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oblomov's review
2.0
I love Sister Wendy Beckett's art shows. Her criticism is passionate, insightful and throughly fascinating, and I admit there's a guilty amusement in watching a sixty year old nun, in full black habit, say the line: 'I do like that pubic hair, it's wonderfully fluffy'. Beckett and her words on art are brilliant, but this book was a lie.
I expected, reasonably I thought, that Beckett would discuss how different artists depicted/interpreted the flood, Jonah, the burning bush (not wonderfully fluffy), etc, with some summaries of the stories and their significance. But this is not really an art book.
Instead, Beckett just gives us an abridged version of the Bible with a few paintings thrown in. That's pretty much it. She offers a short synopsis in her own words before each major story (Mount Sinai, King David, Jacob, etc), discussing its importance or meaning in a Christian sense, but almost never an art sense. She does actually critique some of the paintings floating in this sea of text, though it's only a couple of paragraphs or so. While these are the best parts, if the book was nothing but the actual art critcism I bloody well came for it would barely be a pamphlet.
With a ton of verses not accompanied by any images, I had wondered if there'd been a copyright issue during production and Beckett couldn't add pictures she'd initially planned to, but no. There's some paintings that Beckett doesn't even mention, they're just stapled in there with only the title. It may put the painting in its story context, but I could have done that by googling the Bible verse myself in an art gallery.
So it's not an art book, is it at least a decent Bible study book? No, it's just the Bible abridged and besides the brief summaries I mentioned, Beckett doesn't really pepper the text with any other interpretations or thoughts, she merely lets the stories run on and on. She notably misses out some of the more controversial bits, and while I can appreciate not many artists would have bothered depicting anything in Leviticus or the fig tree incident, Beckett's omittance of Sodom and Gomorrah particularly upset me, as there's tons of art for that horrible story. I presume she left it out because she didn't want to talk about the awful things the 'good man' Lot did to his kids, and what his kids then did to him in a cave, but I had really hoped to read her words on this:
John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which you may have noticed is the finest painting ever produced by human hands, and if you believe otherwise you are wrong and fight me.
So that's art fans, Christians and my wallet disappointed. What art criticism is there is great and Beckett's own brief words on the Bible are indeed interesting, but mostly I just feel very, very betrayed.
TLDR:
I expected, reasonably I thought, that Beckett would discuss how different artists depicted/interpreted the flood, Jonah, the burning bush (not wonderfully fluffy), etc, with some summaries of the stories and their significance. But this is not really an art book.
Instead, Beckett just gives us an abridged version of the Bible with a few paintings thrown in. That's pretty much it. She offers a short synopsis in her own words before each major story (Mount Sinai, King David, Jacob, etc), discussing its importance or meaning in a Christian sense, but almost never an art sense. She does actually critique some of the paintings floating in this sea of text, though it's only a couple of paragraphs or so. While these are the best parts, if the book was nothing but the actual art critcism I bloody well came for it would barely be a pamphlet.
With a ton of verses not accompanied by any images, I had wondered if there'd been a copyright issue during production and Beckett couldn't add pictures she'd initially planned to, but no. There's some paintings that Beckett doesn't even mention, they're just stapled in there with only the title. It may put the painting in its story context, but I could have done that by googling the Bible verse myself in an art gallery.
So it's not an art book, is it at least a decent Bible study book? No, it's just the Bible abridged and besides the brief summaries I mentioned, Beckett doesn't really pepper the text with any other interpretations or thoughts, she merely lets the stories run on and on. She notably misses out some of the more controversial bits, and while I can appreciate not many artists would have bothered depicting anything in Leviticus or the fig tree incident, Beckett's omittance of Sodom and Gomorrah particularly upset me, as there's tons of art for that horrible story. I presume she left it out because she didn't want to talk about the awful things the 'good man' Lot did to his kids, and what his kids then did to him in a cave, but I had really hoped to read her words on this:
John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which you may have noticed is the finest painting ever produced by human hands, and if you believe otherwise you are wrong and fight me.
So that's art fans, Christians and my wallet disappointed. What art criticism is there is great and Beckett's own brief words on the Bible are indeed interesting, but mostly I just feel very, very betrayed.
TLDR:
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