Month: June 2018

Calendar: June 25

A Year: Day to Day Men: 25th of June

The Hidden Balcony

June 25, 1903 is the birthdate of the British author, George Orwell.

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25th of 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. Educated in England at Eton, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. In 1928, Orwell moved to Paris where lack of success there as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described these experiences in his first book, “Down and Out in Paris and London”, published in 1933. It was shortly before the book’s publication that he changed his name to George Orwell.

An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s Orwell had begun to consider himself a socialist. In 1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in his 1937 published non-fiction work “The Road to Wigan Pier’” documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England.

Late in 1936, Orwell had travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. The account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, “Homage to Catalonia” was published in 1938.

In March of 1943 George Orwell started work on his new book, which turned out to be “Animal Farm”. By April of 1944 the book was ready for publication; however, publishing houses refused to publish it, considering it an attack on the Soviet regime which at that time was a crucial ally in the war. Orwell’s allegorical novella “Animal Farm” was finally published in Britain on August 17, 1945, and a year later in the United States on August 26, 1946. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell’s name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life.

His book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases – such as “Big Brother is watching you”, “newspeak”, “thoughtcrime”, and “doublethink” – entering popular use. Orwell’s health had continued to decline since a diagnosis of tuberculosis in December of 1947. In the early morning of January 21, 1950, an artery burst in Orwell’s lungs, killing him at the age of 46. His body is buried in All Saints Churchyard, Oxfordshire, under his birth name Eric Arthur Blair.

Markus Ecke Wie Kante

Markus Ecke Wie Kante, Urbex Places in Germany

Fantastic shots of urbex places around Germany by Markus Ecke Wie Kante, talented self-taught photographer, adventurer and urban explorer based in Berlin, Germany. Markus focuses on abandoned photography. He travels all over Europe to capture impressive urbex places.

Images reblogged with thanks to https://photogrist.com

Ray Bradbury: “Where the Hills Are Fog, and the Rivers Are Mist”

Photographers Unknown, Ten Black and White Moments

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”

― Ray Bradbury

 

George Bellows

George Bellows, “The Knock Out”, 1907, Ink and Pastel on Paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In 1907 George Bellows, a member of the Ashcan School of Art,  produced the first of several paintings of prizefighters in action in the ring; these expressed violent action with power and seeming spontaneity. He was fascinated with the spectacle of the great city: its buildings, crowds, types, and rivers. Though he was denounced by conservative critics as one of the “apostles of ugliness,” his technical brilliance made him more acceptable than any of the other painters of similar impulse.

Calendar: June 24

A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of June

Window Seat on Life

June 24, 1865 was the birthdate of the American Realism painter and teacher, Robert Henri.

In 1886 Robert Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied under Thomas Anshutz and Thomas Hovenden. He traveled to Paris in 1888 to enroll at the Academie Julian, where he studied under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and embraced the Impressionist movement. At the end of 1891, he returned to Philadelphia to study and began teaching at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1892.

By 1895, Henri reconsidered his earlier love of Impressionism and urged his friends and proteges to create a new, more realistic art that spoke to the present time and experience. He believed artists should seek out fresh, less genteel subjects in the modern cities of America. The paintings produced by Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn and others became known as the Ashcan School of American Art. They spurned academic painting and Impressionism as the art of “surface” painting.

Art critic Robert Hughes, known for his television series on modern art, “The Shock of the New” and for his position as art critic with Time magazine, stated that “Henri wanted art to be akin to journalism. He wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter, as real a human product as sweat, carrying the un-suppressed smell of human life.”

In 1908, Henri was one of the organizers of a landmark show entitled “The Eight” at the Macbeth Galleries in New York. The exhibitors included, besides Henri, the artists John Sloan, Everett Shinn, George Luks and William J. Glackens, as well as three artists of a less-realistic style, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson and Arthur B. Davies. The goal of the exhibition was to celebrate America and American art, particularly those artist who depicted regional subjects such as cityscapes, urban dwellers, and the cinema and cabaret.

The exhibition was also intended as a protest against the exhibition policies and narrowness of taste of the National Academy of Design. Although it emphasized American art, “The Eight” became a vehicle for the dissemination of the new French modernist styles, due to Maurice Prendergast’s daring, vibrantly colored contributions to the show. The exhibition later traveled to several cities from Newark to Chicago, prompting further discussion in the press about the revolt against academic art and the new ideas about acceptable subject matter in painting.

