Independent curator Albers (Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti, 2002) presents a sizable biography of Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), a member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters who changed the face of the art world in the 1950s.
Raised in luxury as an heiress to the fortune of famed Chicago engineer Charles Louis Strobel, Mitchell competed for the national figure-skating title as a teen in the early 1940s. She would follow her own path to success, dropping out of Smith College (where, she noted, “I got a B+ in art”) to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. She took up residence in New York’s Greenwich Village in late 1949, becoming part of a vibrant art scene along with soon-to-be famous names like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. The book begins a bit slow, but as Mitchell, armed with talent and a stormy personality, begins to establish herself as an important painter, Albers begins to find her footing as a biographer. The author is at her best when writing about the art, managing the difficult trick of bringing visual work alive on the written page. Eventually dividing her time between New York and France, Mitchell inhabited an alcohol-fueled world of artists, poets and musicians, including her longtime companion, French-Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, poet Frank O’Hara and playwright Samuel Beckett. Discussion of Mitchell’s turbulent personal relationships, her lifelong pursuit of psychoanalytic treatment and her synesthesia and eidetic memory all inform what the author calls her “glorious, all-consuming involvement with memory, landscape, and paint.” “Lady Painter” is how Mitchell often referred to herself, and though her experience as one of few women in a male-dominated milieu is present throughout the narrative, it is not the focus. As Albers writes, Mitchell “refused to differentiate herself from male artists,” and “did not want to be considered among the forgotten or neglected.” A revealing portrait of a complex personality, this biography provides insight into the work of a master artist, but is perhaps too detailed to appeal to casual readers.
Pub Date: May 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-41437-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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