A vivid reminder that one teacher truly can make a difference.
Art transforms the lives of a group of profoundly disabled individuals, in this serviceable account by the man who devised techniques to assist them.
After learning he has retinitis pigmentosa, abstract artist Lefens is asked by his doctor to give a talk about his work to students at the Matheny School in New Jersey. They have a variety of disabilities, but none can walk or use their hands. Lefens, disturbed by what he sees as the staff’s condescending attitude toward their charges, decides to return and teach an art class, taking the students’ special needs into consideration. They begin with wheelchair painting: laying canvas on the floor, covering it with a thick coat of paint and then a sheet of plastic so students can drive onto the canvas, using their chairs as a sort of paint brush. They move on to laser headgear, which enables the artists to realize their vision more clearly by indicating precisely where the paint should go; an able-bodied assistant follows the laser’s path and applies the paint. For the institutionalized students, this class represents their first chance at self-expression, and both they and Lefens are hooked. After years of hard work, the artists are rewarded with a New York show and featured in a documentary. The publicity, however, has repercussions; after repeated clashes with school administrators, Lefens is asked to leave. He goes on to found Artistic Realization Technologies (A.R.T.) and begins working with a variety of schools and organizations for the disabled across the country. Lefens isn’t a captivating writer, but he gets the point across, including as a sidelight a brief history of Abstract Expressionism. This would have benefited from including some of the artists’ images; readers are directed to A.R.T.’s Web site, where a few of the works mentioned in the text are shown.
A vivid reminder that one teacher truly can make a difference.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-8070-3180-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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