the scandal, soon mounting his own exhibition—for which he charged an entry fee. Ustvedt recounts Munch’s doomed love affairs, mental breakdown, and artistic frustrations, all feeding works that evoked—with swirling movement, brash colors, and ghostly images—“the emotional rather than the rational”: anxiety, vulnerability, and “the inner life of the soul.” Though receptive to the “sensibilities of the age,” Munch delved deeply into his psyche, believing that art must be “forced into being by a man’s compulsion to open his heart. All art…must be created with one’s lifeblood.”
A beautifully produced introduction to a celebrated artist. (130 illustrations)Pub Date: July 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-500-29576-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
An engaging, revealing look at the wild world of the Wu-Tang Clan and beyond.
A memoir from one of hip-hop’s most inventive stylists.
As a member of the Wu-Tang Clan and throughout his solo career, Dennis Coles (b. 1970), aka Ghostface Killah, has been one of the most creative rappers in the game. In this deeply personal text, the author narrates his life story through 15 of his songs. It’s a testament to the richness of his rhymes to see him communicate the same thoughts and feelings in a handful of couplets as he does in a full chapter of prose. Sure, Ghostface offers more context and details in each chapter, whether he’s writing about the struggles of his youth that inspired “All That I Got Is You” or his time selling drugs in “Poisonous Darts,” but that is also a little too straightforward for such a creative artist. Ghostface occasionally uses graphic-novel techniques to make some points, and he turns over the narrative to friends and colleagues to make others. There is no sanitizing of his history here. Ghostface is frank about his drug use, his arrests and time in jail, and his health issues—especially how his diabetes can affect his performances and creativity. He also takes time to educate people about the problems in the music industry, what Islam means to his life and his art, and the impact of slavery and racism on hip-hop and America. “My ancestors used to get whipped, and the rest of the slaves had to sit out there and watch them get whipped until they died,” he writes. “When I watched George Floyd die, it felt like that.” His expansive thoughts on any number of topics are fascinating whether you follow hip-hop or not. The book is vividly designed, featuring pull quotes, sidebars, and color photos.
An engaging, revealing look at the wild world of the Wu-Tang Clan and beyond.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781250274274
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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