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Accidental Masterpiece: On Art of Life and Vice Versa
Michael Kimmelman
The chief art critic for The New York Times on the creative impulse that emerges in all of us when we realize that the art of making art starts with the art of living.
Penguin
August 2005
256 pages
ISBN: 1594200556
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Michael Kimmelman, the prominent New York Times
writer and a regular contributor to The New York Review of
Books, is known as a deep and graceful writer across the
disciplines of art and music and also as a pianist who
understands something about the artist's sensibility from
the inside. Readers have come to expect him not only to
fill in their knowledge about art but also to inspire them
to think about connections between art and the larger world-
-which is to say, to think more like an artist. Kimmelman's
many years of contemplating and writing about art have
brought him to this wise, wide-ranging, and long-awaited
book. It explores art as life's great passion, revealing what we
can learn of life through pictures and sculptures and the
people who make them. It assures us that art--points of
contact with the exceptional that are linked straight to
the heart--can be found almost anywhere and everywhere if
only our eyes are opened enough to recognize it. Kimmelman
regards art, like all serious human endeavors, as a passage
through which a larger view of life may come more clearly
into focus. His book is a kind of adventure or journey. It carries the message that many of us may not yet have
learned how to recognize the art in our own lives. To do so
is something of an art itself. A few of the characters
Kimmelman describes, like Bonnard and Chardin, are great
artists. But others are explorers and obscure obsessives,
paint-by-numbers enthusiasts, amateur shutterbugs, and
collectors of strange odds and ends. Yet others, like
Charlotte Solomon, a girl whom no one considered much of an
artist but who secretly created a masterpiece about the
world before her death in Auschwitz, have reserved spots
for themselves in history, or not, with a single work that
encapsulates a whole life. Kimmelman reminds us of the Wunderkammer, the cabinet of
wonders--the rage in seventeenth-century Europe and a
metaphor for the art of life. Each drawer of the cabinet
promises something curious and exotic, instructive and
beautiful, the cabinet being a kind of ideal, self-
contained universe that makes order out of the chaos of the
world. The Accidental Masterpiece is a kind of literary
Wunderkammer, filled with lively surprises and
philosophical musings. It will inspire readers to imagine
their own personal cabinet of wonders.
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