11/07/2016
Booklist editor Seaman (Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books) highlights the lives and work of seven “underappreciated” women artists from the 20th century, but sloppy writing and a lack of focus undermine this slice of art history. For one, Seaman’s selection is highly personal—she explains that she chose “to write about artists whose work has deeply affected ”—but the biographical sketches are framed around a broad notion of obscurity. This feels less than apropos when discussing Louise Nevelson, an artist with a New York City plaza named after her. The biographical sketches of the other artists—Gertrude Abercrombie, Joan Brown, Loïs Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Christina Ramberg, and Lenore Tawney—are undermined by overwrought writing and disjointed stories. Seaman also has a habit of including random facts without further explanation of their significance. For example, Seaman attributes Jones’s scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to her athletic ability without any explanation as to why an art school would be interested in a student’s athleticism. Elsewhere she writes that Brown learned from the experience of teaching at a private school, but fails to explain how. Occasionally photographs will show one of the artists with their work in the background, but there aren’t many images of the actual work. Instead, readers must often rely on written descriptions, which makes Seaman’s book even harder to penetrate. B&w photos. (Feb.)
"Re-creates the careers of seven groundbreaking female virtuosos, rescuing from history's margins bold, invigorating work that defied male-centric norms." - O, the Oprah Magazine
"Female creators rise in all their splendor and defiance in Donna Seaman’s wonderful new book . . . Seaman [is] an enchanting biographer" - Washington Post
"Seaman is out to right a grievous wrong but she does so not with shrill arguments but rather with stylish, sensitive and deeply researched prose. "Identity Unknown" is a revelatory, engaging and provocative work." - Chicago Tribune
"Identity Unknown goes far beyond the more narrow question of criticism in discussing seven women artists whose relative neglect places them in unfair obscurity. No more obscurity for this arty septet! Seaman’s lively portraits make the reader eager to rediscover them, a process helped along by the book’s photos of them and their art." - Seattle Times
"[A] diligently researched and compassionately written look into several undsersung female artists . . . It is only through books like Seaman's, which contains fascinating biographical details as well as keen analyses of individual artworks, that this great historical (and ongoing) slight of accomplished women artists has any hope of being corrected." - Buffalo News
"Donna Seaman’s . . . flowing, image-rich sentences are always composed with a painterly precision and texture, layering words upon words like a painter blends colors . . . A multifaceted, fascinating list . . . both in terms of the art and the artists’ lives." - Booklist
"With impressive research, Booklist editor Seaman curates a fine retrospective on the history of women in the male-dominated world of 20th-century art . . . A decidedly important and long-overdue showcase." - Kirkus Reviews
"Seaman's refreshingly intimate descriptions of these women are as candid as they are beautiful . . . She writes as if she knew them personally, and refuses to gloss over their imperfections, even while she lauds their artistic geniuses . . . Identity Unknown's call for remembrance of female artistic brilliance is thorough, poignant, and elucidating." - The Los Angeles Review
"Rendered in wise and beautiful prose . . . Donna Seaman has written a dangerous book about dangerous women who were dangerous because they dared to be themselves . . . Identity Unknown is a credo to creativity, to lives lived large without apology . . . Seaman creates an artistic afterlife for seven women artists whom we can no longer forget." - Pacific Standard Magazine
"In-depth analysis and richly written prose." - Chronogram
"Beautifully written and wise, this haunting book reveals the lives of seven brilliantly creative American artists who, though successful in their own day, have somehow fallen out of sight, along with countless other women artists throughout history. Seaman throws them an elegantly-crafted lifeline, rescuing them from obscurity, in colorful prose that vividly portrays the rich spell of their work, and delves into their lives with empathic curiosity. The result is seven cameos that are poignant and funny, pensive and dramatic, full of calamity and loss at times, as creative lives tend to be, but also love, adventure and the transcendent glory of creating such mesmerizing work. The storied quilt of these unknown lives is absolutely enchanting." - Diane Ackerman, author of THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE
"Identity Unknown is not only a book that illuminates the lives and works of seven artists who have been unjustly neglected, a fate shared by countless brilliant women in many fields, it is a passionate examination of the artistic calling itself. As she moves between a particular artist's personal history and her work, Donna Seaman reveals the stubborn resolve, consuming drive, and fervid concentration necessary for creative labor. In elegant, lucid prose, Seaman makes the unknown known, filling in each blank with a vivid portrait of an exceptional twentieth century artist." - Siri Hustvedt, author of THE BLAZING WORLD
12/01/2016
This book presents seven 20th-century American women artists who achieved critical success while active, but who are not much known today. Arguably, Louise Nevelson is really not forgotten, but the other six painters and sculptors likely will be unfamiliar to most readers: Gertrude Abercrombie, Lois Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Joan Brown, Christina Ramberg, and Lenore Tawney. Seaman (editor, adult books, Booklist; Writers on the Air) provides a loosely constructed biographical sketch of each artist, incorporating snippets of interviews, journal entries, art journalism, and other primary sources. Her writing is more idiosyncratic than academic in tone, at times using incomplete sentences, poetic passages, and strings of examples and descriptors. Seaman describes many important artworks in text, but the book includes frustratingly few reproductions, severely limiting the ability of readers to appreciate or form an impression of the artists' work. Those who want to view the art will need to find other sources. VERDICT This primarily nonvisual approach to art history, focusing on relatively unknown women artists, will fill a hole in the received record. Most useful for research and specialty art collections.—Kathryn Wekselman, Cincinnati
2016-11-09
Vital portraits of forgotten women artists that aim to celebrate their lives and work and to establish their permanent standing within the canon of contemporary art.With impressive research, Booklist editor Seaman (Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books, 2005, etc.) curates a fine retrospective on the history of women in the male-dominated world of 20th-century art. Inspired by the carelessness with which scholars would identify group photographs of artists—famous men named, women overlooked—the author chronicles her subjects' lives in lengthy essays that fall gently between biography and scholarly criticism. Louise Nevelson, Gertrude Abercrombie, Loïs Mailou Jones, Ree Morton, Joan Brown, Christina Ramberg, and Lenore Tawney each led rich lives of passionate pursuit, all while managing the uneven expectations hoisted upon midcentury wives and mothers. This fine selection of artists lends the book both cultural and technical diversity. Jones, an accomplished black painter often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, studied under Rodin in Paris and embraced her African heritage while facing racial prejudice at home. Tawney worked exclusively in fiber, weaving tapestries in New York City while friends Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg worked nearby. Abercrombie, queen of the Chicago jazz scene and painter of mesmerizing works, appears in photographs alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins. Ramberg's sensual graphics can be found not only in analyses of the Chicago Imagists, but also in the pages of Playboy in the 1970s. Seaman exuberantly portrays each highly accomplished woman as the inspirational force she was, and she does a service by bringing them back into contemporary discourse. Unfortunately, the author too often lets her excitement carry her away, running lists of adjectives and too many descriptions on top of one another. This results in clumsily executed passages—e.g., Brown's "slapped, sloshed, slashed, layered, kinetic canvases" and Abercrombie's "bewitching, enigmatic, elegant, awkward, eerie, funny, clever, sad, anguished, teasing and playful" paintings.Seaman's frequent thesaurus-leaning renders her portraits overpainted, but despite its awkward turns, this is a decidedly important and long-overdue showcase (two 16-page color inserts).
