By Rolling
Stone
This is a great coffee-table book collecting the best
of portraits done for Rolling Stone. Many of them are really spectacular,
highlighting work from the best illustrators working in the past few
decades. More than anything else, the range of styles is the best feature
of the book. They range from Al Hirschfield's economy of line to Philip
Burke's vibrating pools of color to Nancy Stahl's vector-based stylized
shapes. As an artist, it's incredible to see eerie likenesses in both
caricatures and portraits, abstract shapes and assemblages. A sketch
of Bob Dylan, for example, has a curl of painted hair and a light bulb
for a nose. The resemblance is uncanny. Then there are works like the
two paintings of Lennon and McCartney, truly the work of a master of
attention to detail, with every brush stroke perfectly delineated.
While I don't have any complaints about the portraits,
the book uitself is another matter. It appears disjointed and precariously
organized. Placing Elvis and the Beatles first and continuing through
the history of rock, the portraits seem to be listed in some sort of
chronological or relevant order, but the rest of the book deviates from
this to the point of distraction. Worse, quotes pepper the book, but
not frequently enough, only about every ten pages or so. Rolling Stone
interviewed the subjects on what they thought about their portraits,
but so few of these are included that it only looks conspicuously as
if they just didn't get that many responses. If you're willing to ignore
these and take each page as the separate masterpiece it is, you'll enjoy
a great book.
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