Calendar: August 8

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of August

Lounging on White Cotton

August 8, 1907 was the birthdate of jazz saxophonist Bennett Lester Carter.

Bennett Carter appeared on record for the first time in 1927 as a member of the Paradise Ten led by Charlie Johnson. He did arrangement work for recordings by Fletcher Henderson and his band. Carter’s arrangement of the 1930 “Keep a Song in Your Soul” for Henderson was very complex and a significant song in his career. After leaving Fletcher, Carter became leader of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers in Detroit until he formed his own band in New York City. The songs “Lonesome Nights” and Symphony in Riffs” written in 1933 show Carter’s masterful writing for saxophones.

By the early 1930s Bennett Carter was considered one of the leading alto saxophonists. He also became known as a leading trumpet player, having rediscovered the instrument from his childhood. Carter’s orchestra played the Harlem Club in New York but only recorded a few records for Columbia, Okeh (under the name of “The Chocolate Dandies”), and Vocalion.

In the middle 1940s, Bennett Carter made Los Angeles his home, forming another big band, which at times included Max Roach, JJ Johnson, and Miles Davis. But this would be the last big bands he would lead. With the exception of occasional concerts, performing with Jazz at the Philharmonic, and recording, he ceased working as a touring big band bandleader. Los Angeles provided him many opportunities for studio work, and these dominated his time during the next decades. He wrote music and arrangements for television and films, such as “Stormy Weather” in 1943. During the 1950s and ‘60s, he wrote many arrangements for vocalists such as Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee.

In 1969, Carter was persuaded to spend a weekend at Princeton University by Monroe Berger, a sociology professor at Princeton who wrote about jazz. This led to a new outlet for Carter’s talent: teaching. For the next nine years he visited Princeton five times, most of them brief stays except for one in 1973 when he spent a semester there as a visiting professor. In 1974 Princeton gave him an honorary doctorate. He conducted teaching at workshops and seminars at several other universities and was a visiting lecturer at Harvard.

Bennett Carter had an unusually long career. He was perhaps the only musician to have recorded in eight different decades. Another characteristic of his career was its versatility as musician, bandleader, arranger, and composer. He helped define the sound of alto saxophone, but he also performed and recorded on soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and piano. Carter received the Jazz Masters Award in 1986 given by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts created by the United States Congress.

Claude Buck

Claude Buck, “Self Portrait”, 1917, Charcoal and Crayon on Paper Mounted on Paper-Board Sheet, 20 x 12.7 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Claude Buck started to paint when he was very young; at the age of eight he applied to be a copyist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum rejected him because of his age, but Buck kept asking and three years later was finally granted permission to copy the old master paintings. Buck was the youngest artist ever to study at the National Academy of Design, where he spent eight years creating works inspired by romantic literature.

In 1917, Claude Buck founded the ‘Introspectives’, a group of four painters who created surreal images and believed that the ‘poetry’ of a picture meant more than the imitation or even the representation of nature. Later in his career, however, Buck completely rejected these strange, dreamlike themes and joined the Society for Sanity in Art, which celebrated straightforward, representational painting. He was also a leading member of the avant-garde Symbolism artist movement in Chicago.

Claude Buck was known for his fantastic, sometimes disturbing images with allegorical and literary themes drawn from writings of Edgar Allen Poe, operas by Richard Wagner, classical mythology and New Testament writings from the Bible. Some of his early paintings had Luminist movement elements achieved with light-toned paints worked with transparent glazes.

Calendar: August 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of August

Roses and Arrows

August 7, 1927 was the birthdate of American singer and actor, Carl Dean Switzer, best known for his character “Alfalfa”.

As a child, Carl Switzer and his brother Harold became famous in their hometown for their musical talent and performances. Both of them could sing and play a number of instruments. In 1934, while the family traveled to California to visit relatives, they did some sight seeing at the Hal Roach Studios. After the tour and at the studio’s public cafeteria, Carl and Harold gave an impromptu performance which was seen by Hal Roach. Roach signed both brothers to appear in the studio’s “Our Gang” series. Harold was given the nicknames “Slim” and Deadpan”; Carl was dubbed “Alfalfa”.

