I knew Jimmy. He was brilliant, charming, passionate, humane, intellectually and emotionally complex, fun and funny, and utterly fascinating and exciting to be with. I knew him the last few years of his life, late 1980s. He was traveling throughout the United States to see old friends and haunts. It was his last lap, his stomach cancer was incurable. He also wanted to take measure of his country–if life had changed for the better for African-Americans in a decade.
Read MoreWhy don’t we know about Paula Modersohn-Becker? The book reveals she showed her work but a few times while she was alive, she died young at age 31, and the modernist style and nudes, made in the last year of her life, 1906, were a shock when discovered. No one quite knew what to make of her work. “Greatness” an early critic said; in the same decade of 1910s another said “odd.” This book is the first in English to give a definitive account of her life, exhibition and critical history, and art historical assessment.
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