When Andy Warhol cast Paul Swan (1883–1972) in three films in the mid-1960s, he knew that the octogenarian had once been internationally hailed as “the most beautiful man in the world” and as “Nijinsky’s successor.” Arthur Hammerstein had advertised Swan as “a reincarnated Greek God,” and George and Ira Gershwin had celebrated his beauty in their musical Funny Face.
What Warhol didn’t know was that Swan had also been called “America’s Leonardo,” portrait artist of the famous and the infamous, including writer Willa Cather, aviator Charles Lindbergh, British Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, and dictator Benito Mussolini. This book is the first to tell Swan’s story, from his days as a world-famous dancer and artist, through his film career—which ran from silent pictures, including De Mille’s Ten Commandments (1923), to Warhol’s Camp, Paul Swan, and Paul Swan I-IV (1965)—to his portrait painting late in life when Nelson Rockefeller’s children, Malachy McCourt, and Pope Paul VI were among his subjects.
With unprecedented access to Swan’s scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and an unpublished memoir that tells the story of a bisexual man trying to build a public life in perilous times, Janis and Richard Londraville reconstruct the intriguing life of this uniquely interesting figure, whose story, although widely glossed in the press, was until now never fully known.

The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol

Biographies & Memoirs

Londraville, Richard

Londraville, Janis

Arts & Literature

University Of Nebraska Press

The life of a remarkable Adirondack woman (model, journalist, and poet) provides readers with a unique insider's view―drawn from diaries and primary material published here for the first time―into art and literature during the birth of the Age of Modernism. Jeanne Foster challenged the accepted role for women at the turn of the twentieth century. Born on a hardscrabble farm in the Adirondack Mountains in 1879, she was hailed as an important voice in American poetry by 1916 when her first books of verse, Neighbors of Yesterday and Wild Apples were published. She had early success as a model―she was the Harrison Fisher girl of 1903―and later became a journalist for the American Review of Reviews. In 1918, she met John Quinn, patron of the arts, which placed her in the middle of some of the most important literary and artistic movements in the twentieth century. She counted among her friends John Butler and William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi. This book reveals her dark affair with Aleister Crowley and her great friendship with Tomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia. Today, Jeanne Foster lies buried in Chestertown, New York, next to her old friend John Butler Yeats.

Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle of Friends (Writing American Women)

Literature & Fiction

Syracuse University Press

A biography of one of America’s neglected grand masters. A Sicilian immigrant who trained at the Art Students League in New York, Jon Corbino (1905–1964) was one of the most influential members of the “Sarasota School” of art, a group of painters and artists, many of them expatriate New Yorkers, who came to the west coast of Florida for its natural beauty, the quality of its light, and the open-aired freedom to explore their art. He began his career by chronicling the lives and struggles of his fellow immigrants, and by the 1930s he was being hailed in newspapers as “the founder of the school of Baroque-Romanticism in America.” In 1938, Life Magazine called him “the Rubens of New England,” and his work sold to the most prestigious museums, including the Metropolitan, the Whitney, and the Carnegie. In 1956, he shared the stage with Edward Hopper in a two-man exhibition sponsored by the Rehn Gallery of New York. Strong-willed and temperamental, Corbino was also beset by personal demons, and today his paintings, once so much a part of American culture, are remembered primarily by students of American art and a select group of collectors who are moved by the power of his work. Drawing on unprecedented access to the artist’s archives, letters, and family records, as well as interviews with some of his contemporaries, Janis and Richard Londraville tell the story of a gifted and talented Italian American artist who, despite a career filled with awards and acclaim, nevertheless struggled against personal demons and ethnic prejudice, and who, as a realist/romantic painter, felt pushed aside by the march of Abstract Expressionism and the many other “isms” of twentieth-century American art. As Karal Ann Marling argues in her introduction, “the trajectory of the process whereby Giovanni Corbino became Jon Corbino, then CORBINO, and finally Jon Corbino again, illuminates a whole, neglected chapter in the twentieth-century struggle to define what American art ought to be.”

Corbino: From Rubens to Ringling (Excelsior Editions)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press

DESIGNER DEATH is the story of small town detective Stan Gorski as he hunts for the source of the drugs that have recently killed two of Bowland, New York's promising teenagers. His quest is personal. Several years earlier his younger sister died from an overdose, and he suspects that the same criminals are to blame--but this time the drugs are deliberately designed to kill. Stan and his police department captain must resolve personal conflicts and follow the clues that lead to suspects as different as two Jordanian princes and a thug named Spiro. In the meantime, brutal murders continue. DESIGNER DEATH keeps the reader on edge until the last page.

Designer Death

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Drowning Lessons: The Collected Poems of Richard Londraville

Literary

Independently published

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Books by Londraville, Richard