To think it took just two days in 1959 to record this masterwork. Most of the players get a mini-biography. These are fine in the case of Miles Davis,To think it took just two days in 1959 to record this masterwork. Most of the players get a mini-biography. These are fine in the case of Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and Cannonball Adderley, but too meager in the case of John Coltrane and all but nonexistent for bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb. The most interesting part of the book for me was the discussion of George Russell's "Lydian Chromatic Concept for Tonal Organization," a sophisticated modal theory of music which greatly influenced Miles, Coltrane's post-Miles work, Charles Mingus and much of the post-bop generation. With that single exception, though, I think the writing about the music itself is rather thin. But isn't this true of all music writing? Sure, one can convey something of the music's emotional effect, something of its reception and historical importance, even an idea of the labors involved in making it, but in the end it's all simulacra. One is reminded of sex in novels. Nor does the writing itself rise to a level of achievement consonant with its subject matter. That said, the book is a wonderful adjunct to the recording....more
Shattering. Edie's story is a tragedy. Wait until you meet her family. Her father should have been taken out at dawn, blindfolded and shot. Moreover, Shattering. Edie's story is a tragedy. Wait until you meet her family. Her father should have been taken out at dawn, blindfolded and shot. Moreover, if you want insight into the 1960s New York art world and contemporary culture as a whole, this is your book. It's redolent of America in the '60s. Fascinating.
An excellent overview of the work of Diego Velazquez and his standing among the Old Masters. It's also the story of one man transfixed to the point ofAn excellent overview of the work of Diego Velazquez and his standing among the Old Masters. It's also the story of one man transfixed to the point of monomania by one of Velazquez's works, John Snare, a 19th century bookseller and collector. Highly recommended....more
I'm no great reader of biographies. I tend to find them lackluster with their cradle-to-grave narrative arc and cheap psychologizing. But this particuI'm no great reader of biographies. I tend to find them lackluster with their cradle-to-grave narrative arc and cheap psychologizing. But this particular work is terrific. It's insightful. We see how Georgia O'Keeffe's talent developed early in life. In 1903-04 Georgia and her many sisters were driven some miles in a horse and buggy from their Wisconsin farm to art lessons, an almost unheard of extravagance in those still largely frontier days. We follow O'Keeffe during her subsequent study at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League in New York (57th St.), and Columbia University (Teacher's College), also in New York. She becomes a most unorthodox teacher of art in Virginia and, later, Texas. It is while there, in West Texas, that she discovers Big Sky country, the American southwest, whose strange beauty was to possess her for the rest of her life. But between the Texas teaching and the full-time move to New Mexico there was an interval in New York when she was discovered by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallerist, who championed her, scandalously left his wife and married her, a woman 25 years younger than himself. For about twenty years she lives with the garrulous Stieglitz in New York. In the spring and summer they shift activities to the Stieglitz family compound upstate on Lake George. Here the great man is surrounded by his large family and circle of admirers. For Georgia, the East ultimately comes to seem a dead place. She yearns for the desert southwest. A change is made. Instead of going to Lake George for the summer, she will go to New Mexico, where she will paint prolifically. (She was virtually blocked in the East.)
