If the world’s oldest auction house is still reeling from the art smuggling sting in Peter Watson’s Sotheby’s: The Inside Story (1997), it won’t enjoy Lacey’s gossipy, page-turning history. Lacey, author of books on Grace Kelly (Grace, 1994) Henry Ford’s automotive empire (Ford: The Man and the Machine, 1986), and Meyer Lansky’s gangster life (Little Man, 1991), is triply equipped to deal with Sotheby’s colorful directors and employees, its schemes to get the highest prices (whether for van Gogh’s Irises or Jackie O’s costume jewelry), and its sharp, sometimes dubious business practices in pursuing its ruthless rivalry with Christie’s. While Sotheby’s origins go back to Samuel Baker, a bookseller who opened his business in 1733, credit for originating modern auctioneering—particularly for cultivating the intangible value of “taste” and profiting from it—goes to James Christie, who began in 1766. The two houses coexisted peacefully until a change in Sotheby’s ownership in 1908 introduced real competition, and here Lacey’s account takes off into something like Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies crossed with Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Sotheby’s new owners quickly changed it from a collegial, somewhat pokey enterprise into a suave, cosmopolitan clearinghouse for Old Masters and objets d’art. The real force behind Sotheby’s modern transformation, and its shifting into ethical gray areas, was Peter Wilson, who joined in 1936. The mercurial Wilson, ambitious and irresistibly charming, won over the wealthy as clients and customers during the postwar art boom and established Sotheby’s in America with the takeover of Parke-Bernet, New York City’s premier auction house. Wilson also not only turned a blind eye to objects of questionable provenance, but even engaged in rules-bending directly, with the sale of the Sevso Roman silver for which three countries claimed ownership. As smooth, beguiling, and speedy as any auctioneer’s patter, Lacey’s account mounts in excitement, ending in Sotheby’s successful sale of a slice of the duke and duchess of Windsor’s wedding cake. (b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-51139-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
A succinct, passionate guide to fostering creativity.
A noted critic advises us to dance to the music of art.
Senior art critic at New York Magazine and winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, Saltz (Seeing Out Louder, 2009, etc.) became a writer only after a decadeslong battle with “demons who preached defeat.” Hoping to spare others the struggle that he experienced, he offers ebullient, practical, and wise counsel to those who wonder, “How can I be an artist?” and who “take that leap of faith to rise above the cacophony of external messages and internal fears.” In a slim volume profusely illustrated with works by a wide range of artists, Saltz encourages readers to think, work, and see like an artist. He urges would-be artists to hone their power of perception: “Looking hard isn’t just about looking long; it’s about allowing yourself to be rapt.” Looking hard yields rich sources of visual interest and also illuminates “the mysteries of your taste and eye.” The author urges artists to work consistently and early, “within the first two hours of the day,” before “the pesky demons of daily life” exert their negative influence. Thoughtful exercises underscore his assertions. To get readers thinking about genre and convention, for example, Saltz presents illustrations of nudes by artists including Goya, Matisse, Florine Stettheimer, and Manet. “Forget the subject matter,” he writes, “what is each of these paintings actually saying?” One exercise instructs readers to make a simple drawing and then remake it in an entirely different style: Egyptian, Chinese ink-drawing, cave painting, and the styles of other artists, like Keith Haring and Georgia O’Keeffe. Freely experiment with “different sizes, tools, materials, subjects, anything,” he writes. “Don’t resist something if you’re afraid it’s taking you far afield of your usual direction. That’s the wild animal in you, feeding.” Although much of his advice is pertinent to amateur artists, Saltz also rings in on how to navigate the art world, compose an artist’s statement, deal with rejection, find a community of artists, and beat back demons. Above all, he advises, “Work, Work, Work.”
A succinct, passionate guide to fostering creativity.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08646-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.
A quiet meditation on art and life.
Matar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Return (2016), was about his Libyan father who was kidnapped in Cairo and taken back, imprisoned, and “gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish.” His father’s presence reverberates throughout this thoughtful, sensitive extended essay about the author’s visit to Siena, where he ruminates and reflects on paintings, faith, love, and his wife, Diana. Matar focuses on the 13th- to 15th-century Sienese School of paintings which “stood alone, neither Byzantine nor of the Renaissance, an anomaly between chapters, like the orchestra tuning its strings in the interval,” but he discusses others as well. First, he explores the town, “as intimate as a locket you could wear around your neck and yet as complex as a maze.” Day or night, the “city seemed to be the one determining the pace and direction of my walks.” In the Palazzo Pubblico, Matar scrutinized a series of frescos the “size of a tennis court” painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. As the author writes, his Allegory of Good Government is a “hymn to justice.” Matar astutely describes it in great detail, as he does with all the paintings he viewed. When one is in a despondent mood, paintings, Matar writes, seem to “articulate a feeling of hope.” He also visited a vast cemetery, a “glimpse [of] death’s endless appetite.” Over the month, he talked with a variety of Sienese people, including a Jordanian man whom he befriended. One by one, paintings flow by: Caravaggio’s “curiously tragic” David With the Head of Goliath, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “epic altarpiece,” Maestà. Mounted onto a cart in 1311, it was paraded through Siena. Along the way, Matar also ponders the metaphysics of rooms and offers a luminous, historical assessment of the Black Death.
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-12913-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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