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
Essays by Jane Livingston, curator of the Whitney Museum exhibit of the photos in this volume, and New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik accompany more than 500 black-and-white photographs and color illustrations. Whether he's shooting lowly American drifters or the giant celebrities of the age, Avedon can make the human figure, particularly the face, look like something that the eye has never encountered before. A two-page spread of selected contact prints of the concert pianist and wit Oscar Levant is thoroughly terrifying—and impossible not to stare at.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40922-X
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
This volume demonstrates how brilliantly Grosz caught the life, and more importantly the feverish imagination, of a city and a nation in a particularly turbulent time. Marrying the jumpy lines and figural distortions of cubism to narrative subjects and an angry sense of morality, he illuminated the tawdry, often violent, lives of Berlin's down-and-out, its powerbrokers, and its murderers, during the chaotic Weimar years of the 1920s, in corrosive, unsettling, kinetic images. The drawings and prints of drunken prostitutes and their leering customers, calm murderers inspecting the bodies of their victims, fat businessmen and their voluptuous mistresses, prim bourgeoisie and exhausted workers, and mutilated ex-soldiers, are complemented here by some of Grosz's less familiar, and equally disturbing, watercolors. Whitford, a former lecturer in art history at Cambridge, provides a useful introduction to Grosz's life and times, and detailed and very helpful annotations to the artwork. A superb overview of a unique career. (139 b&w and 54 color illustrations)
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-07206-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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