Unorthodox, and definitely not for beginners, but a delightful exercise for the educated consumer.
Unapologetically opinionated, slightly Anglocentric narrative from respected popular historian Johnson (A History of the American People, 1998, etc.).
Despite its all-embracing title, this covers non-Western art primarily for the effect it had on the art of Europe and its colonies. The extremely erudite author frames this epic, eloquent tale as a spellbinding, one-sided conversation in which he spills out the story of art, its production, and its meaning. Johnson, himself the son of an artist, appreciates technique. Whether it is the introduction of concrete in antiquity or oil paint in the northern Renaissance, he makes the tools of the trade and an artist’s facility in using them as much a part of the story as the art itself. His concern with technique and affection for the artist’s craft shapes his judgments: in the chapter covering Rubens, van Dyck, and Poussin, he eloquently lauds the two Flemings’ rich painterly art, suggesting that Poussin’s more classical painting is unduly cerebral and telling the Frenchman’s story with a certain astringency. The text is marked by bold superlatives (always backed up), good contextual points, and Johnson’s idiosyncratic choices. He covers the usual canon, but has his own, sometimes obscure, favorites. He provides, for example, an entire chapter on Russian art and patronizes the Sistine ceiling as “superior scene painting.” Johnson values great artists as they attempt to convey universal truths, so he praises the 19th century’s classically trained landscape painters (particularly Americans) at the expense of Monet, for one, whose treatment he deems more prosaic. The author considers Ilya Repin’s They Did Not Expect Him “one of the greatest paintings produced in the 19th century—perhaps the greatest.” He treats Picasso in a chapter on Fashion Art, and puts forward Walt Disney as the most influential artist of the 20th century. Elgin Marbles owned by the British Museum: good; Cubism: overrated; contemporary art world: bad.
Unorthodox, and definitely not for beginners, but a delightful exercise for the educated consumer.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-053075-8
Page Count: 792
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
Following Roxana Robinson's Georgia O'Keeffe (1989) and Benita Eisler's O'Keeffe and Stieglitz (1991) comes another lengthy biography of America's most persistently scrutinized woman artist. What Hogrefe (Wholly Unacceptable, 1986) has to add to the O'Keeffe file is his access to Juan Hamilton, the artist's controversial, decades-younger, opportunistic companion who inherited a fortune after fighting with O'Keeffe's relatives over her estate. While insisting that ``this is not...Hamilton's book,'' Hogrefe starts with Hamilton, who ``arrived in New Mexico's high desert'' with a ``premonition'' that the elderly O'Keeffe, by then ``successful beyond the dreams of most women and men,'' needed him. At this point, the author, who later rips into O'Keeffe's carefully constructed persona, seems to be weaving more myth. (Is this perhaps because Hogrefe met O'Keeffe at a party in New Jersey in the early 80's and was dazzled by her ``obvious and occult'' smile?) Hogrefe's report on O'Keeffe's final years amounts to accumulated detail rather than enlightenment: You won't find out if or how Hamilton influenced the blind artist to change her will. In covering the rest of the now-familiar O'Keeffe story—from Wisconsin (born in 1887) to teaching in Texas to her notorious alliance with Alfred Stieglitz and her move to the Southwest- -Hogrefe hypes certain aspects of the artist's sometimes troubled inner self beyond what the evidence suggests: ``Rumbling beneath the surface are the weightier issues of repressed homosexuality, incest-induced rage, madness, coercion and deceit.'' For a more balanced and convincing O'Keeffe portrait, go to Robinson; for a microscopic look at the artist's relationship with Stieglitz, see Eisler; and for a sense of O'Keeffe's explosive creativity, read her letters to Anita Pollitzer (Lovingly, Georgia, 1990). (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-553-08116-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
This study of the impact of emerging technologies on the arts is instructive and informative, but lapses into elitist ramblings by its end. In this tour of various virtual worlds—from audio to animation, from a virtual re-creation of San Francisco to the animated flocking birds that were the basis for the swarming bats in Batman Returns—Holtzman (Digital Mantras, 1994) does a marvelous job of showing that ``the most exciting aspect of using computers as creative partners is the possibility of creating completely new worlds, worlds unimaginable before computers.'' He has a knack for taking relatively difficult concepts—for example, the use of fractals (random, computer-generated polygons) in producing lifelike, three-dimensional graphics of mountains, flowers, or chameleons—and making them understandable to the novice. Particularly interesting are his reviews of virtual-reality products that allow the user to control all audiovisual aspects of the environment. At a few points in his narrative, Holtzman shows his fluency in the experimental literature of Jorge Luis Borges, and on the subject of hypertext, he evokes the deconstructionist aesthetic of Derrida and the ``cut-up'' technique of Burroughs to show how nonlinear text is revolutionizing the literary world. This is cleverly illustrated by Holtzman's unannounced change to a Douglas Coupland style in which his own remarks are punctuated by quotes from Marshall McLuhan, the ``patron saint of the digerati.'' But new literature is also the main problem area for Holtzman. Commenting on what some literary critics see as a real threat to traditional narrative, Holtzman glibly states, ``Whatever the book's future is, clearly its role will never be the same. The book has lost its preeminence.'' Somewhat conciliatory but ultimately unapologetic, Holtzman seems to be blowing ``Taps'' for the print media. The tone of disregard notwithstanding, this is, for the most part, a fun read with generally positive implications for the audiovisual arts. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83207-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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