The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa
Michael Kimmelman
The Penguin Press $24.95, 224 pages

"Wonderment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to be perceived as a kind of middle state between ignorance and knowledge," writes Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic of The New York Times. The Accidental Masterpiece, comprised of loosely connected tales whose titles all begin with "The Art of," aims for readers in just this state—curious and alert, if not exactly well informed about art history. Kimmelman's clear prose slaloms casually, conversationally, between fine art and the wondrousness of everyday experience, taking in diverse figures such as the painter Pierre Bonnard and his wife Marthe; a dentist and obsessive light bulb collector named Hugh Francis Hicks; a young German-Jewish woman named Charlotte Salomon who died in the Holocaust and left behind, unexpectedly, a 1,300 page visual diary of her life; and Wayne Thiebaud, the famous painter of sweets and, more recently, sweetly colored landscapes and San Francisco street scenes.

The book's subtitle, "On the Art of Life and Vice Versa," is instructive for the order in which it lists its two ostensible subjects; there are precious few of Kimmelman's opinions on art and artists in these pages. Instead, the chapters, almost uniform in length, are meant to guide us toward two main lessons: first, that art mirrors life, and second, that "art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully." This kind of sentiment borders on the cloying, but thankfully it is spread evenly (and not too densely) throughout the book. Instead, Kimmelman's own experiences lead the way: in this book, he is not a critic, but an amateur enthusiast. (One could make the argument that, despite memorably baring his teeth a few times this spring, the two roles are often blurred in his daily newspaper writing as well.)

He offers an amalgam of travel writing and the personal essay (the writing is more like Peter Matthiessen or Joseph Epstein than Erwin Panofsky), taking us to the top of Montagne Sainte-Victoire (because it is the mountain that Cèzanne painted most often) and onto the frozen salt flats of Utah (because Matthew Barney was making a film there at the time). The storytelling mode will frustrate those looking for more straightforward art criticism, but the upshot is that this manner of writing allows Kimmelman to wear his erudition lightly, nonchalantly sprinkling the text with references to art historians, cultural critics, and novelists. Indeed, the selected bibliography at the end of the book would make for a fascinating and surprisingly diverse year of autodidacticism; condensed as it is between these two covers, it makes for an entertaining if somewhat slight read.