PanThe Wall Street JournalIn recent years it seems to have become standard practice for biographers to insert themselves in the story. Mr. Nemerov is no exception. Do book editors push writers in this direction? Do they see it as a way of heating up potentially chilly subject matter? Mr. Nemerov may not have needed any persuading; he has often aimed to give his writing a strong personal slant—a bit of essayistic pizzazz. He’s not wrong to feel that his family background gives him a privileged view of the mid-20th-century cultural milieu, but I’m not sure that he knows what to do with the experiences he’s had ... The whole question of proximity—of how close we are and what we can ever really know—becomes a problem. In a book this brief, some of the more personal material suggests an understanding of the dramatis personae that Mr. Nemerov hasn’t really earned ... I can’t see that Mr. Nemerov sheds much light on the work of this painter who had little or no interest in preparatory processes or definable structures and symbols. The best he can offer are on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand formulations ... Doesn’t he realize that even as he prepares to salute Frankenthaler as a painter he’s turning her into a feminine cliché? Reading this book, I found myself wondering whether Mr. Nemerov would be on a first-name basis with his subject if the artist were a man.
Alex Ross
MixedNew York Review of Books... his most ambitious book ... There’s nothing breezy about it ... Ross has much that’s interesting to say about the responses to Wagner’s controversial, wide-ranging, and widely circulated writings ... He’s generous when it comes to citing the work of a great many scholars who have explored Wagner’s influence on generations of literary figures and on social and political issues and movements. Ross goes overboard in demonstrating his scholarly credentials ... At times Wagnerism seems not a sustained narrative but an encyclopedia of everything related to Wagner ... a reader may begin to wonder whether some of his subjects were as obsessed with the composer as he is ... The strongest pages in Wagnerism—they come in the final third of the book, mostly in the chapter \'Siegfried’s Death\'—deal with the complex position of Wagner in Hitler’s imagination, Nazi Germany, and the Allied countries before, during, and immediately after World War II. Ross brings a feeling for historical paradox and ambiguity to this prototypical case study in the relationship among art, society, and politics ... He has a focus here that eludes him in much of the rest of the book, where he piles up so much information and makes matters so complicated that a reader may end up wondering what exactly he’s getting at ... the more I’ve thought about his book, the more I’m convinced that the overload of sometimes only partially digested material that he’s packed into these pages is engineered to feel anarchic—maybe even nihilistic. Ross has set out to shatter Wagner’s work into a million pieces ... Does Ross’s book really support the conclusions he wants to draw about Wagner in particular and, I suspect, about the arts more generally? I don’t think so.
Barbara Ehrlich White
PanThe New York Review of BooksWhite has dedicated her career to Renoir and has already published a great deal about him; I have no doubt as to her deep sympathy for the man and his art. A biography would seem a natural next step for her, except that she isn’t much of a writer. She knows everything about Renoir but relatively little about what do with what she knows … White seems vexed that Renoir’s extraordinary personal warmth and kindness couldn’t keep him from embracing a violent public prejudice. But it is by no means unusual for a person to assume public or political positions that are not entirely consistent with private feelings or conduct … White’s tendency to see everything in black and white is fatal when it comes to understanding human motives and passions. It’s equally dangerous when grappling with the achievement of an artist who was simultaneously as radical and conservative as Renoir.
