Author: Donald Friend
Publisher: National Library Australia
ISBN:
Category : Artists
Languages : en
Pages : 744
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Book Description
Donald Friend's legendary years in Bali in the 1960s and 1970s and his subsequent final decade in Australia are revealed in detail in this fourth and final volume of The Diaries of Donald Friend. In Bali he lives luxuriously, like a lorda even keeping his own gamelan orchestraa and becomes an international celebrity artist. He welcomes guests such as Mick Jagger and the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, entertains numerous other visitors who want to buy his paintings and drawings, and socialises freely with friends, including many other artists. He engages in significant building activity and property development while also producing superb illustrated manuscripts and books. And despite increasing ill-health, Friend continues to revel in his life's drama and creativity, remaining an eloquent, often charming and sometimes irascible companion. Including over 60 drawings from his diaries, many of them in colour, this volume confirms Friend's quicksilver creative brilliance and extraordinary insight. He is perhaps Australia's most important twentieth-century diarist.
Author: Paul Hetherington
Publisher: Apollo Books
ISBN: 9781742585086
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
Paul Hetherington’s seventh collection of poetry chronicles life in all its beauty, strangeness and familiarity. Ranging across art and poetry, the past and the present, homelands and far-off lands, Six Different Windows meditates on childhood, riffs on mythology, and draws on the everyday. Grouped into six sections, the poems begin in childhood, then move onto the effects of art, history, travel and mythology, before returning home as if from a long journey.
Author: Alexander Masters
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374178186
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
"An unorthodox investigative literary biography of a mysterious graphomaniac whose nearly 150 diaries are rescued from a dumpster by the author"--
Author: Sebastian Smee
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812994817
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists—Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon—whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights. Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary—one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses. Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock’s uninhibited style of “action painting” triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock’s sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend’s mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain’s most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen. Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one’s own as an artist—finding one’s voice—almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate’s expectations of who you are or ought to be. Praise for The Art of Rivalry “Gripping . . . Mr. Smee’s skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid. . . . You leave this book both nourished and hungry for more about the art, its creators and patrons, and the relationships that seed the ground for moments spent at the canvas.”—The New York Times “With novella-like detail and incisiveness [Sebastian Smee] opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists. . . . Each of his portraits is a biographical gem. . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority.”—The Boston Globe
Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1328826317
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Former poet laureate of the United States Donald Hall’s final collection of essays, from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny.”* *(New York Times) “Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Donald Hall answers his own question in these self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. Nearing ninety at the time of writing, he intersperses memories of exuberant days in his youth, with uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades—with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries. Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, this final work is as original and searing as anything Hall wrote during his extraordinary literary lifetime.
Author: Tina Brown
Publisher: Henry Holt
ISBN: 1627791361
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
The diaries of the author's years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair also serves as a portrait of the 1980s in New York and Hollywood, describing her summons from London in the hopes of saving Condé Nast's periodical and her experiences within the world of glamour magazines
Author: Arthur Crew Inman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674454453
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1748
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Book Description
Between 1919 and his death by suicide in 1963, Arthur Crew Inman wrote what is surely one of the fullest diaries ever kept by any American. Convinced that his bid for immortality required complete candor, he held nothing back. This abridgment of the original 155 volumes is at once autobiography, social chronicle, and an apologia addressed to unborn readers. Into this fascinating record Inman poured memories of a privileged Atlanta childhood, disastrous prep-school years, a nervous collapse in college followed by a bizarre life of self-diagnosed invalidism. Confined to a darkened room in his Boston apartment, he lived vicariously: through newspaper advertisements he hired "talkers" to tell him the stories of their lives, and he wove their strange histories into the diary. Young women in particular fascinated him. He studied their moods, bought them clothes, fondled them, and counseled them on their love affairs. His marriage in 1923 to Evelyn Yates, the heroine of the diary, survived a series of melodramatic episodes. While reflecting on national politics, waifs and revolutions, Inman speaks directly about his fears, compulsions, fantasies, and nightmares, coaxing the reader into intimacy with him. Despite his shocking self-disclosures he emerges as an oddly impressive figure. This compelling work is many things: a case history of a deeply troubled man; the story of a transplanted and self-conscious southerner; a historical overview of Boston illuminated with striking cityscapes; an odd sort of American social history. But chiefly it is, as Inman himself came to see, a gigantic nonfiction novel, a new literary form. As it moves inexorably toward a powerful denouement, The Inman Diary is an addictive narrative.
Author: Donald Friend
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
Author: Ashleigh Wilson
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1925355233
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
When he died in 1992 Brett Whiteley left behind decades of ceaseless activity—some works bound to a particular place or time, others that are masterpieces of light and line. Whiteley had arrived in Europe in 1960 determined to make an impression. Before long he was the youngest artist to have work acquired by the Tate. With his wife, Wendy, and daughter, Arkie, Whiteley then immersed himself in bohemian New York. But within two years he fled, having failed to break through. Back in Sydney, he soon became Australia’s most celebrated artist. He won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in the same year—his prices soared, as did his fame. Among his friends were Francis Bacon and Patrick White, Billy Connolly and Dire Straits. Yet addiction was taking its toll: Whiteley struggled in vain to separate his talent from his disease, and an inglorious end approached. Written with unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, and handsomely illustrated with classic Whiteley artworks, rare notebook sketches and candid family photos, this dazzling biography reveals for the first time the full portrait of a mercurial artist.
Author: Donald Spoto
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815411839
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 753
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Book Description
Relying on over 150 interviews as well as Marilyn's letters and diaries, this work by best-selling biographer Spoto casts new light on every aspect of the actress's tempestuous life.
