Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art
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Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art
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Overview
In 1959, Richard Bellamy was a witty, poetry-loving beatnik on the fringe of the New York art world who was drawn to artists impatient for change. By 1965, he was representing Mark di Suvero, was the first to show Andy Warhol’s pop art, and pioneered the practice of “off-site” exhibitions and introduced the new genre of installation art. As a dealer, he helped discover and champion many of the innovative successors to the abstract expressionists, including Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Walter De Maria, and many others.
The founder and director of the fabled Green Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, Bellamy thrived on the energy of the sixties. With the covert support of America’s first celebrity art collectors, Robert and Ethel Scull, Bellamy gained his footing just as pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art were taking hold and the art world was becoming a playground for millionaires. Yet as an eccentric impresario dogged by alcohol and uninterested in profits or posterity, Bellamy rarely did more than show the work he loved. As fellow dealers such as Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis capitalized on the stars he helped find, Bellamy slowly slid into obscurity, becoming the quiet man in oversize glasses in the corner of the room, a knowing and mischievous smile on his face.
Born to an American father and a Chinese mother in a Cincinnati suburb, Bellamy moved to New York in his twenties and made a life for himself between the Beat orbits of Provincetown and white-glove events like the Guggenheim’s opening gala. No matter the scene, he was always considered “one of us,” partying with Norman Mailer, befriending Diane Arbus and Yoko Ono, and hosting or performing in historic Happenings. From his early days at the Hansa Gallery to his time at the Green to his later life as a private dealer, Bellamy had his finger on the pulse of the culture.
Based on decades of research and on hundreds of interviews with Bellamy’s artists, friends, colleagues, and lovers, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties rescues the legacy of the elusive art dealer and tells the story of a counterculture that became the mainstream. A tale of money, taste, loyalty, and luck, Richard Bellamy’s life is a remarkable window into the art of the twentieth century and the making of a generation’s aesthetic.
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"Bellamy had an understanding of art and a very fine sense of discovery. There was nobody like him, I think. I certainly consider myself his pupil." --Leo Castelli
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374715205 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/12/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 381 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Eye of the Sixties
Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art
By Judith E. Stein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2016 Judith E. SteinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71520-5
CHAPTER 1
HIS FATED ECCENTRICITY
In 1929, the first year of the talkies, an astounding 110 million Americans — one out of three — went to the movies. One popular film was Welcome Danger, set amid a San Francisco Chinatown tong war. The comic Harold Lloyd played an endearing bungler who chases a pigtailed ruffian into a building and ends up decking an entire roomful of similarly attired Chinese men. The champ explains that he KO'd the lot because "they all look alike."
Richard Townley Bellamy, the man everyone in the art world called "Dick," was born to a Chinese mother and Caucasian father on December 3, 1927, in Wyoming, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. The year of Welcome Danger's release, Dick was a beguiling toddler with coal-black hair and epicanthic eyelids. No one in Wyoming had eyes like his except his mother, Lydia Blome Hu Bellamy. The boy's looks "didn't sit right with some people," an empathetic neighbor sighed to recall. When polled for "dislikes" by his high school yearbook, Dick would write "people who ridicule me."
Twenty-six-year-old Dr. Lydia Hu gave "San Francisco" as her birthplace when she and her American fiancé, Dr. Curtis Bellamy, applied for a marriage license in 1926. This wasn't true — Lydia was born in China. She arrived as a teenager, so full of patriotism for the United States that classmates dubbed her "Little Miss George Washington." When the Immigration Act of 1924 pulled shut the nation's golden door, foreign-born Chinese such as Lydia found themselves locked out. Perjury was the only way a "permanent foreigner," as Lydia was newly classified, could become a citizen. Her false claim regarding San Francisco was never questioned. Eighteen years earlier, the city's earthquake had destroyed all municipal records, including birth certificates. For Lydia and countless other Chinese, an affidavit was proof enough of native-born status.
Dick would never meet his mother's parents, C.P. and Shiu Wing Hu. In photographs, his grandmother holds her head at a slight tilt, as Dick did. He inherited his grandfather's elegantly long neck, the one part of his body he never liked. C.P. went by his initials — his real name is today unknown. He was born in Jiujiang (formerly Kiukiang), a Yangtze River port city more than four hundred miles west of Shanghai. During China's devastating civil war, roughly contemporary with the American Civil War, Jiujiang was a stronghold of the Taiping rebels fighting against the corrupt rulers of the Qing Dynasty. By the time C.P. was born, in 1872, the imperial forces had won, and the once populous city was left in ruins.
