Writers on Artists - Softcover

Engaging, challenging and delightful, these 41 essays attest to writers' uncanny ability to fathom the creative minds of painters and sculptors. Aldous Huxley contemplates how El Greco "combined Byzantium and Venice in the strangest possible way." Norman Mailer profiles Picasso, who "for the last fifty years . . . has used his brush like a sword." All of the selections are highly accessible, even when they go in for compositional analysis, such as Mark Strand's dissection of the feelings of loneliness that Edward Hopper's paintings engender. Try Jean Genet's visceral reflections on Rembrandt, Joyce Carol Oates's appreciation of Winslow Homer's watercolors, John Updike's witty review of an Andrew Wyeth exhibit ("Heavily Hyped Helga"). Each essay is accompanied by a full-page art reproduction. Among the general essays, Cyril Connolly discusses surrealism as an enlargement of sensibility, while Randall Jarrell sees abstract expressionism as a form of provincialism. Halpern, poet and essayist, is editor of Antaeus , where many of the pieces here first appeared.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"An exceptionally handsome book, Halpern's reminds us once again that the visual and verbal arts are sisters, sometimes competitors but more often collaborators and confidantes." -- Washington Post Book World

"Engaging, challenging and delightful." -- Publishers Weekly

"For lovers of art and lovers of literature, this is a book that can inform and enhance both subjects." -- Booklist

"The essays... form a strong history of art... a pointillist history of stories and aperus and ruminations." -- New York Times Book Review