Bright Stars

Like the artists' paintings, to me Bright Stars is a work of art. A masterpiece. I just discovered many other artists who died young with their genius in mind. My heart rips for artists like Keith Haring, Jean Basquait, Dash Snow, Vincent Van Gogh and Francesca Woodman.

Artists like Keith Haring and Jean Basquait should have been highly appreciated because their art/paintings have brought them into being activists where they were not appreciated in their times. Jean Basquait from being homeless, teenage runaway and made ends meet by creating art, to Keith Haring who was diagnosed with AIDS , who with art , brought social activism in drugs, South African apartheid, nuclear disarmament and gay rights.

Overall, this book was well published and briefly detailed so the readers would not get bored. I would highly recommend this book for individuals who does or does not appreciates art.

Bright Stars is art historian Kate Bryan’s engaging and informative new book about thirty artists who sadly died young. Some of her choices are very well known, Van Gogh, Raphael, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, Schiele, Beardsley, Mapplethorpe, Haring and Basquiat among them and much has been written about each. You might think then that this is a book for the general reader, but Bryan's real strength is in passionately championing the lesser-known artists featured.

I was initially drawn to Bright Stars because of three names on the list of artists: Pauline Boty who I looked up after reading Ali Smith's Seasons quartet, Gordon Matta-Clark and Helen Chadwick whose work I’d seen decades ago at The Serpentine Gallery. Some, like Gerda Taro, Ana Mendieta and Amrita Sher-Gill I had some idea about but others including Robert Smithson, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Noah Davis were not familiar. Reading about them and their work was quite inspirational and so was learning more about Khadija Saye who sadly died in the Grenfell Tower fire, only a month after her work was featured at the Venice Biennale. Illustrations accompany each entry along with a signature artwork and while I liked the illustrations, I wished for more artwork.

Bryan is really good with promoting diversity and inclusivity in the arts. She has included many female, LGBTQI+ and minority artists but her scope is too narrow. Apart from Amrita Sher-Gill, the focus is only on artists who worked in Western Europe and the US. I thought about this omission after finishing the book, surely there were great artists elsewhere who died young and deserve wider attention? Didn’t some Russian constructivists die young? So I did some research (not an art historian) and found two, Lyubov Popova (quite well known) and Olga Rozanova as well as (among others) Japanese artist Hishida Shunso, Korean artist Lee Jeung Seob, Marie Bishkirtseff from Ukraine and Lithuanian Mikolajos Konstantinas Čiurlionis. Their work looked interesting and worth finding out more about. And perhaps that’s the best compliment I can give Kate Bryan’s book, despite its limitations, it inspired me to learn about and see more art.

My thanks to Quarto Publishing Group and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Bright Stars.

This is a fun coffee table book. I enjoyed the illustrations and the entertaining information. Any art lover would devour this ins no time, and it would make an excellent conversation piece.