Today is the 92nd birthday of the photographer Vivian Dorothy Maier. I have long expressed my fondness for street photography and it’s unplanned, un-staged captured moments. I love the rawness of the subjects, the realness of their emotions so clearly displayed on their faces. It takes a great talent to be able to chronicle that moment in time. I have also long expressed my fondness for misfits and loners, anyone not easily understood. Anyone who doesn’t neatly fit into a box, anyone who has complexity that scares or confuses people. Her story is a great one, how the most ordinary of people can create the most extraordinary of lives and legacies. The trailer to the documentary about her is below, you should watch it. The world is a better place because she is in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Vivian Dorothy Maier
OCCUPATION: Photographer, Nanny
BIRTH DATE: February 1, 1926
DEATH DATE: April 21, 2009
PLACE OF BIRTH: New York City, NY
PLACE OF DEATH: Chicago, IL

BEST KNOW FOR: Vivian Dorothy Maier was an American street photographer. Maier worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, pursuing photography during her spare time.

Many details of Maier’s life remain unknown. She was born in New York City, the daughter of a French mother, Maria Jaussaud Justin, and an Austrian father, Charles Maier (also known as Wilhelm). Several times during her childhood she moved between the U.S. and France, living with her mother in the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur near her mother’s relations. Her father seems to have left the family temporarily for unknown reasons by 1930. In the 1930 census, the head of the household was listed as Jeanne Bertrand, a successful photographer who knew Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In 1935, Vivian and her mother were living in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur and before 1940 returned to New York. Her father and brother Charles stayed in New York. The family of Charles, Maria, Vivian and Charles were living in New York in 1940, where her father worked as a steam engineer.

In 1951, aged 25, Maier moved from France to New York, where she worked in a sweatshop. She moved to the Chicago area’s North Shore in 1956, where she worked primarily as a nanny and carer for the next 40 years. For her first 17 years in Chicago, Maier worked as a nanny for two families: the Gensburgs from 1956 to 1972, and the Raymonds from 1967 to 1973. Lane Gensburg later said of Maier, “She was like a real, live Mary Poppins,” and said she never talked down to kids and was determined to show them the world outside their affluent suburb. The families that employed her described her as very private and reported that she spent her days off walking the streets of Chicago and taking photographs, usually with a Rolleiflex camera.

John Maloof, curator of some of Maier’s photographs, summarized the way the children she nannied would later describe her:

“She was a Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. She learned English by going to theaters, which she loved. … She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn’t show anyone.”

In 1959 and 1960, Maier took a trip around the world on her own, photographing Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt, and Italy. The trip was probably financed by the sale of a family farm in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur. For a brief period in the 1970s, Maier worked as a nanny for Phil Donahue’s children. She kept her belongings at her employers’; at one, she had 200 boxes of materials. Most were photographs or negatives, but Maier also collected newspapers, in at least one instance, “shoulder-high piles,” and sometimes recorded audiotapes of conversations she had with people she photographed. In the documentary film Finding Vivian Maier (2013), interviews with Maier’s employers and their children suggest that Maier presented herself to others in multiple ways, with various accents, names, life details, and that her behavior with children could be inspiring and positive, and also unpredictable and frightening.

The Gensburg brothers, whom Maier had looked after as children, tried to help her as she became poorer in old age. When she was about to be evicted from a cheap apartment in the suburb of Cicero, the Gensburg brothers arranged for her to live in a better apartment on Sheridan Road in the Rogers Park Community area of Chicago. In November 2008, Maier fell on the ice and hit her head. She was taken to a hospital but failed to recover. In January 2009, she was transported to a nursing home in Highland Park, where she died on April 21, 2009.

In 2007, two years before she died, Maier failed to keep up payments on storage space she had rented on Chicago’s North Side. As a result, her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8 mm film were auctioned. Three photo collectors bought parts of her work: John Maloof, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow. Maier’s photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008 by Slattery, but the work received little response.

Maloof had bought the largest part of Maier’s work, about 30,000 negatives, because he was working on a book about the history of the Chicago neighborhood of Portage Park. Maloof later bought more of Maier’s photographs from another buyer at the same auction. Maloof discovered Maier’s name in his boxes but was unable to discover anything about her until a Google search led him to Maier’s death notice in the Chicago Tribune in April 2009. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier’s photographs on Flickr, and the results went “viral”, with thousands of people expressing interest.

In early 2010, Chicago art collector Jeffrey Goldstein acquired a portion of the Maier collection from Prow, one of the original buyers. Since Goldstein’s original purchase, his collection has grown to include 17,500 negatives, 2,000 prints, 30 homemade movies, and numerous slides. In December 2014, Goldstein sold his collection of B&W negatives to Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto. Maloof, who runs the Maloof Collection, now owns around 90% of Maier’s total output, including 100,000 to 150,000 negatives, more than 3,000 vintage prints, hundreds of rolls of film, home movies, audio tape interviews, and ephemera including cameras and paperwork, which he claims represents roughly 90 percent of her known work.

