Reinhard Kleist, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: An Art Book. Book Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

At its very best, Art should pull you into the subject at hand and make you feel like an invisible voyeur, a sense of the celestial moving silently through the void but touching upon the heavenly and the fire in that other place with equal charm and fondness; the Artist and Art, sometimes indecipherable, indistinguishable, often being drawn in the same breath and with same feeling of mysterious beauty thrown in for good measure.

It is to art as a subject that we turn to when the world makes no sense, politics and science finding themselves relegated in the pecking order when we look for a comforting word or perhaps an image to capture our soul’s own torment. To frame the artist and the art is arguably the sense the order in the chaos we intrinsically believe they create and yet for someone like Nick Cave, the swirling mass that lives in the space between truth and legitimate power of invention, the chaos is indelible, a black hole, a void to which the only thing that escapes is genius and a kind of imbalance of the natural order to which the fans cling to with a fervour bordering on the greatest of hope.

Nick Cave may feel like an creation to lesser men but in that one that lays undoubted truth, a master of lyrical persuasion, of the down beat but high emotion and one that perhaps can only be talked of, written about as if it was a film, a story book, for no true biography can muster the illumination, no sheer sense of worded scale can capture the gravitas within and so it falls to Reinhard Kleist to capture the soul of the man and it is a work of art in itself that the mission is completed.

A biography can become staid, a natural progression of A to B and with no colour to keep the reader interested; even the finest anecdotes can be seen as grating after a while. Yet Reinhard Kleist does something unique with his look at the subject in his book Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: An Art Book, a sense of perspective captured by a more tangible physicality, an art book in the finest of tradition of graphic novel, of alluding to the Noir that breathes inside this extraordinary musician.

Some people have a life that is just a few steps out of the ordinary, some are granted it seems by providence to seek out a truth and live it absolutely; what Reinhard Kleist has created is a piece of art that matches the subject’s personality and drive, the stories, the mystery, the challenge and in each panel, each full length picture, the noir becomes deeper, the persona melds with the man and the art becomes overwhelming.

A genuinely intriguing art book which is beyond compare, a sense of purity, of unconditional compassion and one that seeks out the truth as laid out by a thousand unadulterated narratives; a book of art that showcases all that was thought impossible.

Ian D. Hall