The unknown night : the madness and genius of R.A. Blakelock, an American painter / Glyn Vincent.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vincent, Glyn.

Contributor:

Blakelock, Ralph Albert, 1847-1919.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Blakelock, Ralph Albert, 1847-1919.

Blakelock, Ralph Albert.

Painters--United States--Biography.

Painters.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

x, 362 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), portraits ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Grove Press, [2003]

Summary:

In the Early 1900s Ralph Albert Blakelock's mysterious paintings were as sought after as the works of such American masters as Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. In 1916, his haunting landscape, Brook by Moonlight, was sold at auction for $20,000, a record price for a painting by a living American artist. The sale, his second record price in three years, made Blakelock famous. The newspapers called him America's greatest artist; thousands flocked to exhibits of his work. Yet at the time of his triumph Blakelock had spent fifteen years confined in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York and his wife and children lived in poverty. Released from the asylum, Blakelock fell into the dubious care of an eccentric adventuress, Beatrice Van Rensselaer Adams, who kept him a virtual prisoner while siphoning off the profits of his success, entangling the artist in one of the most heartless scams of the century. This is the first complete biography of Blakelock's dramatic life (1847-1919), spanning a tumultuous period of American history. Unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and authority, The Unknown Night chronicles the life, times, and madness of one of America's most celebrated and exploited painters, whose brooding, hallucinogenic landscapes anticipated abstract expressionism by more than half a century. With unfaltering historical detective work, Glyn Vincent unearths the facts of Blakelock's childhood in Greenwich Village, his youthful journeys among the Sioux and Uinta Indians, his mystical leanings, and the years in which he struggled to support his family peddling his canvases door-to-door and playing piano in vaudeville theaters. He explores the nature of Blakelock's mental illness and his radical shift away from the Hudson River School of art toward a more expressive style of painting that, ultimately, defined Blakelock's true place in the pantheon of American art. This book is a portrait of a vanished world, particularly of New York in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a city of artists' studios and spiritualists' salons, shantytowns and millionaires' mansions, a city where the line between obscurity and adulation was treacherously thin. Filled with human drama and vivid period detail, The Unknown Night is a seductive mixture of scholarship and storytelling.

Contents:

Introduction: Looking for Blakelock vii

Part I Exhibition

1 News 3

2 The Asylum 14

3 Beatrice Adams 20

4 Release 27

Part II Blood and Art

5 From Yorkshire to New York 35

6 Village Life 42

7 The Blood 59

8 The Art 74

Part III On the Snake River

9 Up the Missouri River 93

10 Indian Paintings 103

11 The Pacific and Home 108

12 To Wyoming 112

Part IV On the Line

13 A Crisis 127

14 Marriage 136

15 Recognition and Controversy 143

16 East Orange 160

17 A Waterfall, Moonlight

A Taste of Success 176

Part V Moonlight

18 Death and Vaudeville 191

19 The First Collapse 205

20 Recovery and Relapse 215

21 Money and Modern Art 228

22 Middletown and Catskill 235

Part VI Fame and Misfortune

23 The Reinhardt Gallery Exhibit 249

24 The Real Mrs. Adams 254

25 A Battle of Hide-and-Seek 267

26 Two Years of Freedom 275

27 The Last Year 284.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [309]-342) and index.

Local Notes:

Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Sheldon Hackney.

Storage copy inscribed to Lucy Hackney by her cousin "Betsy."

ISBN:

0802117341

OCLC:

50291168