Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann, “The Spirit of Our Time”, 1920, Assemblage with Wooden Head

Rauol Hausmann was an Austrian artist, a founder and a central figure in the Dada Movement in Berlin. He began his formal training at the atelier of Arthur Lewin-Funcke where he focused on anatomy and nude drawing. He later connected with the German Expressionist movement, studying woodcutting and lithography under Erich Heckel.

In 1917, Hausmann met Richard Hulsenbedk, who introduced him to the principles and philosophy of Dada, a new and visual art and literary movement. Dada artists and writers created provocative works that questioned capitalism and conformity, which they believed to be the fundamental motivations for the first World War which had just ended, leaving chaos and destruction throughout Europe.

‘Spirit of Our Time’ was a sculptural metaphor for the inability of the establishment to inspire the changes necessary to rebuild a better Germany. This sculpture illustrated Raoul Hausmann’s belief that the average supporter of what he considered to be a corrupt society had no more capabilities than those which chance had glued to the outside of his skull; his brain remained empty. With his eyes deliberately left blank, the ‘Spirit of Our Time’ was a blind automaton whose blinkered attitude excluded any possibility of creative thought.

Calendar: September 28

A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of September

Amber Waves of Grain

September 28, 1924 was the birthdate of Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni.

Marcello Mastroianni made his uncredited screen debut as an extra in the 1939 Italian comedy “Marionette”. He made several more minor film appearances and landed his first big role in the 1951 “Atto d’Accusa”, playing Renato La Torre in the melodrama. Within a decade, he became a major international celebrity, starring in “Big Deal on Madonna Street” and in Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” opposite Anita Ekberg. In “La Dolce Vita”, Mastroianni played a self-loathing and disillusioned tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights. exploring Rome’s high society.

After “La Dolce Vita”, Mastroianni starred in another Fellini film “8 1/2”. He played the signature role of a film director who, in the midst of self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block in his effort to direct an epic science-fiction move. Between 1954 and 1995, Mastroianni starred in twenty seven films including “La Notte” with Jeanne Moreau; “Marriage Italian-Style”; Robert Altman’s “Ready to Wear” with Sophia Loren; “The Pizza Triangle” with Monica Vitti”; Fellini’s “City of Women” and “Ginger and Fred”; and Nikita Mikhalkov’s “Dark Eyes” with Marthe Keller.

Marcello Mastroianni was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor three times; for “Divorce Italian Style”, “A Special Day”, and “Dark Eyes”. He is one of only three actors to have been twice awarded the Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. Mastroianni won it in 1970 for “The Pizza Triangle” and in 1987 for his role of Romano in “Dark Eyes”. His final film was “Voyage to the Beginning of the World”, a Portuguese- French drama film, released in 1997  after his death.

Mastroianni died of pancreatic cancer in December of 1996 at the age of seventy-two. The Trevi Fountain in Rome, associated with his role in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”, was symbolically turned off and draped in black as a tribute. At the 1997 Venice Film Festival, his lover Anna Maria Tatò, an author and filmmaker, screened her four-hour documentary entitled “Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember”. His honors included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival, and two Golden Globe Awards.

Dick Goody

Dick Goody, “Haberman Cutting the Grass”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 54 x36 Inches, Broad Museum, Michigan State University

Professor of Art Dick Goody is an expressionist painter whose work depicts figures, landscapes and still lifes that at times feel to be autobiographical. He earned a master of Fine Arts Degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

The oil on Goody’s canvas works are flat, nuanced, ambiguous and reflect a somewhat consistent color palate, especially his use of the color of red.  On his previous work, Goody used direct words and writing passages which would often dominate the composition. In “Haberman Cutting the Grass”, there is an economy of form and colors in this figure-centered composition and a lack of any graphics..

Calendar: September 27

A Year: Day to Day Men: 27th of September

Flesh and Silver Claws

September 27, 1885 was the birthdate of magician Harry Blackstone, Sr.

Born Harry Bouton in Chicago, Illinois, Harry Blackstone was a famed magician and illusionist. He was in the model of courtly, elegant predecessors such as Howard Thurston and Harry Keller, and the last of that group in America. Blackstone customarily wore white tie and tails while performing, and traveled with a sizable cast of assistants and large-scale illusions. His stage show was presented to the accompaniment of a pit orchestra.

One of Blackstone Senior’s especially effective illusions was called the Kellar Levitation billed as “The Dream of Princess Karnac”. A woman would lay on a couch, uncovered unlike other magicians’ versions, and rise up in the air. In another illusion,  a woman stepped into a cabinet in front of many tubular incandescent bulbs. Blackstone would suddenly push the perforated front of the cabinet backwood so the bulbs protruded through the holes in the front of the box. The cabinet was then revolved, revealing the woman impaled by the blinding filaments.

