Klaus H. Carl

What even was this tiny garbage book?! Klimt is one of my favourite artists, and while this book may pack quite a bit of his work into its small stature, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so disappointed in a book about him. The small pages made it a challenge to really appreciate the intricate details of his work, though they did an admirable job highlighting some choice details with cutout sections in the layout, but what really drove me crazy was the text. Completely divorced from the accompanying images, it meanders through a half-assed chronology of Klimt’s life, touches on a few recurring themes, and dabbles at some provocative commentary without actually grounding us in any sort of real discovery of the artist before concluding in a cloud of non-information. The only positive that I can see in this book is that it does introduce the reader to a decently broad range of Klimt’s works - covering (if randomly) his portraits, architectural installations, landscapes, classical (early) work, and sketches. Unfortunately, this breadth without any meaningful paired dialogue makes for haphazard reading and a generally unpleasant experience… I don’t know that I would even buy this book for my collection, even though I tend to hoard everything related to artists I love, that’s how much I dislike this book!… (meer)

This book is about the Paris Exhibition of 1925, but almost all of the illustrations are of art deco examples in general. (Some of these, such as a Chinese-themed Tiffany desk clock, are stunning, however.) This disconnect, and the sort of 'artsy' tone of the text, which manages to sound almost contemporary to the exhibition itself, make for an only intermittently satisfying read (and look). But they will have you searching the web for more pictures and explanation. Of course, how sad to think that the hope-driven exhibition, full of all this artistic expression in 1925, shortly after the end of World War I, was only a brief interlude in the march to the even greater horrors of Word War II.… (meer)