Check out The New York Sun today for James Panero’s review of the new biography, Marc Chagall by Jonathan Wilson. James begins his review, entitled The Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism, with a question:
The problem with art biographies is that they tend to contain very little art. You cannot quote a painting the way you can a novel, a letter, or a line of poetry. To compensate, art biographers toss in everything about an artist but the kitchen sink — the models and the mistresses, the comrades and the critics. But without direct contact with the work — the reason we are reading the biography in the first place — can an art biography ever really describe the heart of its subject’s life? And I’m not talking about including a few color reproductions.
James writes that Wilson responds to this challenge in an unexpected way, by writing in a manner that recalls Chagall’s painting style. Wilson locates his subject “In the air, floating over the mundane non-essentials of an artist’s life…over distinctions that might have hemmed in more Earth-bound personalities…and between the ascetic parameters of high modernism and the nostalgic sentimentality for a lost home.”
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