Carl Switzer’s first appearance was in the 1935 “Our Gang” short film titled “Beginner’s Luck”. At the end of 1935, Carl, as Alfalfa with his hair in a cowlick, was one of the main characters; his brother Harold was relegated to a background actor. Although Carl was an experienced singer and musician, his character Alfalfa was often called upon to sing off-key renditions of popular songs, most often those of the popular singer Bing Crosby.

By the end of 1937, Carl Switzer as Alfalfa had surpassed George “Spanky” McFarland, the series’ nominal star, in popularity. While the boys got along, the two stars’ fathers argued constantly over their sons’ screen time and salaries. However, Carl Switzer was known for being abrasive and difficult on the set. He would often play cruel jokes on the other actors and hold up filming with his antics.

Carl Switzer’s role in the “Our Gang” series of films ended in 1940, when he was twelve. He continued to appear in films in various supporting roles including the 1944 movies “Going My Way”, which won Best Picture award for the year, and “The Great Mike”, in the role of eight-year old “Speck”, the movie hero’s dim-witted friend. He reprised his ‘Alfalfa’ character in the “Gas House Kids” comedies produced in 1946 and 1947. Switzer had a small role in the 1946 Christmas film “It’s A Wonderful Life” playing the dance date of Mary Hatch, performed by Donna Reed, in the film’s beginning.

In 1953 and 1954, Carl Switzer co-starred in three William Wellman directed films: “Island in the Sky” and “The High and the Mighty” both starring John Wayne, and “Track of the Cat” starring Robert Mitchum. In 1956 he co-starred in the “Bowery Boys” film “Dig That Uranium” followed by a small part in “The Ten Commandments”. His final film role was in the 1958 drama “The Defiant Ones”.

Besides acting, Carl Switzer bred and trained hunting dogs and guided hunting expeditions Among his clients were Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, James Stewart and Henry Fonda. Switzer was fatally shot in January of 1959 in a dispute over a fifty dollar reward for a returned missing hunting dog. The shooting was very controversial but was officially judged to be self-defense. Later testimony by a third witness brought up questions of murder; but the case was never reopened. Carl Switzer is interred at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, “Knockout”, 1929, Oil on Canvas, 46 x 44 cm, Private Collection

Born in Lund, Sweden, in April of 1884, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, was an artist working in both oils and watercolors, and writer of poetry and short stories. He is regarded as a founding member of the Modernist art movement in Sweden.

For his early education, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson attended a Technical Company School; he later studied at Danish historical painter Kristian Zahrtmann’s School in Copenhagen. In 1907, he entered his work in an exhibition held at the Art Museum of the University of Lund. Adrian-Nilsson traveled to Berlin in 1913 where through author and critic Herwarth Walden’s gallery, Der Sturm, he came in contact with the contemporary art movements.

Both Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc were of huge importance when Adrian-Nilsson began developing his own style of expressive cubism, a semi-abstract style with deep, vibrant colors. Adrian-Nilsson became very influential in the radical art movement and was a member of the Halmstadgruppen, a group of avant-garde artists at Hamstad, Sweden, which continued unchanged until 1979. This group eventually included painter and sculptor Alexander Archipenko, painter and graphic artist Erik Olson, Sven Jonson, and Esaias Thorén. Initially cubists, the group was influenced later by Adrian-Nilsson’s surrealistic phase and his motifs of seamen.

Adrian-Nilsson was fascinated by modern technology and masculine strength, which was reflected in his images of sailors and sportsmen . Works of this nature include the 1914-15 “Katarinahissen I”, depicting two sailors amid a cubist blue-toned landscape, and “Sjömän i Gröna Lunds tivoli II”, a surrealistic work in blues and browns depicting sailors in Gröna Lund’s amusement park. Living a hidden life at a time that gay eroticism was both taboo and illegal in Sweden, Adrian-Nilsson expressed himself through these cubist and surreal images.

By 1919, Adrian-Nilsson’s art was developing into pure abstraction. He lived in Paris between the years 1920 and 1925, during which time he met Alexander Archipenko and Fernand Léger whose influence can be seen in Adrian-Nilsson’s renderings of mechanically-styled sportsmen, seamen and soldiers. In the later part of the 1920s, Adrian-Nilsson was working in his geometric abstract period. He developed his own personal style of surrealism during the 1930s and exhibited his work in multiple exhibitions, including the 1935 Kubisme-Surrealisme exhibition in Copenhagen.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson died in Stockholm on March 29, 1965 and is buried at the cemetery of Norra Kyrkogården in Lund.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson’s work is represented at the Nationalmuseum and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg’s Art Museum, the Malmö Art Museum, and the Museum of Culture in Lund where his work constitutes a permanent exhibition of modernistic art. Adrian-Nilsson’s writings are preserved at the University Library of Lund.

