Rembrandt's Monkey: And Other Tales from the Secret Lives of the Great Artists - Hardcover

Connor, Alexandra

9780312060046: Rembrandt's Monkey: And Other Tales from the Secret Lives of the Great Artists

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312060041 ISBN 13: 9780312060046

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1991

Recounts the lives, deaths, love affairs, criminal records, patrons, illnesses, subjects, and relationships of a variety of European artists

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From Kirkus Reviews:

A hyperbolic retelling of lurid and lecherous gossip about famous artists. Here, Connor, a British novelist, has rewritten much of European art history with an eye for the scatological: ``Then, there is the drawing Rembrandt did of the woman urinating (and worse, if you look very closely)....'' She writes of eroticism, crime, deformity, ghosts, and the occult from the Renaissance onward, focusing on debauchery, depravity, homosexuality, and insanity, all of which she seems to find amusing. Taking this route, she confuses cause and effect: Goya's soaring descriptions of war are reduced to a fascination with cannibalism and attributed to a ``dark nature.'' The 20-century German George Grosz, who so convincingly and movingly painted the torment and confusion caused by WW I, becomes a man whose ``real problem was that he could not look at the war dispassionately but used it as an excuse to loathe mankind in general.'' Meanwhile, Connor draws illogical conclusions and calls them facts. Out of nowhere, she writes: ``It would seem almost certain that [Delacroix's] real father was the French statesman Talleyrand, because M. Charles Delacroix was, at the time of the painter's conception, recovering from an operation to remove a tumor that precluded any sexual activity for some time.'' She also makes points that often seem pointless and relays stories that are incomprehensible: ``During the sack of Rome, [Florentine artist Giovan Battista] was captured by the Germans, who stripped him and forced him to lift huge weights and empty a shopful of cheese.'' There are numerous stories of women done their artists wrong, and sniggering tales of sexual preference: ``[Caravaggio's] picture of St. John the Baptist is blatantly sexually inviting, and the Lute Player resounds with all the homosexual leanings of both the artist and his patron, Cardinal del Monte.'' Connor may be correct when she says that the writing of art history can be pompous and overbearing, but surely there's a better way to poke lighthearted fun than this. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

With the suggestion that art is boring if taken seriously, Connor assembles this flip, cliche-ridden collection of anecdotes about artists, their families, their subjects and patrons. Artistic achievements are peripheral in this chronicle of Leonardo's homosexuality, Fra Filippo Lippi's sensuality, Caravaggio's criminal tendencies, among other examples of eccentric behavior. Depicting the art world as a place of misfits and neurotics, the British author, a onetime model, artist and art historian, degrades her subjects and perpetuates a number of myths in reaching for the sensational effect. There are numerous art-history studies that give more accurate and entertaining accounts of the artistic temperament than this sophomoric tome.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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