Goodden's well-measured life of the artist may help bring Kauffman's oeuvre back to light.
Oxford historian and biographer Goodden (The Sweetness of Life, 1999) enlists her considerable knowledge of 18th-century art history in this fine study of the popular, though frequently belittled, Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman.
Goodden attempts to raise Kauffman's technical reputation while acknowledging her faults. Much like her contemporary Vigée Le Brun, Kauffman was denied the rigorous art training afforded to men, such as learning to draw anatomy from life, and relegated to so-called feminine and decorative subjects such as flower-painting and botanical drawing. However, Kauffman was a sensational popular portraitist in her heyday of late 18th-century London—she was triumphantly elected to the Royal Academy in 1768. She learned how to paint from her Austrian father, who would exert a strong influence on her for most of her life. Early on, she rejected her Swiss origins, and she received her formative training in Italy, copying the masters. On her Grand Tour, she picked up important commissions from the aristocracy, and her fame grew, as did her earnings for portraits; the young woman was the breadwinner in the household. Famous portraits of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and David Garrick established her reputation by the time she arrived in London, and she cemented important friendships with Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli. Despite a rash marriage to a man who turned out to be a faux aristocrat and bigamist, Kauffman seems to have lead the quiet, single-minded life of a serious and industrious artist; her Catholicism prompted her to eventually flee her beloved England and settle in Rome with a second husband and friend to her father. A portrait of Goethe followed on their brief acquaintance, though he complained it was “effeminate.” In the end, the author deems Kauffman a populist, adaptable painter whose own success creating pretty pictures damned her.
Goodden's well-measured life of the artist may help bring Kauffman's oeuvre back to light.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-8441-3758-9
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Pimlico/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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