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
It's high spirited reading.
When Françoise Gilot, an aspiring young painter, met Pablo Picasso in May, 1943, she was twenty-one years old, he some forty years her senior.
As they grew together, setting about their mutual campaigns upon each other, she proved herself a worthy adversary rather than acolyte. In the ten years which she shared with him, undertaking to assuage his solitude, bearing him two children, meeting his friend and admirers, she maintained a cool comprehension along with her compassion for Picasso the man that shows to delightful advantage here. For Françoise Gilot has the capacity to reveal the man in his intimate and professional dealings, and Picasso is superlative, inimitable copy. Witness Picasso dangling his agents, foremost among them Kahnweller, fancing with his friends Braque and Matisse, playing cat and mouse with the women in his life -- wife Olga, Marie Therese Walter, Dora Marr, Françoise and her successor Jacqueline Roque. But the author has the capacity as well to show Picasso the artist: she quotes him on painting, describes his method of work in painting, sculpture, pottery. Picasso himself is so articulate that he defies other description; au fond, art and the artist are subversive. His re-marks on art include not only his own but that of his foremost colleagues, Matisse and Braque, Miro, Legor, Chagall...All his encounters here are formed by his own formidable temperament, and recalled in satisfying detail by the woman who shared them. An intimate, vivid, above all intelligent and authentic portrait of Picasso, with its twin elements of love and art, this should sell like mad. And rightly.
It's high spirited reading.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781681373195
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Disjointed in spots but thoughtful and often inspirational.
An acclaimed actor “taught not to make scenes” as a young girl explores how “scenes” from her life have made her into the woman she became.
In her first book, Wu, best known for her roles in the TV show Fresh Off the Boat and the film Crazy Rich Asians, reflects on the experiences that transformed her from a shy girl into a self-confident performer able to create meaningful, stereotype-defying characters. The American-born daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Wu, who dreamed of a professional acting career, assimilated well into the conservative White Virginia suburb where she grew up. Yet the Asian actors she saw often made her want to cringe for the way they brought attention to the “Asian-ness” Wu could not entirely accept in herself. It wasn’t until she began studying drama in college that the author began to dig within herself to find what could truly make her characters come alive. In her personal life, Wu deepened her emotional maturity with lessons in love while also experiencing the turmoil caused by a traumatic sexual experience. “I didn’t feel attacked or assaulted or coerced and I certainly didn’t feel raped,” she writes. “Strange as it sounds, the word ‘rape’ didn’t even occur to me.” After moving to California for her acting career, she began to educate herself on rape culture. Her awakening, however, could not protect her from Hollywood anti-feminism or her own desire to be a “cool girl” who could brush off casual misogyny. As she gained professional visibility and acclaim, Wu found herself at the mercy of an Asian American producer who intimidated and sexually harassed her. The essays—parts of which she cleverly imagines as stage scenes—are intimate and rich in emotional detail. However, the time shifts and occasional lack of thematic connection sometimes limit the impact of the author’s message.
Disjointed in spots but thoughtful and often inspirational.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982188-54-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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