The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life
It's hard to decide which aspect of painter Jon Schueler's painfully candid memoir is more fascinating: the unsparing depictions of his tormented relationships with women, or the nuts-and-bolts details of the art trade's byzantine financial dealings. In both cases, Schueler (1916-92) never minces words, nor does he let himself off the hook, since his unusual book includes the perspectives of lovers, collectors, and art dealers (via their letters to him) as well as his own (through correspondence and journal entries from 1957 through 1979). The painter is reticent concerning his aesthetic preoccupations, though the few words he writes about his feelings for nature, especially the wild coastline on Scotland's Sound of Sleat, are fervent and lucid. It's easy to see how Schueler came to be married five times and divorced four: his letters to women are seductively passionate, yet brutally honest about the fact that his first commitment will always be to his work. Color reproductions suggest that his art has been too glibly pigeonholed as "second-generation abstract expressionist," when in fact it has a luminous quality that transcends categorization. Leo Castelli and Willem de Kooning are among the many notables who make appearances, but this is one art-world memoir that doesn't rely on name-dropping for its punch.--Wendy Smith