From fantastical beginnings - his mother went into labour while gambling at a French casino - to escaping Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and ultimately conquering New York City, John Gruen's life has been anything but ordinary. As a boy unable to speak a single word of English, Gruen was determined to make it in America. Anxious to learn about his adopted country, Gruen ventured to the midwest to attend Iowa University, emerging five years later as a fully Americanised graduate student on his way to a PhD. Here is a subtly revealing self-portrait of a truly remarkable man.
Coating opera's roles in opulence, Maria Callas (1923-1977) is a lyrical enigma. Seductress, villainess, and victor, queen and crouching slave, she is a gallery of guises instrumentalists would kill to engineer… made by a single voice. But while her craftsmanship has stood the test of time, Callas’ image has contested defamation at the hands of saboteurs of beauty. Twelve years in the making, this voluminous labour of love explores the singer with the reverence she dealt her heroines. The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography reaps never-before-seen correspondence and archival documents worldwide to illustrate the complex of their multi-faceted creator - closing in on her self-contradictions, self-descriptions, attitudes and habits with empathic scrutiny. It swivels readers through the singer's on- and offstage scenes and flux of fears and dreams... the double life of all performers. In its unveiling of the everyday it rolls a vivid film reel starring friends and foes and nobodies: vignettes that make up life. It's verity. It's meritable storytelling. Not unlike the Callas art.
Early on, critics often were distracted by the Maestro's dancelike style as a conductor.... But he always protested that he was not aware of it during the performance. His podium manner had to be a burning need to communicate the composer's thought processes to both orchestra and audience, whatever the physicality it took to make it manifest. At times it was as if he were-in the title of one of his songs from On the Town-"Carried Away." One is reminded of words from Psalm 35:
Isabelle Storey's memoir of her 10-year marriage to Walker Evans. The story of an elegant young woman's infatuation with a great American artist - with the man himself, with what he stood for aesthetically and with his artistic and social circle and how her initial passion gradually cooled into disenchantment. In candid, poignant narrative, which draws on the couple's correspondence, Isabelle describes how their marriage grew more formal, cooler and eventually failed altogether as Isabelle felt compelled to move on.
Painter, fisherman, pseudo-hermaphrodite—Forrest Bess lived his life in obscurity at an isolated bait camp off the east coast of Texas. From 1949 through 1967, Bess showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, alongside superstar artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Rediscovered after his death in 1977, Bess's small visionary paintings are now prized by museums and collectors for their primal beauty, and can fetch over $200,000 apiece. Bess's treasured canvases were only part of a grander theory—based on alchemy, Jungian philosophy, and aboriginal rituals—that proposed that hermaphrodism was the key to immortality. As an artist, Bess could never equivocate, and in 1960 he underwent an operation to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite. For the first time ever in print, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle combines the beauty of Bess's art with the drama and tragedy of his personal life. Using Bess's own hauntingly sincere words (in letters to Betty Parsons, Meyer Schapiro, and others) the book traces the life and logic of this forgotten artist and explains how a love of beauty and a desire for wholeness lead Bess to self-surgery and, ultimately, a mental hospital. Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle is a fascinating look at one of America's most notorious cult visionaries—a man who truly believed that art could save his life.
Speed Bumps on a Dirt Roadis a living document of country music's founding fathers and mothers. John Cohen photographed musicians, at home, backstage at public events, from the wings at fiddlers' conventions, out in country music parks, and in the studio for live radio show performances and recording sessions. Back in 1961 it was still possible to know a few of America's original country musicians from the '20s and '30s. Renowned and celebrated musician and artist John Cohen came of age at the confluence of old time and early bluegrass music, the historic intersection of traditional and folk music. Cohen traveled the country playing music, recording, and documenting what was to be a generation of musicians who would influence American music and culture for decades to come. Traveling between the Union Grove fiddlers' convention to the Grand Ole Opry to a coal celebration in Hazard, Kentucky, Cohen made historic photographs of performers like Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, the country's very first all-bluegrass show, and a bluegrass bar in Baltimore, among much more.Speed Bumps on a Dirt Roadpresents old time music as the root of country music. Includes photographs of: Flatt & Scruggs, fiddler "Eck" Robertsonin Amarillo, Texas, Doc Watson, bluegrass fiddler "Tex" Logan, the Stanley Brothers at Sunset Park, Sara and Maybelle of the Carter Family, and Cousin Emmy, Alice & Hazel, and a dulcimer in a parking lot.
Lesley Arfin kept a diary during the apocalypse that was her adolescence, chronicling her depression from being bullied in the 10th grade and her discovery of heroin. Lesley told her diary everything. Now in her 20s, Lesley has returned to her journal and added new comments that only an adult looking back on their own life can perceive. Most of these are in the vein of What the hell was I talking about?' Lesley's hilarious updates remind readers how heavy it all seemed back then and how irrelevant it all really is in the face of adulthood.'
"Paul P. has become internationally known for his haunting paintings and drawings of the faces and figures of young men, all sourced from pre-AIDS gay magazines. Nonchaloir, the artist's first monograph, collects over 100 of his stunning portraits in a small, intimate volume. Paul P.'s subjects and their poses are imbued with references to famed painters James McNeil Whistler and John Singer Sargent. Even the title itself is referential: nonchaloir is a defunct French word suggesting repose and resignation, found in works by Mallarmé and Baudelaire. Introduction by Collier Schorr." -- from Art Metropole website (viewd 25 May 2018).
Vincent Persichetti: Grazioso, Grit, and Gold is the first critical biography of the esteemed American composer, bringing together scholarly work and short contributed essays of prominent performers. Andrea Olmstead weaves a captivating narrative of the composer from his early life to his musical activities at Juilliard and death in 1987.
The first feminist analysis of some of the most performed works in the American-opera canon, emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the sopranos who brought these operas to life. In the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were busy seeking to create an opera repertory that would be deeply responsive to American culture and American concerns. They did not break free, however, of the age-old paradigm so typically expressed in European opera: that is, of women as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, with no middle ground. As a result, in American opera of the 1950s, women risked becoming once again opera's inevitable victims. Yet the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Sometimes they used their lived experiences to invest greater authenticity in the roles. With chapters on The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden, this book analyzes some of the most performed yet understudied works in the American-opera canon. It acknowledges Catherine Clément's famous description of opera as "the undoing of women," while at the same time illuminating how singers like Beverly Sills and Phyllis Curtin worked to resist such undoing, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. In short, they ended up helping to dismantle powerful gendered stereotypes that had often reigned unquestioned in opera houses until then.
