Kennedy Fraser Selected Works

At 22 years old, fresh out of university, Ms. Kennedy Fraser left England and moved to New York City for a job that no longer exists today: "Feminine Fashions" columnist at The New Yorker. She wrote about the panoply of costumes walking down Fifth Avenue, couture collections, and the emergence of "electronic" shopping, assuming the role of the seasoned analytical observer—and convincingly too, given her safe and acknowledged lack of experience. In the 33 essays collected here, Fraser, who is critical of the fashion establishment, vigorously examines the trends and temperament of her time, using lofty rhetorical devices to analyze who is wearing what and why.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded by visionary patron and artist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942), is home to one of the finest collections of American art in the country. Frames of Reference features eminent contributors from the fields of art, literature, and contemporary culture who together provide a wide-ranging introduction to American art as well as to the Whitney Museum's unparalleled collection.

Kennedy Fraser's introductory essay focuses on Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, especially on her relationships with the artists of her time, her own artistic development, and her farsighted advocacy of American art and artists. In section two, Adam D. Weinberg, Beth Venn, Kathryn Potts, and Kate Rubin concentrate on twenty-seven of the Whitney's most popular works, each entry accompanied by captions and related images that shed new light on old favorites. The book's third section features ten "icons" from the Whitney's Permanent Collection, with three contributors providing distinct perspectives on each work. This stimulating combination of voices instructs, enlightens, and, at times, amuses: John Updike on Edward Hopper's "Early Sunday Morning," Alan Dershowitz on Ben Shahn's "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti," and George Plimpton on George Bellows' "Dempsey and Firpo" are examples of this section's diverse mix. With its unique design and variety of approaches to viewing and understanding art, Frames of Reference will change the way visitors experience the Whitney Museum and will delight art lovers who might not have the opportunity to visit New York.

In these fourteen essays, Fraser focuses on women in love affairs, friendships, marriages, and families; in relation to one another and to the talented men who so often rendered them invisible. In Ornament and Silence we see Virginia Woolf, haunted and eventually destroyed by the sexual secrets of her childhood. We meet Flaubert's theatrically importunate mistress, Louise Colet, the one woman who could briefly slip past the master's misogyny. Fraser offers vibrant portraits of the Russian novelist Nina Berberova and the English naturalist Miriam Rothschild. And here is Fraser herself, learning her craft at The New Yorker, tending her English garden and—on every page—delighting us with the manifold felicities of her prose.