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- Article Title: ‘Great Music Makers’ review
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ABR readers may be more familiar with Louis Kahan’s illustrations for Clem Christesen’s Meanjin or with his portrait of Patrick White (which won the Archibald Prize in 1965) than with his sketches of musicians, but this stylish book from Macmillan Art Publishing reveals not just the fluidity of Kahan’s style but also his passion for music and music-makers. And what a range of artists he could draw on (mostly at rehearsals) during the second half of his life. Present-day concert-goers, inured to leaner rostrums resulting from high fees and a faded currency, will marvel at the list of luminaries who performed here during the three decades after the war. There is Claudio Arrau (1947), grave and poetic; Otto Klemperer (1950), Olympian, bespectacled; a young Lorin Maazel (1961), gaunt and driven like a Schiele self-portrait; Luciano Pavarotti (1965) before the years of glory and girth; and Marian Anderson (1971), mighty in her sensible hat.
- Book 1 Title: Great Music Makers
- Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan Art, $88 hb, 144 pp, 1876832894, $66 pb, 1876832886
- Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
- Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
This is a compendious volume, befitting a long career. Kahan was conceived in Russia and raised in Vienna during the age of Mahler. In the 1920s, now in Paris, he designed clothes for Colette and Josephine Baker. There he drew Arturo Toscanini (handsomest of conductors), the first in his Great Music Makers series, which, over the next fifty-eight years, produced more than 100 portraits in pen, pencil, ink and wash. Fleeing Vienna in 1939, Kahan returned to Paris and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. After the war he joined his family in Perth, before settling in Melbourne.
Michael Shmith, in his fond introduction, records Kahan’s observations about his subjects. Bernard Heinze he found ‘Businesslike. A maestro in a double-breasted suit.’ Of Joan Sutherland, whom he drew during the famous 1965 tour, he said: ‘The law, sure: but the majesty!’ When he asked Igor Stravinsky to sign his portrait, the composer declined: ‘I am a draftsman, too, and people might think I drew this.’
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