Moving reflections rendered in precise, radiant prose.
A tender homage to art.
Scottish art critic Cumming, the author of The Vanishing Velázquez, melds memoir, art history, and biography in an elegant, beautifully illustrated meditation on art, desire, imagination, and memory. Central to her narrative are two artists: her beloved father, James Cumming (1922-1991), self-described as a painter of “semi-figurative art,” and Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), one of some 600 to 700 painters working in Holland during what has been called the Golden Age of Dutch art. A contemporary of Rembrandt, with whom he studied, and Vermeer, Fabritius was killed in a devastating explosion of gunpowder stores—a great thunderclap—that leveled his studio and nearly killed his neighbor Vermeer as well. Unlike his more famous contemporaries, Fabritius is survived by scant biographical information and barely a dozen paintings, of which two—A View of Delft and The Goldfinch—are the most well known. From shards of evidence, Cumming has created a nuanced portrait of an enigmatic artist whose works have profoundly affected her. A View of Delft, she writes, “is like a seer’s dream, a vision materialising as if through an adder stone, floating in mind and memory.” The Goldfinch, a single bird held captive by a chain, speaks to her of the “isolation and withdrawal” that she imagines characterized Fabritius himself, a man who had buried his wife and children and who faced indebtedness and loneliness. “This bird,” she writes, “has a specific force of personality, an air of solitude and sorrow, a living being looking out at another living being from its prison against the wall.” Cumming recalls the paintings she saw as a child growing up in Edinburgh, the richness of the works that she saw on a family visit to the Netherlands, and her careful observations of her father, engrossed in the work that, for her, keeps him alive. “The painter dies,” she writes, “though I still cannot believe it. He dies, but his painting survives.”
Moving reflections rendered in precise, radiant prose.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181741
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.
A study of two writers uncomfortably entwined.
After Eve Babitz (1943-2021) died, her biographer Anolik came upon a letter from Babitz to Joan Didion (1934-2021) that startled her. Filled with “rage, despair, impatience, contempt,” it read like a “lovers’ quarrel.” “Eve was talking to Joan the way you talk to someone who’s burrowed deep under your skin, whose skin you’re trying to burrow deep under.” That surprise discovery suggested a “complicated alliance” between the two. In sometimes breathless prose, with sly asides to the “Reader,” Anolik draws on more than 100 interviews with Babitz and many other sources to follow both women’s lives, tumultuous loves, and aspirations before and after they met in Los Angeles in 1967, sometimes straining to prove their significance to one another. “Joan and Eve weren’t each other’s opposite selves so much as each other’s shadow selves,” she asserts. “Eve was what Joan both feared becoming and longed to become: an inspired amateur.” At the same time, “Joan was what Eve feared becoming and desired to become: a fierce professional.” Didion had just won acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem when Babitz, newly arrived from New York, began socializing with her and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The reticent Didion and the sensual, energetic Babitz could not have been more different, and Anolik clearly prefers Babitz. “I’m crazy for Eve,” she admits, “love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon. Besides, Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona—part princess, part wet blanket—tough going.” Their relationship—hardly a friendship—fell apart in 1974 when Didion and Dunne were assigned to edit Babitz’s autobiographical novel, Eve’s Hollywood. Babitz, resentful of Didion’s attitude and intrusion, “fired” her, pursuing her writing career on her own. Didion soared to literary fame; not, alas, Babitz.
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781668065488
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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