A vigorous meditation on life-writing and one artist’s reality.A vigorous meditation life-writing and one artist’s reality.
Searching for Leonardo.
In a copiously illustrated volume, art historian Campbell considers the challenges of historical scholarship through his perceptive and authoritative analysis of the life, works, and afterlife of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). With only “partial and fragile evidence” of Leonardo’s life, many biographers have filled in the gaps with fictionalizations, creating a mythical persona—homosexual, vegetarian, solitary genius—who has become the central figure in what Campbell derides as “Da Vinci Worlds”: “environments in which the legacy of the Florentine artist polymath is put on show for a mass public of spectators.” He decries the commodification and commercialization that keeps Leonardo’s ghost alive before a voracious public through “the most hopeless new attribution, the most lurid conspiracy theory, the most preposterous evaluation.” Even many scholars, Campbell argues persuasively, reflect their own cultural milieu and assumptions about selfhood, agency, sexuality, and psychology rather than accounting for differences in Renaissance Europe. Campbell examines art historical and biographical interpretations surrounding many works, including The Last Supper, “stormy exchanges” generated by the Salvator Mundi, and the “dense thicket of myth and wishful thinking” surrounding the Mona Lisa, including the identity of the sitter and her connection to Leonardo. He contests the much-repeated idea that Leonardo was “ahead of his time,” which he sees as an “expression of glib superiority toward the past.” Campbell’s project in this book is precisely to embed Leonardo within the political, social, religious, and scientific tensions roiling European culture in the 1400s and 1500s; to construct what he calls an “anti-biography” that “seeks to make Leonardo unfamiliar”; and to ask: What does it mean to have a self, now and in the past? How can we understand “a nonmodern way of being a person”?
A vigorous meditation on life-writing and one artist’s reality.A vigorous meditation life-writing and one artist’s reality.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780691193687
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.
Celebrating a beloved artist.
Published to coincide with a major exhibition of works by British-born artist David Hockney (b. 1937) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, this lushly illustrated volume offers a detailed overview of the artist’s life and work, along with chapters focused on his various styles and subject matter, a chronology, and a glossary of the many techniques he employed in his art, including camera lucida, computer, and video. Contributors of essays include noted art historians and curators, such as Norman Rosenthal, who edited the volume; Simon Schama; Anne Lyles; James Cahill; and François Michaud. Growing up in the north of England, Hockney was drawn to the light and sparkle that he found in Hollywood movies. When he finally arrived in Los Angeles, the sunlit landscapes inspired him, and his new sense of artistic freedom concurred with sexual freedom: As a gay man, he felt liberated from the constraints that had weighed on him in Britain, even in the “relative Bohemia” of the Royal College of Art. Essayists reflect on his artistic interests, such as landscapes, portraiture, flowers, and the opera—for which he created boldly exuberant sets—as well as on his influences and experimentation. Michaud examines the impact on Hockney of a visit to Paris in the 1970s, where he became familiar with Henri Matisse and his contemporaries from museum exhibitions. In the 1990s, visiting his mother and friends in Yorkshire, Hockney painted both outdoors and in the studio, experimenting with various media—including the photocopier and fax machine—as he worked to render the woodsy landscape. As a companion to the exhibition, the volume offers stunning reproductions of Hockney’s prolific works. Enormously popular with museumgoers, Hockney, Rosenthal exults, “transforms the ordinary and the everyday into the remarkable.”
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780500029527
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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