RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAn outsize but propulsive read (600 pages in snack-size chapters) with a peppery twofold brief ... The book’s narrative is linear in a peripatetic, back-and-forth way ... Many of its elements are beyond familiar: the people (dealers, other artists, spouses and lovers); the places (Spain, Paris, the South of France); the creative metabolism with its swings between paradigm-zapping and product-churning ... In Cohen-Solal’s account, French xenophobia, primal and entrenched, was a major shaper of Picasso’s biography, and it’s her tracing of it that makes her book distinctive. She cites examples — some more convincing than others — of its operations early and late ... [An] accessible multitasking book — a critical biography that is, in fact, only glancingly critical of its artist-subject ... Indeed, what the book really is, or wants to be, is a form of art history as protest. Cohen-Solal’s recurring first-person appearances throughout make this clear ... Thematically insistent.
Joshua Rivkin
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"... the most substantive biography of the artist to date ... Rivkin describes these tense meetings in a tone of anxious exasperation, though this is by no means his only voice. When he is talking about Twombly’s art, or the book’s larger themes of evasiveness and evanescence, you stop hearing the thwarted reporter and start hearing the poet, who approaches this art as a gold mine of metaphors and symbols, and finds the experience enrapturing ... Poetic ardor can be exhausting. (As the many quotes from art critics that pepper Rivkin’s book demonstrate, Twombly tends to send writers into lyric overdrive.) But it is also a propulsive, positive and persuasive mode. Over the stretch of this long but surely not last Twombly biography, it carries the day.\
Jed Perl
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe young Calder and his middle-aged counterpart are almost identical: self-assured, hard working, constitutionally cheerful — and that’s about it. If you view biographies as, by definition, accounts of psychological development, you may find this one puzzling. To readers in search of dark-minded revelations, it will be a page-turner in the wrong way ... there’s the matter of Calder’s personality. When Perl calls it 'fundamentally imperturbable,' he may be saying most of what there is to say. We’re assured that the artist had hidden depths, though we never convincingly see them ... What the book gets absolutely right — thanks in part, actually, to the pacing — is its demonstration of Calder’s staying-in-place-while-flying move from toy-making to art-making, and how profound that move was.
