A sure hit for fans of art history, and readers looking to understand modern art and especially abstraction will find this...
Cohen-Solal’s (Leo and His Circle: A Life of Leo Castelli, 2010, etc.) study of Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is notable for her ability to link his strong Jewish ties to his changing, evolving art. Her access to newly available archives enables her comprehensive portrait of the man.
Born in Russia, Rothko's father insisted he attend Talmud Torah from ages 4 to 10, after which his family immigrated to Portland, Oregon, and a strong Jewish community. While he quit the temple shortly after his father’s death in 1914, his ties to Judaism and his anger at being a minority and an immigrant often obsessed him. He abandoned his scholarship to Yale after two years due to the WASPish exclusion practiced against Jews. The author seems to skip over Rothko’s art education; suddenly, at age 32, he has his first solo exhibition in Portland, followed by exhibits in New York and Paris the following year. His style changed often in the 1930s, when he was part of “The Ten,” a group of radical, experimentalist individuals rejecting regionalism and searching for the true form of American art. He went from a mythological phase to surrealism to a multiform period. Dissatisfied with realism, he explored “subjective abstraction.” When he saw Matisse’s Red Studio in 1949, he plunged fully into the realm of abstraction. The artist was always angry, especially at art institutions, which made him hostile and suspicious. They rejected the new American artists and treated his paintings as “decorative.” Rothko was obsessive and controlling in exhibitions, but his art conjured emotion out of simplicity; even in the dark, his swaths of color exuded their own light, making his work a complete experience.
A sure hit for fans of art history, and readers looking to understand modern art and especially abstraction will find this wonderfully enlightening.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-18204-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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