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 Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
Night of the Tiki arrives as a small, smartly produced argument in the idiom of the coffee-table book: it stakes a curatorial claim with images, short essays, and selection rather than a long, linear history. What it proposes—clearly, and with a kind of tasteful provocation—is that postwar American “Tiki” is neither mere kitsch nor purely … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Dark by Robert Munsch
The Dark (a picture book that sits squarely in his larger catalogue of anxious, exuberant, and oddly consoling childhood tales) is less a cautionary tale than a quiet excavation of a single, universal fear: the impossible-to-see thing that nonetheless feels very present. Munsch’s gifts — an ear for spoken cadence, a knack for compressing a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Dark by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
At first glance Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever presents itself as the kind of picture book that trades in the obvious—short sentences, a repeating refrain, and a domestic tableau meant to reassure a child at bedtime. Read more closely, however, the book’s spare language and circular structure sustain a far more complicated emotional logic: a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mortimer by Robert Munsch
Mortimer reads at first like a comic domestic sketch: it’s bedtime, Mortimer refuses, Mortimer makes a racket, and every adult who enters the scene fails to quiet him. But beneath that simple spine of plot sits the set of a small stage where Munsch — working in his characteristic oral-storytelling register — orchestrates an escalating … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mortimer by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
Robert Munsch’s Mud Puddle reads like a tiny masterpiece of oral storytelling compressed into thirty-two pages: brisk, comic, cumulative, and animated by a single, delightfully absurd conceit — a mud puddle that repeatedly “jumps on” a child and gets her “completely all over muddy.” The story began as a tale told in a nursery school … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch
Thomas' Snowsuit by Robert Munsch turns a domestic, wintertime battle into an energetic miniature drama: a small boy resists the ritual of being bundled for cold weather, and the adult attempt at care escalates into a comic standoff. The narrative depends on repetition, mounting absurdity, and a tight point of view that keeps the reader … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
At first glance The Paper Bag Princess is the kind of picture book one might read in five minutes and, in good conscience, tuck back on a shelf. Read closely, however, it behaves more like a miniature manifesto: a tight, witty demolition of fairy-tale expectations that nevertheless leaves room to teach — not by sermonizing, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Potter’s Studio Handbook by Kristin Müller
Kristin Müller’s Potter’s Studio Handbook is the sort of practical-intellectual hybrid that appears, at first glance, to belong strictly to the bench: measured lists, sequences of photographs, and angled hands shaping clay. Read closely, however, it reveals itself as a small pedagogical manifesto — a sustained argument about how technique, habit, and deliberate constraints generate … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Potter’s Studio Handbook by Kristin Müller
The New Renaissance Mindset 