Eye of the Sixties

"Ms. Stein's evocative portrait of Bellamy recreates in stunning, touching and often humorous detail the chaotic, creative, still bohemian art scenes of Provincetown, Mass., in the '50s, and New York in the '60s . . . With Ms. Stein's biography . . . the secretive spirit of the '60s becomes at last a concrete and real person with a permanent place in art history. The character that emerges is of an impossible, improbable, irresponsible, irresistibly innocent sophisticate who many found to be the hero of the masterpiece that was his life." --Barbara Rose, The New York Times

"By using [Bellamy's] unlikely ascent as a prism, Ms. Stein brings to vibrant life a corner of the culture that was as outrageous as it was visually revolutionary." --Ann Landi The Wall Street Journal

"An exemplary work of journalism and research . . . Stein's attentive approach successfully bridges art's journalistic and scholarly cultures, itself an important accomplishment when much art publishing cleaves to one or the other tribe . . . By sheer force of research and reporting, the book is sure to be a resource for future art-historical work on the decade." --Mostafa Heddaya, The Art Newspaper

"Stein brings vividly to life both the man and his wild artistic times." --Lew J. Whittington, The New York Journal of Books

"Her engrossing, impressively researched, consistently readable, and often entertaining tale restores a crucial figure to his rightful place in the annals of postwar American art." --Lilly Wei, Art in America

"An infectious biography . . . Shot through with verve, bearing years of research lightly, Stein's book is the first to give this rare, inscrutable figure his proper due." --James Miller, The Brooklyn Rail

"Stein's ability to capture the changes in this world, and the cast of characters who brought them about, is remarkable . . . Indispensable reading for lovers of art from an era that changed everything." --Jedd Beaudoin, Spectrum Culture

"Stein's compellingly intimate portrait of a creative, passionate, and essential advocate for pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art doubles as a fresh and dynamic chronicle of a historic artistic revolution." --Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"An intricate biography of New York art dealer Richard Bellamy (1927-1998), written with a striking level of detail. . . This engrossing story immerses the reader in Bellamy's whole world--the "creative chaos" of the early 1960s New York contemporary art scene." --Publishers Weekly

"A scintillating, detailed portrait . . . [Eye of the Sixties] is an endearing and illuminating work of biography. A shadowy figure of the 1960s art world is gloriously revealed." --Kirkus Reviews

"In this colorful, meticulously researched, and captivating volume, Judith E. Stein perfectly captures the circus that was the art world of the sixties, in which Richard Bellamy was an inadvertent but essential ringmaster. He was a poet dreamer, an iconoclastic hipster who was as short on business acumen as he was long on vision. Unburdened by art history, his legendary galleries were arenas of possibility; in silence, with intuition and innocence of eye, his guileless ability to identify authentic artists--from Di Suvero to Oldenburg and from Rosenquist to Judd--was uncanny, matched only by the strategies of the great Leo Castelli."
--Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art

"We all owe a debt to Judith E. Stein. Her biography of Richard Bellamy, Eye of the Sixties, retells the story many of us know and reminds us why we set out on our journey in the first place. The book is not academic, but a readable, worldly narrative of the art world by someone who knows and loves it."
--Dave Hickey, author of Air Guitar

"Richard Bellamy was one of a kind: a legendary art dealer who was contrary and self-effacing, with a keen eye for the artistically vital and unexpected. The artists he showed at his transformative Green Gallery define the canonical American art movements of the sixties. In Judith E. Stein's meticulously researched and magnetically animated biography, we see this formative moment in American art through Bellamy's eyes. Here, it looks boundless, like some unstable nomadic family in which great artists commingled in a wildly generative swarm."
--Michael Brenson, author of Acts of Engagement