The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters
Despite pitching the book as a melding of art history and personal exploration, Moser is reluctant to peruse this line of inquiry. In the pages between the introduction and afterword, details about his own struggles are scarce ... The book reads more like a collection than a single, fluid account. There’s a good deal of repetition from chapter to chapter — each considering a different artist and a handful of his or her works — and together the book presents a fragmented sense of the era’s political and cultural history. In several cases, so few biographical details are available that Moser makes a joke of it ... Too busy theorizing to see the work that’s right in front of him, Moser writes with little feel for the human story in the work, and the ways that looking at art can be enlivening on its own ... Some of his assessments invite suspicion, if not bafflement ... Whatever insight he may have gained isn’t to be found here.
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An excellent companion: conversational and congenial, essayistic and elevating ... In a series of digestible pieces, each devoted to an individual artist, Moser combines biographical capsules and historical context with commentary on key works. I’m familiar with all the artists included, but I learned many things I didn’t know and was glad for Moser’s wider, worldly perspective ... The book wanted to be something other than it seemed to be. The dissonance came more from subtle shifts in Moser’s tone than any more-overt waywardness ... Moser’s prose is not flashy. He writes well, with an attractive specificity and receptiveness, about the art itself ... The shifts in Moser’s tone are part of his attempt to draw the general reader in with personal revelations. More and more nonfiction authors are choosing this route. At first (for me, anyway), this strategy was distracting ... But by the book’s end, I found that Moser’s intimate asides had accumulated into something affecting and open-ended ... The Upside-Down World is much more than an elegant guide to Dutch painters. I had the sense Moser didn’t know he wanted it to be more than that while writing these pieces, with the result that at times the book is neither one thing nor another. But I suppose that makes it, commendably, its own kind of thing — and one of several reasons this book will stay with me.
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Moser interweaves personal memoir with observations he has gleaned from years of faithful looking at Dutch paintings ... At its best, the book simulates what it must be like to walk around a gallery of Dutch art with Mr. Moser providing the running commentary ... The problem is, it’s reasonable to expect more depth and sustained analysis from a book than from even the most charming and learned companion. Mr. Moser, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his authorized biography of Susan Sontag, flits from topic to topic, artist to artist, never lighting on any one subject long enough to provide a new interpretation or much insight ... Given Mr. Moser’s reluctance to fully commit to biography, one might hope for eloquent visual descriptions. But this is not his strength ... Superficially, Mr. Moser’s book seems to have much to recommend it. If the only tomes on Dutch art were dull ones, this might be a reasonable option for those curious to learn about such a fascinating subject. But the field is an exciting and productive one, with no shortage of compelling writers...all of them presenting far richer ideas than the scattered reflections and self-reflections Mr. Moser has to offer.
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