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A review by crystalisreading
Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov
Did not finish book. Stopped at 2%.
I'd never heard of Helen Frankenthaler prior to seeing Fierce Poise offered on NetGally. I'm not as knowledgeable about art as I would like to be, and Helen's story sounded interesting, and the cover is just beautiful, so I requested it. Why not? I was so excited to dig in--and then I started reading the introduction.
The author has a bizarre and off-putting tone to his writing here, one that manages to be both obsequious and overly familiar. Nemerov talks about his lifelong love to Frankenthaler and her work, saying he feels a special connection with her because they both lived in a similar area for periods of their life, and his father was her English teacher for one year of school and attended a party with Frankenthaler's first serious romantic partner within a few days of the author's birth. It's a bizarre and kind of creepy stretch. But for all that he claims to have felt this awareness of her since before he could speak, and has wanted to write a book about her and her art for twenty years, he admits that he never tried to meet her or interview her, not even during the ten years when his teaching job was only 45 minutes from her home at the time, prior to her death. Instead, he just presumes to be intimately familiar with her and her art, referring to her throughout the book as Helen, as a "token of the proximity I feel," explaining this familiarity at length in the introduction. The writing felt like something an unbalanced fan, or certainly at least an entitled rich white cisgender man, would write, and it put me off this book entirely.
So thank you to #NetGalley and Penguin for granting me an #advancedcopy of #FiercePoiseHelenFrankenthalerand1950sNewYork, but I will not be finishing this book.
The author has a bizarre and off-putting tone to his writing here, one that manages to be both obsequious and overly familiar. Nemerov talks about his lifelong love to Frankenthaler and her work, saying he feels a special connection with her because they both lived in a similar area for periods of their life, and his father was her English teacher for one year of school and attended a party with Frankenthaler's first serious romantic partner within a few days of the author's birth. It's a bizarre and kind of creepy stretch. But for all that he claims to have felt this awareness of her since before he could speak, and has wanted to write a book about her and her art for twenty years, he admits that he never tried to meet her or interview her, not even during the ten years when his teaching job was only 45 minutes from her home at the time, prior to her death. Instead, he just presumes to be intimately familiar with her and her art, referring to her throughout the book as Helen, as a "token of the proximity I feel," explaining this familiarity at length in the introduction. The writing felt like something an unbalanced fan, or certainly at least an entitled rich white cisgender man, would write, and it put me off this book entirely.
So thank you to #NetGalley and Penguin for granting me an #advancedcopy of #FiercePoiseHelenFrankenthalerand1950sNewYork, but I will not be finishing this book.