Insert Image: Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, “Katarinahissen I”, 1914-15, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 56 cm, Private Collection

Calendar: August 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of August

A Bed of Flowers

August 6, 1874 was the birthdate of American writer and researcher, Charles Hoy Fort.

During 1915, Charles Fort, an experienced journalist with wit and a contrarian nature, began to write two books, titled “X” and “Y”, the first dealing with the idea that beings on Mars were controlling events on Earth, and the second with the postulation of a sinister civilization in existence at the South Pole. These books caught the attention of writer Theodore Dreiser who attempted to get them published, but to no avail.

Discouraged by this failure, Charles Fort burnt the manuscripts, but was soon renewed to begin work on the book that would change the course of his life, the 1919 “The Book of the Damned”, which Dreiser helped to get published. The title referred to “damned” data that Fort collected, phenomena for which science could not account and that was thus rejected or ignored.

For more than thirty years, Charles Fort visited libraries in New York City and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes on phenomena that were not explained well by the accepted theories and beliefs of the time. He marveled that seemingly unrelated bits of information were, in fact, related. The notes were kept on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes, in a cramped shorthand of Fort’s own invention.

From this research, Charles Fort wrote four books. These are: “The Book of the Damned” published in 1919; the 1923 “New Lands”, a theory on the Super-Sargasso Sea: “Lo!“ published in 1931 dealing with astronomy and teleportation; and the 1932 “Wild Talents” describing Fort’s new theory of psychic and mental powers.

Examples of the odd phenomena in Charles Fort’s books include many occurrences of the sort variously referred to as occult and paranormal. Reported events include: teleportation; the falling of frogs and fishes from the sky; spontaneous human combustion; ball lightning; levitation; unexplained disappearances; and giant wheels of light in the ocean, among others. His books offered many reports of out-of-place objects found in unlikely locations and out of their place in time. He was an early proponent of extraterrestrial spacecraft and the first to explain human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction.

Suffering from poor health and falling eyesight in the early 1930s , Charles Fort was pleasantly surprised to find himself the subject of a cult following. The Fortean Society was initiated at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City on January 26, 1931 by some of Fort’s friends, many who were also writers. Fort rejected the official society but met informally with many members. Distrusting doctors, Fort did not seek medical assistance for his worsening health. After he collapsed on May 3rd of 1932, he was rushed to the Royal Hospital in the Bronx, dying only hours afterward, most likely from untreated leukemia. He was interred in the family plot in Albany, New York. More than 60,000 of his handwritten notes are in the New York Public Library.

T. Marie Nolan

T. Marie Nolan, “Rabbit Run”, Date Unknown

Self-taught artist, T. Marie Nolan, lives in the basement of a church near the Mississippi River in Mark Twain’s hometown, Hannibal, Missouri. She was born, the eighth of eleven children, in Connecticut on February 28, 1954. Library work of all kinds, story teller, book repairer and bookmobile driver, occupied her until the mid-1980’s when art became her full time obsession.

Nolan constructs her art from materials salvaged from local construction dumpsters, using them as her canvases. Her colorful paintings employ a narrative, sometimes humorous approach to such topics as Adams and Eves, Cats and Fishes, Saints and Sinners and the various unique characters that inhabit her mind.

Nolan’s work has been exhibited at outsider folk art events such as Slotin Folk Fest, the House of Blues, and the Kentuck festival.

Calendar: August 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of August

Searching for Socks

August 5, 1887 was the birthdate of John Reginald Owen, the English character actor.

Reginald Owen studied at Sir Herbert Tree’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made his professional debut on stage in 1905. When he was still a young actor, he met the author Mrs. Clifford Mills. Upon hearing her idea of a children’s play to be called a Rainbow Story, Owen persuaded her to turn it into a play. This became the play “Where the Rainbow Ends” which opened on December 21st of 1911 starring Owen as Saint George. It received good reviews.

