On those rare occasions when I choose to read a big, fat, thick-as-a-brick book about a famous person, I usually pick one about a politician. David McCullough’s Truman is a great example. I tend to gravitate toward books about political figures because, in the course of reading about their lives, you also get a free history lesson. That is, the story of Harry Truman is also the story of World War II, the atomic bomb, Korea, the founding of Israel, and the Berlin Wall.
Biographies of artists are more problematic, for me. I just finished reading de Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. It chronicles the long life of the great painter—a life barely contained within the span of the Twentieth Century—in which de Kooning lived to be the celebrated, Grand Old Man of modern American art. He became, in fact, the only American artist whose figure and reputation approached those of Picasso.
Continue reading “Books on Art: “de Kooning – An American Master””
Ash Clifton, Writer 