Since her posthumous discovery, Maier’s photographs, and their discovery, have received international attention in mainstream media, and her work has appeared in gallery exhibitions, several books, and two documentary films.

Photography critic Allan Sekula has suggested that the fact that Maier spent much of her early life in France sharpened her visual appreciation of American cities and society. Sekula compared her work with the photography of Swiss-born Robert Frank: “I find myself imagining her as a female Robert Frank, without a Guggenheim grant, unknown and working as a nanny to get by. I also think she showed the world of women and children in a way that is pretty much unprecedented.”

John Maloof has said of her work: “Elderly folk congregating in Chicago’s Old Polish Downtown, garishly dressed dowagers, and the urban African-American experience were all fair game for Maier’s lens.” Photographer Mary Ellen Mark has compared her work to that of Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, and Diane Arbus. Joel Meyerowitz, also a street photographer, has said that Maier’s work was “suffused with the kind of human understanding, warmth and playfulness that proves she was ‘a real shooter’.”

Maier’s best-known photographs depict street scenes in Chicago and New York during the 1950s and 1960s. A critic in The Independent wrote that “the well-to-do shoppers of Chicago stroll and gossip in all their department-store finery before Maier, but the most arresting subjects are those people on the margins of successful, rich America in the 1950s and 1960s: the kids, the black maids, the bums flaked out on shop stoops.” Most of Maier’s photographs are black and white, and many are casual shots of passers-by caught in transient moments “that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion”.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, William Meyers notes that because Maier used a medium-format Rolleiflex, rather than a 35mm camera, her pictures have more detail than those of most street photographers. He writes that her work brings to mind the photographs of Harry Callahan, Garry Winogrand, and Weegee, as well as Robert Frank. He also notes that there are a high number of self-portraits in her work, “in many ingenious permutations, as if she were checking on her own identity or interpolating herself into the environment. A shadowy character, she often photographed her own shadow, possibly as a way of being there and simultaneously not quite there.”

Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times, has drawn attention to how Maier’s photographs are reminiscent of many famous 20th century photographers, and yet have an aesthetic of their own. She writes that Maier’s work “may add to the history of 20th-century street photography by summing it up with an almost encyclopedic thoroughness, veering close to just about every well-known photographer you can think of, including Weegee, Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, and then sliding off in another direction. Yet they maintain a distinctive element of calm, a clarity of composition and a gentleness characterized by a lack of sudden movement or extreme emotion.”

In the documentary film Finding Vivian Maier (2013), the grown-up children whom Maier had cared for in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s recall how she combined her work as a photographer with her day job as a nanny. She would frequently take the young children in her care with her into the center of Chicago when she took her photographs. Occasionally they accompanied her to the rougher, run-down areas of Chicago, and, on one occasion, the stock yards, where there were bodies of dead sheep.

In the late 1970s, Maier stopped using her Rolleiflex. Most of her photographs taken in the 1980s and 1990s were color transparencies, taken on Ektachrome film.

Source: Vivian Maier Photographer | Official website of Vivian Maier | Vivian Maier Portfolios, Prints, Exhibitions, Books and documentary film

Source: Vivian Maier – Wikipedia

Source: Vivian Dorothea Maier (1926 – 2009) – Find A Grave Photos

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Today is the 85th birthday of Yoko Ono.  First, let’s think about how it is strange to attach an age to her, and now let’s talk about that is still creating art and music, like right now.  Her efforts to promote world peace and equality will be her legacy.  The world is very lucky that she is still in it.

NAME: Yoko Ono
OCCUPATION: Artist, Anti-War Activist
BIRTH DATE: February 18, 1933
EDUCATION: Sarah Lawrence College, The Peers School (The Gakushuin School)
PLACE OF BIRTH: Tokyo, Japan

BEST KNOWN FOR: Yoko Ono is a multimedia artist who became known worldwide in the 1960s when she married Beatles front man John Lennon.

Multimedia artist and performer Yoko Ono was born on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Japan, the eldest of three children born to Eisuke and Isoko, a wealthy aristocratic family. Her father, who worked for the Yokohama Specie Bank, was transferred to San Francisco, California, two weeks before she was born. The rest of the family soon followed. Her father was transferred back to Japan in 1937, and she susbequently enrolled at the elite Peers School (formerly known as the Gakushuin School) in Tokyo.

The family moved to New York in 1940, then back to Japan in 1941, when her father was transferred to Hanoi on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Ono remained in Tokyo through World War II, including the great firebombing of 1945. At the age of 18, Ono moved with her parents to Scarsdale, New York. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College, but left to elope with her first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi.

