Informative and fun.
An insider’s look at the exciting and unpredictable “discovered masterpiece” side of the art world.
If the author’s appearances on Antiques Roadshow have taught aspiring art collectors anything, it’s that discovery is possible. Antique paintings are often unattributed or mislabeled, and that dusty Rembrandt look-alike at the flea market may well be the real thing, with centuries of pollution and poorly applied overpaint disguising it. Mould, a London gallery owner and art sleuth, tells his tale of a rags-to-riches Rembrandt, the restoration of which he calls “the boldest feat of detection and restoration I had ever heard sanctioned by an eminent academic.” An engaging storyteller, the author describes several other adventures, all of which culminate in the affirmation of an authentic work. There was the emergence of an early Thomas Gainsborough, originally mislabeled at auction; the enthralling story of an unknown portrait of Elizabeth I, whose history was almost as intriguing as the painting itself; and a Homer watercolor that washed up in dump in Ireland, sending Mould on a trip through several countries before he was able to connect the dots of its provenance. In the most mysterious tale in the book, the author describes how a fake Norman Rockwell was not only touted as authentic in the Rockwell Museum, but that the painting was part of a plot concocted to hide the original during a nasty divorce. The Rockwell scam involved two generations, a masterful forgery and secret storage panels. Mould points out that art, and its pursuit, “can be extremely eloquent about human behavior,” a theme to which he often returns in examining the “innumerable paths, dramas, challenges and characters” that make up the discovery market. The author also explores the nuances of connoisseurship, the delicate risks and startling rewards of restoration and the science of correctly identifying an unknown painting by an established master.
Informative and fun.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02185-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
An epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek.
With a hoarder’s zeal, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) collected objects he liked until shopping bags filled entire rooms of his New York town house. Rising to equal that, Gopnik’s dictionary-sized biography has more than 7,000 endnotes in its e-book edition and drew on some 100,000 documents, including datebooks, tax returns, and letters to lovers and dealers. With the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the author serves up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol’s life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist’s influences and techniques. Warhol exploded into view in his mid-40s with his pop art paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silkscreens of Elvis and Marilyn. However, fame didn’t banish lifelong anxieties heightened by an assassination attempt that left him so fearful he bought bulletproof eyeglasses. After the pop successes, Gopnik writes, Warhol’s life was shaped by a consuming desire “to climb back onto that cutting edge,” which led him to make experimental films, launch Interview magazine, and promote the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Warhol yearned “for fine, old-fashioned love and coupledom,” a desire thwarted by his shyness and his awkward stance toward his sexuality—“almost but never quite out,” as Gopnik puts it. Although insightful in its interpretations of Warhol’s art, this biography is sure to make waves with its easily challenged claims that Warhol revealed himself early on “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before” and that he and Picasso may now occupy “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.” Any controversy will certainly befit a lodestar of 20th-century art who believed that “you weren’t doing much of anything as an artist if you weren’t questioning the most fundamental tenets of what art is and what artists can do.”
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-229839-3
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.
A Los Angeles–based photographer pays tribute to a legendary musician with anecdotes and previously unseen images collected from their 25-year collaboration.
St. Nicholas (co-author: Whitney: Tribute to an Icon, 2012, etc.) first met Prince in 1991 at a prearranged photo shoot. “The dance between photographer and subject carried us away into hours of inspired photographs…and the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime.” In this book, the author fondly remembers their many professional encounters in the 25 years that followed. Many would be portrait sessions but done on impulse, like those in a burned-out Los Angeles building in 1994 and on the Charles Bridge in Prague in 2007. Both times, the author and Prince came together through serendipity to create playfully expressive images that came to represent the singer’s “unorthodox ability to truly live life in the moment.” Other encounters took place while Prince was performing at Paisley Park, his Minneapolis studio, or at venues in LA, New York, Tokyo, and London. One in particular came about after the 1991 release of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls album and led to the start of St. Nicholas’ career as a video director. Prince, who nurtured young artists throughout his career, pushed the author to “trust my instincts…expand myself creatively.” What is most striking about even the most intimate of these photographs—even those shot with Mayte Garcia, the fan-turned–backup dancer who became Prince’s wife in 1996—is the brilliantly theatrical quality of the images. As the author observes, the singer was never not the self-conscious artist: “Prince was Prince 24/7.” Nostalgic and reverential, this book—the second St. Nicholas produced with/for Prince—is a celebration of friendship and artistry. Prince fans are sure to appreciate the book, and those interested in art photography will also find the collection highly appealing.
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293923-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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