A delightful and most welcome contribution to the field of Whistler scholarship and to our knowledge of 19th-century art and culture. The American-born expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler (18341903) has long defied easy categorization. During his lifetime, Whistler bridged the enormously different art worlds of London and Paris. British scholars Anderson and Koval, in their splendid account of Whistler's life and work, situate the artist's achievements within this social and cultural milieu, documenting their subject's relation to the significant artistic currents of the day. In London, as a major proponent of the Aesthetic Movement, he was at theoretical odds with the Victorian mainstream, yet he desperately sought acceptance from the Royal Academy and other official institutions. Whistler found a more receptive atmosphere in Paris, where his friends and supporters included MallarmÇ, Degas, Manet, and Monet. But Whistler, whose art was superficially related to Impressionism, remained somewhat isolated by the uniqueness of his artistic approach. As the title suggests, the intention of the authors is to present a revisionist account of Whistler's life and work. In this they succeed. Previous biographies, as they rightly point out, have been weakened by their focus on mythological accounts of Whistler's life, many perpetuated by the artist himself. While never indulging in trendy psychobiography, Anderson and Koval give us a sense of both the private Whistler and his carefully crafted public persona, candidly discussing the insecure artist's need to edit or alter the facts of his life and his impulse to court public controversy. Ever the PR man, Whistler waged aesthetic battles in the press: His trial with John Ruskin and his falling-out with Oscar Wilde are legendary. This volume, marked by distinguished scholarship, level- headedness, and fine narrative style, goes a long way toward setting the record straight. (24 pages illustrations, 8 in color, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0187-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
