Adrian Dannatt Knihy

A detailed survey of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The book showcases the enchanting and surreal functional sculptures created by the Lalannes, once coveted by elite collectors like Yves Saint Laurent and the Agnellis. It highlights their unique artistry and the dreamlike quality of their work, offering a comprehensive celebration of this previously guarded secret in the art world.

An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric. In Doomed and Famous, an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity. For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged the dead, with a macabre disregard for the etiquette of mortality. His specialty, much in demand among even the most mainstream publications, was to memorialize those whose eccentricity or criminality made them unlikely candidates for the fleeting immortality of a newspaper necrology. Dannatt maintained a veritable lust, perverse certainly, for capturing and celebrating such wayward existences. This book is a selection of some of the best—meaning most improbable—of these miniature biographies. Here are arranged an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world's rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum, and many others. Dannatt terminates this volume with his own putative extinction, performing the difficult if not dangerous task of penning his personal life history and ultimate end.

James Ingo Freed's United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem is regarded as one of the late 20th century's most profound architectural statements. Examined in this book, it is more than a museum, as an institution dedicated to research and teaching as well as contemplation and commemoration. In designing it, Freed sought nothing less than to use the very fabric of the building to convey the criminality of the systematic, industrialized extermination of some six million Jews and other so-called enemies of the Nazi state. Freed was galvanized in this approach by a visit to some of the death camps, and came away convinced that the architecture of the memorial could suggest the frightening efficency with which the Final Solution was carried out. It follows that the Hall of Witness, the great central void around which the museum is organized, is a haunting and evocative space in modern architecture.