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Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists
by Edward Lucie-Smith.
Thames & Hudson, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1999.
ISBN: 0-500-23739-5.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50613-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net
As the author admits at its outset, this book (as implied by its title)
is indebted to Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari, a classic
collection of articles on the agonies and ecstasies of individual
artists, first published in 1550. Vasari's mission was more manageable,
writes Lucie-Smith, if only because he did not have to deal with the
bewildering diversity of modern life. That said, he embarks on the
arduous task of selecting and writing about 100 artists of the Modern
and Postmodern periods, beginning with "Toward the Modern" (featuring
Edvard Munch and Kathe Kollwitz) and ending 23 sections and more than
300 pages later with "The Artist Not the Artwork" (Louise Bourgeois,
Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Eva Hesse, and Jean-Michel Basquiat). The
articles, like those of Vasari, are both entertaining and informative,
and arranged chronologically in stylistic categories. The book is also
well-illustrated, in the sense that the author has chosen artworks that
are representative yet not overused, supplemented by curious, revealing
photographs that are sometimes the strangest, most memorable part.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 15, No. 4, Summer
2000.)
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