Month: July 2018

Calendar: July 26

A Year: Day to Day Men: 26th of July

The Dock of the Bay

July 26, 1895 was the birthdate of American comedian Gracie Allen.

Gracie Allen, born in San Francisco, made her first appearance on stage at the age of three and was given her first role on the radio by Eddie Cantor. She attended the Star of the Sea Convent School, at which time she became a talented dancer. She soon began performing Irish folk dances with her three sisters, billed as “The Four Colleens”. In 1909, Allen joined her sister as a vaudeville performer.

At a vaudeville performance in 1923 in Union City, New Jersey, Gracie Allen met George Burns, a vaudeville performer who usually did a comedy routine  and a dance with a girl partner. The two immediately launched a new partnership called “Burns and Allen” with Gracie playing the role of the ‘straight man’ and George delivering the punchlines as the comedian. Burns knew something was wrong when the audience ignored his jokes but snickered at Gracie’s questions. Burns cannily flipped the act around.

Gracie Allen’s part was known in vaudeville as a “Dumb Dora” act, named after a very early film of the same name that featured a scatterbrained female protagonist, but her “illogical logic” style was several cuts above the Dumb Dora stereotype. She and George Burns took the act on the road, gradually building a following. The act was so consistently dependable that vaudeville bookers elevated them to the more secure “standard act” status, and finally to the Palace Theater in New York. After three years together, Gracie Allen married Burns in Cleveland, Ohio in January of 1926.

In the fall of 1949, Jack Benny convinced Gracie Allen and George Burns to join him in the move to the CBS network. The “Burns and Allen” radio show, which had run from the early 1930s, became part of the CBS lineup and a year later a television program. They played themselves, as television stars, bewildering the guest stars and their neighbors, Harry and Blanche Morton, with Gracie Allen’s illogical logic. Each show began with a brief monologue by George Burns about Gracie’s activities on that day. Audiences continued to love Allen’s character, who combined the traits of naivety, zaniness, and total innocence.

Gracie Allen retired in 1958 due to her health. She fought a long battle with heart disease, ultimately dying of a heart attack in Hollywood on August 27, 1964, at the age of 69. Her remains are interred in a crypt at the Freedom Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.

Gracie Allen Quotes:

“I was so surprised at being born that I didn’t speak for a year and a half.”

“I read a book twice as fast as anybody else. First, I read the beginning, and then I read the ending, and then I start in the middle and read toward whatever end I like best.”

“You speak it the same way you speak English, you just use different words.”

A is for Apple

René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964, Restored by Shimon D. Yanowitz, 2009.רנה מאגריט, בנו של אדם, 1964, רסטורציה ע”י שמעון ינוביץ, 2009

At Least a Dozen Apples

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of 

Waldemar von Kazak

Illustration by Waldemar von Kazak, Unknown Title

Waldemar Kozak is a contemporary Russian artist, who was born in Tver in 1973. In 1995 he graduated from the Tver Art College with a degree in graphic design. A year after graduating from college, Kazak mastered Quark XPress and Aldus Page Maker programs. He worked as a designer in advertising and book design before immersing himself in illustration. His dark digital images flirt with surrealism and social commentary, using sexual tension and bizarre characters to capture viewers’ imaginations.

Calendar: July 25

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

Splashes of Light

July 25, 1870 was the birthdate of the painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish.

Born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Maxfield Parrish was the son of painter and etcher Stephen Parrish. His parents encouraged his drawing talent and took the young Parrish in 1884 on a trip to Europe. Parrish was exposed to the architecture and the paintings by the old masters, as he toured England, Italy and France. The family returned to the United States in 1886.

Maxfield Parrish attended the Haverford School, a private school for boys, and later studied for two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After graduating, he shared an art studio with his father in Annisquam, Massachusetts. A year later Parrish attended the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry.

Early in his career, Parrish did illustrations for “Harper’s Bazaar” and “The Scribner’s Magazine”. He also illustrated in 1897 the children’s book “Mother Goose in Prose”, written by L. Frank Baum, who went on to write and publish “The Wizard of Oz” three years later. By 1900, Parrish, now a  member of the Society of American Artists, traveled to Europe again to visit Italy.

Parrish worked with many popular magazines throughout the 1910s and 1920s. He also created advertising artwork for companies such as Colgate and Oneida Cutlery. Parrish received an exclusive contract with Collier’s and worked for them from 1904 to 1913. By the 1920s, however, Parrish decided to concentrate on his painting and stopped his illustrative commercial work.

In his forties, Parrish did paintings for children’s books and began working on large murals. His most popular work was the painting “Daybreak” which was produced in 1923. Featuring a scene of a columned portico with two female figures, it had undertones of the now famous Parrish blue color. The print of this work is regarded as the most popular print in the American 20th century based on the number of prints sold, equal to one for almost every four households.

Parrish’s art is characterized by vibrant colors. He achieved such luminous color through the process of glazing. This process involves applying alternating bright layers of oil color separated by varnish over a base rendering, usually a blue and white monochromatic underpainting. He would often project photographs of his draped models onto the canvas, allowing him to accurately represent the distortion of patterns of the draping.

