Shadows On A Wall: Juan O’Gorman and the Mural in Patzcuaro
Novelist and essayist Hilary Masters recreates a moment in 1940s Pittsburgh when circumstances, ideology, and a passion for the arts collided to produce a masterpiece in another part of the world.E. J. Kaufmann, the so-called “merchant prince” who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, was a man whose hunger for beauty included women as well as architecture.He had transformed his family’s department store into an art deco showcase with murals by Boardman Robinson and now sought to beaut
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Research into the Semantic Poetics of Russian Akmeism (Russian Edition)
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Research into the Semantic Poetics of Russian Akmeism& is a collection of articles that combines the texts of two literary theorists and linguists, Suren Zoljan and Mihhail Lotman. The book is devoted to the poetics of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Ahmatova, leading figures of Russian akmeism in which their most important semantic mechanisms are outlined. Mandelstam and Ahmatova both share the compression of meaning, but their works also exhibit principal differences, e.g. Ahmatova often tries to enc
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Montaigne’s Novella,
This book’s striking cover caught the eye of many a potential juror as I read it while spending a day waiting to be placed on a panel of prospective jurors. What’s more striking than the cover, though, is the prose inside and the artful way in which Masters has created scenes with the same photographic skill that has made his memoir, Last Stands, an American classic.
The book is aptly described as part history, part fiction, all essay and one can’t help but wonder that if the father of the essay had written a novella, this is surely what it would havve looked like.
Time and memory and the way in which memory allows us to travel in time (but always in an altered, often better, condition) are often the subject of Masters’s work. Here, though, one sees the inner workings of his process as he forges a coherent narrative out of scant details and very few recollections. Reading this book is like watching an accomplished mathematician work out a solution to a famous unsolved problem. Except, the solutions here are presented as scenes of what might have happened.
And like a mathematician, Masters has the same up-front honesty: he acknowledges where his answers might be lacking. He hastens to add, however, that the truth is rarely as interesting as fiction, as what we remember: “My old friend and mentor Wright Morris once told me,” he writes, “pass any fact through the human mind and it immediately becomes fiction.”
Artists, affairs, robber barons and one giant attempt at a meaningful narrative produce a great read that never disappoints and often surprises.
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|Noit enough research,
This book was certainly interesting reading. Although as Juan O’Gorman’s daughter I was very offended by Mr. Masters portrayal of the relationship my father had with me.
Our relationship was far from the “chilly” one described by Masters. I do not know where Mr. Masters got his facts, but when he contacted me he was only interested in what happened in Pittsburg which occured prior to my birth. Mr. Masters did not collect any information from me, about my full lifetime with Juan O’Gorman and Helen.
Masters carries on about a surgery my mother had, she had gallbladder surgery, not an abortion as he contends.
Another falacy was that Juan and Helen were divorced at the time of Juan’s death,they had divorced and remarried pror to my birth, but I took care of all the legal affairs following my father’s death and nowhere was there anything about them being divorced at that time. Helen did not leave Mexico and Juan to move to the US with me, she had come to the U.S. for medical care related to lung cancer, she returned to Mexico only to find he had commited suicide. These many “inacuracies” are hurtful to myself and my family.
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|Answering Maria Carstensen,
It is disturbing to see Maria Carstensen using the good offices of Amazon to discredit my essay on her father Juan O’Gorman and the “merchant prince” of Pittsburgh, E.J. Kaufmann- “Shadows on a Wall–Juan O’Gorman and the Mural in Patzcuaro.”
Number one: My essay is an imaginative account that attempts to understand why what could have been a mural masterpiece in Pittsburgh was never painted but resulted in the masterpiece that was painted in Patzcurao.
Number two, as the member of a family that has been frequently written about, I can well understand how perspectives may differ.
Hilary Masters
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