Product Description

The chief art critic for The New York Times on the creative impulse that emerges in all of us when we realize that the art of making art starts with the art of living.

Michael Kimmelman, the prominent New York Times writer and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, is known as a deep and graceful writer across the disciplines of art and music and also as a pianist who understands something about the artist's sensibility from the inside. Readers have come to expect him not only to fill in their knowledge about art but also to inspire them to think about connections between art and the larger world--which is to say, to think more like an artist. Kimmelman's many years of contemplating and writing about art have brought him to this wise, wide-ranging, and long-awaited book.

It explores art as life's great passion, revealing what we can learn of life through pictures and sculptures and the people who make them. It assures us that art--points of contact with the exceptional that are linked straight to the heart--can be found almost anywhere and everywhere if only our eyes are opened enough to recognize it. Kimmelman regards art, like all serious human endeavors, as a passage through which a larger view of life may come more clearly into focus. His book is a kind of adventure or journey.

It carries the message that many of us may not yet have learned how to recognize the art in our own lives. To do so is something of an art itself. A few of the characters Kimmelman describes, like Bonnard and Chardin, are great artists. But others are explorers and obscure obsessives, paint-by-numbers enthusiasts, amateur shutterbugs, and collectors of strange odds and ends. Yet others, like Charlotte Solomon, a girl whom no one considered much of an artist but who secretly created a masterpiece about the world before her death in Auschwitz, have reserved spots for themselves in history, or not, with a single work that encapsulates a whole life.

Kimmelman reminds us of the Wunderkammer, the cabinet of wonders--the rage in seventeenth-century Europe and a metaphor for the art of life. Each drawer of the cabinet promises something curious and exotic, instructive and beautiful, the cabinet being a kind of ideal, self-contained universe that makes order out of the chaos of the world. The Accidental Masterpiece is a kind of literary Wunderkammer, filled with lively surprises and philosophical musings. It will inspire readers to imagine their own personal cabinet of wonders.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24242 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-18
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Thechief art critic of the New York Times, Kimmelman (Portraits) delivers an uplifting art-is-good-for-you message that is surprisingly easy to swallow. Intelligent but not obscure, warm but not intrusively personal, Kimmelman manages in 10 chapters to cover a lot of ground, with a working definition of "art" that goes far beyond what's found in galleries and museums. The reader encounters not only the likes of Pierre Bonnard and Matthew Barney but Hugh Francis Hicks, a serious collector of lightbulbs, and Frank Hurley, whose miraculously preserved images of the 1914 Antarctic Endurance expedition are as haunting as any "art." This is Kimmelman's point: though passionately concerned with "gallery" art, he is more concerned with the rewards of aesthetic experience, how the attentiveness we bring to art can help to make a "daily masterpiece" of ordinary life. Kimmelman's enthusiasm is infectious; he has an impressive ability to incorporate recent artistic trends into his argument; the chapter on "The Art of the Pilgrimage," for instance, discusses the earth art of Michael Heizer and the minimalism of Donald Judd with a clarity that doesn't shortchange the work's difficulty. If Proust can change your life, so can Bonnard. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Museums frame modern art in terms of masters such as Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock, but no painter in the 20th century influenced more people more directly than a retired Air Force sergeant named Bob Ross. The lack of critical attention devoted to Ross's oeuvre is understandable, given that most of his estimated 30,000 canvases are hackneyed landscapes, essentially interchangeable. His claim to fame was never the finished work, but rather that he made his art on TV, showing hundreds of millions of people worldwide how to brush in "happy little clouds" on "The Joy of Painting."

Michael Kimmelman's unironic appreciation of Ross is characteristic of his attitude toward art. As chief art critic for the New York Times, Kimmelman has eclectic taste by professional necessity, and the artists he discusses in The Accidental Masterpiece range accordingly, from Jan Vermeer to Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning to Matthew Barney. His depictions are entertaining and insightful, as artful in their own way as many of the works he discusses. What distinguishes these fine essays, though, and gives him unexpected common ground with Bob Ross, is his openness, his generosity toward subject and reader. "I hope to approach the art of seeing here in the spirit of an amateur," he writes in his introduction. "I mean amateur in the original sense of the word, as a lover, someone who does something for the love of it, wholeheartedly."

