As good an introduction to classic Guston as one will find, not merely as an artist but as an intellectual.
A concise interpretive biography and memoir of the renegade Abstract Expressionist by his friend, the late novelist Feld (Zwilling’s Dream, 1999, etc.), for many years a Kirkus reviewer.
Philip Guston (1913–80) is perhaps best known for his scandalous conversion to figurative art in 1970 at the height of his career as an Abstract Expressionist, contemporary of Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Feld’s account of Guston, while briefly covering his early life and career as a card-carrying AbEx, is primarily an affectionate homage to the artist and the works he created after his change of style, the period when Feld (who died in 2001) knew him personally. Punctuated by letters from Guston that allow the artist to speak for himself, the author describes and analyzes the deeply personal works from the last decade of Guston’s life that he believes are his friend’s landmark paintings. Feld escorts the reader through Guston’s idiosyncratic iconography and in a loosely chronological fashion easily moves from anecdote to analysis of paintings. Guston’s intellect, his curiosity, his generosity, his “nearly limitless appetite for talk,” and his insecurity are all fodder for this candid tale of an artist whose late works have acquired a contemporary influence inconceivable at the time of their creation. Feld’s effortless prose sets the reader in the studio, in the kitchen, in an Italian restaurant, as he captures his friend’s animus. An added bonus is the inclusion of the pair’s correspondence (minus the Guston letters quoted in the main text) in an appendix, which allows the reader to observe the evolution of this energetic intellectual and personal friendship.
As good an introduction to classic Guston as one will find, not merely as an artist but as an intellectual. (18 b&w photos) (A major Philip Guston retrospective is appearing now through September at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; October through January at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and at the Royal Academy in London in 2004.)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-284-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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