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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.
Michael Kimmelman is
chief art critic of The New York Times and a contributor
to The New York Review of Books. A native New Yorker,
he was educated at Yale and Harvard, was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize, and is the author of Portraits: Talking
with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere,
which was named as a notable book of the year by the Times
and The Washington Post. He has written and hosted
various television shows about the arts. He is also a pianist.
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