All three tales in Super Host are witty, moving, and beautifully written, but its Emma Eastons that raises the most provocative questions about the often torturous relationship between an artist and her work
Tag: Book review
Art and Books: Joanne Mattera remembers
Contributed by Sharon Butler / How artists apprehend the world is framed largely by their early experiences. Yet, unless artists achieve blue-chip success, we rarely get a firm handle on what those experiences might have been. That’s why Joanne Mattera’s memoir Vita makes compelling reading. Artists like Mattera don’t measure […]
Laura Blacklow on painterly photo processes
Contributed by Sharon Butler / On the occasion of the Association of International Photography Dealers (AIPAD) sponsored Photography Show that is taking place on Pier 94 in NYC this weekend, I spoke with Laura Blacklow, a Boston-based artist (and once a teacher of mine) who works with alternative photo processes. Exploring the experimental precinct where painting and photography intersect, Blacklow […]
Reading David Salle
Contributed by Rob Kaiser-Schlatzlein / David Salle, in the 1980s an enfant terrible of painting, has published�How to See,�a collection of essays on art and artists written over the course of some�thirty years. While many people do not know Salle as a writer, recently he has had�a regular column in […]
Lost recipes and other stories of painting’s past
Back in Colonial times, before bottles of medium and tubes of premixed paint were readily available in the local art supply store, painters were like mad scientists, grinding pigments and developing secret methods that would make their paintings more lifelike, stable and, thus, more sought after. For early American artists, […]
Must read: James Elkins deciphers the Art Critique
Contributed by Sharon Butler / After participating in final critiques at Brooklyn College and MICA last semester, I posted some notes for grad students about the critique process, and a reader suggested I check out a recent release from New Academia Publishing called Art Critiques: A Guide. Written by James […]
Book excerpt: A PAINTER’S LIFE by K.B. Dixon
UPDATE (May 11, 2010): Dixon’s book has been selected as a finalist for the 2010 Eric Hoffer Book Award for independent publishing. According to their mission statement, the Hoffer Award was founded at the start of the 21st century (with permission from the Eric Hoffer Estate) to honor freethinking writers […]
Fictional painter’s prose portrait from Doubleday
The Great Man a novel by Kate Christensen, Doubleday: 308 pp., $23.95. In the NYTimes, Janet Maslin reviews this fictional posthumous portrait of a painter: “Oscar Feldman, the fictitious painter at the heart of Kate Christensen�s mischievous new novel, was given a lot of latitude during his lifetime. He had […]
Jubilee City: Joe Andoe’s memoir at full speed
“JUBILEE CITY: A Memoir at Full Speed” by Joe Andoe. Illustrated. 207 pages. William Morrow. $22.95. Visit Joe’s website Amy Finnerty in The NYTimes Sunday Book Review: “He has a gift for ruthless analysis, and among the disjointed microchapters of his life story, there are exacting self-revelations every few pages. […]
Courbet biography: Dirty laundry is the emperor�s new clothes
�The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture� (Princeton; $45), by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu Peter Schjeldahl’s review in the New Yorker: “Gustave Courbet relished scandal as a shortcut to prominence at a time when, for artists, official honors and patronage were losing cachet to notoriety […]