The National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, Rhode Island, claims the largest body of his work, with sixty-nine works by Parrish. However, you can also see works by Parrish at the Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Parrish’s painting “Daybreak” has changed owners several times but has always been in private collections.

Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd. “Portrait of a Young Man”, 1853, Oil on Canvas, Tate Museum, London

Nineteenth century English painter Richard Dadd was a promising young artist who trained at the Royal Academy Schools,, Dadd undertook a grand tour of the Eastern Mediterranean between 1842 and 1843, encompassing Italy and Greece as well as the Ottoman Empire.

Upon his return, Richard Dadd’s life unravelled. Insanity ran in the family, and Dadd started showing signs – not least believing that he was under the power of the Egyptian god Osiris.

Then, in the summer of 1843, Dadd stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Chatham, and escaped to France. Eventually, he was caught and extradited to England, where he spent the rest of his life in criminal lunatic asylums, first at Bethlem Hospital in South London, and then at Broadmoor. During more than four decades of confinement, Dadd produced many paintings.

Maynard Dixon

 

Maynard Dixon, “Lone Bull”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Maynard Dixon’s stay at Cut Bank Creek, on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, ended in early October, 1917 when snow and biting cold arrived forcing him to return to San Francisco. Energized by his experience, he started to produce work drawn from his experiences in the Glacier Park and on the Blackfeet Reservation. For several years afterwards, some of Dixon’s most notable Native American- themed paintings emerged from his Montgomery Street studio, among them “Lone Bull”.

In this 1918 painting, Dixon has captured the image of a young Blackfeet man astride his horse, dressed in only a breechcloth and leggings, relaxed but keeping a close watch over the camp’s horse herd. Beyond them the vast Montana prairie rolls toward the horizon. The Montana stay unleashed a period of creative accomplishments for Dixon as he shifted from a quasi-impressionist approach to a post-impressionist style defined by strong brush strokes, bold color patterns, and careful design.

Like a number of other artists of his generation, Dixon embraced the idea that the Native American stood as a counterpoint to the destructive forces unleashed by the rise of an industrial-oriented America. For Dixon, the Indian lived and moved and had their being drawn from an older, better way of knowledge and behavior. The theme in “Lone Bull” was replicated in 1920 when Dixon painted “Pony Boy”, one of his most iconic images.

Calendar: July 24

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

The Terrazzo Floor

July 24, 1952 marks the release date in the United States of the classic film “High Noon”.

“High Noon” is a 1952 American western film produced by Stanley Kramer, directed by Fred Zinnemann, and starring Gary Cooper. The plot, depicted in real time, revolves around a town marshal, who must face a gang of killers alone, torn between his sense of duty and love for his new bride. The film was mired in controversy with political overtones at the time of its release.

In 1951, during production of the film, Carl Foreman, the screenwriter of the movie, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during its investigation of “Communist propaganda and influence” in the Hollywood motion picture industry. He was labeled an “uncooperative witness” by the committee, making him vulnerable to blacklisting, the practice of denying employment to suspected Communists.

After Carl Foreman’s refusal to name names was made public, Foreman’s production partner Stanley Kramer, the producer of the film, demanded an immediate dissolution of their partnership. As a signatory to the production loan, Foreman remained with the “High Noon” project; but before the film’s release, he sold his partnership share to Kramer and moved to Britain, knowing that he would not find further work in the United States.

Gary Cooper played the lead role of Marshal Will Kane, even doing the fight scenes, despite ongoing problems with his back. He wore no makeup, to emphasize his character’s anguish and fear, which was probably intensified by pain from a recent ulcer surgery. Grace Kelly was given the part of the marshal’s wife, Amy Fowler Kane, despite the thirty-year age disparity with Gary Cooper, after producer Stanley Kramer saw her in an off-Broadway play.

The running time of the story almost precisely parallels the running time of the film itself, an effect heightened by the frequent shots of clocks, to remind the characters, and the audience, that the villain the marshal will have to fight will be arriving on the noon train. Thus the title “High Noon”. Upon its release, critics and audiences expecting chases, fights, spectacular scenery, and other common Western film elements were dismayed to find them largely replaced by emotional and moralistic dialogue until the climactic final scenes.

“High Noon” was criticized in the then Soviet Union as “glorification of the individual”. The American Left lauded it as an allegory against blacklisting and McCarthyism, but it gained respect in the conservative community as well. Now considered a classic western, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four: Best Actor, Best Editing, Best Music Score and Best Music Song. It also won four Golden Globe Awards in the categories of Actor, Supporting Actress, Score, and Black and White Cinematography.

Cab Calloway, “Jumpin Jive”

Cab Calloway, “Jumpin Jive”, with the Nicholas Brothers

This clip is from the 1943 American movie “Stormy Weather” produced and released by 20th Century Fox. The film is considered one of the best Hollywood musicals with an African-American cast. It stars Lena Horne, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, the Nicholas Brothers, among other great performers. If you haven’t seen it, you are missing something great.