Calendar: February 12

Year: Day to Day Men: February 12

Construction Site

The twelfth of February in the year 1554 marks the death of Lady Jane Grey, also known as Lady Jane Dudley after her marriage and as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen. A first cousin once removed of Edward VI, King of England and Ireland, Lady Grey was an English noblewoman who claimed the throne of England and Ireland from the tenth to the nineteenth of July in 1553. 

Lady Jane Grey was the great-granddaughter of King Henry VII through his daughter Mary Tudor and was thus a grandniece of King Henry VIII. She was well educated in the humanities and considered one of the most learned women of her time. In May of 1553, Lady Grey married Lord Guildford Dudley, one of the younger sons of King Edward VI’s chief minister John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. 

In June of 1553, the dying King Edward VI wrote his will and testament in which he nominated Lady Jane Grey and her male heirs as successors to the Crown. Edward VI, who had laid the foundation for the reformed Church of England, removed his half-sister Mary Tudor from the succession, partly due to the fact she was Catholic, and nominated Lady Grey, a committed Protestant who would support the reformed church.

King Edward VI’s will and testament also removed Elizabeth I, the only surviving child of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife. Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate after Anne’s marriage to Henry was annulled. Although Elizabeth had been reinstated under the Third Succession Act of 1543, King Edward ignored those statutes of reinstatement in favor of Lady Grey as successor.

After Edward VI’s death on the sixth of July in 1553, Lady Jane was officially proclaimed Queen on the tenth of July and waited for her coronation in the Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London. Jane’s father-in-law John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, made an attempt to consolidate his power through the capture of Mary Tudor on the fourteenth of July. The attempt failed and Dudley was accused of treason; he was executed less than a month later.

Support for Mary Tudor grew rapidly and most of Lady Jane’s supporters abandoned her. The Privy Council of England, a body of advisors to the sovereign, gave their support to Mary Tudor and proclaimed her queen on the nineteenth of July. Lady Jane and her husband Lord Guildford Dudley were arrested and held prisoner in the Tower of London. Queen Mary I originally had decided to spare Lady Jane’s life; however she was soon viewed as a threat to the Crown. Lady Jane’s fate was sealed after her father, Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, led a rebellion against the marriage of Queen Mary and King Phillip II of Spain. 

Referred to by the court as Jane Dudley, wife of Guildford, Lady Jane was charged with hight treason as were her husband, two of his brothers, and the former archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. They were tried on the thirteenth of November in 1553 at London’s Guildhall. As expected, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Jane was guilty of treason as she had assumed the title and power of the monarch, as presented in the documents she had signed as Queen. Her sentence was to be beheaded or burned alive on Tower Hill as the Queen pleases. 

Scheduled for the ninth of February in 1554, Lady Jane’s execution was postponed for three days to give her a chance to convert to the Catholic faith. On the morning of the twelfth of February, Lord Guildford Dudley was beheaded and the remains were brought inside the tower where Jane was staying. Lady Jane was taken outside to the Tower Green where she blindfolded herself and was beheaded with one stroke. At the time of her death, Jane was no more than seventeen years old.

Lady Jane Grey and her husband Lord Guildford Dudley are buried in the Chapel of Saint Peter ad Vincula on the north side of the Tower Green. No marker was ever erected on their gravesite. Her father Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, was executed for treason on the twenty-third of February in 1554, eleven days after his daughter and son-in-law. 

Renee Sintenis

Renee Sintenis, “Donkey”, Bronze, 1927, Overall: 30 ½ × 9 × 26 ½ Inches, Detroit Institute of Art

From her early years spent in a small rural town, Renee Sintenis felt drawn to animals, and her sculptures of them formed the basis of her later popularity. from 1908-1912, she studied at the Kunsigewerbeschule in Berlin under Leo von König who instructed her in painting and drawing. She learned the fundamentals of sculpture from Wilhelm Haverkamp.

Her early sculptures are characterized by stylized forms and smooth surfaces. Statues of femal nudes apperar alongside the animal sculptures, such as those of foals, deer and donketys. In the mid 1920′s her style changed to one evoking a sense of natural movements, with rough surfaces emphasizing vitality. Her sculptures of athletes included boxers and football players. Sintenis won the Olympia Prize in 1932 for her sculpture of runner Nurmi.

Repose

Photographer Unknown, (Repose)

“Repose is the most expansive posture you can assume. When you are in Repose, your body is as open and extended as it can be. If the power of a pose is determined by how large it makes your body feel and appear, then Repose should be viewed as the ultimate high-power pose.”
― Victor Shamas, Repose: The Potent Pause

Reblogged with thanks to http://jerk-smooth.tumblr.com

Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray, “Untitled” (State II), 1980, Lithograph Printed in Black Ink on Wove Paper, 45.7 x 63.5 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts

Elizabeth Murray was an American painter whose lively imagery and reconsideration of the rectangle as the traditional format for painting was part of a reinvigoration of that medium in the 1970s and ’80s. She is sometimes described as a Neo-Expressionist. The American art critic Roberta Smith considered her to have “reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form.”

