An adroit and lively portrait.
The latest in the Jewish Lives series focuses on a flamboyant champion of modern art.
Art patron Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was notable as much for her scandalous personal life as for her discerning aesthetic sense. In this deftly distilled biography, Prose (Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, 2014, etc.) draws on Guggenheim’s memoir, several biographies, and works by and about her wide circle of friends, offering a cleareyed assessment of the complicated woman and her indelible contribution to modern art. Guggenheim’s Jewishness is handily dispatched. Subjected to anti-Semitism when she was turned away from a hotel, she claimed that her “inferiority complex” stemmed from her appearance rather than prejudice: specifically, her nose, which she hated and believed was an inheritance from her German ancestors. Convinced she was homely, she nevertheless “boasted of having had more than four hundred lovers,” including artists Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, and James Joyce’s son Giorgio. For a woman of independent wealth and strong will, Guggenheim made surprising choices in men. “She lived in an era and a milieu,” writes Prose, “in which women needed men to explain the world to them….Without a man to direct her, without the rewards of male attention…a woman was…a failed human being.” Yet seeking a man’s validation still does not explain why she endured a violent marriage to Laurence Vail, who beat her; nor to the drunken John Holms, “a writer who didn’t write,” who demeaned her; nor to Ernst, who married her, friends thought, for her money and connections. Prose notes Guggenheim’s “lack of empathy” toward her lovers, their wives, and especially her children, a flaw more egregious than “promiscuity, shallowness, stinginess, and a sense of humor that sometimes crossed over into malice.” The author also chronicles her groundbreaking galleries: Guggenheim Jeune in London; the exuberant Art of This Century in Manhattan; and her Palazzo in Venice, where her collection still resides.
An adroit and lively portrait.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-20348-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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