LIVING WITH THE LAIRD

Biographies & Memoirs

Rathbone, Belinda

Historical

Harper-perennial

Walker Evans's haunting images of southern sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were as revolutionary in their time as James Agee's text and are now deeply ingrained in the American consciousness. In the first full biography of this intriguing and enigmatic artist, a leading national authority on Evans looks beyond the calculated anonymity of his work to reveal the singular obsessions behind it. A man in love with Americana, Evans was a sensualist, a junk collector, a connoisseur, a wit, a perpetual weekend guest. His friendships with Hart Crane, Lincoln Kirstein, and James Agee drew him into the promiscuous New York literary scene in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, and his fierce independence from contemporaries such as Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White brought him notoriety among photographers. Both charismatic and seductively aloof, Evans had a spy's genius for capturing the telling detail. From his rise to prominence with the founding of the Museum of Modern Art to his work

Walker Evans: A Biography

EVANS, Walker

Houghton/Mifflin

Based on personal letters and interviews with more than 100 of his friends and colleagues, as well as his two former wives, this is a biography of the American photographer, Walker Evans. Evans's images of Southern sharecroppers and his pictures documenting the Depression era draw a portrait of the American soul. But what is known of the man himself? He attracted many of the brightest talents of the New York art world, counting Hart Crane, James Agee, Lincoln Kirstein, Ben Shahn and Berenice Abbott among his closest friends. But the man who charmed so many could also be cold and aloof; the artist whose work spoke of social injustice was an aristocratic aesthete and a spendthrift. The book offers a view not only of Evans but of the creative art world of which he was a part.

Thames and Hudson c1995

Walker Evan's photographs are American classics. His legendary images of southern sharecroppers in LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN and his pictures documenting the Depression era make up a haunting protrayal of the American soul. Until now, though, the man behind those well-known images has remained elusive, by his own design. In this first full biography, a leading authority on Evans penetrates the anonymity of his legendary photographs to reveal A VERY RICH AND INCLUSIVE LIFE OF FOOLISHNESS, CRUELTY, AND SPLENDOR, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. A portrait of an artist who profoundly influenced the generation of photographers who followed him, WALKER EVANS also traces the artstically fecund times that nurtured him. His career provides a NEW AND PENETRATING ILLUMINATION, ST LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, of everything from the newly established Museum of Modern Art to President Roosevelt's troubled Farm Security Adminsistratiion. WALKER EVANS is a thoroughly engrossing biography of a unique American master.

Arts & Literature

Mariner Books

<div>A major monograph published to accompany the first museum survey of the renowned photographer and conceptual artist Rosamond Purcell (b. 1942), known for her strangely beautiful, often unsettling photographs of objects from the natural and man-made</div>

Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside

Arts & Photography

Irmscher, Christoph

Dion, Mark

Morris, Errol

Wilkins, Gordon

Graphic Design

Rizzoli Electa

Two Lives, Georgia O'Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs

Shattuck, Roger

Turner, Elizabeth Hutton

Harpercollins

The riveting story of a museum director caught in a web of local and international intrigue while secretly pursuing a forgotten Renaissance painting-the Boston Raphael.On the eve of its centennial celebrations in December, 1969, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced the acquisition of an unknown and uncatalogued painting attributed to Raphael. Boston's coup made headlines around the world. Soon afterward, an Italian art sleuth began investigating the details of the painting's export from Italy, challenging the museum's right to ownership. Simultaneously, experts on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to debate its very authenticity. While these contests played themselves out on the international stage, the crisis deepened within the museum as its charismatic director, Perry T. Rathbone, faced the most challenging crossroads of his thirty-year career. The Boston Raphael was a media sensation in its time, but the full story of the forces that converged on the museum and how they intersected with the challenges of the Sixties is now revealed in full detail by the director's daughter.
In her quest for the true story behind this pivotal event in her father's life, Belinda Rathbone digs into the background of the affair as it was reported in the popular press, both questioning the inevitability of its outcome and revealing the power struggle within the museum that led to his resignation. She draws almost entirely from primary source material in various archival collections and over a hundred contemporary and personal interviews. The book is lavishly illustrated with full-color plates and many previously unpublished photographs.

The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change & a Daughter's Search for the Truth

Reference

David R. Godine, Publisher

This modern memoir follows the life of a woman who marries a well-landed Scottish aristocrat and for ten years is bound to the never-ending care of his ancestral estate in Scotland called The Guynd (rhymes with wind). It is the often upbeat but sometimes sad story of an American who while discovering the eccentric and unchanging nature of her husband also learns the joys of motherhood, dancing a reel, home restoration, reconstructing a victory garden, and attending to troublesome tenants.

The Guynd: Love & Other Repairs in Rural Scotland

The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum, and a Daughter’s Search for the Truth

The first biography of George Rickey, one of the greatest kinetic sculptors of the 20th century. His moving blades, squares, triangles, and circles can be found in museums and public spaces around the world, from bucolic landscapes to the streets of New York City. Now, here is the story of his life, his times, and his vision of balance that created something new&#8213;sculpture that is defined by movement. Before his death in 2002, George Rickey created more than 3,000 moving sculptures, including hundreds of major outdoor installations. His "useless machines," as he called them, achieved complete rotation, used multiple variations of the pendulum, and delighted viewers with the joyride effects of conical movement. George Rickey: A Life in Balance follows the life of a renowned artist&#8213;first a painter, then a sculptor&#8213;who found inspiration all around him&#8213;as a child visiting the Singer Sewing Machine factory managed by his father, in his adventurous youth in the London and Paris art studios of the 1920s, as an engineer in the Army Air Corps during World War II, and later as a pioneer in academic art programs around the United States when he embarked on the sculpture he became famous for. But this is not only the story of a single artist's creativity and achievement but of Rickey's life in the larger context of the twentieth century: from Depression-era America to the upheaval of World War II, from the rise of New York as the world's art capital at mid-century to the tumultuous 1960s, when Rickey emerged as an international figure rubbing elbows with Alexander Calder, David Smith, Christo, and many others. It is also the story of an exceptional marriage and of Rickey's charismatic, devoted wife, Edith Leighton, who managed her husband's career and reputation in the high-powered art circles of New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Belinda Rathbone (author of The Boston Raphael and Walker Evans: A Biography) has captured the spirit of an artist and his world in this deeply researched and engrossing biography. George Rickey: A Life in Balance is for any reader fascinated by the lives of artists, the creation of enduring art, or twentieth century modernism. Includes 30 photographs that document Rickey's life and work.

George Rickey: A Life in Balance

Humor & Entertainment

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