Of course, it's one thing to have such enthusiasm, quite another to communicate it: A mere 3 percent of those who watched "The Joy of Painting" ever actually touched brush to canvas. Undoubtedly, Kimmelman will also attract his share of fellow travelers -- he frankly admits to writing "a book whose deepest ambition is simply to be a good read for anyone who happens to pick it up" -- but the artists he chooses to write about (Bob Ross aside) are themselves deeply engaged in the act of looking and in opening viewers' eyes through their work.

Perhaps the most straightforward case is Wayne Thiebaud, a contemporary California painter best known for his depiction of cakes and pies, whom Kimmelman admires for showing us "what's right in front of our noses." Because of his popular subject matter and '60s pedigree, Thiebaud is sometimes categorized as a Pop artist. Kimmelman prefers to compare him with the great 18th-century French painter of still lifes and interiors Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.

On the surface, the two artists' work looks nothing alike: While Chardin secretes careworn crockery and children's toys in darkened rooms, Thiebaud lines up decoratively colored baked goods on white countertops, composing his pictures, like a window-dresser, for maximum optical impact. Yet each artist is deeply engaged in imbuing the everyday with meaning, through the medium of paint. "Heroic artists like Michelangelo or Picasso could conjure up gods and heroes and mythological worlds, which might temporarily distract us from reality, stir our emotions, and elevate us into a higher realm," Kimmelman observes. "But it is the ability of more circumscribed artists to slow our systems, calm our minds, and show us reality as we have probably not considered it." The occasional spectacle is easy to spot, whereas a habit of watchfulness -- the patient eye of connoisseurship -- requires careful cultivation.

Which is not to privilege the quotidian. Kimmelman gives equal attention to artists working at the opposite extreme, most notably James Turrell, who has spent the past several decades tunneling into an Arizona desert volcano called Roden Crater, to create one of the largest works-in-progress of modern times. Turrell's sculptural medium is light, which he has projected, reflected, filtered and refracted to create a dazzling array of optical effects in gallery and museum installations around the world. The rooms inside Roden Crater, precisely positioned under exactingly calibrated apertures, are designed to optimize the experience of celestial phenomena. In one space, the sky appears to fall as the hours pass. In another, the moon aligns every 18.61 years. As Kimmelman describes it, "heightened perception is the goal: becoming more aware of how you see, not just what you see."

The remoteness of Roden Crater, 40 miles north of Flagstaff, is not merely a matter of $6-an-acre real estate: While Thiebaud's paintings remind us of pleasures in easy reach, Turrell's work is emboldened by its isolation and the trouble taken to find it. "Call it controlling if you want," Kimmelman writes, "but the time spent looking and thinking about a work is often proportionate to the effort made to get to it."

Accustomed to his keen critic's eye, Kimmelman is not always mindful of this lesson. If The Accidental Masterpiece has a fault, it is the impression that he gives, through his lucid description of even the most difficult art, that the discipline of connoisseurship is as effortlessly achieved as a Bob Ross landscape. Yet in a culture accustomed to viewing art vicariously through the mass media, if at all, a critic willing to place faith in viewers, guiding them to see for themselves, is a true visionary.

Reviewed by Jonathon Keats
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
As chief art critic for the New York Times, Kimmelman has developed a relaxed and welcoming approach to explicating art that makes this aptly unpredictable consideration of the role accidents and serendipity play in the making of art as pleasurable as it is enlightening. Kimmelman is interested in "how art transforms lives," and in how a life lived artistically can itself be seen as a masterpiece, and the examples he cites open up many new vistas of thought. He reflects on how Pierre Bonnard transformed his "circumscribed world" into a "fantastical" realm through sustained contemplation. He profiles Charlotte Salomon, whose remarkable painted diary survived after she perished in the Holocaust, and Jay DeFeo, who worked for decades on one colossal painting known as The Rose. Kimmelman celebrates the snapshot as a great source for accidental masterpieces, and pays fresh tribute to Chardin and Wayne Thiebaud, painters who discern the "dignity" of ordinary things and the art of everyday life. And Kimmelman himself, a receptive and creative observer, turns criticism into story, thus making art out of thought. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Worth the read...
With The Accidental Masterpiece, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman has stepped over, around and through what we are "supposed" to know, guess or pretend we understand about art. Kimmelman's work has created a comfortable and safe jumping off place for anyone who dreams of producing artwork by illuminating the more (secret and disavowed) mundane aspects of creativity and the resolve of those who feel the relentless drive to create.

