ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, August 18, 1996                TAG: 9608190121
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: 4    EDITION: METRO 

BOOK PAGE

BOOKMARKS

Roanoke author captures Beaux's flair in art book

Reviewed by BARBARA M. DICKINSON

CECILIA BEAUX AND THE ART OF PORTRAITURE. By Tara Leigh Tappert. Smithsonian Institution Press. $29.95.

Tara Leigh Tappert, Roanoke resident and author, is the specialist on the life and career of artist Cecilia Beaux.

Recently she was guest curator of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition "Cecilia Beaux and the Art of Portraiture." The handsome catalog and guide published by Smithsonian Press in conjunction with the show bears the same name as the exhibit.

The book's stunning cover should ensure its success as a "coffee table" book purchase. Its contents surely would reward anyone who desires to view glorious portraitsby a relatively obscure woman.

Beaux was like many other young women painters of the mid-19th century. But what distinguished her from others was her extraordinary talent and fierce will to succeed in the art world.

No early feminist, she simply wanted to survive, and survive she did. Using her art as a "means to an end," she painted her way into the upper class of society by painting society's upper class. (It could not have hurt that her uncle, Will Biddle of the Philadelphia Biddles, helped arrange and finance her early art training.)

Self-indulgent in her tastes, Beaux obviously relished every opportunity to portray lush fabrics, opulent settings, handsome and distinguished subjects and beauty at its finest.

Presidents of banks and colleges, society matrons, first lady Edith Roosevelt, numerous friends and relatives eagerly sought sittings with the artist that William Merritt Chase dubbed in 1898, "the greatest woman painter of modern times." The fact that Beaux became the first woman to teach full time at the famed Pennsylvania Academy further enhanced her reputation and fortune.

Look at Beaux's portraits. A large measure of John Singer Sargent, a pinch of Rembrandt, a touch each of James Whistler and Thomas Eakins: you'll find it all in the arresting and immensely pleasing portfolio of Beaux's.

Tappert has done her homework, sleuthing among her subject's diaries, papers and autobiography. Tappert's concise comments accompanying the numerous excellent reproductions make the reader eager for the promised 450-page Beaux biography that Tappert hopes to publish later this year. Until then, this book is a handsome teaser.

Barbara M. Dickinson is a Roanoke artist and occasional author.

Fred Chappell will sign copies of his books at the Wythe-Grayson Library on Friday at 7:30 p.m.

Gauguin's ``Self-Portrait.''

Truth and legend divided in Gauguin's biography

Reviewed by HARRIET LITTLE

PAUL GAUGUIN: A Life. By David Sweetman. Simon & Schuster. $35.

Many people already "know" quite a bit about the life of 19th-century artist Paul Gauguin.

He quit his job in Paris as a stockbroker and abandoned his wife and children to pursue his career in far-off Tahiti where he developed his subject matter of landscape and models. Meanwhile, he drove his friend, Vincent Van Gogh, to madness and suicide.

In this meticulously researched and amply illustrated biography of Gauguin, David Sweetman reveals that much of this "knowledge" is actually legend.

As to his being a stockbroker, Gauguin actually worked for an agent de change as a liquidator, or a "chief accountant ... an office-bound drudge."

Gauguin's marriage to Mette-Sophie Gad, a mannish, cigar-smoking Dane, was probably doomed from the start, in part, because of constant financial stress.

Children, naturally, increased their problems, and Mette eventually returned to Denmark where she led a relatively comfortable life, though with little or no help from Gauguin even though she continued to promote his work.

Gauguin's long sojourns in Brittany, where living was far cheaper than in Paris, led to what was, perhaps, his first major work, "The Vision after the Sermon." Sweetman writes that this departure from Impressionism marked the beginning of Modernism. "The Vision," as well as George Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte," led 19th-century art away from Naturalism.

Another influence on Gauguin's life and work came from Vincent Van Gogh, who shared his "Studio of the South" in Arles with Gauguin briefly. Gauguin adopted Van Gogh's technique of frequent outdoor painting as well as some of his use of color.

Legend claims that Gauguin's dominance in personality halted Van Gogh's creativity, leading to his final breakdown. In reality, conflicts of personality and artistic vision, coupled with nights of drinking and wretched weather, finally culminated in Van Gogh slicing off a piece of his ear and his interment in an insane asylum. He was unstable before Gauguin's stay in Arles.

Gauguin's longing for a "warm climate, cheap living, exotic subjects" finally led him to investigate faraway places. In 1891, after a sale of his paintings and a brief visit to Mette and the children in Denmark, Gauguin set out on a two-month voyage to Oceania.

Sweetman writes, "To someone planning to stay for at least three years, Gauguin's ignorance of what he would find on Tahiti was almost total." Instead of an "unspoiled rustic paradise," Gauguin discovered a French colony, divided politically, where missionary work had bowdlerized native arts and crafts. In his wood carvings, Gauguin tried to "re-create the art that he was unable to find."

