The show weaves music, biography and analysis of Astaire iconography into a definitive career summary.
Beethoven is still champion after all these years, with forty-two double-columned pages of biography and analysis.
Mr. Hughes offers up what he describes as "a hybrid of literary biography, literary analysis and urban history" in chronological chapters that invoke the Brooklyn of Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, William Styron, Pete Hamill and Paul Auster.
Arranged in chronological order, but sectioned thematically, the images are accompanied by a welcome amalgamation of biography and analysis in the form of contextual text.
Through a blend of biography, art analysis, and cultural history, Paths to the Absolute offers remarkable insights into how a sense of purpose is achieved in painting, and how abstractionism engaged with the intellectual currents of its time.
The show originated at the San Jose Museum of Art and is traveling in what seems to be injudiciously truncated form: it looks better in the thick catalog, whose main essay, by the art historian and museum curator Peter Selz, is a very readable mix of postwar American art history, biography, formal analysis and hyperbole.
"Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo" provides one, Cliff Notes-style: a biography, an analysis of his development as a novelist, the beginning and ending passages of "Palace of Desire" and "Adrift on the Nile," a few one-liners lifted from reviews and an anthology of his works, with brief synopses of 8 of his more than 30 novels.
The most extensive, if not the most successful, of these "biographies" is his analysis of the life and times of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot.
What follows is part biography, part baseball analysis and all Yogibration.
The book, an ingenious amalgam of biography and cultural analysis, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002.
