Book notes: 'David Park: A Painter's Life' by Nancy Boas

David Park: A Painter's Life by Nancy Boas

UC Press, $49.95

David Park (1911-1960) was a first-rate painter who found himself in a tough spot in fall 1946. Clyfford Still, the imperious and voluble artist who would pioneer Abstract Expressionism, wanted to take over the advanced painting class that Park taught at San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts. The administration turned him down, and Still harbored a grudge for years.

Park went on to paint his way out of the dilemma, finding the means for a distinctive type of figuration that could be convincingly infused within muscular abstraction. In "David Park: A Painter's Life," Nancy Boas (Society of Six) draws on 20 years of interviews and research to tell the story of how Park came to spearhead Bay Area Figurative art, spawning Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown and others. This welcome volume is the first full biography of a Northern California artist.

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-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Stephen Sondheim awarded Sheridan Morley Prize for biography

Stephen Sondheim, for the most part, is not a fan of critics. "It takes a long time to learn not to pay attention to critics, or at least not to let them distract you," the theater icon wrote in his recent book, "Look, I Made a Hat.” 

Fortunately, critics don’t seem to share the same sentiment: The 81-year-old composer has been awarded the Sheridan Morley Prize (named for the late British theater critic) for Theatre Biography. 

"Look, I Made a Hat” -- a follow-up to the maestro’s earlier book, “Finishing the Hat” -– offers a peek at the man behind the musical theater curtain with a collection of never-before-seen drafts and lyrics spanning his 30-year career, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sunday in the Park with George.”

Book review: 'The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography'

Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982
Daniell Cornell, ed.; Prestel pp.256; $60

A splashy picture book makes sense for a large-format volume on post-World War II photographs that include swimming pools.

With more than 200 images by nearly 50 artists, starting in the 1940s with Ruth Bernhard and ending with David Hockney's early 1980s multi-Polaroids, this handsomely printed catalog to a large Pacific Standard Time show at the Palm Springs Art Museum accomplishes that.

It fudges a bit by including a few seashore pictures; but together with the photographs' pleasurable indulgences, the five essays also have larger, smarter points to make.

Along with the artificial Eden represented by the swimming pool construction-boom and the emerging gay sub-theme in the arc from Bernhard's babes to Hockney's boys, camera-work underwent a simultaneous shift.

Sharp-focused Modernist purity gave way to postmodern multiplicity, and America's narrow domestic environment changed along with it.

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-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photographing the American Wall

An ominous barrier meanders through a remote landscape appearing to float across the desert sands, reminiscent of a stark, modern-day Great Wall of China. The structure is not filled with ancient wonder but rather conjures up the controversy and hostility associated with the Berlin Wall. This barricade is the American wall that divides the U.S.-Mexico border.

Since 2006, fine art photographer Maurice Sherif has spent sweltering days documenting the wall that hopscotches 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean in California to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. His collection of 96 photos, along with essays from scholars, can be viewed in his giant two-volume book, "The American Wall" (MS Zephyr Publishing).

Book review: 'Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973-1977'

"Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973-1977"
Mike Kelley, Dan Nadel, eds.
Prism / Picturebox $34.95

Destroy All Monsters, the infamous '70s performance art group based in Ann Arbor, Mich., has been the subject of several publications that manage to maintain its anarchic edge of post-adolescent energy, throw-away humor and dead-serious insanity. "Return of the Repressed" is the latest. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at West Hollywood's Prism Gallery, it focuses on the drawings, collages and prints of now-celebrated L.A. artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, plus the off-kilter photographs of Cary Loren and fractured fairy tale images by Niagara (she took her name from the 1953 movie, a noir masterpiece that made Marilyn Monroe a star).

As befits a proto-punk group that erupted from the American Rust Belt's collapsed economy, this paperback edition is a bottomless pit: Most of the hundreds of works reproduced in it haven't been published before. Equally pertinent is the smart introductory essay by Nicole Rudick, former managing editor of Bookforum. Rudick sources what she rightly terms the "sui generis" work's inspirations in everything from composers Sun Ra, Harry Partch and John Cage to artists Jean Dubuffet, Asger Jorn and Joseph Beuys.

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— Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

 

‘Beauty Is in the Street’ features 1968 Paris protest posters

Time magazine called 2011 the year of the protester, so inevitably comparisons have been drawn to another period of civil unrest — the '60s. In particular, the May 1968 uprising in Paris against the French government could be viewed as a precursor to the recent Occupy movement that started on Wall Street and spread around the country.