Settling in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Ono developed an interest in art and began writing poetry. Considered too radical by many, her work was not well-received, but she gained recognition after working with American jazz musician/film producer Anthony Cox, who later became her second husband. Cox financed and helped coordinate her “interactive conceptual events” in the early 1960s.

Ono’s work often demands the viewers’ participation and forces them to get involved. Her most famous piece was the “cut piece” staged in 1964, where the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her clothing until she was naked, an abstract commentary on discarding materialism.

Ono first met John Lennon of the English rock band the Beatles on November 9, 1966, when he visited a preview of her exhibition at the Indica Gallery in London, England. Lennon was taken with the positive, interactive nature of her work. He especially cited a ladder leading up to a black canvas with a spyglass on a chain, which revealed the word “yes” written on the ceiling. The two began an affair approximately 18 months later. Lennon divorced his first wife, Cynthia (with whom he had a son, Julian, born in 1963), and married Ono on March 20, 1969.

The couple collaborated on art, film and musical projects, and became famous for their series of “conceptual events” to promote world peace, including the “bed-in” held in an Amsterdam hotel room during their honeymoon in 1969.

Ono and Lennon became parents in 1975 with the arrival of their son, Sean. Lennon quit the music business to raise Sean. When he returned to the spotlight in 1980, Lennon was shot by a deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, only a few feet from Ono. Sean Lennon has grown up to a well-known musician in his own right.

Since Lennon’s death, Ono has continued her career, recording albums, performing concert tours and composing two off-Broadway musicals. She exhibited her art internationally, and the first U.S. retrospective of her work opened in New York City in 2002.

Ono has also continued to honor Lennon’s memory with a number of different projects. On October 9, 2002, she inaugurated the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace Prize to commemorate what would have been Lennon’s 62nd birthday. On Lennon’s birthday in 2007, she unveiled the Imagine Peace Tower on Videy, an island in Iceland. This outdoor artwork, created by Ono, represents her and Lennon’s commitment to world peace.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2-Sep-2011) · Herself
Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) (2010) · Herself
The Universe of Keith Haring (Apr-2008) · Herself
The U.S. vs John Lennon (31-Aug-2006) · Herself
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (12-Oct-1996) · Herself
Imagine: John Lennon (7-Oct-1988) · Herself
Dynamite Chicken (20-Jan-1971) · Herself
Let It Be (13-May-1970) · Herself

Author of books:
Grapefruit (1964, non-fiction)
Acorn (2013, non-fiction)

Source: Yoko Ono – Wikipedia

Source: Yoko Ono

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Today is the 91st birthday of the graphic designer and artist Elaine Lustig Cohen. Finding recognition and prominence in the 50s and 60s in a male-dominated business is an accomplishment in itself. Her designs are so very emblematic of the era, you look at them and know exactly when they were created. The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Elaine Lustig Cohen
OCCUPATION: American graphic designer, artist and archivist
BIRTH DATE: March 6, 1927
DEATH DATE: October 4, 2016
PLACE OF BIRTH: Jersey City, New Jersey
PLACE OF DEATH: Manhattan, New York City, NY
REMAINS: Buried, Cimetière de Passy, Paris, France

BEST KNOWN FOR: Elaine Lustig Cohen was an American graphic designer, artist and archivist. She is best known for her work as a graphic designer during the 1950s and 60s, having created over 150 designs for book covers and museum catalogs.

Cohen was born in 1927 in Jersey City, New Jersey to Herman and Elizabeth (née Loeb) Firstenberg. Herman was a Polish immigrant and worked as a plumber. Elizabeth, a Jersey City native, attended high school and secretary school before marrying Cohen’s father. Elizabeth instilled in Cohen from an early age the idea that being a woman was not a limitation and encouraged her to pursue her passions, paying first for drawing classes and eventually for her college education. As a teenager, she was exposed to the contemporary art world through Naomi Savage, a niece of Man Ray, and took frequent trips to New York City to visit galleries and museums, such as Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery and the MoMA.

After finishing high school, Cohen enrolled in the Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane University. Two years later, she transferred to the University of Southern California where she graduated in 1948 with a bachelor of fine arts degree. However, she did not intend to work as a fine artist, recalling that at that age, “the idea of being an artist never even occurred to me, […] Coming from a middle-class Jewish family, I didn’t know what it was to be an artist.”

In 1948 during an opening at the Modern Institute of Art in Los Angeles where she was a summer intern, Cohen met graphic designer Alvin Lustig. He was 12 years her senior, at age 32. The two were married in December 1948 and continued their relationship for seven years, until Alvin’s death in 1955. Alvin was diagnosed with diabetes as a teenager and died from complications of the disease.

