ABCDuane: A Duane Michals Primer

This delightful albeit occasionally self-indulgent compendium of visual vignettes shows off photographer Michals’s wide-ranging expressive capacity, treating readers to a delectable smorgasbord of creative output, from experimental to slick, silly to profound. “The raison d’être of my self-expression was to maintain an unfettered freedom to say whatever I wished,” writes Michals, who throughout provides intimate biographical morsels and idiosyncratic, astute, sympathetic commentary on other artists and art from his collection. He is as skillful and entertaining in his writing as in his visual art, and the book’s A-to-Z structure allows for serendipitous leaps, from Marcel Duchamp to Egyptian pyramids by moonlight, from the personal foibles of Lucien Freud to a poignant narrative of the death of Michals’s mother followed by a handwritten tragicomic critique of God, from a stunning photo of postfame Veronica Lake laughing in a diner to irresistible Edward Lear sketches-cum-rhymes inspiring Michals’s own doggerel. Over all, this quirky memoir-collage communicates an intelligence and generosity of spirit that derives from an alchemical amalgamation of childlike playfulness unmarred by the wisdom of experience. [em](Nov.) [/em]