John Reginald traveled to the United States in 1920, originally working on Broadway in New York. He later moved to Hollywood and began a lengthy career in many Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions. Owen is perhaps best known today for his role as Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1938 film version of “A Christmas Carol” , a role he inherited from Lionel Barrymore who suffered a broken hip.

Owen was one of only five actors to play both Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson. He first played Watson in the 1932 film “Sherlock Holmes” opposite Clive Brooks. In the 1933 film “A Study in Scarlet”, Owen played Sherlock Holmes opposite Warburton Gamble in the character of Doctor Watson. Owen also has the odd distinction of playing three classical characters of Victorian fiction- Scrooge, Holmes, and Watson- only to have those characters taken over and personified by other actors, namely Alastair Sim as Scrooge, Basil Rathbone as Holmes, and Nigel Bruce as Watson.

Owen appeared, later in his career, on the television series “Maverick” in two episodes and also guest starred in episodes of the series “One Step Beyond” and “Bewitched”. He was featured in the 1964 film “Mary Poppins” and had a small role in the 1962 film production of the Jules Verne novel “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. John Reginald Owen died from a heart attack at age 85 at his home in Boise, Idaho in 1972, after a film career totaling over one hundred films, many of which are today listed as classics- “Of Human Bondage”, “Anna Karenina”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Call of the Wild”.

Calendar: August 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of August

Early Morning

August 4, 1470 was the birthdate of Lucrezia Maria Romola de’ Medici, the eldest daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Lucrezia de’ Medici was married to Jacopo Salviati, an Italian politician, in February of 1498, bringing a dowry of 2000 gold florins to the marriage. When her brothers Piero and Giovanni were exiled from Florence, she was in a bad position, as her husband Jacopo was a supporter of the newly appointed rulers of Florence. In August of 1497 Lucrezia de’ Medici spent 3000 ducats to support a plot to return her brother Pietro to power. The plot failed. Francesco Valon, the head of Florence, executed all the male participants but spared Lucrezia.

Lucrezia de’ Medici continued to build support for the rise of the Medici family. She negotiated the marriage of her niece, Clarice de’ Medici, to Filippo Strozzi the Younger, a military man and influential banker. This was done against the wishes of the current leaders of Florence. When her youngest brother Giuliano returned from his stay in Venice, he would often ask Lucrezia for advice on restructuring the Florence government.

In March of 1513, Licrezia’s brother Giovanni, then a Cardinal in Rome, was elected Pope upon the death of Pope Julius II, with the support of the younger members of the Sacred College. He was the last non-priest to be elected Pope and took the name of Leo X. The Medici family held days of celebration in Florence, giving gifts and money to the crowds outside their palace. Pope Leo appointed Lucrezia’s son Giovanni to the position of Cardinal in 1517. Lucrezia managed her son’s household and office for him, particularly while he traveled as a Papal Legate. An astute politician herself, she used her son’s influence to further Medici causes in Rome.

Pope Leo X asked his sister Lucrezia to help support convents in Florence. Lucrezia paid for a significant expansion of the convent of San Giorgio, funding new dormitories, cloisters, and workshops. She also built other chapels in 1530 in Rome. Lucrezia and Pope Leo X later worked together to pay for a chapel in Rome which would also serve as a resting place for the family.

The Medici family were again exiled from Florence in 1527. Jacopo Salviati wound up a prisoner of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Pope Clement VII, who was Lucrezia’s cousin. Lucrezia managed to gather a ransom and was able to get her husband Jacopo released. There is no exact date for Lucrezia de’ Medici’s death; but it is estimated as having occurred between the 10th and 15th of November in 1553. She was 83 years old.

Jean Dieuzaide

Jean Dieuzaide, “Dali in the Water”, Cadaquès, 1953, Silver Gelatin Print

Jean Dieuzaide was a French photographer born in Grenade, Haute-Garonne, on June 20, 1921. He was a photographer in the French Humanist style, a ethical and philosophical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, collectively and individually. Dieuzaide was also a member of Le Groupe des XV, a collective of fifteen French Humanist photographers which exhibited from 1946 to 1957.