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There she discovers Ghost Ranch, and a few years later the house at Abiquiu. Steiglitz doesn't like the arrangement but he knows she will not paint otherwise, so her lets her go. The arrangement continues until his death in 1946, when, after three years spent settling his estate, she moves west full time. In the 1960s, the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, she undergoes a ludicrous fall from critical favor. The absurd interpretations by the critics of the day are well represented, and hilarious they are too for being so fantastically off the mark. In the early 1970s she is justly returned to her proper status with a series of big shows in major U.S. cities. I found her will an astonishing thing to contemplate. Unlike most people, and this was her greatest gift in my view, perhaps greater than her artistic mastery, she knew what she wanted from life, almost from day one, and she doggedly went out and got it. This focus is at the core of her spare way of life and stripped down esthetic. Most of all she had this immense appetite for solitude. For most of us, with our various codependencies, that's hard to imagine. But it was fascinating to see it manifest in the life of this woman whose character seems set from the moment of birth. She is an astonishing historical figure largely because of her output of a timeless body of art which has defied all critical reductions. The author has done an excellent job. The biography's far more penetrating than I had thought it could be. And this is done for the most part by showing and quotation, not by that awful sort of psychologizing that is actually a projection of the writer's own wishes. Warmly recommended....more
The selection of works here is the broadest I have ever seen. It includes many works I've never seen in any gallery or museum. The printing job is exqThe selection of works here is the broadest I have ever seen. It includes many works I've never seen in any gallery or museum. The printing job is exquisite (Italy). I'm not sure of the dot pitch, but it must be at least 600 dpi if not more. Fantastic detail! Subtle colors and a reassuringly heavy full cloth binding meant to last. ...more
An extraordinary document! What other inner view of a great artist's creative processes and life do we have like this one? (The Autobiography of BenveAn extraordinary document! What other inner view of a great artist's creative processes and life do we have like this one? (The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini perhaps, but it is boastful precisely where Dear Theo is introspective, materialistic where Dear Theo is threadbare, highly social where Dear Theo is solitary.)
We bear with Vincent when he abandons an early attempt to enter the church, during which he becomes about as parable spewing and pious as any pastor one can imagine. Then as he turns away from his family--except for brother Theo, to whom these letters were addressed--and to the life of a solitary painter. We are with him as he studies under Anton Mauve at The Hague, as he learns and speaks at length about what he has learned about artistic technique.
We feel the heartbreak keenly when he is rejected by a cousin whom he wishes to marry, and during his subsequent emotional crises. When out of deep loneliness he befriends and falls in love with a pregnant streetwalker, who had been abandoned by her lover, I felt for him in his outcast situation keenly. His extended family is outraged. Nevertheless, he takes her in, changes her life, and makes both her and himself briefly happy. These particular passages touch on the hard lives of poor single women during this time of puritanically repressed society as nothing else I have ever read. In the meantime we get van Gogh's verbal descriptions of what he sees, and it's as if we're looking into one of his extraordinary paintings. For example:
I have attacked the old whopper of a pollard willow, and I think it is the best of the watercolors--a gloomy landscape, that dead tree near a stagnant pool covered with reeds, a car shed of the Ryn railroad, where tracks cross each other; the sky with drifting clouds, grey with a single bright white border, and depths of blue where the clouds are parted. I wanted to make it as the signalman in his smock and with his little red flag must see and feel it when he thinks: "It is gloomy weather today." (p. 141)
I like the way editors Irving and Jean Stone have cut the letters into a continuous manuscript, leaving out salutations and much mundane material. But there's a little problem in that there are few dates. One is never quite sure where one is chronologically. I think this could have been remedied by putting the month and year in the margin, much as Robert Graves did in I, Claudius. This would have left unimpeded the free flow of the "autobiography" as they call it, with some justification.
A few things about his painting. Because of his liaison with Sien, Anton Mauve ejected him from his studio and he did not learn to paint from Mauve. What a blessing this was for all of us, since he then had to virtually teach himself. This, I believe, is why his painting is so closely related to his drawing. His original drawings are often replicated in oil almost to the very penstroke.
What is called black and white is in fact painting in black--"painting" in this respect, that one gives in a drawing the depth of effect, the richness of tone value which must be in a picture [painting]. Every colorist has his own peculiar scale of colors. This is also the case in black and white; one must be able to go from the highest light to the deepest shadow, and this with only a few simple ingredients. (p.184)
In my view, if Mauve had taught him the standard techniques, there's a good chance, and he expresses a fear of this, that the paintings we would have today would be somewhat more conventional in execution. So losing Mauve as a mentor was enormously fortunate, though it did not seem so at the time.
Vincent's staunch romanticization of manual labor reminds me of the idiotic Soviet propaganda to come, though he has none of its strident militancy. He had no interest in politics despite the fact that he was miserably poor and living hand to mouth off of insufficient cash infusions from brother, Theo. Often he did not even have enough money for materials (paint, ink, paper, etc.). Imagine that! Vincent van Gogh sitting on his hands without even paper to draw upon!