Cohen and Lustig moved to New York in 1951 where she worked as his assistant. Lustig never intended to teach her graphic design, insisting that his assistants execute his work instead of creating their own designs. Despite this, carrying out Lustig’s artistic visions and observing his process taught Cohen various graphic design techniques. Shortly after her husband’s death in 1955, she was approached by architect Philip Johnson to complete a commission given to Lustig to create the signage for the Seagram Building. Johnson was so fond of her work on the signage that he later hired her to create catalogs and advertisements for the building’s rental spaces. Around the same time, Arthur Cohen, founder of Meridian Books and a friend of the Lustigs, insisted Elaine create cover art for the publisher’s new line of paperbacks. She and Arthur married in 1956. Of working for Arthur, she said, “Having a husband being your client is pretty easy. You never show them what you’re doing until late at night. They’re exhausted and they say, ‘I like it.'”This intimate working relationship gave her the opportunity to build upon what she observed in Lustig’s studio and create her own style distinct from that of her late husband’s.

When designing book covers and museum catalogs, one of her primary goals was to make sure the image on the cover reflected the voice of the work inside. Her modern approach was an alternative to the literal depiction of a book’s narrative that was more common during this time.

Other prominent clients of Cohen’s during her time as a graphic designer were General Motors, The Jewish Museum, the Museum of Primitive Art, and Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art. She designed catalogs, signage, and other printed materials. She often collaborated with architects to ensure that her designs reflected and enhanced the architecture. She continued her career as a graphic designer until 1969.

Arthur Cohen sold Meridian Books to World Publishing in 1960, and Elaine wished to turn to painting full-time. By the late 1960s, the two both left commercial work in order to focus on their creative pursuits and found themselves in need of additional income. They had a growing collection of early 20th century European avant-garde books, magazines, and periodicals. Arthur noticed they had many duplicates and decided to sell them; within one week, he sold everything from that first group. This experiment evolved into the founding of their rare book shop and gallery Ex Libris in 1973. They were some of the first Americans to sell European avant-garde materials, and found success in being one of the few dealers to meet the needs of this niche market. Their collection included works from various avant-garde movements including Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, and Constructivism. The couple created catalogs for the shop, with Arthur writing the text and Elaine designing the covers. Today these catalogs are considered collectibles. Ex Libris remained their primary source of income until Arthur’s death in 1986. Cohen eventually closed the store in 1998 upon having difficultly both finding materials to sell and making a significant enough profit.

In 1969, Cohen resigned from commercial design work, turning almost exclusively to painting. In the late 1970s, she began experimenting with mixed media, collage, sculpture and printmaking. Like her book cover designs, her work frequently incorporates typography and abstraction. During the latter part of her artistic career Cohen continued to produce works both by hand and digitally using Adobe Illustrator.

In 1995, the Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum hosted an exhibition celebrating Cohen’s career as a graphic designer, which featured over eighty examples of her work. In 2012, the AIGA had an exhibition in the AIGA National Design Center in New York City called, “The Lustigs: A Cover Story”. This was the first retrospective that featured the design work of both Alvin and Elaine together.

In 2011, Cohen received the AIGA medal, which is awarded to “individuals who have set standards of excellence over a lifetime of work or have made individual contributions to innovation within the practice of design.

Source: Pioneering Graphic Designer Elaine Lustig Cohen Dies At 89 | Co.Design | business + design

Source: Elaine Lustig Cohen – Wikipedia

Source: Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927–2016) – artforum.com / news

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Today is the 96th birthday of the triple-threat performer Cyd Charisse. Her before/after name change came about more organically than those of her peers, but is still one of the best. The world is a better place because she is in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Cyd Charisse
BIRTH DATE: March 8, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH: Amarillo, Texas, U.S.
DATE OF DEATH: June 17, 2008
PLACE OF DEATH: Los Angeles, California, U.S.

BEST KNOWN FOR: Vamp dancer in Singin’ in the Rain

Cyd Charisse was a terrific dancer whose career as a movie song-and-dance woman was cut short by bad luck. She was denied numerous leading roles opportunities because she worked for MGM while Ann Miller was the studio’s top starlet, and as Charisse finally achieved the stardom and recognition her dancing deserved, movie musicals faded from popularity, and she became just another Hollywood actress.

Born Tula Finklea, her younger brother was unable as a toddler to pronounce “sister,” and called her “Syd” instead. She liked to dance, and her father loved the ballet, so he enrolled her in dance lessons, and by the age of 14 she was dancing professionally. At 16 she came to Los Angeles, where she continued studying dance and fell in love with her instructor, Nico Charisse. They were married in Paris and danced professionally on stage as Nico & Charisse. The marriage did not last but her new last name did.

She made her film debut in 1943 in Something to Shout About with Don Ameche and Jack Oakie, and had featured roles in minor musicals including The Unfinished Dance with Margaret O’Brien,Till the Clouds Roll By with Robert Walker, and The Harvey Girls with Judy Garland. In Singin’ in the Rain it was Charisse who tempted Gene Kelly and the audience by wordlessly dancing the vamp in the “Broadway Melody Ballet” segment.