In the spring of 1929, Henri was named as one of the top three living American artists by the Arts Council of New York. Henri died of cancer that summer at the age of sixty-four. He was eulogized by colleagues and former students and was honored with a memorial exhibition of seventy-eight paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fittingly, among Henri’s most enduring works are his portraits of his fellow painters, exhibiting the classic elements of his style: forceful brushwork, intense dark color effects, evocation of his and the sitter’s personality, and generosity of spirit.

Francisco de Goya

Francisco de Goya, “Vuelo de Brujas”, 1798, Oil on Canvas, Museo del Prado

“Vuelo de Brujas” or “Witches’ Flight” is an oil on canvas painting completed in 1798 by the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. It was part of a series of six paintings related to witchcraft that was acquired by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna in that year. The painting decorated the Duke and Duchess’ villa, La Alameda, on the outskirts of Madrid; and eventually it was acquired by the Prado in 1999, where it is displayed today.

The general scholarly consensus is that the painting represents a rationalist critique of superstition and ignorance, particularly in religious matters and notably the violence of the Spanish Inquisition. The accusations of the religious tribunals are implicily equated with superstition and ritualized sacrifices. The donkey seen in the lower right corner is the traditional symbol of ignorance.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “The Bull”, Lithograph, Plate No. 1, December 1945, Norton Simon Museum

Picasso is credited with revolutionizing the art of lithography. The tradition at the time was that artists would send their works to master printers. Picasso, however was in the printers’ shops creating his pieces, working alongside the printers and altering his work as the technicians did their tasks.

The printers didn’t always understand what Picasso was doing, as sometimes the finished print didn’t appear as complete as an earlier state, His iconic series “The Bull” began with a realistic-looking sketch of the creature which Picasso then darkened and gradually reworked into a geometric-styled animal. He decisively and deliberately reduced the details to reveal a simple stick figure bull as the finished piece.

Calendar: June 23

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 23rd of June

The White Alcove

On June 23, 1868 Christopher Latham Sholes patents the typewriter with the QWERTY keyboard.

In 1837, at the age of eighteen, Christopher Latham Sholes moved to the new territory of Wisconsin where he initially worked for his elder brothers, who published a newspaper in Green Bay. Shortly thereafter Sholes became editor of the “Wisconsin Enquirer”, in Madison. After a year, he moved to Kenosha to take charge of the newspaper there and soon entered politics, serving in the state legislature. In 1860 Sholes became editor of the “Milwaukee News” and later of the “Milwaukee Sentinel”.

In 1864 Sholes and a friend, Samuel W. Soulé, were granted a patent for a page-numbering machine. A fellow inventor-mechanic, Carlos Glidden, suggested to Sholes that he might rework his device into a letter-printing machine and referred him to a published account of a writing machine devised by John Pratt of London. Reading the article in the 1867 issue of the journal “Scientific American”, he was inspired to construct what became the first practical typewriter.

It was the second model attempt by Sholes that received a patent, US 79265, on June 23 in 1868. The working prototype was made by the machinist Matthias Schwalbach. It wrote faster than a pen and had the first QWERTY setup of the keyboard. The first typewriter had no shift-key mechanism though: it wrote in capital letters only because of the problem of printing both capitals and small letters without increasing the number of keys. Later improvements in the machine Sholes made brought him two more patents; however, he developed difficulty in raising working capital for future development.

Sholes sold his patent rights for $12,000 to Densmore and Yost, who made an agreement with the sewing machine and arms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons, a firm with the machinery and skill to carry out the development and marketing. Remington began production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York, placing the first typewriters on the market in 1874.

Among its original features that were still standard in machines built a century later were the cylinder, with its line-spacing and carriage-return mechanism; the escapement, which causes the letter spacing by carriage movement; the arrangement of the type bars so as to strike the paper at a common centre; the actuation of the type bars by means of key levers and connecting wires; printing through an inked ribbon; and the positions of the different characters on the keyboard in a QWERTY format, which conform almost exactly to the arrangement that is now universal.

Mark Twain purchased a Remington model and became the first author to submit a typewritten book manuscript.