As the early infatuation with Sien fades, he begins to see her for what she is--an uneducated woman who can't begin to appreciate his work; an illiterate woman whose brutish mother has instilled in her prejudices against all men as dirty rotten scoundrels and despicable violators of innocence. Ironically, it's her mother who seems to want her to return to her former position as breadwinner. Finally, after years of cohabitation, Vincent leaves Sien and her children, whom he loves, in The Hague, in part because the cost cannot be sustained by Theo. He has come to realize she is too far gone to "save," but this only after he has estranged many of his family members.
Now he moves to the countryside around Drethen (Netherlands) known for its exceptional natural beauty. At once the reader senses how much freer he is, unfettered. He grows almost sunny as he begins to assimilate the landscape and its inhabitants, the shoreline and canals--he rides barges through the very heath--the unusual local dress, the strangely cave-like cottages which are masterpieces of housekeeping and comfort inside.
When he moves to Arles in 1888, he becomes truly proficient as a painter. His industry is astounding. "Night Cafe" for instance was done in three consecutive nights. His "Sunflowers," a series of canvases, took about ten days. Often he would complete a canvas in a single day. His prose becomes chattier, livelier. He finishes the Rulin Family portraits, countless landscapes which must be worked on in the grip of the terrible regional wind, the mistral. There is much planning for the arrival of Gauguin, much discussion of starting a Southern School of sorts for the jaded artists of Le Petit Boulevard (the impressionists generally). But when Gaugain comes, after a few weeks of productive work, Vincent cuts off part of his ear and offers it to one of the sex workers in the local brothel who faints. He is later found by the gendarmes back at his house unconcious from loss of blood. Thus begins van Gogh's decline and it's one of the saddest, most heartbreaking prose sequences you'll ever read. Manic Depression is the disease and at the time there was no treatment; there wasn't even a reliable diagnosis. He was treated for epilepsy which he decidedly did not have.
The thoughts of suicide he mentions to Theo must have been terrifying for the younger brother. Yet he has always been financially dependent on Theo and the time is fast approaching when he will no longer allow himself, especially in the grip of his illness and with all the new costs of his care, to remain a burden. Throughout there has always been the hope that the paintings would eventually sell. They never do. And then he becomes all too aware of the dichotomy between starving, living artists like himself, and the recently dead artists whose work goes for great sums. He must have felt on some level that he'd be better off dead, especially since his demise would be such a relief to Theo, who had married and started a family. It's hard not to read the final pages as valedictory. Two days after the last letter Vincent is dead by his own hand. Theo survives him by a mere six months.
By all means read it, but be prepared to bleed....more
Speculative biography. There are a number of periods in the life of the brilliant Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) about which we know verSpeculative biography. There are a number of periods in the life of the brilliant Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) about which we know very little. Julia Blackburn has taken that sketchy biography and filled in the gaps with speculations about "what Goya might have done" and "what Goya must have seen." In the end, the book is as much about Blackburn's intellectual and emotional response to Goya's work as it is about the painter himself. Blackburn fills in the gaps with descriptions of the towns and villages in which Goya lived, elements of personal memoir (her mother was a painter), insight into the artist's letters, and so on. Blackburn has a spare, engaging style. She's a joy to read. My only proviso is that those expecting a more traditional biography might be better off, say, with Gassier's Goya: Life and Work. This was one of Blackburn's own primary sources. It's fascinating to see how she adroitly dances around the lacunae in the master's biography by writing about Goya's role as court painter to Spain's Charles IV, the Peninsular War through which the artist lived, his printmaking process and so on. Throughout are photographs of the some of the original copper plates Goya used in making the "Caprichos" and "Disparates" print series. This is an interesting choice and perhaps a metaphor for what Blackburn seeks to do here; that is, to give us a detailed though somewhat inverted view--the chronology is loose--of Goya's life and times augmented with personal interpretation. It's a very idiosyncratic book--and a joy....more
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