Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War - REVIEW

by Florian Illies

As the Roaring Twenties wind down, Jean-Paul Sartre waits in a Paris café for a first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who never shows. Marlene Dietrich slips away from a loveless marriage to cruise the dive bars of Berlin. The fledgling writer Vladimir Nabokov places a freshly netted butterfly at the end of his wife’s bed. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Zelda and Scott, Dalí and Gala, Picasso and his many muses, Henry and June and Anaïs Nin, the entire extended family of Thomas Mann, and a host of other fascinating and famous figures make art and love, write and row, bed and wed and betray. They do not yet know that they, along with millions of others, will soon be forced to contemplate flight—or fight—as the world careens from one global conflict to the next.

Riverhead Books
ISBN-13 978-0593713938

‘Race Is Everything’ Art and Human Difference - REVIEW

by David Bindman

A timely and revealing look at the intertwined histories of science, art, and racism.

‘Race Is Everything’ explores the spurious but influential ideas of so-called racial science in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, and how art was affected by it. David Bindman looks at race in general, but with particular concentration on attitudes toward and representations of people of African and Jewish descent. He argues that behind all racial ideas of the period lies the belief that outward appearance—and especially skull shape, as studied in the pseudoscience of phrenology—can be correlated with inner character and intelligence, and that these could be used to create a seemingly scientific hierarchy of races. The book considers many aspects of these beliefs, including the skull as a racial marker; ancient Egypt as a precedent for Southern slavery; Darwin, race, and aesthetics; the purported “Mediterranean race”; the visual aspects of eugenics; and the racial politics of Emil Nolde.

Reaktion Books
ISBN-13 978-1789146967

Basquiat: A Graphic Novel - REVIEW

by Paolo Parisi

Cool, talented, and transgressive, Jean–Michel Basquiat's life is just as fascinating as the work he produced. Delve into 1980s New York as this vivid graphic novel takes you on Basquiat's journey from street–art legend SAMO to international art–scene darling, up until his sudden death. Told through cinematic scenes, this is Basquiat as seen through the eyes of those who knew him, including his father, Suzanne Mallouk, Larry Gagosian, and, most importantly, the man himself. Basquiat is a moving depiction of a troubled artist's life for those interested in both the art and the man who made it.

ISBN-13: 978-1786274151
Laurence King Publishing