![]() “ The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” by Deesha Philyaw Jagger again: “And that was his blaze, his quick swathe through London. Rather, it presents a thick portrait of a now mostly forgotten man, who, for a short while, shined so bright that he was able to almost single-handedly define his cultural moment. ![]() This is not an especially happy story, but it’s also not a moralistic, cautionary tale. He also opened a second iteration of his gallery-a much more indifferent endeavor, which he ran until his death, of AIDS-related causes, in 1986. After closing his gallery’s doors in 1969 (he was by all accounts a very bad businessperson), Fraser drifted, seeking enlightenment in India for a few years, then returning to his home country-and to hard drugs. And having a great time in the process, a very hedonistic time.” Living on the edge almost always has its price, however: in 1967, Fraser was busted for heroin possession while partying at Keith Richards’s country estate Redlands, and was imprisoned for months. (A tall order when your friends are the Rolling Stones.) The best-dressed man in any room, aloof and upper-class and ineffably cool, Fraser was also a junkie and a homosexual, a man who was preoccupied, in the words of Mick Jagger, with “bridging two worlds. After a pit stop in New York, he returned to England, and over the next decade emerged as one of the country’s most important tastemakers, introducing British audiences to artists such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Dubuffet, while living faster and harder than almost any of his peers. The son of a wealthy banker, Fraser was educated at Eton, and served as a young officer in Uganda in the late fifties. Originally published in 1999 and reissued in expanded form in 2016, it features numerous interviews to present the life story of the art dealer Robert Fraser, whose self-titled gallery epitomized the newly hip, class-scrambling world of London in the mid-to-late nineteen-sixties. One fine example of the genre that I picked up recently is “Groovy Bob,” by the writer and curator Harriet Vyner. This could mean a fast-paced contemporary novel whose specifics you’ll probably forget as soon as you finish it, but my preference is for the oral history, which can teach us something meaningful about a particular era from a variety of perspectives, with the bonus of some juicy gossip. For your summer reading, it might be nice to go with something relatively light.
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