During the Paris protests, a group of artists, Atelier Populaire (popular workshop), created posters that were vital in spreading the call to unite workers and students — a function that would be taken over for Occupy by social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

More than 200 images of this protest art, along with firsthand accounts of the clashes, have been published in "Beauty Is in the Street" (Four Corners Books, $40).

Book review: 'The Young Leonardo' by Larry J. Feinberg

'The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence'
Larry J. Feinberg
Cambridge University Press, $95

Leonardo da Vinci's triumphant years in the tough, dangerous environment of Ludovico Sforza's court in Milan is getting lots of attention right now, thanks to an unprecedented exhibition currently at London's National Gallery. If you're wondering what the Renaissance artist's life was like before he moved north, this tightly written, deeply informed recent book chronicles Leonardo's rural Tuscan birth (under less-than-ideal circumstances) through his 20s, when he worked in Verocchio's competitive workshop in Florence.

To limn a portrait of the artist as a young man, Larry J. Feinberg -- director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and a former curator of European painting at the Art Institute of Chicago -- nicely interweaves biography, the implacable social milieu in 15th-century Italy and analysis of Leonardo's rapidly evolving paintings and drawings. Among the book's best features is its keen avoidance of idealizing puffery, which makes Leonardo's accomplishments under often difficult daily circumstances all that much more impressive.

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-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Last minute gift ideas: Memorable theater books

Still wondering what to get your theater friends for the holiday? This year has been a particularly bountiful one for theater books. There’s something for that playwright, actor, director, composer and even (good heavens!) critic in your life. Theater-loving civilians will appreciate these gifts as well, and don't be surprised if gratitude comes in the form of an invitation to see a play or musical in 2012.   

For the playwright in your life who appreciates tragedy as much as comedy, I have two recommendations: The first is Julie Salamon’s compulsive, page-turner of a biography of Wendy Wasserstein, “Wendy and the Lost Boys” (the Penguin Press). The book, as I said in my review, suggests that Wasserstein herself may have been her most complex character. And the second is “The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956” (Cambridge University Press), which is the second in a four-volume series and the one that covers that rich period in which Beckett wrote “Waiting for Godot.” Beckett was one of the sharpest 20th century wielders of prose in the English language (and no slouch in French either), so this volume should inspire writers of all stripes while giving more demanding common readers much to savor as well. 

For the actor pal you just adore, I offer two possibilities. The first is “The Journals of Spalding Gray” (Knopf), a book that I was reluctant to read (given the tragic ending of this groundbreaking theatrical storyteller) but once I started found difficult to put down. And the second is John Lithgow’s supremely eloquent memoir, “Drama: An Actor’s Education,” in which he recounts growing up in the theater with an impresario father who was something of a Shakespeare missionary.   

Book review: 'Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet' in paperback

"Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet"

(Random House)

Jennifer Homans’ book, “Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet” has had a remarkable run. Published in November 2010 -– and just out in paperback –- the 550-page authoritative history of ballet is a bestseller, according to publisher Random House.

Homans, a former professional dancer and professor with a PhD in modern European history, explores classical dance’s beginnings and development through an expansive background. She puts the art form in a fascinating context of politics, religion, economics, and social movements. The journey began at the French court of Henri II in 1533 and continued as ballet flourished throughout Europe and into the New World. Homans ends her story with the death of the 20^th century genius, George Balanchine.

Most striking is how ballet has been subject to a never-ending metamorphosis and mutation, almost from the moment the five basic body positions were written down in the second half of the 17^th century. Many of the tensions that roil the artistic waters today provoked similar disruptions centuries ago too. 

Book: The surrealist self-portraits of Francesca Woodman

"Francesca Woodman," edited by Corey Keller, with essays by Jennifer Blessing and Julia Bryan-Wilson

SFMOMA and D.A.P., $49.95

Would photographs by Francesca Woodman, most notably her nude self-portraits that walk the line between powerful and vulnerable -- pack the same punch if you did not know about her suicide in 1981 at the age of 22? That question is hard to avoid when looking at the beautiful new book published by SFMOMA on the occasion of the museum's current Woodman survey -- her most ambitious retrospective to date. But by publishing an unprecedented number of pictures by the artist in roughly chronological order without interceding commentary, this book gives readers at least a fighting chance to see the images in themselves: Surrealist-laced self-portraits that explore sexual identity as much as mortality and together represent a young artist's coming of age.

--Jori Finkel

www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

Image: Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–78; gelatin silver print; 5 1/8 x 5 1/16 in. (13 x 12.9 cm); courtesy George and Betty Woodman; © George and Betty Woodman.