Product Description

In his widely acclaimed national bestseller The Accidental Masterpiece, Michael Kimmelman climbs mountains, treks into the desert, and even nearly drowns as he pursues art’s truths. He explains that great artists like Bonnard and Chardin—but also obscure obsessives, paint-by-number enthusiasts, amateur shutterbugs, and collectors of strange odds and ends— can show us how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #933656 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-25
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 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
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

This masterpiece is no accident
A friend of mine purchased this book, and I picked it up from her table to read the first page, and found that I simply could not put it down. 'The Art of Life and Vice Versa', the subtitle said - something I have long aspired to understand is the interplay of art and life in its many facets and influences. According to author Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times and frequent author on art and cultural topics, studying art and those who devote themselves to art 'provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully.' Living, according to Kimmelman, can be a 'daily masterpiece' for each of us - we needed be a technical genius such as Picasso to be able to live our lives artistically. One of Kimmelman's early examples is of the dentist Hugh Francis Hicks, whose home was a makeshift lightbulb museum (with more than 75,000 lightbulbs in his collection from all manner of times, places and devices). This is not mere enthusiasm, but an abiding love that made his interest a matter of art.

One of Kimmelman's intentions here, which he has achieved, was not to confront or approach art from the standpoint of an art critic, an art historian, or even as a professional artist, but rather as an amateur - an amateur being that one who does it for the love of it. In this, Kimmelman has produced a text that is readily accessible to those with no particular training or background in the visual arts, but who can nonetheless come to appreciate more fully and profoundly the impact of art on those who engage in it. Art touches the soul in ways that no other healing force can do (Kimmelman references the Greek philosophers who believed that music had healing powers for the soul similar to medicine's healing powers for the physical body; visual arts hold similar power).

Kimmelman combines the familiar with the obscure. The names of Matisse and Picasso are ones that are generally known; the name Bonnard, unfortunately, is not so known. However, Kimmelman introduces the more obscure figures with grace and care such that one comes to have a strong depth of feeling for Bonnard, his wife Marthe/Maria, and his absolute devotion to her as the object of his art. Kimmelman writes of Bob Ross, whom he describes 'may still be the most famous artist on the face of the earth,' not so much for his artistic production, but for his show 'The Joy of Painting'. The television programme continues to air in many places years after Ross' death, and encourages people to take up painting - 'His purpose was as much to massage souls as it was to teach painting. He sold hope.' This is a kind of hope available through art that is rarely if ever found in other media.

Kimmelman stays primarily within the realm of modern art, but ties in pieces of history all along the narrative way. Authors from Aristotle to Stendahl, events from the Industrial Revolution to the Shackleton expedition, figures as diverse as Grover Cleveland, Albert Einstein, Anne Frank, Jack Benny and John Wilkes Booth find a reference here. Kimmelman does introduce concepts from aesthetics and philosophy occasionally, but briefly - the idea of the difference between taste and personal interest from the work of Kant and Hume through Nietzsche and twentieth-century writers is introduced, but not in such a technical or obscure way as to drag down the flow of the text into difficult minutiae.

Kimmelman's passion for art and artists, a term that can be broadly defined to include the amateur pianists who turned up in Oklahoma for a competition and the light-bulb collector in Baltimore in addition to major figures such as Cezanne, Duchamp and Monet, is very apparent on the pages of this book. One reviewer called this a page-turner, and I must agree. I borrowed it from my friend (who hadn't yet finished her last book) promising to return it before she was ready - I've now finished the book (less than 24 hours later, which speaks to the power this book has to hold the attention and the ease with which one can read the text) and must now acquire my own copy.

Not everything is art, however, nor is everything that passes for art necessarily 'good art'. Perhaps my favourite quote from the book comes near the beginning - 'A day of looking at bad art can be long and dark.' It reminds me of Frank Burch Brown's discussion on such topics in his book 'Good Taste, Bad Taste, Christian Taste', in which the kinds of kitsch that becomes popular can be quite well-done in terms of production values but still be in bad taste.

My one regret with this text is that there are no colour pictures or plates. There are 26 images in black-and-white, but this is a text that cries out for colour. Kimmelman does provide an index and a select bibliography for further reading that will be most handy.

This book is a masterpiece, not by accident.

Paying Attention
This book has changed my life! Mr. Kimmelman's urbane discussions have enhanced my understanding of the impulse behind my own enthusiasm for objects and arrangements and for the place of art in my life. I wish I had had the book years ago.

Mr. Kimmelman has a superb, almost magical talent for transporting a reader to places and people he has visited as well as to times when his imagination -- informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of writers past and present -- fills in the gaps.

He takes us to a painter's studio darkened by black curtains where Philip Pearlstein transforms models into geometrical compositions; on an exhausting climb up Cezanne's Montagne Sainte-Victoire, where, to his chagrin, he finds a group of elderly French ladies there before him; for an early-morning walk with Pierre Bonnard at his home in southern France, where he lives with an impossible wife; to Antarctica with Frank Hurley, the fearless Australian photographer who captured the romance of the cold south when he sailed with Shackleton on the Endurance; on a near-death experience in Utah, where he had gone to visit a Matthew Barney sculpture in the salt flats in the winter and found himself in chest-high icy water in total darkness after volunteering to find help when car and cell phone failed.

Chapter titles provide clues to how he makes the art experience apparent, i.e., The Art of Making Art Without Lifting a Finger, The Art of Collecting Light Bulbs, The Art of Maximizing Your Time, The Art of Having a Lofty Perspective, The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost. As for the last, this book has made me feel "found". I have heard many lectures by eminent art historians--among them Erwin Panofsky at Princeton and Seymour Slive at Harvard--yet not until I read Mr. Kimmelman did I learn to pay attention, live life more alertly, and embrace the art in my daily life.

Mr. Kimmelman, an art critic whose opinions I would like to hear about everything, is a charming companion -- insightful, funny, eloquent, utterly without pretense, and a fountain of perfectly placed observations from past writers, from Nabokov and Proust to Heine, Hobbes, and Hegel. He has created a conversational genre all his own, one that is both moving and joyful.

Intelligent, Interesting, Inspiring
One of the best books I've read in a long time. Pure pleasure. Much of what Kimmelman writes about visual art also applies to writing (I'm a writer), & I found this inspiring. The chapters about Pierre Bonnard (his artistic & personal obsession with his wife, Marthe), Frank Hurley (his sometimes egocentric obsession with capturing the spectacle of Shackleton's Arctic exploration, even when faced with hellish conditions), & Philip Pearlstein (his obsession with routine; his commitment to work even when it isn't going well; his belief that one should "look slowly & hard at something subtle & small") are particularly wonderful. I especially appreciate Kimmelman's description of Pearlstein's process, from the beginning to the end of one of his paintings. This gem of a book reminds us to see again -- as if for the first time. I recommend "The Accidental Masterpiece" for anyone who creates, collects, or appreciates art, in any of its sometimes surprising forms. And even if you don't think the previous sentence applies to you, you'll change your mind after reading this book, which is never pretentious but always smart. One final note: Kimmelman's writing -- his prose -- is excellent. Clear & pleasing to my ear.