B.H. Friedman’s Followers (6)

B.H. Friedman

Born

in New York City, NY, The United States

July 27, 1926

Died

January 04, 2011

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Bernard Harper Friedman was a real estate executive who gave up his business career to write well-received novels and art criticism and whose books included an early biography of Jackson Pollock.

From the time he graduated from Cornell in 1948 until the early 1960s, Mr. Friedman was by some standards a case study in postwar American business success. He worked in New York City real estate, mostly for Uris Brothers (later known as the Uris Buildings Corporation), a successful firm run by his uncles, where he rose from assistant residential manager of a single building to vice president and company director.

But he was hardly a conventional businessman. A jazz aficionado, an art collector, an experimenter with drugs (his 2006 memoir, ''Tripping Bernard Harper Friedman was a real estate executive who gave up his business career to write well-received novels and art criticism and whose books included an early biography of Jackson Pollock.

From the time he graduated from Cornell in 1948 until the early 1960s, Mr. Friedman was by some standards a case study in postwar American business success. He worked in New York City real estate, mostly for Uris Brothers (later known as the Uris Buildings Corporation), a successful firm run by his uncles, where he rose from assistant residential manager of a single building to vice president and company director.

But he was hardly a conventional businessman. A jazz aficionado, an art collector, an experimenter with drugs (his 2006 memoir, ''Tripping,'' recounts his mind-bending experiences with the guru of psychedelia Timothy Leary), he was, while going to the office by day, also writing fiction and contributing articles on literature, art, architecture and music to a variety of publications.

''Circles,'' his first novel, about ''sex, status, and professional aggressiveness in the Abstract Expressionist set in New York and East Hampton,'' as The New Yorker described it, was published in early 1962, and the next year he left the real estate business to become a full-time writer.

Mr. Friedman's fiction generally resided just outside the mainstream, and though several of his books were published by prominent houses, in the early 1970s he was a founding member of the Fiction Collective, a nonprofit venture run for and by writers who were being increasingly marginalized by commercial publishers.

Mr. Friedman often wrote about the art world, which formed part of his social milieu even when he was a businessman, and he often wrote about writers. In books like ''Almost a Life'' (1975), about a biographer who becomes entwined in the life of his subject; ''The Polygamist'' (1981), about the loves of an Islamic studies professor, with frequent invocations of the tale-weaving Scheherazade; and ''Coming Close'' (1982), a novella and overlapping stories that hew closely to the facts of his own life, he experimented with the divide between fiction and autobiography and examined the relationship between lives and the stories of lives.

He was an early collector of Pollock's work, and he also became a friend. His book ''Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible'' is generally credited with being the first Pollock biography. On its publication in 1972, the art critic Hilton Kramer, writing in The New York Times, called it ''a book that everyone interested in the social history of modern art will want to read.''

Bernard Harper Friedman, known as Bob to his friends, was born in Manhattan on July 27, 1926. His father, Leonard, was in the shoe business. His mother, Madeline Copland Uris, whose brothers ran the real estate business, was a cousin of the composer Aaron Copland. He went to both public and private schools in New York, then entered Cornell, where he started in pre-med and ended up studying literature. His college years were interrupted by two years in the Navy, 1944-46.

Mr. Friedman's expansive biography of the sculptor and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was published in 1978. In addition, he wrote short stories, plays and monographs of artists.

In 1948, while he was finishing at Cornell, Mr. Friedman eloped with his second cousin, Abby Noselson. She died in 2003. His brother, the writer Sanford Friedman, died in 2010. ...more

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Average rating: 4.21 · 709 ratings · 57 reviews · 23 distinct works • Similar authors

	Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible 3.74 avg rating — 73 ratings — published 1972 — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: A Biography 3.56 avg rating — 16 ratings — published 1978	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Yarborough 4.43 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 1969 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Tripping: A Memoir really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 2006 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Polygamist 3.75 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 1981	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	School of New York: Some Younger Artists 3.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 1959 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	WHISPERS. A Novel. really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 1972 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Swimming Laps: Stories and Meditations it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1999 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Alfonso Ossorio it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1974 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Almost a Life it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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B.H. Friedman’s Followers (6)

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B.H. Friedman’s books