Murray was raised in small towns in Michigan and Illinois, and she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (B.F.A., 1962) and Mills College in Oakland, Calif. (M.F.A., 1964). She taught at Rosary Hill College in Buffalo, N.Y. (1965–67), and then moved to New York City.

After experimenting with reconciling late-minimalist painting with aspects of identifiable subject matter, Murray literally began to push the edges of the rectangle in works such as “Children Meeting” (1978), with large bulbous forms and lines pressing against the edge of the canvas. As if to make the exterior edges of her painting correspond to the energetic rhythms of the various elements pictured within—highly stylized objects such as coffee cups, tables, and chairs, as well as less-definable shapes—she began to create shaped canvases.

Elizabeth Murray carried her experimentation further during the 1980s, when she began to use multiple canvases for a single work. Her “Painters’ Progress” (1981), for example, is a unified image composed of 19 canvases. She evolved a personal and sprightly range of curved imagery, much of which made reference to art-historical styles. In the 1990s, in works such as “Careless Love” (1995–96), she constructed her canvases to extend a bit from the wall, giving them sculptural and spatial qualities.

Marlene Dietrich, “Sag Mir, Wo die Blumen Sind”

Marlene Dietrich, “Sag Mir Wo die Blumen Sind”, 1963

Marlene Dietrich performed the song in English, French, and German. The song was first performed in French as “Qui Peut Dire où Vont les Fleurs?” by Marlene in 1962 at a UNICEF concert. She also recorded the song in English and in German, the latter titled “Sag’ Mir Wo die Blumen Sind”, with lyrics translated by Max Colpet.  She performed the German version on a tour of Israel, where she was warmly received; she was the first person to break the taboo of using German publicly in Israel since WWII. Her version peaked #32 in German charts.

Calendar: February 11

Year: Day to Day Men: February 11

The City’s Pier

The eleventh of February in 1938 marks the first televised broadcast of a science fiction program. The British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, adapted Karel Čapek’s seminal play, “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)” into a thirty-five minute production which aired at 3:30 in the afternoon. 

Born in January of 1890, Karel Čapek was a Czech writer, playwright and journalist. He became best known for his science fiction works, most notably the 1936 “War with the Newts”, a satirical work of exploitation and human flaws, and his “R.U.R.”, a three-act play with prologue that introduced the word robot to the English language. Although nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Čapek never received the award. Several awards, however, commemorate his name among which is the Karel Čapek Prize that is awarded to those who contribute to the reinforcement and maintenance of democratic and humanist values in society. 

The robots in Čapek’s 1920 “R.U.R.” are not robots in the popularly understood sense of an automaton or a mechanical device. They were artificially biological organisms that were similar to humans. These robots more closely resembled more modern conceptions such as replicants ( 1982 Blade Runner ) or android hosts ( 2016 Westworld television series ). Their skin and brains were produced in vats, their bones in factories, and their nerve fibers, arteries and intestines were spun on factory bobbins. The robots, themselves living biological beings, were finally assembled on factory lines as opposed to grown or born.

“R.U.R.” had its first theatrical premiere on the twenty-fifth of January in 1921 at Prague’s National Theater. English writer Paul Selver translated the play into English and sold it to St. Martin’s Theater in London. The translation was adapted for British theater by actor Sir Nigel Ross Playfair in 1922. Performance rights for the United States and Canada were sold in the same year to the New York Theater Guild. The American premiere of “R.U.R.” took place in October of 1922 at New York City’s Garrick Theater on 35th Street in Manhattan where it ran for one hundred and eighty-four performances. 

In April of 1923, actor and director Basil Dean produced “R.U.R.” in Britain for the Reandean Company at London’s St. Martin’s Theater. This version was based on Playfair’s adaptation and included several revisions from the New York Theater Guild. During the 1920s, the play was performed in several British and American theaters. In June of 1923, Karel Čapek sent a letter to translator Edward March with the play’s final lines that had been omitted from previous translations. A copy of this final and complete translation of Čapek’s play later appeared in the 2001 journal of “Science Fiction Studies”.

The BBC airing of Čapek’s “R.U.R.” occurred just two years after England launched the broadcasting service; it is unclear whether any recordings of the event survived. The play’s effects, though very rudimentary by today’s standards, made it very suitable for showing on the new television medium. Although its popularity peaked in the 1920s, Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” became the foundation of many of science fiction’s modern franchises, both film and television.