Customer Reviews

Images from the World Between: The Circus in Twentieth-Century American Art

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Donna Gustafson's Images From The World Between: The Circus in 20th Century American Art is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand it does offer a number of images of rare artistic works depicting or inspired by the world of the circus, from the straightforward to the surreal, from impressionist to abstract. Many of these I had never seen before, and so the book does merit consideration for anyone interested in the imagery of circus life and how it is seen by various artists. There are also some purely photographic works, but they seemed out of place here and there are definitely better and more comprehensive books for purely photographic images of the circus.

On the definite plus side, for me anyway, was the discovery of some works and artists with which I was not previously familiar. Reginald Marsh's paintings from the 1930's were quite compelling, capturing the rowdy atmosphere of the crowds and the sideshow and the raw muscularity of trapeze artists in mid-flight. Robert Riggs' lithographs, also from the 1930's, vividly capture acts in the ring, one of tumblers being watched not only by the crowds but by their fellow circus performers with the band playing in accompaniment, and another of an elephant act with five elephants, one bearing a female rider aloft, playing to the crowd as the handlers on the ground put the animals through their paces, with clowns on the sidelines carrying on, a frenzied moment all perfectly caught in time.

That said, however, I was expecting more from this book than I found in it. The text sections are mildly informative but with an academic bent that lacked appeal, more commentary than narration, and I found myself wishing that more space had been allocated to the art than to the text. The book would have, I feel, been better off leaving the photographic sections to other books and including more paintings, drawings and sculptures to give a broader selection both in breadth and depth of those works and artists. I kept looking for, hoping for, more depictions of other of the many varied aspects of circus life, and I felt that the book came up short of what it could have been.

All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the circus and in how circus life and performances have been portrayed by artists over the years, though with the qualifier that is of only limited value and that there are likely to be other better books on the subject.