A shadowy figure of the 1960s art world is gloriously revealed.
An in-depth biography of influential art gallery dealer Richard Bellamy (1927-1998).
Journalist, curator, and former NPR arts reviewer Stein has been working on this book since the mid-1990s. Her extensive research and numerous interviews provide a scintillating, detailed portrait of one of the “most influential and enigmatic American art dealers of the sixties.” The author calls her subject “legendary” and says “the remarkable talent he unearthed was jaw-dropping.” The Cincinnati native inherited his Chinese mother’s “epicanthic eyelids,” which gave him a tired look. An odd, aloof, enigmatic man who made little money, he was frequently homeless or lived in his galleries, where he would “artfully dodge posterity.” After one semester at the University of Ohio in 1948, he went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he lived a bohemian life surrounded by artists. Bellamy now knew what he wanted to do: live fully in the art world, show art, and talk about it. The small Hansa Gallery in New York City hired him as their director; it gave him the opportunity to provide little-known artists with a place to show their works, maybe even sell some—not one of Bellamy’s best skills. He was pure in the belief that it was the art for the art’s sake, not the money, which often disappointed his clients. With the financial help of collector Bob Scull, he opened his Green Gallery in 1960. It quickly became an “extraordinary forum for any young artist.” Besides popular “happenings,” Bellamy featured the works of Marco Polo di Suvero, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Larry Poons, Donald Judd, and a then-unknown Andy Warhol. A few years later, at his Oil & Steel Gallery, he championed the work of Yoko Ono. Heavy drinking, drugs, and three packs of unfiltered cigarettes per day did him in. A man of shrewd and impeccable taste, Bellamy’s role in promoting the often misunderstood art of abstract expressionism, pop, and minimalism was profound. This is an endearing and illuminating work of biography.
A shadowy figure of the 1960s art world is gloriously revealed.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-15132-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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