cover image James Wyatt: Architect to George III

James Wyatt: Architect to George III

John Martin Robinson. Yale Univ., $75 (384p) ISBN 978-0-300-17690-2

Robinson, a British architectural historian, tells in almost obsessive detail the story of the colorful life and innovative, elegant work of this prolific, controversial 18th-century architect. According to Robinson, Wyatt "pioneered %E2%80%98Modern Gothic' as a major aspect of English architectural output and one that was to become increasingly significant in the course of the nineteenth century." Despite Wyatt's celebrity among his contemporaries, his 45-year career, and his enormous output, he left little documentation of his work or life, and some of his major buildings, including the stunning Pantheon, no longer exist. Robinson exploited contemporary references, as well as research by Frances Fergusson, to build this portrait of Wyatt and his work, often depending on "the echoes of his views in other people's gossip," a source that also adds a lively sense of the era, as well as of Wyatt's propensity to both charm and infuriate, which together are sources of his life's "trajectory from early brilliance, achievement and unparalleled success" to "his posthumous reputation as a drunk, a habitual absentee, a womanizer, and a financial incompetent." Amateur architecture buffs will enjoy the generous, handsome illustrations and Robinson's insightful analysis of Wyatt's style and influence on 18th- and 19th-century English and Irish architecture, but the main readership for this massive, heavily researched biography is likely to be architecture students and historians. Illus. (Sept.) H Saul Steinberg: A Biography Deirdre Bair Doubleday/Talese, $40 (752p) ISBN 978-0-385-52448-3 The pre-eminent New Yorker cartoonist, creator of the famously self-obsessed Manhattan map that squeezes the unimportant remainder of the planet into the margins, leads a life worthy of his own ironic art in this scintillating biography. National Book Award winner Bair (Samuel Beckett: A Biography) chronicles Steinberg's career as the "%E2%80%98Picasso of the art form known as the doodle'" whose work made the adjective "Steinbergian" a by-word for an off-kilter blend of visual satire and philosophical complexity. Steinberg emerges as a tangle of neurotic contradictions: a wildly successful commercial artist with insecure longings for high-brow cachet; a disaffected immigrant son who was also the financial mainstay of his grasping family; a European modernist with an abiding love for Americana; a callous philanderer who remained a stalwart provider to a string of melodramatic women. Bair's long and amply researched biography unfolds in a graceful prose that's stocked with absurdist scenes%E2%80%94hastily inducted into the Navy as a propaganda officer, Steinberg was baffled by the salutes he received%E2%80%94and colorful characters, led by Steinberg's hilariously domineering mother, Rosa, the archetype of similar figures in his art and relationships. But much like one of her subject's caricatures, Bair's breezy writing works subtly and slyly to unearth psychological depths beneath the amusing surface of the Steinbergian picaresque. Photos. Agent: Kris Dahl, ICM Talent. (Nov.)