Rating: 
Summary: Destined to be a classic.
Review: A delightful read. David Sweetman follows up his biographies of Gaughin and Van Gogh with another masterpiece biography. This is not only a book about Toulouse-Lautrec and his art, but also a broad sweeping look at his time and place. We are transported back to the Moulin de Gallete and the Moulin Rouge, which were two of the great dancehalls of Fin de Siecle Paris. Lautrec, a pretender to noble birth, broke with the "prettiness" of the by then established Impressionists by painting and drawing the scenes around his table at the dancehalls and clubs in seedy Montmarte section of Paris. Lautrec went to great lengths to hide his louche activities from his prim and proper "aristocratic" doting mother even to the point of editing his painting for exhibitions to just proper portraits and leaving out the club scene paintings. She, as Sweetman suggests, was guilt ridden over her marriage to a 1st cousin when also her parents and her husband's parents were the results of close consanguinal marriages as well. This, Sweetman concludes, resulted in Lautrec's congenital defects and dwarfism. The text is sprinkled with interesting tidbits. We learn that the Can-Can is not the movie version, but a dance that was participated in by the customers as well. Why the scandalousness of the Can-Can? It isn't too hard to figure out when it is explained that the dancehalls hired men to police the dances making sure that the women had their knickers on. Many of the girls in the club were surviving their low paid day jobs by picking up customers in the clubs. Knowing that changes our reading when we see them gaze at men in Lautrec's paintings. In his mother's eyes, this was not a place for a man of Lautrec's breeding. Lautrec thrived on it. Even at 500 dense pages and epic in sweep, the book is highly readable. We get to meet Oscar Wilde, the chic anarchist Felix Feneon, and a host of other interesting characters. Valadon and Jane Avril make repeated entrances as lovers and friends of the now syphilitic Lautrec. We get to see the fashionable anarchist scene turn violent. We see Lautrec with his innovative posters (scandalizing his mother when they showed up on manure carts!) inventing modern day advertising. Sweetman makes the scene come alive, his research appears to be impeccable, and his critiques of Lautrec's art is on target. If you have any interest in art history at all, this is a must read book. I wish there was a 10 star rating!
Rating: 
Summary: Warning
Review: Great read, but it's the same book as another by the same author that is under a different title
Rating:
Summary: Blown Away!
Review: I decided to pick up this book after I had read Mr. Sweetman's wonderful biography of Paul Gauguin. I was not disappointed. This is another excellent book. As the title lets you know right away, this is a book that is about much more than Toulouse-Lautrec, although he is the main subject. But even the cover doesn't begin to tell you the whole story. Inside you will find interesting and informative biographical sketches of many other people who moved in the literary and theatrical and artistic circles of turn of the century Paris. People such as: La Goulue, Jane Avril, Alfred Jarry, Andre Gide, Valentin Le Desosse, Yvette Guilbert and many, many others. It is a tribute to Mr. Sweetman's descriptive skills that after reading only a few pages about any one of these people you will want to go out and try to find a full biography! Besides dealing with personalities the author also widens his scope to write about the Dreyfus affair, anti-semitism, prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases, etc. Mr. Sweetman is a very thoughtful writer and he always gives you a balanced portrait of the people he writes about. Nothing is ever black or white. There are always shades of gray. Toulouse-Lautrec did a lot more than sit around the dance halls of Montmartre and get drunk, although many nights he did get drunk. And there was a lot more to his art than the widely reproduced posters he did of the Moulin Rouge and the Moulin De La Galette. Besides the fact that this book is beautifully written there is the bonus that it contains over 100 period photographs. They are fascinating and I have never seen the vast majority before. If you have any interest in art or in late 19th century Paris I have no doubt that you will enjoy this book. It is one of the best books I've read this year!
Rating: 
Summary: the conventional smugness of david sweetman
Review: I was able to read through chapter six before I lost all confidence in what the author was saying. his smug and shoddy treatment and inaccurate descriptions of suzanne valadon are mean-spirited enough to think the author carries some kind of personal agenda against tough and talented women. apparently, poor mr.sweetman became so distracted he got her maiden name wrong calling her marie-christine when her certified birth name is marie-clementine. this was irratating, but when I read page 166 I found it impossible to continue reading and trusting sweetman. sweetman has valadon's son, maurice utrillo, dying an early death on his "bad" mother's door step. maurice utrillo died in 1955. suzanne valadon died 1938. david sweetman must be the british version of america's [late] albert goldman. john e. nordin.
Rating: 
Summary: poorly written, self-contradictory
Review: I'm sorry to be so negative, but I found this book to be poorly written, often cynical, often self-contradictory, and, in its discussions of the radical politics of the period, often factually wrong. I have to admit also that I'm offended by the smug tone of authorial omniscience running through the thing. As an example of its cynicism, see the discussion of the debates among young artists prompted by Seurat's success, which begins on page 123. These artists aren't in the least moved by passion for their art: "To them, the message was clear -- first get yourself a new, preferably outrageous style, then promote it with as much noise and opposition as you can provoke.... In ateliers and garrets across the city, the search was on for some manner of painting that would stir up the same sort of fuss." As an example of self-contradition, see the alternating absolute categorizations of Suzanne Valadon who on page 164 is "in no way docile...fiercely independent, a trait that was to cause Henri much suffering" yet on the next page "obediently" wears an ugly style of hat for the rest of her life purely because Renoir once insisted. As an example of factual errors re radical politics, see the statements on pages 227 and 378 which mention "the nascent Communist Party" and "the rising Communist Party" respectively, although the Communist Parties weren't founded until after the first world war, twenty years after the fin de siecle. On the whole the book leaves the impression of having been very quickly written, so perhaps these statements, and the smugness with which they're made, are really the result of haste. If so, a really good editor might help a future edition.