After ten years dancing on screen, Charisse was finally given a leading role in Vincente Minnelli‘sThe Band Wagon, now widely considered one of the best musicals ever made, dancing alongsideFred Astaire. She starred with Gene Kelly in Brigadoon and It’s Always Fair Weather, and re-teamed with Astaire for Silk Stockings. Charisse was finally a star, but as musicals faded she became more an actress than a dancer.

In her first non-musical role, she played the dull but faithful girl looking for Richard Basehart inTension in 1950, and she had her best dramatic role as the titular Party Girl in 1958, luring gang-connected lawyer Robert Taylor toward a noirishly doomed demise. She often worked on television and on stage through the 1990s, and she appeared in advertisements for Coppertone tanning lotion, General tires, Lustre-Creme shampoo, and Lux toilet soap. Her last film was a 1989 Italian drama,Visioni private (Private Screening).

In 1948, after a fling with playboy Howard Hughes, she married then-superstar singer Tony Martin, and in the 1960s and ’70s she and Martin had a popular nightclub act. They co-authored their joint autobiography, The Two of Us, in 1976, and co-starred in a schmaltzy TV movie, Sentimental Journey, in 1984. Charisse and Martin were married more than sixty years.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
That’s Entertainment! III (16-Jun-1994) · Herself
Warlords of Atlantis (May-1978)
Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (26-May-1976)
Maroc 7 (22-Mar-1967)
The Silencers (18-Feb-1966) · Sarita
Two Weeks in Another Town (17-Aug-1962) · Carlotta
Something’s Got to Give (1962)
Five Golden Hours (Feb-1961)
Black Tights (1960)
Party Girl (28-Oct-1958) · Vicki Gaye
Twilight for the Gods (6-Aug-1958)
Silk Stockings (18-Jul-1957) · Ninotchka
Meet Me in Las Vegas (9-Mar-1956) · Maria Corvier
It’s Always Fair Weather (1-Sep-1955) · Jackie Leighton
Deep in My Heart (9-Dec-1954) · Dancer
Brigadoon (8-Sep-1954) · Fiona Campbell
The Band Wagon (7-Aug-1953) · Gabrielle Gerard
Sombrero (22-Apr-1953)
The Wild North (10-May-1952) · Indian Girl
Singin’ in the Rain (27-Mar-1952) · Dancer
Mark of the Renegade (2-Aug-1951)
Tension (11-Jan-1950) · Mary Chandler
East Side, West Side (22-Dec-1949) · Rosa Senta
Words and Music (9-Dec-1948) · Margo Grant
The Kissing Bandit (18-Nov-1948) · Dancer
On an Island with You (3-May-1948) · Yvonne Torro
The Unfinished Dance (19-Sep-1947) · Mlle. Ariane Bouchet
Fiesta (12-Jun-1947) · Conchita
Till the Clouds Roll By (5-Dec-1946) · Dancer
Three Wise Fools (26-Sep-1946)
Ziegfeld Follies (8-Apr-1946) · Ballet Dancer
The Harvey Girls (18-Jan-1946) · Deborah

Source: Cyd Charisse

Source: Cyd Charisse – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Today is the 89th birthday of the photographer Bill Cunningham. He photographed street style for decades, so long he became a celebrity himself. Watch his documentary, you will fall in love with him and understand fashion even more. The world is a better place because he is in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Bill Cunningham
OCCUPATION: Photographer
BIRTH DATE: March 13, 1929
DEATH DATE: June 25, 2016
EDUCATION: Harvard University
PLACE OF BIRTH: Boston, MA
PLACE OF DEATH: New York City, NY
FRENCH LEGION OF HONOR 2008
CARNEGIE HALL MEDAL OF EXCELLENCE 2012

BEST KNOWN FOR: William John “Bill” Cunningham Jr. was an American fashion photographer for The New York Times, known for his candid and street photography.

William John Cunningham Jr. was born into an Irish Catholic family and raised in Boston. He never lost his Boston accent. He had two sisters and an older brother. His parents were religious and used corporal punishment. He had his first exposure to the fashion world as a stockboy in Bonwit Teller’s Boston Store. He later said his interest in fashion began in church: “I could never concentrate on Sunday church services because I’d be concentrating on women’s hats.” After attending Harvard University on scholarship for two months, he dropped out in 1948 and moved to New York City at the age of 19, where he worked again at Bonwit Teller, this time in the advertising department. Not long after, he quit his job and struck out on his own, making hats under the name “William J”. He was drafted during the Korean War and was stationed in France, where he had his first exposure to French fashion. After serving a tour in the U.S. Army, he returned to New York in 1953 and his work as a milliner. In 1958, a New York Times critic wrote that he had “cornered the face-framing market with some of the most extraordinarily pretty cocktail hats ever imagined.” He also worked for Chez Ninon, a couture salon that sold copies of designs by Chanel, Givenchy, and Dior. His clients in the 1950s included Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, and future First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier. Encouraged by his clients, he started writing, first for Women’s Wear Daily and then for the Chicago Tribune. He closed his hat shop in 1962. Following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy sent Cunningham a red Balenciaga suit she had bought at Chez Ninon. He dyed it black and she wore it to the funeral.

