Kitchen Stuff Plus

This lavishly illustrated biography gives the painter Mary Pratt her due. Combining art criticism and journalistic narrative, Anne Koval makes a strong case for Pratt’s work as “sideways autobiography,” to quote the curator Mireille Eagan. Tracing the artist’s life from her early childhood in Fredericton to her final years in St. John’s, the book benefits enormously from the author’s direct access to her subject as well as to Pratt’s family, friends, and colleagues. Koval has also made good use of Pratt’s papers at Mount Allison University, where she is a professor.

Pratt’s still-life paintings are more sophisticated than Frida Kahlo’s or Joyce Wieland’s, and they represent a form of subtle self-fashioning that’s steeped in jouissance, even more so than Georgia O’Keeffe’s. Koval draws liberally upon Pratt’s own words (the author first met the artist only three years before her death, in 2018) alongside the perspectives of such poets and non-fiction writers...