Absorbing new perspectives on some of the great characters and neglected corners of art history
Over the past few years, James Fenton has published a series of long essays on art history in The New York Review of Books. This book brings the pieces together along with numerous black-and-white illustrations, providing a fascinating sideways look at painting and sculpture. Displaying an enviable depth of interest and knowledge, Fenton's pieces range from a controversial essay on Egyptian funerary portraits--he questions whether in fact they were death portraits at all--and an intriguing piece on Leonardo's virtually unknown but extremely talented nephew Pierino da Vinci, to essays on Degas, Picasso, and the American painter Thomas Jones, among others. An unexpected reference or forgotten bit of history is often Fenton's entre into his subject: he approaches Jasper Johns via the patriotic sculptors of the turn of the century; Joseph Cornell through the history of the European Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities; and the nature of the statue through an examination of Freud's attachment to his startlingly large collection of antique statuettes. Endlessly illuminating and packed with suggestive detail, Leonardo's Nephew opens doors on the back rooms and shadowy passageways of art history.
Fenton's writing is most moving in those essays that take off from a chance thought or a bit of accidentally discovered history, like the one on Freud. And those that began as book reviews are in a class by themselves. Fenton generally shreds or praises his subjects according to his own meticulous research, which refreshingly tends toward primary sources, but occasionally he simply takes the reader aside. Quoting one critic, he groans, "If this sort of writing makes you want to throw up, I quite agree." His, on the other hand, makes one want to turn back to the beginning of the book and start all over again.