Jean Dieuzaide was very influential inthe photographic culture of the city of Toulouse for over two decades. The portrayal of Salvador Dali swimming with his moustache decorated with daisies is one of his most famous portraits. In 1974 Dieuzaide founded Le Chateau d’Eau, a photography gallery in Toulouse, originally a water tower and now one of the oldest public places dedicated to photography in the world.

Fernando Bayona

Fernando Bayona, “The Last Time” from the Series “The Life of the Other”

Fernando Bayona’s series “The Life of the Other” is a research project made of 12 images that are halfway between documentary photography and staged photography.

The project reflects upon the use of the body as working tool for three groups of professionals. These groups are both sides of the coin of desire. On one of the coin are the strippers and porn actors as unobtainable object of desire. On the other side are male prostitutes who are not just obtainable but occupy a somehow subordinate role.

The name of the project refers to the double set of identities these workers have in order to protect their privacy. They develop an alter ego as a sort of a virtual mask to differentiate themselves from who they are. To perform the tasks their profession requires they create a construct which mutates to adapt to the different demands of the customers, thus becoming — consciously or unconsciously — actors who have very particular type of existence.

Reblogged with many thanks to https://cevans75.tumblr.com

Source: mysomethingtoremember

Calendar: August 3

A Year: Day to Day Men: 3rd of August

Heart and Soul

August 3, 1995 marks the passing of Anglo-American actress Ida Lupino.

Dubbed “the English Jean Harlow”, Ida Lupino was discovered by Paramount in the 1933 film “Money for Speed”, playing a good girl/bad girl dual role. She was asked to try out for the lead role in the 1933 “Alice in Wonderland”. When she arrived in Hollywood, the Paramount producers did not know what to make of their sultry potential leading lady, but she did get a five-year contract.

Mark Hellinger, associate producer at Warner Bros., was impressed by Lupino’s performance in the 1939 film “The Light That Failed” and hired her for the femme-fatale role in the Raoul Walsh-directed “ They Drive by Night’, opposite stars George Raft, Ann Sheridan and Humphrey Bogart. The film did well and the critical consensus was that Lupino stole the movie, particularly in her unhinged Courtroom appearance. Warner Brothers offered her a contract which she negotiated to include some freelance rights. She worked with Raoul Walsh and Bogart again in the 1941 “High Sierra”, where she impressed critic Bosley Crowther of the New York Times in her role as “adoring moll”.

The 1949 film “Never Fear” was Ida Lupino’s first director’s credit. After producing four more films about social issues, including “Outrage”, a 1950 film about rape, Lupino directed in 1953 her first hard-paced, all-male-cast film, “The Hitch-Hiker”, making her the first woman to direct a film noir. Lupino and her husband Collier Young formed their own film studio, The Filmmakers, which produce twelve feature films. Six of these Lupino either directed or co-directed; she wrote or co-wrote five of the screenplays, of which she acted in three and co-produced one.

Lupino and Young’s studio produced films that dealt with unconventional and controversial subject matters other producers would not touch, including out-of-wedlock pregnancy, bigamy, and rape. Lupino described her independent work as “films that had social significance and were entertainment based on true stories, things the public could understand because they had happened or been of news value.” She focused on women’s issues for many of her films and liked strong characters.

Ida Lupino was the only woman working in the 1950s Hollywood studio system to become a pioneering director and producer. Her interests outside the entertainment industry included writing short stories and children’s books, and composing music. Her composition “Aladdin’s Suite” was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1937. Lupino has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to the fields of television and film.

Calendar: August 1

A Year: Day to Day Men: 1st of August

Calendar: July 31

A Year: Day to Day Men: 31st of July

Oh, Happy Day

July 31, 1901 was the birthdate of French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet.

In 1945, Jean Dubuffet, impressed with painter Jean Fautrier’s abstract paintings, started to use thick oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, straw, pebbles, sand, plaster, and tar. He abandoned the tradition use of the brush; instead, he worked with a paste into which he could create physical marks, scratches and slashes. These impasto paintings, the ‘Hautes Pâtes’ series, he exhibited at his show in 1946 at the Galery Rene Drouin. He received some backlash from the critics but also some positive feedback as well.

