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The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

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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.

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.

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.

Michael Kimmelman has succeeded in creating a much-needed bridge between artist and public in his wondrous book of essays THE ACCIDENTAL MASTERPIECE: ON THE ART OF LIFE AND VICE VERSA. For those whose lives are spent making art, critiquing art, selling art, exhibiting art, or writing about art, Kimmelman puts the emotional drive into words and in doing so, opens windows of understanding better many other writers today. He is able to explain the unexplainable simply by stepping outside the circle of rarity that too often cocoons art, keeping non-artists at an unfortunate distance.

In this group of immensely readable essays Kimmelman surveys ideas about such artists as Vermeer, Duchamps, Donald Judd, James Turrell, Wayne Thiebaud, Chardin, and Matthew Barney - to give an idea of the spectrum of thoughts! Yet he also is in praise of the all but unknown artist Bob Ross who spoke to more Americans about the enrichment painting can bring into the senses in his television series 'The Joy of Painting', a didactic but infectious course in the magic of brush, paint and observation. It is that kind of equality that makes Kimmelman so effective. He takes us from starchy museum or sterile gallery and lifts from those encounters the communication art creates. And that most important of all aspects of looking at art or learning about art is of course altering the way we perceive our world. For Kimmelman our world is our canvas and his drive is to bring the reader into that ethereal field of true observation and experience that will enhance our quality of artful living. 'Art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully...art becomes our entree to the sublime.'

For the art aficionado or the novice this is a book worth the read and even more worth the absorption. Were that there were more Michael Kimmelmans around to paste together the deconstructed chaos of the world as we have abused it. This is an invitation to do just that. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, March 06

This book is not about art but more about how art came about. I enjoyed in particular the chapters on collecting and Antarctica. Collecting led to museums and what went into them (art). Antarctica was about travel photography and how the photographs taken there are now a part of our historical memory. What is particularly nice is how non-judgmental the author is - this adds value to every chapter and the various types of art represented. In the last chapter Michael Kimmelman relates well the realism of objects painted in our current era to past era's - capturing something innocuous like a gum-ball machine or earlier representations of simple commonplace things that surround people in everyday life. Capturing everyday things that we hardly notice is art in itself. All-in-all an enjoyable read.

The reviews of this book were laudatory, and the topic interesting, but in my view this book was erudition with only a thin point to make. The constant quotes from famous artists sometimes made a point, sometimes not.

Many of the vignettes are interesting, in particular the stories of Bonnard and Ross, the painters (as mentioned in most of the other reviews here), were fun. However, questions tying the thread of the narrative were weaker. For example, the theme moralizing that each artist was lucky to find their groove grows a bit old. Maybe Bonnard was not lucky to have an isolationist wife. Maybe Ross would have also found success in other endeavors. Maybe Dr. Hicks would have been better served by preoccupations other than gathering 75,000 light bulbs. For another example, the question of what is and what is not Art struck me as artificial.

Perhaps I am too much of a scientist, but I valued reading Kimmelman's odd facts more than his somewhat didactic editorial remarks.

Still, the book is worthwhile if one is seeking a wide-ranging and desultory conversation on art by a true expert.

Highly recommended for any one with even a glancing interest in art. The author's short essays easily invite the reader to look anew at what artists create. And, as this book shows, an inspired artist can be one involved with anything from quilting to painting gum-ball machines. Mr. Kimmelman is a gifted teacher and an excellent writer.

When I lived in Moscow and would visit St. Petersburg, a visit to the Hermitage Art Museum was always an obligatory pleasure. Ditto for New York; the last time my wife and I traveled there we visited the Metropolitan Museum. But at both museums I felt a pronounced sense of dislocation, like I somehow lacked the knowledge, the experience, or the aesthetic sensibility to appreciate fully the exhibits we saw. We enjoyed much of what we saw, but we still saw a lot of "art" that caused me to resonate with Harry Truman's judgment that Churchill's works were "damn good" because "at least you can tell what they are and that is more than you can say for a lot of these modern painters." Were the artists and their work pretentious, or was I just ignorant?

Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times, has written an unpretentious book that genuinely appreciates that common dilemma for both artist and amateur. He moves the reader beyond Truman's humorous but ill-informed notion, and does so in a manner that does not condescend toward the reader or dumb down his subject. His book is eminently accessible and written with a deft touch, itself a textual work of art that is a pleasure to read. Yes, he takes you through the world of professional artists like Matisse and Michelangelo, the brilliant and the bizarre, but he also gives equally serious attention to the artistic impulse in the likes of dentist Hugh Hicks who had a collection of 75,000 light bulbs, a prisoner named Ray Materson who learned how to do exquisite embroideries of his beloved New York Yankees, painting by numbers that I tried as a child, and the homemade quilts made by poor black women in remote Gee's Bend, Alabama ("...some of the most miraculous works of modern art that America has ever produced."). Although a professional critic, Kimmelman imparts an infectious sense of wonderment and enthusiasm that democratizes art in the best sense of that term.

Art can transform our lives by helping us to live more fully and attentively, and not only by engaging the sublime but by appreciating the mundane and the utterly ordinary. Humanity's creative impulse hints at something beyond and greater than ourselves that emerges not despite but even because of restraints, conflicts, and confinement. Beauty, in Kimmelman's view, clearly has a spiritual element that helps us to "slow our systems" so that we can live as we ought. Through appreciating art, "we may learn something about how to conceive of our own ordinary existence--about how to live and die, more constructively or at least more alertly." Which is to say that even, or especially, one's life can be a creative act of art and beauty.

I simply can't avoid the cliche -- this book changed my life. This book is, as Kimmelman hopes, a good read for anyone who picks it up, but it's so much more than that. I am an art history major at a university, and I was impressed with Kimmelman's ecclectic choices for artists. He merely references Picasso and Michelangelo, not wasting time or detailing a name that is common even to the most common of men. Kimmelman takes -- often times -- eccentric artists who devoted their entire lives to some form of art. When people think of art, they think of oil on canvas or they think or Italian architecture or modern sculpture. They think of GENRES of art, whereas Kimmelman points out that all of life is an art. Everything that we do, what we say, who we say things to... everything and everyone is part of the greatest canvas of all, our own personal lives.

Kimmelman was -- somehow -- able to clearly express his thoughts and views with both enthusiasm and fact. He is a wonderfully gifted writer, and I learned more about myself, life in general, and art, than I have in my entire 22 years of existence. Each chapter held a refreshing look on the world, and I was deeply touched by many of the stories. My favorite chapter was The Art of Maximizing Your Time, and the story of Charlotte Salomons.

You don't need to be an artist or to have studied art in order to "get" this book. You simply have to be human, to exist in a world of beauty and heartache. Kimmelman illustrates this point by retelling a story of artist Jay DeFeo:

DeFeo once described a waking dream in which, reborn as someone else in the future, she wanders through room after room of a museum and suddenly finds The Rose, restored, a person staring intently at it. She walks up to the person. "You know," she says, "I did that." (p. 130)

Seriously. This book changed my life, and it will change yours.

Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, takes a very down-to-earth tour of the nature of visual art and its contemporary issues in THE ACCIDENTAL MASTERPIECE. This is a book that reaches out to the general reader, beguiling with anecdotes and a willingness to define terms and issues plainly without oversimplification. Kimmelman welcomes everyone to the table of art, not just the cognoscenti. His enthusiasm for artists and the place of art in our lives is infectious.

The first essay inspired the title of the collection. Kimmelman sorts through the work and circumstances of Pierre Bonnard (1867 - 1947), whose career and life took a permanent turn the day he glimpsed a pretty young woman on the street. She became his muse and often his tormenter, his model and wife. From Bonnard he moves onto the rise of photographic technology and, with its proliferation, the rise of the amateur on the art scene. Then onto how we define and are moved by beauty, which he reflects upon while panting up mountains that have stirred great painters but belatedly release an epiphany for him. He addresses conceptual art next ("The Art of Making Art Without Lifting A Finger"), and then collecting, then finding oneself (and art) when lost, and then the changing attitudes toward figurative rendering, especially nudes, while profiling Philip Pearlstein in particular. "The Art of the Pilgrimage" heads to the land art out west and the last chapter concludes with art that depicts ordinary objects--not Warhol's soup cans as one might imagine, but Wayne Thiebaud's depiction of gumball machines and Chardin's painting of a young man blowing a bubble.

This is not a comprehensive introduction to art history and some academics may argue it is not particularly critical, but it generously imparts a lot of knowledge and awe via its conversational tone. It is a pleasure joining an insider for a special tour of his world.