bertozzi (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bertozzi) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} act_i_vate,@ 2007-06-06 13:32:00 |
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NY Times Book Review's Review of THE SALON!
(photo by Ryan Roman
Dear Friends,
Check out this past Sunday's (June 3rd) edition of the New York Times Review of Books to find a most pleasing review of THE SALON. John Hodgman's "Summer Reading: Comics" review focuses on four new comics, one of which is THE SALON about which he says "I’ve never understood Cubism as well as when Bertozzi’s Braque and Picasso are first discussing it on a train, with Braque theorizing about simultaneous points of view and Picasso protesting that he was merely drawing the reflection in the train window." He goes on to write many other wonderful things about THE SALON that fill my heart with glee!
You can read the review here (sign in necessary for NYT):
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/b
(scroll down two paragraphs)
Summer Reading
Comics
By JOHN HODGMAN
Published: June 3, 2007
-------EXCERPT---------
Elsewhere in the early 20th century, Pablo Picasso was developing Cubism by reading “The Katzenjammer Kids.”
“You miss the simple of it,” Picasso explains to his dismissive friend Georges Braque in Nick Bertozzi’s art-history mystery THE SALON (St. Martin’s Griffin, paper, $19.95). Defending his beloved comic strip (Gertrude Stein, it is said, supplied him with copies), Picasso-via-Bertozzi pronounces: “Easy to see ... read fast ... no try to be thing of beauty. Is thing of beauty.”
Like Deitch’s work, “The Salon” blurs the frame between fiction and history, art and reality. Drawn in oblong comic-strip panels and colored in beautiful blue- and rose-period hues, it follows Picasso, Braque, the Steins (Gertrude and her brother Leo) and an assortment of other moderns as they try to solve a series of murders plaguing Paris in 1907. The solution lies in a set of newly discovered Gauguins and a bottle of rare absinthe that allows the artists to literally enter the paintings to search for clues — or, in the case of Apollinaire, to frolic with Gauguin’s Tahitian muses. That Apollinaire!
This is an amusing and well-played game, and often eerie, though there is something a little self-serving about Bertozzi’s use of Picasso to defend comics: his transformation of paintings into immersive cartoons, and of their artists into gumshoes — it’s the pulpification of high art.
But this is more than made up for by Bertozzi’s deft characterization. I’ve never understood Cubism as well as when Bertozzi’s Braque and Picasso are first discussing it on a train, with Braque theorizing about simultaneous points of view and Picasso protesting that he was merely drawing the reflection in the train window.
Throughout the book, Picasso is a fireplug, always ready to smack Matisse in the face, always championing the brusque, intuitive punch of art over Braque’s philosophical deliberations. There’s something so winning about their friendship in “The Salon,” something so Castor-and-Popeye-ish, that you hardly need a luminous, absinthe-colored murder scene to enjoy it.
-------END EXCERPT---------
(photo by Ryan Roman
Dear Friends,
Check out this past Sunday's (June 3rd) edition of the New York Times Review of Books to find a most pleasing review of THE SALON. John Hodgman's "Summer Reading: Comics" review focuses on four new comics, one of which is THE SALON about which he says "I’ve never understood Cubism as well as when Bertozzi’s Braque and Picasso are first discussing it on a train, with Braque theorizing about simultaneous points of view and Picasso protesting that he was merely drawing the reflection in the train window." He goes on to write many other wonderful things about THE SALON that fill my heart with glee!
You can read the review here (sign in necessary for NYT):
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/b
(scroll down two paragraphs)
Summer Reading
Comics
By JOHN HODGMAN
Published: June 3, 2007
-------EXCERPT---------
Elsewhere in the early 20th century, Pablo Picasso was developing Cubism by reading “The Katzenjammer Kids.”
“You miss the simple of it,” Picasso explains to his dismissive friend Georges Braque in Nick Bertozzi’s art-history mystery THE SALON (St. Martin’s Griffin, paper, $19.95). Defending his beloved comic strip (Gertrude Stein, it is said, supplied him with copies), Picasso-via-Bertozzi pronounces: “Easy to see ... read fast ... no try to be thing of beauty. Is thing of beauty.”
Like Deitch’s work, “The Salon” blurs the frame between fiction and history, art and reality. Drawn in oblong comic-strip panels and colored in beautiful blue- and rose-period hues, it follows Picasso, Braque, the Steins (Gertrude and her brother Leo) and an assortment of other moderns as they try to solve a series of murders plaguing Paris in 1907. The solution lies in a set of newly discovered Gauguins and a bottle of rare absinthe that allows the artists to literally enter the paintings to search for clues — or, in the case of Apollinaire, to frolic with Gauguin’s Tahitian muses. That Apollinaire!
This is an amusing and well-played game, and often eerie, though there is something a little self-serving about Bertozzi’s use of Picasso to defend comics: his transformation of paintings into immersive cartoons, and of their artists into gumshoes — it’s the pulpification of high art.
But this is more than made up for by Bertozzi’s deft characterization. I’ve never understood Cubism as well as when Bertozzi’s Braque and Picasso are first discussing it on a train, with Braque theorizing about simultaneous points of view and Picasso protesting that he was merely drawing the reflection in the train window.
Throughout the book, Picasso is a fireplug, always ready to smack Matisse in the face, always championing the brusque, intuitive punch of art over Braque’s philosophical deliberations. There’s something so winning about their friendship in “The Salon,” something so Castor-and-Popeye-ish, that you hardly need a luminous, absinthe-colored murder scene to enjoy it.
-------END EXCERPT---------
