A beautifully produced, authoritative volume.
Celebrating an American icon.
This comprehensive catalog of a major exhibition of Thiebaud (1920-2021) at the Museum of Fine Arts San Francisco gathers four essays, a bibliography of publications by and about Thiebaud, and an appendix of notes from Thiebaud’s lessons in figure drawing. Contributors include Timothy Anglin Burgard, the museum’s senior curator; Rachel Teagle, founding director of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis; Eve Aschheim, Thiebaud’s teaching assistant from 1985 to 1987; and Burgard’s colleague Lauren Palmor, associate curator of American art. Both Burgard and Palmor address Thiebaud’s self-proclaimed penchant for appropriating and reinterpreting other artists—even his students. “I see myself as a total thief,” he once boasted. Yet, Burgard notes, although he freely admitted that he was influenced by others’ work (“I feed on it,” he remarked), among his prolific output—up to 100 works each year for 70 years—only a small percentage are appropriations; all reflect the capaciousness of his artistic interests. Although he spent most of his life in Sacramento, in 1956-57 Thiebaud took a year’s sabbatical in New York, with the goal of meeting leading figures of abstract expressionism, and he came away impressed by those artists’ engagement with European and American art traditions. At UC Davis, where he was a professor from 1960 to 1991, he taught painting, drawing, and art theory and criticism. Even after he retired at age 70, he returned to teach his lecture course and to offer private lessons in his studio almost until his death at age 101. Teagle and Aschheim, drawing on interviews with his former students, portray a vibrant, provocative teacher who brought to his classes, and his work, a broad knowledge of art history and an energetic spirit of invention.
A beautifully produced, authoritative volume.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780520418325
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
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