A perceptive, richly detailed biography.
The artistic career of Romare Bearden (1911-1988) reflects political, social, and aesthetic transformations.
Spelman College president Campbell (Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America, 1994, etc.) met Bearden in 1973 when she was a graduate student in fine arts at Syracuse University, spurring her interest in his work and leading to her curating her first museum show, Mysteries: Women in the Art of Romare Bearden. Drawing on her interviews with the artist and his first biographer, along with considerable archival and published material, Campbell offers a discerning portrait of Bearden’s long and successful career. Bearden grew up partly in Harlem, with his parents, and partly in Charlotte and Pittsburgh, where he lived with relatives. His mother, an activist, journalist, and New York City school board member, welcomed assorted artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals into her Harlem home, giving her son access to the creative spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. As a college student, he had two passions: baseball and cartoons, which appeared in undergraduate publications and political journals such as Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. Bearden’s more serious work as an artist began in the 1930s, a period that Campbell sees as “a cauldron of competing approaches to art” and controversy over how to represent African-American experience. Besides painting, Bearden worked as a case worker, which fueled an awareness of social injustice that emerged in his muckraking cartoons. Like the murals of Diego Rivera, whom he admired, his canvases showed “overtones of labor strife and the burden of poverty, and the strains they put on life.” The advent of modernism challenged Bearden to reassess his commitment to a naturalistic, social realist style; after a formative five-month stay in Paris in 1950, he returned feeling “unmoored from the markers of race and community.” The rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, however, caused another transformation, spurring him to reconcile “the multiple inheritances that made up his identity.” A 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art made Bearden a celebrity.
A perceptive, richly detailed biography.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-505909-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
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
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