Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is at once a theatrical confection and a sharply worked tragedy of language. Written for the theatre — and written to be heard — the play glories in the sound of words: the quick thrusts of wit, the rolled cadence of heroic verse, the extravagant pyrotechnics of rhetoric. Yet beneath … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (with a bonus at the end: Cyrano’s “A Nose…” monologue)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
Clifford Ross’s The World of Edward Gorey is less a conventional monograph than an act of tasteful conjuration: a careful, lovingly lit cabinet that sets an uncanny miniature theatre at the center of view. Ross treats Gorey not simply as an illustrator who doodled at the margins of Victorian melodrama, but as a singular authorial … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
Sue Roe’s In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art is a capacious, elegiac portrait of a place and a moment. It threads biography, cultural history, and close-looking criticism to argue that Montmartre — with its cafés, studios, cheap lodgings and convivial degradations — was not merely backdrop but active engine of a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The 20th Century Art Book from Phaidon Press
Phaidon's The 20th Century Art Book presents itself as an atlas of modernity: a compact compendium that tries, with admirable audacity, to put the century’s dizzying artistic revolutions into the reader’s hands. It is not a monograph, nor an exhaustive history; it is a curator’s pocket guide, a series of literary vignettes paired with image-plates, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The 20th Century Art Book from Phaidon Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Art Book from Phaidon Press
Phaidon’s The Art Book is not a book that seeks to be read from first page to last as a single sustained argument; it is an atlas of encounters. Its achievement is simple and ambitious at once: to compress the dizzying plurality of visual practice into a portable, democratic form. The editors do not attempt … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Art Book from Phaidon Press
The. Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Naked Clay: Ceramics without a Glaze by Jane Perryman
Jane Perryman’s Naked Clay arrives as both manifesto and love letter: a careful, persuasive case for the expressive potency of unglazed ceramics and a sustained meditation on what a surface — left deliberately “bare” — reveals about process, place, and person. The book is at once practical and philosophical, moving between shop-floor particulars (clay bodies, … Continue reading The. Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Naked Clay: Ceramics without a Glaze by Jane Perryman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
"Taboo: The Art of Tiki" is at once a curatorial flourish and a cultural document: a small, handsome volume that archives a particular late-20th-century fascination with Pacific iconography as refracted through the sensibilities of Lowbrow and pop-surrealist artists. Edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten, and credited with contributions from figures … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra
Masters: Earthenware arrives not as a dry handbook but as a museum catalogue written in the idiom of the studio. Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra, the volume assembles compact, richly illustrated mini-retrospectives that together argue for earthenware as a lively, experimental, and emotionally capacious medium rather than a mere step on … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret
Gilles Néret’s compact monograph—published in Taschen’s widely circulated Basic Art series under the title Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns—functions less as a revisionist manifesto than as a lucid, image-forward argument for a familiar claim: that Manet inaugurates modern painting by refusing the consolations of academic narrative and classical imitation. The central … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
Earth Fire Soul is less a conventional catalogue and more a sustained meditation on making. The book stages Korean ceramics as a living conversation among three inevitable forces — the clay (earth), the kiln (fire), and the human presence that lends works their inward breath (soul). Organized around the masterpieces held by the National Museum … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
The New Renaissance Mindset 