Outlines : Bessie Smith

by JackieKay (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $3.47

  Bessie Smith was certainly the greatest blues singer who lived and probably one of the greatest and most influential singers of the twentieth century. Her blues songs mirrored her tempestuous life as she travelled across America performing and making records, taking both male and female lovers, achieving great wealth and stardom until her eventual decline during the years of the depression. She died in a car crash in 1937 aged 43.

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $3.28

  Based on a candid conversation with the artist, Peter Adam's Outline leads us through David Hockney's endlessly inventive artistic development. From the perspective of his enduring fascination with the male nude, it also charts his relationships with the friends and lovers who fired his imagination and whom he portrayed, both intimately and formally, in his work - including those in London, such as W.H. Auden, Ossie Clark and Patrick Procktor, and later those in the United States, notably Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans. It tells the story of a wonderfully engaging artistic personality, from his swinging sixties' peroxided hair and gold lame jacket, through his impatience with English prudery and censoriousness, to the present day when so many of those he has painted or drawn are no longer alive.