Tradition and superstition dominated the China of C.P.'s boyhood. Infanticide and polygyny were everyday occurrences, and foot binding was the rule, not the exception. Girls didn't go to school. Evangelical Anglo-American missionaries, whose presence in the country expanded after 1860, were vocally opposed to these practices. They found receptive ears in C.P. (possibly in his parents as well), who converted to Christianity. Never more than a tiny portion of China's population, converts typically held progressive ideas about their country's future. C.P. must have impressed Jiujiang's Southern Methodist missionaries, who in 1888 arranged for the sixteen-year-old to be educated in Germany. He returned five years later, a modern-thinking idealist with a doctor of divinity degree and a taste for Wagner. His fluency in German was then a rare skill in his homeland. According to family lore, warlords once approached him to negotiate on their behalf with German munitions companies. To do so, he told them, was incompatible with his religion, and he turned them down.
Fresh from abroad, C.P. taught in a Methodist school in Zhenjiang (Chinkiang), a Yangtze River port close to Nanjing (Nanking). It was there, within Zhenjiang's small Christian community, that C.P. met the teenage Shiu Wing Kung, who sang in the church choir. Her family had come to Zhenjiang from Yangzhou (Yangchow), another of the Yangtze's ports, and were likely Christian converts, as they left their daughter's feet unbound. Zhenjiang was also home to a little American girl who would grow up to be the Nobel Prize–winning writer Pearl S. Buck. Her celebrated novel The Good Earth (1931) is set in the China of her youth, a land of wealthy landowners and poverty-stricken farmers fated to endure the cyclical catastrophes of flood, drought, and famine. Buck's parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries and may have been among the wedding guests when, in 1896, the twenty-six-year-old C.P. married Shiu Wing, age seventeen.
In 1899 C.P. and his young wife returned to his hometown, Jiujiang. Lydia, their firstborn, arrived with the new century. Eight of their ten children survived infancy. The Hus likely stayed in touch with the Sydenstrickers — the Hus' youngest child, Rebecca, born in 1923, recalled that when she and her brothers complained that their father was too strict, he would remind them that Pearl's father, Absalom, a zealous evangelist, was even worse. Eight years younger than Pearl, Lydia was a baby during the Boxer Rebellion, a peasant uprising that targeted westerners and Christian converts. Just how the Hus got through those lawless times is unrecorded, but when Lydia would have been old enough to understand, she likely heard stories about those horrific few years. Dick's cousin Jack Davies, who was close to him in age, remembered a visit to the Bellamys when Lydia made a point of sitting down with the boys to talk about the Boxers and that moment in Chinese history.
In 1905 C.P. again left China to study, this time in the United States, and the stalwart Shiu Wing stayed behind with the children. Lydia was eight when her father returned three years later with degrees in theology and liberal arts and joined the faculty at William Nast College, a Methodist school in Jiujiang. He was still teaching there in 1912 when China's last emperor abdicated and Sun Yat-sen became president of the new Republic of China. Sun was a hero to forward-thinking Chinese like the Hus. Lydia would later talk about Sun to Dick and his cousin. Sun's successor, Chiang Kai-shek, was a Methodist, as was his wife, May-ling Soong, and the Hu children counted Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her two sisters as friends. Whatever reservations the Hus may have had about Chiang's vision of China's future, they supported the nationalists when they split with the Communists in the late twenties.
Dick's grandparents were part of China's new educated elite, proud to send their daughters as well as their sons to university. Everyone at home played an instrument, and music was integral to their lives. C.P. and his wife read English newspapers and spoke German to each other when they didn't want to be overheard. Their oldest girls, Lydia and Hannah, trained as doctors in the United States. Their parents took it for granted that the two would return to minister to their people, as C.P. had done. Lydia arrived in the United States in the fall of 1916 and enrolled in the Northern Arizona Normal School in Flagstaff, a high school with a primarily occidental and Native American student body. An editor of her yearbook, she excelled in Latin, math, and science and earned her highest grade — 99 — in music. She adored music, a passion her son would share.
