Synopsis
From Publishers Weekly:
Art critic Munro (Originals: American Women Artists) grew up in the shadow of her free-thinking yet authoritarian father. Educator, atheist, museum curator and protege of John Dewey, this overconfident paterfamilias preached modernism and pragmatism while he kept wife and daughter meekly submissive. The author was raised in genteel poverty in Cleveland in a home full of phallic African sculpture, esoteric books, French romantic music. Her first marriage to an art critic who, like her father, demanded female compliance recapitulated the dynamics of her childhood. This painfully candid autobiography follows Munro from her postwar years in Paris to her tenure as editor of Art News in the 1950s; the crosscurrents of experimental theater, the women's movement and abstract expressionism helped her blossom. The author walks an emotional tightrope in a memoir tinged with unspoken grief; she emerges shaky but whole, her journey of self-discovery a balancing act of self-preservation.
Reviews
Art critic Munro (Originals: American Women Artists) grew up in the shadow of her free-thinking yet authoritarian father. Educator, atheist, museum curator and protege of John Dewey, this overconfident paterfamilias preached modernism and pragmatism while he kept wife and daughter meekly submissive. The author was raised in genteel poverty in Cleveland in a home full of phallic African sculpture, esoteric books, French romantic music. Her first marriage to an art critic who, like her father, demanded female compliance recapitulated the dynamics of her childhood. This painfully candid autobiography follows Munro from her postwar years in Paris to her tenure as editor of Art News in the 1950s; the crosscurrents of experimental theater, the women's movement and abstract expressionism helped her blossom. The author walks an emotional tightrope in a memoir tinged with unspoken grief; she emerges shaky but whole, her journey of self-discovery a balancing act of self-preservation.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
For more than 20 years, critic Munro has contributed thoughtful and elucidating efforts to the literature on contemporary art. Here she turns inward to share with us her sensitive and analytical observations of her own emotional and intellectual formation from childhood. Daughter of a father avidly interested in "modernist" social theories as well as modern art and of a mother whose "liberated" identity seemed to pale in light of the author's own, Munro does not shy from criticizing but does not grind an axe. She portrays her Cleveland girlhood and New York City maturation touchingly but without sinking into a nostalgia that excludes the reader. This thorough, beautifully written book belongs in most general collections.Francisca Goldsmith, Golden Gate Univ. Lib., San Francisco
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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