If you imagined Claude Monet at work on his late masterpieces, the Water Lilies, you might picture him seated in his garden in Giverny, France, placidly dabbing blues and purples onto canvas, capturing watery impressions with ease. The portrait that Ross King offers in Mad Enchantment is far more complicated. In 1914, Monet was 73 and the world’s highest-paid artist. He’d already spent several years painting views of his pond, but now he envisioned a grouping of massive canvases that would evoke a “watery aquarium.” It took him the rest of his life.

King, the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and The Judgment of Paris, has done his research—the book contains 40 pages of endnotes—but he spins a readable narrative. Mad Enchantment tells the story of Monet’s efforts to bring his vision to reality, even as the Great War and all its privations interrupted. King details Monet’s struggles, how he approached technical concerns such as displaying the enormous canvases in an oval gallery, and how he coped as his “prodigious” eyes began to fail. And contrary to popular belief (and Monet’s claims), he didn’t just dash off his paintings en plein air—he reworked them at length in his studio, often adding layers of paint.

This is also the story of Monet’s enduring friendship with Georges Clemenceau, who led France in the Great War. It was Clemenceau who persuaded Monet to donate his unfinished Water Lilies to France and to complete them (and to stop being a pain in the behind about it, as Clemenceau termed it). King uses the lens of this friendship to show Monet’s often-cantankerous personality (“frightful old hedgehog,” Clemenceau called him) as well as his abiding love for his family and friends.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The sense that something purchased cheaply at an auction may turn out to be priceless treasure did not originate with “Antiques Roadshow.” Consider the case of John Snare, an English bookseller who picked up a painting of King Charles I that raised more questions than he could readily answer. The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece merges history and mystery, obsession and deception, yet views the works in question with a clear and illuminating eye.

Author and Observer art critic Laura Cumming (A Face to the World) traces Snare's lifelong obsession with and devotion to his painting, which he believed to be the work of Diego Velázquez, and which ultimately led him to ruin before he was able to definitively confirm its provenance. Snare was alternately derided as a lunatic and thought of as a visionary, and the painting changes hands so many times it can be hard for readers to keep track of its whereabouts.

Cumming also sketches the artist's life and work—Velázquez is notable for a tender and affectionate view of his subjects—in language that brings each portrait to life. Though Velázquez is compared to Shakespeare because so little is known of his actual life, Cumming finds that we are able to deduce much from the artist’s subject matter and the way he portrayed himself, "to know (him) through his work."

While Snare and Velázquez are both somewhat hard to trace, the details unearthed here are rich ones; Snare's bookshop and printing business are vividly evoked, and his journey to America and time in New York's burgeoning art world are a bold adventure. Still, we are left to wonder, what of the family he left behind? The Vanishing Velázquez offers a penetrating look at art and the lengths to which it can move the human heart.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, March 2016

Olivia Laing’s soulful blend of biography and autobiography makes her one of the most compelling nonfiction writers around. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking made numerous “best of” lists in 2014 with its gimlet-eyed portrayal of the ravages of alcohol on the careers of otherwise distinguished writers. Laing continues to pursue her unique blend of experiential research in her new book, deepening her personal investment in the material.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone begins with a brokenhearted Laing (who’s British) adrift in a series of New York City sublets. She finds, as so many do, that loneliness has a particularly urban flavor, and that modern cities are very easy to get lost in, particularly if they are not yours. Partly to assuage her loneliness, she starts pursuing the life stories of American visual artists who made the experience of isolation part of their art. 

She begins with Edward Hopper’s famous painting “Nighthawks,” with its indelible portrait of a late-night diner, and explores the bitter dynamics of his marriage to a fellow artist. Other subjects include Andy Warhol’s use of technology to create a safe barrier to intimacy, and—heartbreakingly—downtown artist David Wojnarowicz’s depiction of the tragic isolation of gay men in the era of AIDS. A chapter on outsider artist Henry Darger—the creator of the weird and epic Vivian Girls—argues for his deliberate transmutation of childhood trauma into art.

Laing’s own wrestling with loneliness, and her readings in psychology and philosophy, weave in and out of these portraits, creating a complex and multilayered narrative. Her experiences of “insufficient intimacy” and the social awkwardness of the lonely offer a humane and sensitive lens through which to view the life and art of her subjects. This is a stunning book on the nearly universal experience of feeling alone.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On September 24, 1963, Andy Warhol left New York for a road trip to Hollywood in a black Ford Falcon station wagon. His companions were his assistant and up-and-coming poet Gerard Malanga, antic underground film “superstar” Taylor Mead and Wynn Chamberlain, who owned the car. In Deborah Davis’ impressive recounting of this adventure, The Trip, Warhol’s experiences mark the turning point in his life between “Raggedy Andy” Warhola, a small-town kid from Pittsburgh, and Andy Warhol, filmmaker and pop art impresario.

Davis’ copious research into the flotsam and jetsam of 1963 establishes the mood: She shows us the billboards lining Route 66, takes us into the motels and truck stops and listens to the pop songs on the radio. These details do more than evoke the period; they also show how Warhol’s iconic “multiples”—like his Campbell’s soup cans—emerge from the mass culture of the 1960s. 

Once in Los Angeles, the ragtag adventurers get busy. Warhol has a first art show at the Ferus Gallery; Dennis and Brooke Hopper throw Andy a “real Hollywood party”; Warhol meets his idol Marcel Duchamp; and Warhol and crew shoot a movie called Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of, with the impish Mead as Tarzan and Dennis Hopper as his body double. Davis argues that this trip to Hollywood gives birth to the Warhol of the later ’60s, the artist whose silver Factory and entourage of underground divas we remember today.

A good introduction to Warhol for pop art neophytes, The Trip will also appeal to readers eager to learn more about the “Mad Men”–era collision between art and advertising.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One of the first artists featured in Sarah Thornton’s fascinating 33 Artists in 3 Acts is American Jeff Koons, who tells her that he never wants people to feel small when they view his art. Clearly Thornton ascribes to a similar principle. In this witty, smart follow-up to her 2008 bestseller, Seven Days in the Art World, Thornton generously cracks the sometimes perplexing code of modern art.

She cleverly divides her artist profiles into three sections. First, Thornton explores artists’ attitudes toward politics and power in their work. She then probes the network of relationships an artist needs to succeed, before finally looking at the artistry itself.

Let’s face it: Artists are, by and large, a weird bunch. (Laurie Simmons, the mother of “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, spends part of the book toting a silicone Japanese sex doll between her Tribeca loft and her home in Connecticut as she “gets to know” her before creating a series of photographs.) While the strangeness of artists is entertaining, Thornton goes beyond the quirks by asking each to articulate their own definition of an artist.

For the most part, she presents their answers without judgment. But Thornton is no pushover. When she sits down with Koons—who is a millionaire many times over for his art—she gently reminds him that she is “familiar with his famous adages and anecdotes so it would be great if he could resist his penchant for reiterating them and answer my questions as directly as possible.” She gets points for trying to draw more than pat answers from a man who, by virtue of his wild success, no longer needs to answer for anything.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.