Of Kimmelman's ten chapters I chose the seventh as my favorite - decided the moment I read its title one-hundred or so pages in. Chapter 7, "The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost", provides a vivid snapshot of photographer Frank Hurley who pursued his passion for his art by joining an expedition into Antarctica in 1911. The expedition itself failed, trapping Hurley for 15 months on the frozen sea. After almost 500 days without encountering dry land the ship's crew and the members of the expedition spent several more months on the utterly desolate Elephant Island before being rescued. Hurley was able to save a combination of 120 film plates, photos and movies but was forced to leave over 400 others behind. Once returned home , he chose not to attend a homecoming celebration in favor of developing his carefully guarded film. After returning from this adventure, Hurley went on to photograph WWI and to travel the world pursuing his art but never produced any work as compelling as his dramatic Antarctic record.

The point Kimmelman makes with this chapter is that it is crucial to make the most out of what's at hand rather than letting a lack of means, supposed failure or even immense hardship derail our work. Trapped with minimal resources, Frank Hurley photographed Antarctica and produced a body of work that is still considered his best despite the fact that the majority of his career occurred after the expedition.

The Accidental Masterpiece is a siren call for the "amateur" who, as Kimmelman reminds us, "...in the original sense of the word, [is] a lover, someone who does something for the love of it, wholeheartedly." (Pg. 5) The author topples a myriad of pedestals that art has been shoved onto by allowing for ordinary things and ordinary people to shine with extraordinariness. From a light bulb collecting dentist to the "Mr. Rogers of oil painting", Bob Ross, we are to understand that everyone has the creativity gene. The much maligned Ross was, like Kimmelman, the champion of the everyday artist:
"Ross thereby touched on a basic reason for making art - to
have a place to indulge your id and comfort your ego, an area of
authority..." (Pg. 34)
"In death [Ross] still reportedly reaches 500 million households...
satisfying...this craving to be creative, and providing comforting
escape from worldly woes." (Pg. 35)

This book exemplifies my favorite Anais Nin quote,acknowledging the growing (and often unrewarded) ache that most of us feel at many of the liminal points in life:

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more
painful than the risk it took to blossom."

excellent anecdotal reviews
Very fun reading, and he touches on some of the big guns in art today, ones that are often difficult to describe, much less review critically. Kimmelman has a smooth, scholarly manner making his work accessible and insightful. If you're looking for rigorous analytical parsing of contemporary art, this is not your destination.

art for the rest of us
When I lived in Moscow and would visit St. Petersburg, a visit to the Hermitage Art Museum was always an obligatory pleasure. Ditto for New York; the last time my wife and I traveled there we visited the Metropolitan Museum. But at both museums I felt a pronounced sense of dislocation, like I somehow lacked the knowledge, the experience, or the aesthetic sensibility to appreciate fully the exhibits we saw. We enjoyed much of what we saw, but we still saw a lot of "art" that caused me to resonate with Harry Truman's judgment that Churchill's works were "damn good" because "at least you can tell what they are and that is more than you can say for a lot of these modern painters." Were the artists and their work pretentious, or was I just ignorant?

Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times, has written an unpretentious book that genuinely appreciates that common dilemma for both artist and amateur. He moves the reader beyond Truman's humorous but ill-informed notion, and does so in a manner that does not condescend toward the reader or dumb down his subject. His book is eminently accessible and written with a deft touch, itself a textual work of art that is a pleasure to read. Yes, he takes you through the world of professional artists like Matisse and Michelangelo, the brilliant and the bizarre, but he also gives equally serious attention to the artistic impulse in the likes of dentist Hugh Hicks who had a collection of 75,000 light bulbs, a prisoner named Ray Materson who learned how to do exquisite embroideries of his beloved New York Yankees, painting by numbers that I tried as a child, and the homemade quilts made by poor black women in remote Gee's Bend, Alabama ("...some of the most miraculous works of modern art that America has ever produced."). Although a professional critic, Kimmelman imparts an infectious sense of wonderment and enthusiasm that democratizes art in the best sense of that term.

Art can transform our lives by helping us to live more fully and attentively, and not only by engaging the sublime but by appreciating the mundane and the utterly ordinary. Humanity's creative impulse hints at something beyond and greater than ourselves that emerges not despite but even because of restraints, conflicts, and confinement. Beauty, in Kimmelman's view, clearly has a spiritual element that helps us to "slow our systems" so that we can live as we ought. Through appreciating art, "we may learn something about how to conceive of our own ordinary existence--about how to live and die, more constructively or at least more alertly." Which is to say that even, or especially, one's life can be a creative act of art and beauty.