The wider world perceives fashion as frivolity that should be done away with. The point is that fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life. I don’t think you can do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization.

Cunningham contributed significantly to fashion journalism, introducing American audiences to Azzedine Alaïa and Jean Paul Gaultier. While working at Women’s Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune, he began taking candid photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. He was a self-taught photographer. He took one such photograph of Greta Garbo, though he later said he had not recognized her while photographing her nutria coat: “I thought: ‘Look at the cut of that shoulder. It’s so beautiful.’ All I had noticed was the coat, and the shoulder.” He then published a group of impromptu pictures in the New York Times in December 1978, which soon became the regular series On the Street. His editor at the New York Times, Arthur Gelb, called these photographs “a turning point for the Times, because it was the first time the paper had run pictures of well-known people without getting their permission.” He nevertheless joked about his role at the paper: “I’m just the fluff. I fill around the ads, if we have any.” He pioneered the paper’s coverage of the gay community, photographing a fundraising event in the Fire Island Pines in 1979 letting the perceptive reader interpret his photos without verbal clues. By the 1990s, he integrated AIDS benefits, pride parades, and Wigstock into his coverage.

Cunningham’s most notable columns in the Times, On the Street and Evening Hours ran in the paper from February 26, 1989 until shortly before his death in 2016. For On the Street, Cunningham photographed people and the passing scene in the streets of Manhattan, often at the corner Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, which the New York Times called Cunningham’s “main perch”. As he worked, his focus was on clothing as personal expression. He did not photograph people in the manner of paparazzi, preferring genuine personal style to celebrity. He once explained why he was not joining a group of photographers who swarmed around Catherine Deneuve: “But she isn’t wearing anything interesting.” Late in life he explained: “I am not fond of photographing women who borrow dresses. I prefer parties where women spend their own money and wear their own dresses…. When you spend your own money, you make a different choice.” Instead, wrote Hilton Als in The New Yorker, “He loved ‘the kids,’ he said, who wore their souls on sleeves he had never seen before, or in quite that way.” He was uninterested in those who showcased clothing they had not chosen themselves, which they modeled on the red carpet at celebrity events. Most of his pictures, he said, were never published. His fashion philosophy was populist and democratic:

Fashion is as vital and as interesting today as ever. I know what people with a more formal attitude mean when they say they’re horrified by what they see on the street. But fashion is doing its job. It’s mirroring exactly our times.

He wrote fashion criticism and published photo essays in Details, beginning with six pages in its first issue in March 1985 and sometimes filling forty pages. He was part owner of the magazine for a time as well. His work there included an illustrated essay that showed similarities between the work of Isaac Mizrahi and earlier Geoffrey Beene designs, which Mizrahi called “unbelievably unfair and arbitrary”. In an essay in Details in 1989, he was the first to apply the word “deconstructionism” to fashion. Designer Oscar de la Renta said: “More than anyone else in the city, he has the whole visual history of the last 40 or 50 years of New York. It’s the total scope of fashion in the life of New York.” He made a career taking unexpected photographs of everyday people, socialites and fashion personalities, many of whom valued his company. According to David Rockefeller, Brooke Astor asked that Cunningham attend her 100th birthday party, the only member of the media invited.

For eight years beginning in 1968, Cunningham built a collection of vintage fashions and photographed Editta Sherman in vintage costumes using significant Manhattan buildings of the same period as the backdrop. Years later he explained that “We would collect all these wonderful dresses in thrift shops and at street fairs. There is a picture of two 1860 taffeta dresses, pre–Civil War–we paid $20 apiece. No one wanted this stuff. A Courrèges I think was $2. The kids were into mixing up hippie stuff, and I was just crazed for all the high fashion.” The project grew to 1,800 locations and 500 outfits. In 1978, he published Facades, a collection of 128 of these photographs.

I go out every day. When I get depressed at the office, I go out, and as soon as I’m on the street and see people, I feel better. But I never go out with a preconceived idea. I let the street speak to me.

A selection of photos from Cunningham’s Facades Project series was shown in 1977 exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The Facades series received a full exhibition at the New-York Historical Society in 2014. The Society also holds 91 silver gelatin silver prints from the Facades series, donated by Cunningham, in their permanent collection. In 2016, the Savannah College of Art and Design FASH Museum of Fashion + Film presented “Grand Divertissement à Versailles, Vintage Photographs by Bill Cunningham,” an exhibition of Cunningham’s images of the 1973 Battle of Versailles fashion show.

All the people who tell the truth are in the last rows.