Smart, genteel, and strikingly beautiful, Lydia earned her B.A. in 1921 at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, and was the only woman in the class of 1925 at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. She met Curtis Franklin Bellamy — two classes ahead of her at the medical school — at a dance, and they were engaged before she graduated. Lydia's choice of a husband and her decision to remain in the States wounded her parents, who expected her to marry a countryman and to practice medicine in her homeland. Chinese prejudice against non-Chinese differed little from the bias they themselves faced outside of China — Lydia Bellamy's in-laws didn't take to her either. Strong enough to reject the life her parents outlined for her, Lydia nonetheless carried her guilt for a lifetime.
Determined that Hannah would not follow in her elder sister's footsteps, the Hus called her back to China. She married Shiu Kee Yee, today known by his initials, S.K. Yee was an undercover operative for the Nationalist Chinese secret service, as was the Hus' charismatic youngest son, Daniel. Dick was ten in 1937, when an anguished Lydia learned of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, where her parents then lived. Perhaps in retaliation for the clandestine activities of the extended Hu family, the Japanese targeted them, first requisitioning C.P.'s prizewinning rosebushes, then destroying their house. The Hus watched helplessly as his treasured library and Wagner recordings went up in flames. Not long after, he died of dysentery, and his widow and daughters Hannah and Rebecca joined S. K. Yee in Hong Kong. Weeks after Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese closed in there, Lydia's mother and sisters made harrowing getaways, as did Yee, who fled separately in a daring Christmas Day escape by sea with compatriots and several British soldiers.
* * *
"It used to be said of my father that one leg was shorter than the other from walking down the hill from the one-room log cabin, of course, to the out-house — the path had a rut in it," Dick wrote to a collector friend in the 1960s. "Did you know that I was half-breed Kentuckian? Hill-Billy Chinese, as it were." When Dick was a boy, his paternal relatives had a family farm in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the northern banks of the Ohio River, just across the water from Kentucky. His grandfather Townley Hannah Bellamy was a dignified but rough-hewn tobacco farmer and justice of the peace whom everybody called "Judge." It wasn't until after Dick's death that his cousin Joe David Bellamy researched the family's complete genealogy. Likely Dick was unaware that the earliest Bellamy/Bellomys arrived in the New World as early as the 1630s and possibly sooner, or that he was a direct descendant of New Englanders John and Samuel Adams. It would have tickled him to learn that he was related to the famed circus master, Phineas T. Barnum.
Dick's father, Curtis — "Doc" to family and friends — was born in 1899, the fourth of Townley and Sarah Edith Lawhorn Bellamy's nine children, the third of their five gregarious and athletic sons. After Sarah Bellamy died, in 1934, her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Victor, lived with Doc and his family until he finished high school. Doc bankrolled his brother "endlessly and way beyond good sense," as Joe David Bellamy saw it. Doc paid for Victor's operatic study at Juilliard — expensive training not technically necessary for his subsequent career as a country-and-western singer. He had a beautiful bass voice and made it onto Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour — a national TV show with the prestige of American Idol. Billed as Vic Bellamy, Dick's young uncle was a regular on the televised Midwestern Hayride, a Cincinnati version of the Grand Ole Opry.
There was to be only one Dr. Bellamy in the family after Lydia and Doc wed in 1926. Although she briefly interned at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, Lydia never practiced medicine. She had conservative views about married women as wage earners, Dick later told a friend; besides, Doc didn't want his wife to work. The young couple bought a house in Wyoming, just past the northern boundary of Cincinnati — a Tudor revival with snug window seats and a fireplace flanked by blue- and pink-flowered Rookwood tiles. The house had a shoulder-high hedge and a Chinese (lacebark) elm that Lydia planted in the front yard.
Dick grew up amid Chinese furnishings and artifacts. Later in life he would tell friends that he first understood beauty by handling Lydia's collection of jade carvings. Chairs that once belonged to her parents sat in the Bellamys' living room near Chinese porcelains Lydia used as accent pieces; a large Oriental rug with a dragon motif covered the floor. A marble Buddha sat in a small niche near the hearth. Dick's school friends marveled at the oil painting of his mother above the mantel. Dressed in a Chinese embroidered robe and ornate headdress, Lydia seemed every bit a princess, a rumor Dick himself may have started.