Jean Dubuffet achieved rapid success in the American art market, largely due to his inclusion in the Pierre Matisse exhibition in 1946. His association with Matisse proved to be very beneficial. Dubuffet’s work was placed among the likes of Picasso, Braque, and Rouault at the gallery exhibit; he was only one of two young artists to be honored in this manner. In 1947, Dubuffet had his first solo exhibition in America, in the same gallery as the Matisse exhibition. Reviews were largely favorable, and this resulted in Dubuffet having a regularly scheduled exhibition at that gallery.

In his earlier paintings, Dubuffet dismissed the concept of perspective in favor of a more direct, two-dimensional presentation of space. Instead, Dubuffet created the illusion of perspective by crudely overlapping objects within the picture plane. Dubuffet’s “Hourloupe” style in later paintings developed from a chance doodle while he was on the telephone. The basis of it was a tangle of clean black lines that forms cells, which are sometimes filled with unmixed color. Dubuffet believed the style evoked the manner in which objects appear in the mind. This contrast between physical and mental representation later encouraged him to use the approach to create sculpture.

Between 1945 and 1947, Jean Dubuffet took three separate trips to Algeria—a French colony at the time in order to find further artistic inspiration. He was fascinated by the nomadic nature of the tribes in Algeria, particularly the ephemeral quality of their existence. The impermanence of this kind of movement attracted Dubuffet and became a facet of the new Art Brut movement.

Dubuffet coined the term art brut, meaning “raw art”, for artwork produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms, such as art by psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. He felt that the simple life of the everyday human being contained more art and poetry than did academic art, or great painting. Dubuffet found the latter to be isolating, mundane, and pretentious, He sought to create in his own work an art free from intellectual concerns; and as a result, his work often appears primitive and childlike.

Calendar: July 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of July

Reading His Messages

The first Defenestration of Prague occurred on July 30, 1419.

In the early 15th century there was a fair amount of discontent internally within the Catholic Church; in particular, regular folks were angry over the relative amount of wealth held by the clergy and nobility compared with the grinding poverty of the peasant class. As a result , reforming and sometimes radical preachers arose to protest these grievances.

Jan Želivsky was a prominent Czech priest during the Hussite Reformation which was started by reformer John Huss. Želivsky preached at Church of Our Lady of the Snows in Prague. He was one of a few moderate Utraquist priests of the reformation movement at that time and strongly influential. His sermons were noted both for their eloquence and their apocalyptic descriptions.

The first defenestration of Prague began when radical Hussites wanted to free several moderate Hussites imprisoned by the magistrates. The town council had refused to exchange their Hussite prisoners. Jan Želivsky led his congregation on a protest procession through the streets of Prague to the New Town Hall on Town Square.

While they were marching, a stone was thrown at Želivský from the window of the town hall, allegedly hitting him. This enraged the mob and they stormed the town hall. Once inside the hall, the group defenestrated the judge and council members. Some thirty radical Hussites threw the judge and seven members of the Prague Town Council out of the upper stories windows of the New Town Hall, sending them to their deaths on the pikes of the Hussite Army below. The shock of the news caused the Czech king, Wenceslas IV, to die of a heart attack.

The consequences for this defenestration of Prague’s leaders were rather severe. John Huss was burned at the stake after being betrayed with a safe conduct, setting up the tension for Martin Luther a century later under similar circumstances. After that, the rest of Europe fought a “crusade” against the Hussites, who managed to fight them off for twenty years before suffering some military defeats.

The remaining Hussites agreed to a compromise solution that ended up setting up an Utraquist rite that helped portend the Protestant Reformation and led to a complex religious situation in Bohemia. The First Defenestration of Prague could be considered a qualified success, showing the powerlessness of the Luxemburg dynasty and giving the Bohemian nobility significant freedom of religion, though short of the total liberty that many of them wanted.

Okiie Hashimoto

Okiie Hashimoto, “Sand Garden Scene”, 1959, Wood Block Print, Edition of 60

Japanese printmaker Okiie Hashimoto graduated from Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1924 with training in Western-style oil painting. He also studied with the printmaker Haratsuka Un’ichi; but it wasn’t untill the 1930s that Hashimoto began to make woodblocks in any great number. After Hashimoto retired from his teaching career in 1955, he concentrated on his printmaking.

Hashimoto’s prints from the period between 1957 and 1966 represent a particular phase of his work which was imbued with complex perspectives and drawn with aspects of Western abstraction. He used modernism with its abstract tendencies to show a subtle view of reality.