In 1983 the Council of Fashion Designers of America named Cunningham the outstanding photographer of the year. In 2008 he was awarded the Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. As he accepted the award at a Paris ceremony, he photographed the audience and then told them: “It’s as true today as it ever was: he who seeks beauty will find it.” In 2009, he was named a “living landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. In 2012 he received the Carnegie Hall Medal of Excellence. The invitations to the award ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria read “Come Dressed for Bill”.

His personal philosophy was: “You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.” He sometimes said it another way: “Money is the cheapest thing. Liberty is the most expensive.” He declined all gifts from those he photographed, even offers of food and drink at gala parties. He said: “I just try to play a straight game, and in New York that’s very… almost impossible. To be honest and straight in New York, that’s like Don Quixote fighting windmills.” Though he contributed to the New York Times regularly beginning in the 1970s, he did not become an employee until 1994, when he decided he needed to have health insurance coverage after being hit by a truck while biking. Most of his pictures were never sold or published. He said: “I’m really doing this for myself. I’m stealing people’s shadows, so I don’t feel as guilty when I don’t sell them.”

He cultivated his own fashion signature, dressing in a uniform of black sneakers and a blue work man’s jacket, his only accessory a camera. He travelled Manhattan by bicycle, repeatedly replacing those that were stolen or damaged in accidents. He praised the city’s bike sharing program when it launched in 2013: “There are bikes everywhere and it’s perfect for the New Yorkers who have always been totally impatient. What I love, is to see them all on wheels, on their way to work in the morning in their business suits, the women in their office clothes … It has a very humorous and a very practical effect for New Yorkers … I mean, it’s wonderful.” After breaking a kneecap in a biking accident in 2015, he wore a cast and used a cane to cover a Mostly Mozart Festival gala.

In 2010, filmmaker Richard Press and writer Philip Gefter of The New York Times produced Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary about Cunningham. The film was released on March 16, 2011. It shows Cunningham traveling through Manhattan by bicycle and living in a tiny apartment in the Carnegie Hall building. The apartment has no closet, kitchen, or private bathroom, and is filled with filing cabinets and boxes of his photographs. The documentary also details his philosophy on fashion, art, and photography, and observes his interactions with his subjects while taking photos.[

Cunningham was featured on BBC Two’s The Culture Show in March 2012.

Cunningham died age 87 in New York City on June 25, 2016, after being hospitalized for a stroke. His death was widely reported in both the fashion and the general press.

Following his death, the Bergdorf Goodman department store created a display in its window memorializing Cunningham. Thousands signed an online petition requesting that the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th Street in New York City be renamed “Bill Cunningham Corner”.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Bill Cunningham New York (24-Mar-2010) · Himself

Source: Bill Cunningham’s Best Quotes On Style : Harper’s BAZAAR

Source: Bill Cunningham

Source: Bill Cunningham (American photographer) – Wikipedia

Source: Zeitgeist Films :: Bill Cunningham New York :: a film by Richard Press

Source: Bill Cunningham Takes to the Streets

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Today is the 89th birthday of Audrey Hepburn.  Have you seen Charade, How to Steal a Million and Funny Face lately? Then watch Wait Until Dark and your mind will be blown. The woman is more than an actor, she makes you care for her well being. You forget that she is playing a character and you simply want to protect her. There is no surprise everyone loves her.  The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Audrey Hepburn
OCCUPATION: Film Actress, Theater Actress, Philanthropist
BIRTH DATE: May 04, 1929
DEATH DATE: January 20, 1993
EDUCATION: Arnhem Conservatory
PLACE OF BIRTH: Brussels, Belgium
PLACE OF DEATH: Tolochenaz, Switzerland
OSCAR: Best Actress 1954 for Roman Holiday
GOLDEN GLOBE: 1954 for Roman Holiday
GOLDEN GLOBE: 1955 World Film Favorite, Female
EMMY: 1993 for Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn
HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME: 1650 Vine St.

BEST KNOWN FOR: Actress Audrey Hepburn, star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, remains one of Hollywood‘s greatest style icons and one of the world’s most successful actresses.

I depend upon Givenchy as American women depend upon their psychiatrist.

Audrey Hepburn was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world’s most famous actresses of all time, remembered as a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century. Redefining glamour with “elfin” features and a gamine waif-like figure that inspired designs by Hubert de Givenchy, she was inducted in the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame, and ranked, by the American Film Institute, as the third greatest female screen legend in the history of American cinema.

Born in Ixelles, a district of Brussels, Hepburn spent her childhood between Belgium, England and the Netherlands, including German-occupied Arnhem during the Second World War. In Arnhem, she studied ballet before moving to London in 1948 where she continued to train in ballet and performed as a chorus girl in various West End musical theatre productions. After appearing in several British films and starring in the 1951 Broadway play Gigi, Hepburn gained instant Hollywood stardom for playing the Academy Award-winning lead role in Roman Holiday (1953). Later performing in Sabrina (1954), The Nun’s Story (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Charade (1963), My Fair Lady (1964) and Wait Until Dark (1967), Hepburn became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age who received Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and accrued a Tony Award for her theatrical performance in the 1954 Broadway play Ondine. Hepburn remains one of few entertainers who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards.