He was seven when his young uncle moved in. Prohibition had only recently been repealed. Vic arrived well acquainted with hooch, and perhaps became Dick's unwitting role model. A prankster, Vic once painted rings around the eyes of the family's bull terrier, Pete, making it look as if the dog were wearing glasses. On another occasion he brushed the treads of an old tire with paint and rolled it over poor Pete's side. When the pet lay down in the middle of West Mills Avenue, as he liked to do, it appeared he'd been run over by a car.
The Bellamys' parcel of land on Springfield Pike in the affluent village of Wyoming was close to Hartwell, a working-class neighborhood. Their home was the biggest in the immediate vicinity. They lived comfortably during the Great Depression, with a maid, and radios in every room. Doc operated a private emergency clinic in Cincinnati's West End, a poor, quasi-industrial area whose manufacturing plants had no facilities to treat job-related injuries. People who lived and worked nearby kept Doc's waiting room full. He cared for them regardless of their ability to pay, charitable acts likely subsidized by his surgical privileges at major hospitals. He also dabbled in real estate and could have been a very wealthy man, his nephew Jack said. "But he was not interested in money; I think he taught Dick to be that way." A few months before Dick died, his son, Miles, asked him to name Doc's most admirable trait. "He treated all people equally," Dick replied, a precept he too lived by.
* * *
Dick was about to enter first grade when the infant son of the aviation pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh was kidnapped and later found dead, one of the most highly publicized domestic crimes of the century. Mothers everywhere hugged their children tighter. Lydia did not allow her little boy to leave their front yard, even to get candy at the general store with kids in the neighborhood. But sometimes the world came to him. The American-born movie star Anna May Wong, the most famous Asian performer of her generation, was a friend of Lydia's and on one occasion stayed with the family when she was filming nearby. To the end of his life Dick treasured the memory of his dandle on the beautiful actress's knee.
Dick saw many movies as a boy — Doc owned most of a block of businesses in nearby Hartwell, including the Vogue movie theater. His cousin Jack laughed to recall Dick's spot-on mimic of Charlie Chaplin's comic walk. There were Chinese characters in movies, but the parts almost never went to Chinese actors. Anna May Wong was considered "too Asian" for the starring role in the 1937 film based on Pearl Buck's The Good Earth and was passed over in favor of a white woman in yellowface. Chinese evildoers appeared in several films popular in the thirties, artifacts of "the yellow peril" of the last century. The sinister, made-to-look-Asian Boris Karloff commanded, "Kill the white man and take his women!" in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), a film based on pulp fiction that had been around for years. The wicked Ming the Merciless, Flash Gordon's nemesis, first appeared in comics of the twenties and survived for decades on celluloid. The honorable Charlie Chan may have been the sole Chinese screen character with whom Dick felt kinship. The impeccably polite, benevolent detective with a sense of humor outsmarted bad guys in nearly fifty films between 1926 and 1949. Played by a succession of occidental actors, Charlie Chan was given to cryptic aphorisms spoken in ungrammatical Pidgin English.
The Bellamys' only child was an exotic presence in the homogeneous Anglo-Saxon community of Wyoming, Ohio. Over the years, Dick attended school with only a handful of black children and likely fewer Jews. "I thought from his appearance he might be Jewish," remembered a schoolmate who first saw Dick at the Vogue Theater. "I didn't like him, and I told him to go back where he came from." People didn't know what a Jew was, Dick once told Sheindi, recounting a time when he and his friends hid in the bushes to see if they could spot horns on the head of a Jewish man.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Eye of the Sixties by Judith E. Stein. Copyright © 2016 Judith E. Stein. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Frontispiece,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Preface,
Introduction,
PART I. GUSTS OF GREAT ENKINDLINGS,
1. His Fated Eccentricity,
2. Provincetown, 1948–49,
3. This Calling of Art,
4. Hansa Days,
5. Provincetown, 1957,
6. Hipsters, Beatniks, Bohemians, and Squares,
7. An Era's End,
8. The Republic of Downtown,
PART II. LIVING IN CHANGE,
9. The Secret Sharer,
10. "Our Greenest Days",
11. Seeing and Unseeing,
12. Pop Goes the Weasel,
13. Tomorrow Is Yesterday,
14. Dark Green,
15. Wrong Man at the Right Time,
16. Fade to Black,
PART III. THE PLEASURES OF MERELY CIRCULATING,
17. Goldowsky Days,
18. 1973 and All That,
19. Bel Ami,
Postscript,
Appendix: Green Gallery Exhibitions,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
A Note About the Author,
Copyright,