Kirjahaku

This biography focuses on Wright's family history, personal adventures and colourful friends and family. The author had unprecedented access to an archive of over 100,000 of Wright's letters, photographs, drawings and books, and she also interviewed surviving devotees, students and relatives.

Anyone who has admired Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" of the Huntington Collection in California, or Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owes much of his or her pleasure to the art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869-1939). Regarded as the most influential - or, in some circles, notorious - dealer of the twentieth century, Duveen established himself selling the European masterpieces of Titian, Botticelli, Giotto, and Vermeer to newly and lavishly wealthy American businessmen - J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, to name just a few. It is no exaggeration to say that Duveen was the driving force behind every important private art collection in the United States. The first major biography of Duveen in more than fifty years and the first to make use of his enormous archive - only recently opened to the public - Meryle Secrest's "Duveen" traces the rapid ascent of the tirelessly enterprising dealer, from his humble beginnings running his father's business to knighthood and eventually a peerage. The eldest of eight sons of Jewish-Dutch immigrants, Duveen inherited an uncanny ability to spot a hidden treasure from his father, proprietor of a prosperous antiques business. After his father's death, Duveen moved the company into the riskier but lucrative market of paintings and quickly became one of the world's leading art dealers. The key to Duveen's success was his simple observation that while Europe had the art, America had the money; Duveen made his fortune by buying art from declining European aristocrats and selling it to the "squillionaires" in the United States.

Elsa Schiaparelli was an integral figure in the artistic movement of the times. Her collaborations with artists such as Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti elevated the field of women's clothing design into the realm of art. This book deals with her life and work.

The first and only full-scale and definitive biography of one of the the most important composer-lyricists in musical theater. A remarkable portrait of the man, the music, and the genius of Stephen Sondheim: star of his own fascinating life. Drawing on personal conversations with Sondheim himself, as well as interviews with his friends, family, collaborators, and lovers, Secrest offers new insight into the enigmatic and very private Stephen Sondheim. Here, we learn about his childhood on New York's Upper West Side, his parents' devastating divorce, and his ascent to the peaks of the Broadway musical. Secrest vividly recreates the energy, passion, and despair that went into each beloved show, from Sondheim's fabled collaboration with Hal Prince on Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music, to his disagreements with co-lyricist Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story.

Secrest reveals how Sondheim learnt to play the piano at an early age and writes about the effect his parent's divorce had on him when he was 10. She reveals the difficulty he had struggling to gain a foothold in the theatre, attempting to make a living scriptwriting before his Broadway fame and successes. Originally published in 1998.

The life of composer Richard Rodgers encapsulates the very essence of New York and London high society during the first half of the twentieth century and his brilliant twenty-five year collaboration with Lorenz Hart gave rise to songs that will live forever: "Manhattan", "The Lady is a Tramp", and "Blue Moon" are just a few of them. He later collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein II and together they wrote classics such as "Oklahoma", "South Pacific", "Carousel", "The King And I" and "The Sound Of Music". In her outstanding biography, "Secrest" sets the scenes for five decades of American musical history. It is also the intriguing portrait of a complex man: personable, sunny and seductive. Though riddled with insecurities, he was a composer unequalled, not just for longevity but output - thirty-nine musicals, more than a thousand songs, rediscovered and adored by successive generations around the world.

A Groundbreaking New Perspective of Princess Margaret by Renowned Biographer Meryle Secrest Meryle Secrest, distinguished biographer in the arts and humanities, and recipient of a White House Medal, has turned her focus to royalty. In Princess Margaret and the Curse, she has put the conventional view of a much-reviled Princess on its head. Her latest study, which she considers more of an investigation than a biography as such, proposes that nobody knows the truth about the fabled, doomed Princess. She is the first person to have looked at Princess Margaret in a particular family context. That is to say with reference to her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the daughter of a famous, hard-drinking Scottish family that had inhabited an ancient dwelling, Glamis Castle, for centuries. Her older brothers were already renowned for their prowess in alcohol consumption. Decades later, once she became Queen Mother, this Elizabeth would begin to imbibe by eleven in the morning. She was already lamenting the loss of her "drinking powers" when, because of severe bouts of morning sickness during her first pregnancy with the future Queen Elizabeth in 1926, she could not drink. Four years later, while pregnant with Princess Margaret in 1930, she was not so handicapped. Doctors believed it was perfectly safe for a mother-to-be to drink, so she drank. The doctors were wrong. But it took another forty-three years, until 1973, before new studies established that alcohol in any amount was poisonous to the developing human being. The effect is lifelong. We now know that victims’ growth is stunted (Margaret stopped growing at five feet), and their skeletal structures are fragile. They get sick sooner and age faster. There are characteristic emotional differences, too. They never develop maturity of mind. They remain subject to sudden tantrums, rages, are poor judges of character, and particularly prone to run and hide, as Princess Margaret tried to do all her life. They may be as intelligent and gifted as she was, but mulish and fly into a rage. They are, it turns out, exactly like the person she became. None of this has ever been recognized, let alone understood. With this study, the author places Margaret's life in its proper perspective. It seems particularly sad that someone expected to be perfection itself in her manners and behavior should have been born in the one situation where perfection was, in fact, impossible. It is time we looked at this public figure from a new and more forgiving frame of mind, and with a new understanding.