Listening to Stone: the Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi
Hayden Herrera
Thames & Hudson, 592pp, £24.95 (hb)
As the biographer of Arshile Gorky and Frida Kahlo, Hayden Herrera is well placed to write about the American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-88), since Noguchi was best friends with the former and had a serious affair with the latter. This is the first substantial biography, and because of Noguchi’s illegitimacy and mixed-race parentage (Japanese poet father; American writer mother), and frequent globetrotting, it opens a fascinating window into 20th-century history.
Noguchi encountered frequent prejudice, both in Japan and America, and was interned during the Second World War. Without his evident charm and good looks (in the internment camp married women fought over him), it is doubtful if talent and determination alone would have seen him through.
Herrera carefully charts his development as a sculptor and designer, and is scrupulous enough to note his debts to other artists, whether it be Brancusi (for whom he worked as studio assistant in 1927) or Giacometti, and the perennial criticism of his sculpture for being too tasteful. There may be better sculptors, but as Herrera shows, few have surpassed him as a designer of stage sets, furniture and above all gardens, in a compelling Zen-Modernist style.
• James Hall is the author of The World as Sculpture and, most recently, The Self-Portrait: a Cultural History
I Can Give You Anything But Love
Gary Indiana
Rizzoli Ex Libris, 242pp, $25.95 (hb)
Gary Indiana, who was born Gary Hoisington in 1950 in New Hampshire, has worked as a novelist, playwright and artist since the late 1970s. His new biography switches mainly between the first three decades of his life and the present day – from growing up gay in rural America to dropping out of Berkeley, University of California, in 1969 to co-produce porn films.
In the memoir, he is at his most cutting and incisive when he directs his ire at the wave of US consumerism that threatens to engulf Cuba, his part-time home for the past 15 years. “Of course it’s coming, coming here, coming soon, the gathering tsunami of ‘our kind of capitalism’. iPad, iPod, YouTube, buy it, love it, fuck it, dump it, buy a new one,” he says.
But readers hoping for insights into his artistic practice and art criticism will be disappointed. The polymath is known for his three-year stint as chief art critic at the Village Voice in the mid-1980s, expounding in elegant and forceful prose his views on artistic and political matters in the context of New York’s Aids crisis. But he dismisses this journalism as “a bunch of yellowing newspaper columns I never republished”.
• Gareth Harris is an editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper
Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance
Holly S. Hurlburt
Yale University Press, 360pp, £40 (hb)
Holly S. Hurlburt’s monograph focuses on Caterina Corner, a Venetian noblewoman who married the King of Cyprus in 1472. Widowed ten months later, she became regent and then Queen of Cyprus following her infant son’s death, before eventually renouncing her crown in favour of her native city in 1489. In return, Caterina lived out her life in a small but select court in Asolo, one which has gained mythical status for its poetic and artistic patronage. The book goes beyond the legend to position the last Queen of Cyprus and ruler of Asolo within the multiple political, geographic and social spaces she inhabited over her lifetime. Importantly, Hurlburt shows how many different groups benefited from Caterina’s reputation, including her own family, the senators and doges who claimed Cyprus as part of Venice’s expanding empire, poets such as Pietro Bembo, whose bucolic dialogue Gli Asolani was set in Asolo, and artists such as Gentile Bellini, whose portrait of Caterina was inscribed with the boast that, “You see how great I (Caterina) am, but the hand of Gentile Bellini is greater….”
Beautifully illustrated, the book will be of value to anyone interested in gender and authority, as well as to Renaissance specialists who want to get behind the Caterina Corner myths.
• Evelyn Welch is a professor of Renaissance studies and the vice-principal of King’s College London
George Lance, Victorian Master of Still Life
John Radcliffe and Mark Lance
Philip Wilson Publishers, 192pp, £25 (hb)
George Lance is known, as in the title of this book, as one of the foremost Victorian still-life painters. But he was already in the studio of Benjamin Haydon, as a pupil – along with Edwin Landseer – and occasional collaborator, before the accession of George IV. Among his earliest patrons in the 1820s and 1830s were the eminent collectors Sir George Beaumont, Robert Vernon and John Sheepshanks, benefactors respectively of the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He chose still-life over the more esteemed and profitable history painting at the moment, when English taste for the Dutch 17th century was at its height, with large prices paid for the flower and fruit pieces by Van Huysum, Frans Snyders and Jan van Os.
The authors are both members of the Lance family, and to them we owe the assiduous research into Lance’s origins and early family life. With Lance’s arrival in Haydon’s studio, an interesting picture of the art world in the early 19th century emerges. After a difficult start, Lance’s fortunes improved, with commissions from the aristocracy and landed gentry. He was admired for his minutely realistic, lush arrangements of fruit and flowers. He introduced a succession of heavily chased silver and gold dishes, chalices, jugs, salvers and tankards, jewellery and objets de vertu, some from the royal goldsmiths, Rundell and Bridge, into these elaborate set-pieces, affording insights into the taste of time.
An untraced painting (known from a colour lithograph) that belonged to Jeremiah James Colman, maker of the eponymous mustard, had important personal significance for Lance; the imaginary lidded chalice is set with miniatures of his favourites among his own works.
Lance’s pupil, William Duffield (whom he outlived), included similar vessels, as did his follower Edward Ladell. Their works are worth studying as a minor contribution to the history of collecting.
One curious episode in Lance’s career is related in full, his involvement with the restoration of the great Velázquez boar hunt in the National Gallery. In a foreword, Martin Wyld, recently retired from his post as director of conservation at the National Gallery, adds a footnote to this tangled episode.
Lance may not be at the forefront of art historical studies, but his works have always sold at a certain level, sometimes, even, at prices that reflect their technical quality and period importance. Context is everything, and the present book provides this.
• Charlotte Gere is a writer, exhibition curator and 19th-century decorative arts specialist. Her most recent books include Artistic Circles (2010) and Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria (with Judy Rudoe), the winner of the 2011 William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History