American arts scene reading recommendations?

There's a ton of stuff on my favorite gay modernist American arts nexus: Paul Cadmus, Jared French, George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Westcott. Letters, diaries, picture books, biographies.

Thanks, CandiRue. Very interesting!

Rare Birds: An American Family by Dan Bessie. I read this a few years back and really enjoyed it.

Bessie, a film writer and director, has put together a lively look at a bunch of his relatives. What is remarkable is not only his voice--it is all in the practiced cadences of a born raconteur--but the number of interesting people he is related to. There's his favorite cousin, the aptly named birder Phoebe, who before her death in 1999 had logged 85 percent of the 10,000 bird species. His Uncle Harry ran the Yale Puppeteers and the famed Turnabout Theater with his partners Roddy and cousin Forman; as Richard Meeker, Forman wrote the famed gay classic, Better Angel (1931). Bessie's father, Alvah, was blacklisted and went to prison as part of the Hollywood 10. His gentle, impaired stepfather was convicted of murder. His half-sister, Eva, married Wes Wilson, whose astonishing posters for the Fillmore Auditorium in the 1960s are now icons. Like the titles listed in the Read-alike column "In Search of Our Parents" [BKL Mr 1 00], this memoir would make a great choice for discussion groups exploring family chronicles. GraceAnne DeCandido Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Continual Lessons : Journals of Glenway Wescott 1937 - 1955

Integral to the group at R1: Lincoln Kerstein, George Balanchine, Pavel Tschelichew, George Tooker, Donald Windham, Marsden Hartley for more material you can take in any direction you choose. New York in the 1940s, centered around these figures, was a fertile creative ground.

I liked "Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art" by Phoebe Hoban; Patricia Morrisroe's "Mapplethorpe"; and the recent "Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art."