Overview
This book eloquently demonstrates that just as our human relationships change and develop over time, so do our ties to cherished works of art. Such works, with their overlays of perception and projection, exert a lasting influence on the psyche.In the first half of the book, Ellen Handler Spitz guides us through a maze of surreal paintings by René Magritte, with psychoanalytic thought as her beacon. In the second half she leads us on a kaleidoscopic journey through other "museums of the mind," where interrelated works in drama, film, cartoon art, poetry, and opera are illuminated and rediscovered. She analyzes a performance of Chekhov's "The Bear," revisits the 1970s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from the perspective of the 1990s, reviews the film "Dead Poets Society," muses on the psychological themes in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, rereads a beloved sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and reconsiders "Antigone" to discover startling insights into the "twinship of good and evil." Her final chapter, "Music of Hope," looks directly at the power of art to shape the mind as well as to be shaped by it. Here Spitz reflects on the impact of the children's opera Brundibár, written by the Czech composer Hans Krása in 1938 and performed many times by inmates of the Terezín concentration camp.
Synopsis
This book eloquently demonstrates that just as our human relationships change and develop over time, so do our ties to cherished works of art. Such works, with their overlays of perception and projection, exert a lasting influence on the psyche.
In the first half of the book, Ellen Handler Spitz guides us through a maze of surreal paintings by René Magritte, with psychoanalytic thought as her beacon. In the second half she leads us on a kaleidoscopic journey through other "museums of the mind," where interrelated works in drama, film, cartoon art, poetry, and opera are illuminated and rediscovered. She analyzes a performance of Chekhov's "The Bear," revisits the 1970s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from the perspective of the 1990s, reviews the film "Dead Poets Society," muses on the psychological themes in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, rereads a beloved sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and reconsiders "Antigone" to discover startling insights into the "twinship of good and evil." Her final chapter, "Music of Hope," looks directly at the power of art to shape the mind as well as to be shaped by it. Here Spitz reflects on the impact of the children's opera Brundibár, written by the Czech composer Hans Krása in 1938 and performed many times by inmates of the Terezín concentration camp.
Publishers Weekly
Belgian surrealist painter Ren Magritte's mother committed suicide by drowning herself when he was 13. Spitz, a psychoanalytic critic, interprets his enigmatic paintings as signs of a lifelong struggle with this loss. In this dense but intriguing scholarly miscellany, Spitz (Art and Psyche) muses on the absurd as manifested in Chekhov's play The Bear and in Freud's dissection of jokes; interprets Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as an avant-garde postmodernist work; and explores themes of nonconformity and rebellion in the film Dead Poets Society and in Calvin and Hobbes, a comic strip whose six-year-old protagonist creates a florid fantasy life with his toy tiger. In Sophocles's Antigone, Spitz finds an ethical imperative: conflicts in life must not be avoided. Her poignant concluding essay on Brundibar, a Czech children's opera that was performed many times by child inmates at the Nazis' Terezin concentration camp, illumines the power of art to inspire hope and a will to live. Illustrated. (Jan.)