Finally Gauguin left Papeete, the Europeanized capital, for the wilder shores of Mataiea where he lived in a bamboo hut from 1891 to 1893. His life there, according to Sweetman, "manifested itself in breathtaking lurches between states of blissful happiness, swiftly followed by a plunge into gloom and introspection." There he lived on expensive imported food and French wine or absinthe because he found living like the natives impossible because of his lack of skills.

Sweetman refers to the frequent and severe bouts of illness that caused Gauguin to seek medical care in Papeete, and writes that they were probably caused by syphilis in spite of Gauguin's own self-diagnosis of heart trouble. Again, Gauguin found himself in financial trouble and relied on loans from friends.

In 1892, desperate for money, Gauguin arranged to ship 50 of his Tahitian paintings to Copenhagen for an exhibition. Sweetman remarks on Mette's "considerable self-control" in acting as an agent for the paintings when so many of them offered "explicit evidence of her husband's intimacy with other women." The resulting frenzy of critical response to Gauguin's Tahitian work only increased his reputation as an artistic revolutionary.

When, at last, Gauguin's long-awaited Paris exhibition opened, the legends come closer to the truth. Gauguin had hoped for praise from both critics and fellow artists. In both he was disappointed, and Camille Pisarro even accused him of "stealing from the savages of Oceania." Sweetman writes that, nevertheless, Gauguin had "succeeded in adding a dimension to European art which had never been so fully expressed before," and eventually favorable criticism appeared in the press.

Ill and "the victim of his own myth," Gauguin determined to return to Tahiti with his affairs in chaos in 1895. He accepted a degrading job in the public works department in Papeete. Ultimately, he had to face the reality that Polynesia was not and had never been the paradise of which he had dreamed. In 1903, so constantly in pain that "only morphine had any reality," Gauguin died.

Sweetman closes with a quotation from a letter written by Gauguin only a month before his death: "Thus I can say: no one taught me anything. On the other hand, it is true that I know so little! But I prefer that little, which is of my own creation. And who knows whether that little, when put to use by others, will not become something big?"

Sweetman brings reality to the legends of the great artist and, in doing so, bring Paul Gauguin vividly to life.

Harriet Little teaches at James River High School.

Great read for day at the beach

Reviewed by MARGARET GRAYSON

A LIVE COAL IN THE SEA. By Madeline L'Engle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24.

Madeline L'Engle is best known as the author of the children's classic, "A Wrinkle in Time." "A Live Coal in the Sea" is no children's book but a novel for adults about an American family whose many secrets unfold in a complex and compelling way. It is a gripping story about a search for identity and, finally, mercy.

This search by a contemporary family begins with an 18-year-old's question to her grandmother, Dr. Camilla Dickenson, an award-winning astronomer on the faculty where the teen-ager is a student, "Are you or aren't you my grandmother?" The redemptive answer, not fully revealed until the last page, is a twisting tale which begins with Camilla's beautiful but promiscuous mother, Rose Rafferty Dickenson. It winds through the lives of Camilla's Episcopal priest husband, whose father is a bishop of a diocese in Florida, and of Camilla's son, Artaxia, named for the bishop and whose TV soap opera fans adore him as "Taxi." It is Taxi's daughter, Raffi, who sends her grandmother on a journey into the past with her blunt question.

L'Engle does not miss a beat as she masterfully moves from past to present and from one generation to another. Each flashback takes on unexpected twists and turns, mostly of a sexual nature, which provide a psychological backdrop for the mildly dysfunctional family around which her novel revolves. Given the sexual revelations, one wonders that the various family members are as normal as L'Engle draws them.

"A Live Coal in the Sea" is not great literature, but it is a great read - perfect for a day at the beach or an overseas flight.

Margaret Grayson teaches Latin at North Cross School.

BOOKS ON TAPE

Reviewed by MARY ANN JOHNSON BOOK PAGE EDITOR

NEANDERTHAL.

By John Darnton. Read by Jay O. Sanders. Random House Audiobooks. Abridged. $18.

The status of prehistoric man seems to be the topic of the season.

This novel won the publishing race with "I, Adam," and the issue of which will be the most successful movie will be decided later.

The audio tape of "Neanderthal" gives the essence of the plot, but the abridgement is rough, with confusing and awkward transitions, particularly in the beginning as characters are being established. Whether, however, the story can carry the full length of the book is for readers to decide.

CLOISTER WALK.

By Kathleen Norris. Read by Debra Winger. Abridged. Audio Literature. $17.95.

"Cloister Walk" is the journal of a married Protestant woman, Kathleen Norris, who becomes an oblate at a Benedictine monastery.

Norris explores the mystery of monastic life by describing the people and their daily practices and religious rituals in addition to her personal reactions, as layman and poet, to the experience.

The tape, released simultaneously with the book, is dispassionately read by Debra Winger, and although abridged, it brings reality and meaning to the world within a cloister while also exploring broader questions of faith.

LENGTH: Long  :  204 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  Gauguin's "Self-Portrait."