Month: October 2018

José Villegas Cordero

José Villegas Cordero, “Self-Portrait”, 1898, Oil on Canvas, Museo National del Prado

José Villegas Cordero was a Spainish painter of historical, genre, and costumbrista scenes. Costumbrism is the pictorial interpretation of everyday life with its customs and mannerisms. It is related both to thhe movements of Realism with its focus on precise representation and Romanticism with its interest on expression and romantic styling.

José Cordero studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Seville. In 1867 he traveled to Madrid and worked in the studios of Federico de Madrazo. copying the works of Valazquez to perfect his technique. Codero visited Rome in 1868 where he first created his costumbrista works.

Calendar: October 26

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

Slow Moving Water

October 26, 1825 marks the opening of the Erie Canal.

From the days of the birchbark canoe, the early trade routes of the Northeast utilized New York’s waterways. The Lake Champlain-Hudson River Route and the Lake Ontario-Oswego River-Mohawk River Route were utilized by native Americans, fur traders, missionaries and colonizers. The birchbark canoes used earlier were supplemented by longer heavier boats rowed or pulled by several men, which by 1791 was able to haul a two ton load.

In March of 1792, the Western Inland Lock and Navigation Company came into being and improved navigation on the Mohawk River. Also in that year, this company built small canals 3 feet deep with locks of 12 feet by 74 feet around the falls and rapids of the river. By 1796, Durham boats with capacities of 15-20 tons were able to navigate the route. Although business was brisk, maintenance on the wooden locks and channels depleted revenue and the operation folded a few years later.

In 1817 the Erie Canal was established under the management of a New York State Commission. Federal funds were not legislated; so this canal and all subsequent canals in New York State were built and maintained exclusively with state funds. The canal was dug from Albany to Buffalo, 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide, with stone locks 15 feet by 90 feet. The locks were the limiting factor on boat size and their efficiency of operation dictated the allowable traffic flow.

Additional canals were dug from the Hudson River to Lake Champlain, from Montezuma to Cayuga and Seneca Lakes and from Syracuse to Oswego. This canal system proved to be so successful that almost every community in the state lobbied for a link to the system, resulting in a network of canals. These lateral canals proved to be of marginal value at best:

In 1836, an enlargement program commenced on the main Erie Canal system. The canal was straightened a bit, the channel was increased in size to 7 feet by 70 feet, and the locks were enlarged to 18 feet by 110 feet. This permitted boats of much greater size on the Erie, Champlain, Cayuga-Seneca and Oswego canals, and further diminished the importance of the smaller lateral canals. Most of the lateral canals were closed by 1878 with only the Black River Canal lasting until the eventual close of the entire system in 1917.

The growth of steam power on the canal and steel boat construction eliminated the need for a waterway as protected as the old Erie Canal. A twentieth century canal of grand dimension with cast concrete structures and electronic controls was begun. This Barge Canal system, utilizing canalized rivers and lakes and enlarged sections of the original Erie Canal, opened in 1918. Several of the old routes are still utilized today.

Ramón Novarro: Film History Series

Ramón Novarro

Ramón Novarro, whose birth name was Jose Ramón Gil Samaniego, was a Mexican-American actor born in 1899 in Durango, Mexico. Fleeing the Mexican Revolution in 1913, Novarro and his family settled in Los Angeles, California.  Within four years, he started appearing in the films of Rex Ingram and his wife Alice Terry, while also working as a singing waiter. Novarro’s first major success was his role in the 1923 “Scaramouche”, playing the lead role of André-Louis Moreau.

Novarro’s good looks and adequate skill as an actor made him an ideal competitor for Rudolph Valentino’s dominance as a Latin lover. Three years after Valentino played the title character of “The Shiek” in 1921, Novarro played a similar role. In 1925, Novarro gave his breakthrough performance as the title character in director Fred Niblo’s “Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ”.  The film was a blockbuster hit, cementing MGM’s reputation as a quality studio and elevating Navarro into the Hollywood elite.

Valentino’s 1926 death left Novarro the title of Latin Lover Number One in Hollywood, and he enjoyed the status  into the talking film era.  He was popular as a swashbuckler in action films and one of the great romantic leads of the era. Novarro appeared with Norma Shearer in the 1927 “Student Prince in Old Heidelberg” and in the 1928 “Across to Singapore” with actress Joan Crawford.