His “Sawing a Woman in Half” illusion involved an electric circular saw some three to four feet in diameter mounted in an open frame. Blackstone demonstrated the efficacy of the device by sawing noisily through a piece of lumber. Then a female assistant was placed on the saw table in full view, as wide metal restraints were clamped upon her midsection. The saw table was pulled by a motor through the saw blade.The blade whirred and appeared to pass through her body. As ripping sounds were heard, the woman shrieked, and particles were scattered by the whirring blade. When the blade stopped she, of course, rose unharmed.

“The Floating Light Bulb”, was perhaps Blackstone’s signature piece. In a darkened theatre, Blackstone would take a lighted bulb from a lamp and float it, still glowing, through a small hoop. He would then come down from the stage and the lamp would float out over the heads of the audience. This illusion was passed to Blackstone’s son, also Harry Blackstone, and then after his son’s death to the Dutch illusionist Hans Klok.

Harry Blackstone Sr. spent the last years of his life performing at the Magic Castle, a magical attraction in Hollywood, California. He died at the age of 80 in Hollywood on November 16, 1965. Blackstone was interred In Colon, Michigan where the main street was renamed Blackstone Avenue in his honor.

In 1985, on the 100th anniversary of his father’s birth, Harry Blackstone Jr. donated to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. the original floating light bulb, which Thomas Edison designed and built, and the original Casadega Cabinet, used in the “Dancing Handkerchief” illusion. This was the first ever donation accepted by the Smithsonian in the field of magic.

Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Left Hand of Darkness”

Photographer Unknown, (Left Hand Behind His Back)

“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Reblogged with thanks to https://gr8lad.tumblr.com

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “Architect”, 1950, Tempera on Panel, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Paul Cadmus has participated in thirty-seven Whitney Museum Annual and Biennial exhibitions of contemporary art, making him one of the most frequently exhibited artists in the history of that ongoing curatorial project. Cadmus’s repeated, indeed almost serial, inclusion in the Whitney’s signature exhibitions of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s marks both the centrality and the longevity of this artist’s contribution to twentieth-century art.

The “Architect” was exhibited at the 1950 Whitney Annual. The model in the painting was Charles “Chuck” Howard.

Calendar: September 26

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

Infectious Smile

September 26, 1877 was the birthdate of character actor Edmund Gwenn.

In 1901 Edmund Gwenn went to Australia and acted on stage there for three years, not returning to London until 1904. There he took a small part in “In The Hospital”, which led to him receiving a postcard from George Bernard Shaw, offering him a leading role as Straker, the chauffeur, in Shaw’s “Man and Superman”. Gwenn accepted and the play was a success. He spent three years in Shaw’s company, performing in “John Bull’s Island”, Major Barbara”, “The Devil’s Disciple” and other plays by Shaw.

Edmund Gwenn made his first appearance on screen in a 1916 British short “The Real Thing at Last”, followed by a silent version of “The Skin Game” in 1920 as the character Hornblower. This role he would reprise in a talking version by Alfred Hitchcock, released in 1931. After these films, Gwenn worked steadily until the end of his life, appearing in English stage pays and films, eventually doing more and more on Broadway and in Hollywood.

In 1940 Edmund Gwenn played a delightful Mr Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice”, then played a completely opposite role as an assassin in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 “Foreign Correspondent”. He later played a comedic role in the 1941 “Charley’s Aunt”, in which he romanced Jack Benny, masquerading as a woman. Gwenn was in the 1945 “Bewitched”, “Of Human Bondage” released in 1946, and the 1947 “Green Dolphin Street”.

Then in 1947, Edmund Gwenn became a super star. Twentieth Century-Fox was planning the film “Miracle on 34th Street”. The studio had offered the role of “Kris Kringle” to Gwenn’s cousin, the well-known character actor Cecil Kellaway, but he had turned it down with the observation that the role was too whimsical. Twentieth Century-Fox then offered it to Edmund Gwenn, who immediately accepted. His performance earned him at the age of 71 an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor and, because it is rerun every Christmas season, Gwenn would become for many their all-time favorite screen Santa.

Though rotund, Edmund Gwenn didn’t feel he was rotund enough to look like the jolly old elf most people expected after having read Clement Moore’s “The Night before Christmas”, in which Santa “had a broad face and a little round belly”. Although it was suggested that he could wear padding beneath the Santa costume, Gwenn resisted as he saw the padding effect as too artificial. So he gained almost 30 pounds for the role, a fair amount for a man of his short stature, and added nearly five inches to his waistline.

Gwenn’s final days were spent at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, California. Having endured terrible arthritis for many years, he had suffered a stroke, and then contracted pneumonia, from which he died at age 81 on September 6, 1959. His body was cremated, and his ashes are buried in a vault at The Chapel of the Pines in Los Angeles.