Having revealed her taste for the obscure in books on Norfolk fishermen, lavender, and attitudes toward animals in the 18th century, Festing now offers the intense and productive but parochial life of Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932)—her gardens, flower arrangements, crafts writings, and English gentry friends and their country homes. One of six children of an upper-middle-class family, Jekyll traveled and studied to be an artist, but her poor eyesight and competing interests led her to crafts, photography, and gardens, and to develop theories of color, texture, design, flower arrangement, and breeding that she published in 15 books with such titles as Wood and Garden and Garden Ornament. Like Ruskin (her inspiration, whom she met while visiting her sister in Venice) and William Morris, Jekyll participated in the Arts and Crafts Movement, a reaction against industrial mass-production in favor of well-designed, handmade goods, especially pottery and needlework. Politically an elitist, personally an abrasive, autocratic, reclusive perfectionist, excessively sensitive to sound, she was affectionately known as ``Bumps,'' an awkward ``spinster'' who disliked children but inspired such loyalty that after her death her gardening boots went on a 20-year odyssey as friends tried to place them in major museums. Largely because of the great writings about it, the garden has come to serve a powerful metaphoric function in English life. While Jekyll may have been aware of the significance of her vocation, especially as a woman, Festing apparently is not. Instead of a cultural lineage, she offers social lineage and unfamiliar names- -Hercules Brabazon of Oaklands in Sedlescomb, or the Higford Burrs of Aldermaster Court, for instance, and of the ``imperishable memory'' of visiting ``Mr. Barr's Tooting nursery with Mrs. Bennet- Poe.'' With few illustrations of Jekyll's work (the 47 b&w photographs are mostly of people) or quotations from her writings, it is difficult to tell what purpose this biography serves.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-82788-6
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
Unlike earlier biographers, many of whom considered Leonardo divine or demonic, French novelist and biographer Bramly offers the image of a gifted, methodical, rational, emotionally simple craftsman whose personal life remains wrapped in mysteries—some intentional and others, such as the loss of his grave and many of his works, the results of time and circumstance. Born in 1452, illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant girl, contemporary of Machiavelli, Columbus, Erasmus, and Michelangelo, Leonardo appears here as only one among many geniuses, though distinguished by engaging eccentricities: a playful good nature; unusual personal beauty; a preoccupation with hygiene; an inability to complete or even begin the many commissions he won in painting and sculpture; a disregard for politics in a stormy age during which his livelihood depended on being allied with political power; and a form of dyslexia that made him write from right to left and in reverse, rendering his many notebooks nearly incomprehensible. A homosexual, he is believed to have been chaste except for relations he may have had with a young boy he adopted. More preoccupied with mechanics than art, Leonardo designed cities that were never built, flying machines that could not be built, and invented a theory of color—yet could not complete the Mona Lisa or, for that matter, The Last Supper, itself an experiment in fresco. Bramly presents Leonardo much as he represented himself, a collection of lights, names, lines, dates that merely introduce an artist who, judging from his self-portrait with its averted eyes and shadows, as Bramly points out, does not want to be known. Still, there must be more to know: surely Bramly could have shared more of Leonardo's voice from the many notebooks that he clearly read and claims to understand. And, while Bramly belittles Freud's reading of Leonardo's psyche, he offers little to replace it, indeed almost no insight into his subject's inner life or the sources of his creative energy. (Four pages of color photos; 75 b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016065-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
A full-throated attack on the —new British art,— a movement obsessed with commerce and cults of the personal, that manages to be smarter and more far-reaching than its hyped, hopped-up subject. Stallabrass (Art/Oxford Univ.; Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, not reviewed, etc.) considers how, under —transgressive— veneers, this movement represents a furtherance of Warhol’s beliefs in the primacy of commerce and the creator’s carefully tended persona. Artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Chris Ofili have presented provocative and sometimes moving work whose larger effect is inevitably subordinated to whatever catchall —controversial— components have been integrated (e.g., animal decay, promiscuity, elephant dung). Dismissing the theory driving this art as —facile postmodernism,— Stallabrass reveals the concealed privilege and elite education of the artists involved. He finds the external responses to the —movement— reflected in both the crude, glossy tactics and the subjects of the young artists—who see this ultraconceptual art as highly marketable even when it requires little technical prowess—and the egregiously inflationary effect of Charles Saatchi, the movement’s primary purchaser. The ’scene’s— media-savvy harnessing of promotion, positive or otherwise, becomes an artistic component incorporating even the movement’s disparagers, from conservative art commentator Brian Sewell to New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the former prosecutor whose shameless grandstanding against the Brooklyn Art Museum’s —Sensation— exhibit could have been choreographed by Saatchi’s admen. Stallabrass, fortunately, is no Giuliani: His critique is sensitive in both its artistic interpretation and its exposure of the political calculation of the artists— endeavors. Although Stallabrass appreciates the light their work intermittently throws on modern beliefs about art and culture, he cannot forgive them their aggressive solipsism or their childlike insistence that raunchy cleverness merits reward all on its own. Nimbly written and bolstered by a constellation of critical and cultural referents: a balanced, engrossing, historically framed examination of this latest avant-garde, so startling yet so oddly familiar. (50 color and b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2000
ISBN: 1-85984-721-8
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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