At the peak of his success in the early 1930s, Novarro was earining more than 100,000 US dollars per film.  It was only after his studio contract with MGM Studios was not renewed in 1935 that his celebrity faded.  After that, he made sporadic appearances in film, including John Huston’s 1949 “We Were Stagers” and the 1950 film-noir crime film “Crisis” with Cary Grant.

Ramón Novarro was gay in a time when society had little understanding and no tolerance for anyone considered different. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer asked him to take a woman as a bride, to participate in a “lavender marriage’ for publicity purposes.  Novarro refused, and maintained romantic relationships with men, including composer Harry Partch and Hollywood journalist Herbert Howe. On the night of October 30, 1968, Novarro was murdered by brothers Paul and Tom Ferguson whom he invited into his home. Believing there was a large sum of money in the house, the brothers hoped to rob him. Novarro died as a result of asphyxiation, choked to death on his own blood after having been beaten. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari, “Six Tuscan Poets”, 1554, Oil on Canvas, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis,Minnesota

In this group portrait “Six Tuscan Poets” by Giorgio Vasari, six distinguished poets and philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are shown as if engaged in a literary conversation. Each was revered for his role in the development of lyric poetry, which helped establish the Tuscan dialect as the standard language in Italy.

The seated figure is Dante Alighieri, author of the “Divine Comedy”. Facing him is Guido Cavalcanti, acclaimed for his love sonnets. The standing figure in clerical garb is the humanist and classical scholar Francesco Petrarch; to his right is Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the “Decameron”. The figures at the far left are two authoritative commentators on their works, the humanist and writer  Marsilio Ficino and the platonic philosopher Cristoforo Landino.

All four of the main figures wear laurel wreaths, symbolic of literary achievement. The objects on the table represent various scholarly disciplines. The solar quadrant and celestial globe denote astronomy and astrology; the compass and terrestrial globe, geometry and geography; the books, grammar and rhetoric.

Ruth Benedict: “Patterns of Culture”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Three

“A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. Each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives, the heterogenous items of behaviour take more and more congruous shape.

Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an unimportant detail. The whole, as modern science is insisting in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the result of a unique arrangement and interrelation of the parts that has brought about a new entity.”

― Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

Jean Cocteau: Film History Series

Enrique Riveros, “The Blood of a Poet”, 1932, Director Jean Cocteau, Cinematographer Georges Périnal

Jean Cocteau’s “The Blood of a Poet” is an avant-garde film which starred Enrique Riveros, a Chilean actor who had a successful career in European films. It is the first part of the Orphic Trilogy, which is continued in the 1949 “Orphee”, and followed by the 1960 “Testament of Orpheus”.

The film was financed by French nobleman Charles de Noailles who gave Cocteau one million francs to make the film. Shortly after the completion of the film, rumors began circulating that it was an anti-Christian message. Due to the riotous public reaction to Noailles’s previous film “L’Age d’Or”, Cocteau’s release date for his film was delayed for more than a year. “The Blood of a Poet” was finally released on January 20, 1932.

In this scene from the second section of the film, the artist played by Riveros is transported through the mirror to a hotel, where he peers through several keyholes, witnessing such people as an opium smoker and a hermaphrodite. The artist finally cries out that he has seen enough and returns back through the mirror.

“Many years ago, as I was glancing through a catalogue of jokes for parties and weddings, I saw an item, ‘An object difficult to pick up’. I haven’t the slightest idea what that ‘object’ is or what it looks like, but I like knowing that it exists and I like thinking about it.

A work of art should also be ‘an object difficult to pick up’. It must protect itself from vulgar pawing, which tarnishes and disfigures it. It should be made of such a shape that people don’t know which way to hold it, which embarrasses and irritates the critics, incites them to be rude, but keeps it fresh. The less it’s understood, the slower it opens its petals, the later it will fade. A work of art must make contact, be it even through a misunderstanding, but at the same time it must hide its riches, to reveal them little by little over a long period of time. A work that doesn’t keep its secrets and surrenders itself too soon exposes itself to the risk of withering away, leaving only a dead stalk.” 

Jean Cocteau, Cocteau on the Film, 1972, Dover Publications

Reblogged with thanks to http://bandit1a.tumblr.com

Calendar: October 25

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

Flair for the Orient

October 25, 1909 was the birthdate of American character actor Whitner Nutting Bissell.

Born in New York City, Whitner Bissell trained with the Carolina Playmakers, a theatrical organization associated with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in drama and English. Bissell also was in the Moss Hart play “Winged Victory”, produced by the US Army Air force during World War II as a morale booster and a fund raiser for the Army Emergency Relief Fund.

