Customer Reviews

Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism (Georgia Okeeffe Museum)

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This book was a big disappointment to me. It is overflowing with information, but ultimately it is much less than the sum of its parts. While there is a rough overall chronological organization to the presentation of material, the few structural themes repeatedly appear and disappear with wide gaps between, which makes following the thread of thought very difficult. There are also frequent and overly lengthy digressions onto themes of at best peripheral relationship to the main subject.

In the end, the impression I am left with is a working draft of a college thesis written by a student who has a lot to learn about how to make a cohesive and effective presentation, and who has put a lot of effort into padding out the material in order to reach a required length. The book would have been greatly improved if reduced to about a third of its present length, though even that would have been much longer than needed to present the very limited amount of useful interpretation and analysis to be found wandering about within.