Rating:
Summary: A+ For Ambition
Review: Sweetman's book may very well contain factual inaccuracies (try to find another work of history that doesn't), and maybe the author has bitten off a teensy bit more than he could chew. However, I assure most readers that when they actually sit down and immerse themselves in its pages, these criticisms are going to seem nitpicking and petty. Fact is, to read Sweetman's book is to be transported to another world, and by the time you finish you very well might feel as if you've lived there for a short while, too (a glass or two Pernod might help this illusion along). For me, in some respects Sweetman's book in analogous to Luc Sante's "Low Life," both which are so lovingly evocative of already half-forgotten social milieus and which show such compassionate understanding for the people who populated them; and both of which, finally, can be seen as the red-blooded antitheses of all the cold pedantic tomes which in our times have glutted the market under the auspices of academia. I say let Mr. Sweetman amend the factual inaccuracies in future editions of his fantastically ambitious book, as is the prerogative of every author to do. But I hope he won't change anything else. Bravo, Mr. Sweetman! I absolutely love your book! By the way, Sweetman's biographies of Van Gogh and Gauguin are very fine, also. But "Explosive Acts" is in a class by itself.
Rating:
Summary: Not so long ago, and not so far away...
Review: The subtitle of the Sweetman book, Explosive Acts, is "Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Felix Feneon and the Art and anarchy of the Fin de Siecle". Sweetman has previously written a wonderful biography of Gauguin that I heartily recommend. This is a great book about a particular time and place rather than about a particular person. Sweetman begins with the discription of a huge canvas mural that Lautrec painted as a front wall for a "funfair" booth to be used by eccentric and exotic dancer "LaGoulue". As a framing device for the book, Sweetman explains the significance of the mural and points out real characters from the Paris/Montmartre socio-political scene in 1895 who are to be found in the foreground, including Wllde, Feneon, Lautrec himself, and others. Then Sweetman goes back and provides fascinating detail regarding the intertwining lives of all these people who knew each other at the fin de siecle. By the time he is finished the reader has a wonderful feel and appreciation for the time, the place, and the personalities of the various individuals involved. At the conclusion he comes back to the "funfair" booth and discusses the individual fates of the mural, La Goulue, Lautrec and the others. This is a wonderful read. Even if you don't consider Lautrec to be of the caliber of his more well-known contemporaries (Van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, etc.), and even if you've already read Frey's well-researched biography of him, you'll find this book a fascinating analysis of a time and place you'd certainly like to if not live in, at least visit for a while.
Rating:
Summary: F for False
Review: There's a difference between nitpicking over minor historical innacuracies and making up nonsense out of whole cloth. This unfortunate book is of the latter sort. It's distorted by what the late Hal Draper called "falsifictions": self-invented statements uttered with an air of scholarly objectivity. The work will indeed transport one to another world: naturally so, because it isn't real. Fortunately there are alternatives which are vivid, entertaining, and careful with the facts. Richard Ellmann and Barbara Belford have excellent, colorful biographies of Wilde. June Rose has a very fine biography of the fascinating Suzanne Valadon. Alexander Varias has a good account of the fin-de-siecle anarchists. Roger Shattuck has a truly superb book on the rich artistic ferment of la belle epoque, the 30 years or so before the first world war: "The Banquet Years". Shattuck's book is at once a definitive work of scholarship and a hugely fun read. Sweetman's is neither. Incidentally Sweetman's bio of Gauguin suffers from the same tendency toward posturing. Whoops!, suddenly we're in the midst of detailed technical excursus into problems of large-scale engineering, or of epidemiology. (Gauguin tried to live in Panama at the time of the digging of the canal.) Is the author expert in these subjects? He certainly seems to want us to believe that he is. Nevertheless one doubts and, in doubting, questions his expertise on the subjects of art, literature and politics as well. If you're looking for an entertaining experience from the pen of an expert, read Ellmann or Rose or especially Shattuck. Give Sweetman a rest.
Rating:
Summary: F for False
Review: There's a difference between nitpicking over minor historical innacuracies and making up nonsense out of whole cloth. This unfortunate book is of the latter sort. It's distorted by what the late Hal Draper called "falsifictions": self-invented statements uttered with an air of scholarly objectivity. The work will indeed transport one to another world: naturally so, because it isn't real. Fortunately there are alternatives which are vivid, entertaining, and careful with the facts. Richard Ellmann and Barbara Belford have excellent, colorful biographies of Wilde. June Rose has a very fine biography of the fascinating Suzanne Valadon. Alexander Varias has a good account of the fin-de-siecle anarchists. Roger Shattuck has a truly superb book on the rich artistic ferment of la belle epoque, the 30 years or so before the first world war: "The Banquet Years". Shattuck's book is at once a definitive work of scholarship and a hugely fun read. Sweetman's is neither. Incidentally Sweetman's bio of Gauguin suffers from the same tendency toward posturing. Whoops!, suddenly we're in the midst of detailed technical excursus into problems of large-scale engineering, or of epidemiology. (Gauguin tried to live in Panama at the time of the digging of the canal.) Is the author expert in these subjects? He certainly seems to want us to believe that he is. Nevertheless one doubts and, in doubting, questions his expertise on the subjects of art, literature and politics as well. If you're looking for an entertaining experience from the pen of an expert, read Ellmann or Rose or especially Shattuck. Give Sweetman a rest.
Rating:
Summary: Warning
Review: this book is simply wrong. not just details, but the big picture. the anarchists weren't like that. the artists weren't like that. these people lived in a ferment of intellectual and moral commitment. i didn't feel the author was 'sensitive' to them at all: very much the opposite. i felt he was dismissive and patronizing.
|
