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82 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This masterpiece is no accident, September 3, 2005
A friend of mine purchased this book, and I picked it up from her table to read the first page, and found that I simply could not put it down. 'The Art of Life and Vice Versa', the subtitle said - something I have long aspired to understand is the interplay of art and life in its many facets and influences. According to author Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times and frequent author on art and cultural topics, studying art and those who devote themselves to art 'provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully.' Living, according to Kimmelman, can be a 'daily masterpiece' for each of us - we needed be a technical genius such as Picasso to be able to live our lives artistically. One of Kimmelman's early examples is of the dentist Hugh Francis Hicks, whose home was a makeshift lightbulb museum (with more than 75,000 lightbulbs in his collection from all manner of times, places and devices). This is not mere enthusiasm, but an abiding love that made his interest a matter of art.
One of Kimmelman's intentions here, which he has achieved, was not to confront or approach art from the standpoint of an art critic, an art historian, or even as a professional artist, but rather as an amateur - an amateur being that one who does it for the love of it. In this, Kimmelman has produced a text that is readily accessible to those with no particular training or background in the visual arts, but who can nonetheless come to appreciate more fully and profoundly the impact of art on those who engage in it. Art touches the soul in ways that no other healing force can do (Kimmelman references the Greek philosophers who believed that music had healing powers for the soul similar to medicine's healing powers for the physical body; visual arts hold similar power).
Kimmelman combines the familiar with the obscure. The names of Matisse and Picasso are ones that are generally known; the name Bonnard, unfortunately, is not so known. However, Kimmelman introduces the more obscure figures with grace and care such that one comes to have a strong depth of feeling for Bonnard, his wife Marthe/Maria, and his absolute devotion to her as the object of his art. Kimmelman writes of Bob Ross, whom he describes 'may still be the most famous artist on the face of the earth,' not so much for his artistic production, but for his show 'The Joy of Painting'. The television programme continues to air in many places years after Ross' death, and encourages people to take up painting - 'His purpose was as much to massage souls as it was to teach painting. He sold hope.' This is a kind of hope available through art that is rarely if ever found in other media.
Kimmelman stays primarily within the realm of modern art, but ties in pieces of history all along the narrative way. Authors from Aristotle to Stendahl, events from the Industrial Revolution to the Shackleton expedition, figures as diverse as Grover Cleveland, Albert Einstein, Anne Frank, Jack Benny and John Wilkes Booth find a reference here. Kimmelman does introduce concepts from aesthetics and philosophy occasionally, but briefly - the idea of the difference between taste and personal interest from the work of Kant and Hume through Nietzsche and twentieth-century writers is introduced, but not in such a technical or obscure way as to drag down the flow of the text into difficult minutiae.
Kimmelman's passion for art and artists, a term that can be broadly defined to include the amateur pianists who turned up in Oklahoma for a competition and the light-bulb collector in Baltimore in addition to major figures such as Cezanne, Duchamp and Monet, is very apparent on the pages of this book. One reviewer called this a page-turner, and I must agree. I borrowed it from my friend (who hadn't yet finished her last book) promising to return it before she was ready - I've now finished the book (less than 24 hours later, which speaks to the power this book has to hold the attention and the ease with which one can read the text) and must now acquire my own copy.
Not everything is art, however, nor is everything that passes for art necessarily 'good art'. Perhaps my favourite quote from the book comes near the beginning - 'A day of looking at bad art can be long and dark.' It reminds me of Frank Burch Brown's discussion on such topics in his book 'Good Taste, Bad Taste, Christian Taste', in which the kinds of kitsch that becomes popular can be quite well-done in terms of production values but still be in bad taste.
My one regret with this text is that there are no colour pictures or plates. There are 26 images in black-and-white, but this is a text that cries out for colour. Kimmelman does provide an index and a select bibliography for further reading that will be most handy.
This book is a masterpiece, not by accident.
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57 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paying Attention, September 10, 2005
This book has changed my life! Mr. Kimmelman's urbane discussions have enhanced my understanding of the impulse behind my own enthusiasm for objects and arrangements and for the place of art in my life. I wish I had had the book years ago.
Mr. Kimmelman has a superb, almost magical talent for transporting a reader to places and people he has visited as well as to times when his imagination -- informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of writers past and present -- fills in the gaps.
He takes us to a painter's studio darkened by black curtains where Philip Pearlstein transforms models into geometrical compositions; on an exhausting climb up Cezanne's Montagne Sainte-Victoire, where, to his chagrin, he finds a group of elderly French ladies there before him; for an early-morning walk with Pierre Bonnard at his home in southern France, where he lives with an impossible wife; to Antarctica with Frank Hurley, the fearless Australian photographer who captured the romance of the cold south when he sailed with Shackleton on the Endurance; on a near-death experience in Utah, where he had gone to visit a Matthew Barney sculpture in the salt flats in the winter and found himself in chest-high icy water in total darkness after volunteering to find help when car and cell phone failed.
Chapter titles provide clues to how he makes the art experience apparent, i.e., The Art of Making Art Without Lifting a Finger, The Art of Collecting Light Bulbs, The Art of Maximizing Your Time, The Art of Having a Lofty Perspective, The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost. As for the last, this book has made me feel "found". I have heard many lectures by eminent art historians--among them Erwin Panofsky at Princeton and Seymour Slive at Harvard--yet not until I read Mr. Kimmelman did I learn to pay attention, live life more alertly, and embrace the art in my daily life.
Mr. Kimmelman, an art critic whose opinions I would like to hear about everything, is a charming companion -- insightful, funny, eloquent, utterly without pretense, and a fountain of perfectly placed observations from past writers, from Nabokov and Proust to Heine, Hobbes, and Hegel. He has created a conversational genre all his own, one that is both moving and joyful.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intelligent, Interesting, Inspiring, November 22, 2005
One of the best books I've read in a long time. Pure pleasure. Much of what Kimmelman writes about visual art also applies to writing (I'm a writer), & I found this inspiring. The chapters about Pierre Bonnard (his artistic & personal obsession with his wife, Marthe), Frank Hurley (his sometimes egocentric obsession with capturing the spectacle of Shackleton's Arctic exploration, even when faced with hellish conditions), & Philip Pearlstein (his obsession with routine; his commitment to work even when it isn't going well; his belief that one should "look slowly & hard at something subtle & small") are particularly wonderful. I especially appreciate Kimmelman's description of Pearlstein's process, from the beginning to the end of one of his paintings. This gem of a book reminds us to see again -- as if for the first time. I recommend "The Accidental Masterpiece" for anyone who creates, collects, or appreciates art, in any of its sometimes surprising forms. And even if you don't think the previous sentence applies to you, you'll change your mind after reading this book, which is never pretentious but always smart. One final note: Kimmelman's writing -- his prose -- is excellent. Clear & pleasing to my ear.
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