Whitner Bissell’s first role in film was in the 1943 “Holy Matrimony”, playing the valet Henry Leek in the comedy film. He regularly was cast in science fiction and horror films, appearing in the 1954 “Creature from the Black Lagoon” playing doctor Edwin Thompson who is severely injured by the creature. Bissell has an uncredited role in the 1956 “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” as Doctor Hill, the psychiatrist in the film’s opening scene.

Between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, Bissell guest-starred in many television series followed by more occasional roles in later years. He appeared in episodes of “Whirlybirds”, “Peyton Place and “The Brothers Brannagan”. He was also cast in the NBC education drame series “Mr. Novack” for the 1965 episode “May Day, May Day”. Bissell made four appearances on the “Perry Mason” series and played different roles in multiple episodes fo the long-running western series “The Rifleman” starring Chuck Connors.

Whitner Bissell often played silver-haired authority figures in many of the television series. His most prominent television role was that of General Heywood Kirk in thirty episodes of the 1966-67 season of the sci-fi series “The Time Tunnel”, establishing his screen persona of a man of military bearing, but in an annoyingly dominating way, especially with regard to petty or trivial matters. This characterized persona  showed up in other series: “The Outer Limits”, “Hogan’s Heros”, and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”.

In 1960, Whitner Bissell appeared in George Pal’s production of “The Time Machine” as Walter Kemp,, one of the time-traveler’s dining friends. He also appeared in a 1978 television movie of Wells’ novel set in the modern era. Thirty-three years later, in the 1993 documentary film “Time Machine: The Journey Back” featuring the original stars of the movie, Rod Taylor, Alan Young, and Bissell, he recreated his role as Walter Kemp. This was Bissell’s last acting performance.

Whitner Bissell served for many years on the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild, and represented the actors’ branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences board of governors. In 1994, two years before his death, he received a life career award from the Academy of Science fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.

Calendar: October 24

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

Zebra Stripes

October 24, 1882 was the birthdate of English actress Dame Agnes Sybil Thorndike.

Sybil Thorndike was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, and was educated at the Rochester Grammar School for Girls. She trained as a classical pianist, visiting London to attend lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, an independent arts school. Thorndike gave her first public performance as a pianist at the age of eleven. However, in 1899, she was forced to give up playing due to cramps affecting the muscles in her hand and forearm.

Sybil Thorndike’s brother, the author Russel Thorndike, encouraged her to train as an actress under voice teacher Elsie Fogerty at her school, the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Thorndike was offered her first professional contract at the age of 21: an United States tour in actor Ben Greet’s company. She first appeared on stage in the 1904 production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” by Shakespeare. Thorndike continued touring the US for four years doing Shakespearean repertory and playing 112 different roles.

In 1908, Thorndike was understudy for the role of Candida in a tour directed by George Bernard Shaw, who recognized her talent. It was on this tour that she met her future husband, Lewis Casson, a British actor and theater director. Later in 1908, she joined theater manager Annie Horniman’s company, playing various roles over a three year span. She joined the non-profit Old Vic Company in London, playing leading roles in Shakespeare and other classical plays.

From 1920 to 1922 Thordike and her husband starred in a British version of the French ghoulish and grisly “Grand Guignol” that was directed by Jose Levy. She appeared in the title role of “Saint Joan” in 1924, a play written specifically for her by George Bernard Shaw. It was a major success and was revived repeatedly until her final performance in that role in 1941.

During the second World War, Sybil Thorndike and her husband toured in Shakespearean productions on behalf of the Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, before joining Laurence Olivier for the 1944 season at the Old Vic Theater. After the war, it was discovered that she was listed in the Nazi “Black Book” as one of the Britons who were to be arrested and held after a future Nazi invasion of Britain.

Sybil Thorndike was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1931. She was made a Companion of Honor, an award for outstanding achievements, in 1971. She and her husband, Lewis, who was knighted in 1945, were one of a few couples who both held titles in their own right. She is one of the principal characters portrayed in Nicholas de Jongh’s play “Plague Over England”, about John Gielgud’s arrest for homosexual acts in 1953. Sybil Thorndike passed in June of 1976 and her ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.

The Black Derby

The Black Bowler Derby

The bowler hat, also known as the billycock, is a hard felt hat with a rounded crown, originally created by London hat-makers Thomas and William Bowler during 1849, It has traditionally been worn with semi-formal and informal attire. The bowler, a protective and durable had style, was popular with the British, Irish, and American working classes during the second half of the nineteenth centrury.