IN HER 1993 BOOK on Jared French (1905-1988), the first devoted entirely to this painter, Nancy Grimes remarks on the interpretive difficulties that spring from the painter’s private symbolism, difficulties compounded by our inadequate knowledge of his life: …
More… Clifford Wright was such a retiring person, and living on such a remote island as he did, that writing letters was his chief means of connecting with people, especially his gay friends. And since he had known everyone in the arts, his correspondence in the Danish Archives of Arts and Letters Modern Collection is staggering-12,500 items. In my archive at the University of Delaware, too, are a treasure trove of 85 fat letters from Clifford, a testament to his indomitable gay spirit. …
MoreArt—A Sex Book John Waters and Bruce Hainley Thames & Hudson 208 pages, $29.95 (paper) The comedies of John Waters are practical exercises in æsthetic philosophy. This theme…More
OF THE MANY women who figured in the lives of Gertrude Stein and her circle in the early 20th century, the Cone sisters—fabulously wealthy, single women from Baltimore—stand out as power brokers in the Paris art world in their own right. Their money came from the family’s denim mills, the largest in the world. Although deeply steeped in the Victorian mores of their time, they bought “works by artists who, at the time, were dismissed as charlatans, or denounced as pornographers, and sometimes both,” in the words of Mary Gabriel in The Art of Acquiring.
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