Although she appeared in fewer films as her life went on, Hepburn devoted much of her later life to UNICEF. Her war-time struggles inspired her passion for humanitarian work and, although Hepburn had contributed to the organisation since the 1950s, she worked in some of the most profoundly disadvantaged communities of Africa, South America and Asia in the late eighties and early nineties. In 1992, Hepburn was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador but died of appendiceal cancer at her home in Switzerland, aged 63, in 1993.

Personal Quotes:

I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.

My look is attainable. Women can look like Audrey Hepburn by flipping out their hair, buying the large sunglasses, and the little sleeveless dresses.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

Only the absolutely determined people succeed.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can’t take it all in at once.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Always (22-Dec-1989) · Hap
Love Among Thieves (23-Feb-1987)
They All Laughed (14-Aug-1981)
Bloodline (29-Jun-1979)
Robin and Marian (11-Mar-1976) · Maid Marian
Wait Until Dark (26-Oct-1967) · Susy Hendrix
Two for the Road (27-Apr-1967)
How to Steal a Million (13-Jul-1966) · Nicole
My Fair Lady (21-Oct-1964) · Eliza
Paris When It Sizzles (16-Mar-1964)
Charade (5-Dec-1963) · Reggie Lampert
The Children’s Hour (19-Dec-1961) · Karen Wright
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (5-Oct-1961) · Holly Golightly
The Unforgiven (6-Apr-1960)
The Nun’s Story (18-Jun-1959) · Sister Luke
Green Mansions (19-Mar-1959) · Rima
Love in the Afternoon (30-Jun-1957) · Ariane Chavasse
Funny Face (13-Feb-1957)
War and Peace (21-Aug-1956) · Natasha
Sabrina (22-Sep-1954) · Sabrina Fairchild
Roman Holiday (27-Aug-1953) · Princess Anne
Secret People (5-Feb-1952)
Young Wives’ Tale (Nov-1951)
The Lavender Hill Mob (26-Jun-1951) · Chiquita
Laughter in Paradise (Mar-1951)
We Go to Monte Carlo (1951)

Source: Audrey Hepburn

Source: Audrey Hepburn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Audrey Hepburn – Theater Actress, Philanthropist, Film Actress – Biography.com

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Today is the 119th birthday of Fred Astaire.  Naming his best work is pointless, it is all flawless. Naming one of my favorite pieces is easy, I absolutely love the “Clap Your Hands” piece from Funny Face he performs with Kay Thompson (included below).  Absolutely brilliant.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Fred Astaire
OCCUPATION: Dancer
BIRTH DATE: May 10, 1899
DEATH DATE: June 22, 1987
PLACE OF BIRTH: Omaha, Nebraska
PLACE OF DEATH: Los Angeles, California
OSCAR: (honorary) 1950
GOLDEN GLOBE: 1951 for Three Little Words
GOLDEN GLOBE: 1975 for The Towering Inferno
EMMY: 1978 for A Family Upside Down
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: 1981
KENNEDY CENTER HONOR: 1978
HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME: 6756 Hollywood Blvd. (motion pictures)

BEST KNOWN FOR: Fred Astaire was an American dancer of stage and film who is best known for a number of successful musical comedy films in which he starred with Ginger Rogers.

Light on his feet, Fred Astaire revolutionized the movie musical with his elegant and seemingly effortless dance style. He may have made dancing look easy, but he was a well-known perfectionist, and his work was the product of endless hours of practice.

Astaire started performing as a child, partnering up with his older sister Adele. The two toured the vaudeville circuit before making it to Broadway in 1917. Among their many productions the brother-sister team starred in the 1927 George and Ira Gershwin musical Funny Face. For all his early success, though, career in the movies alluded Astaire. He had done a screen test, but he failed to attract any interest. A studio executive wrote at the time, “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Slightly balding. Can dance a little.”

In 1932, Astaire suffered a career setback. His sister Adele retired from the act to marry a British aristocrat. He floundered a bit professionally without his usual partner, but then decided to go to Hollywood to try once more to break into film.

Finally, Astaire landed a small role in 1933’s Dancing Lady with Joan Crawford. The role opened the door to new opportunities, and Astaire signed a contract with RKO Radio Pictures. He was matched up with another Broadway talent, Ginger Rogers, for Flying Down to Rio, also in 1933. Cast as supporting players, their dance number stole the movie. Astaire and Rogers appeared in several more films together, including The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935). The duo became film’s most beloved dance team. Their routines featured a hybrid of styles—borrowing elements from tap, ballroom and even ballet. Katharine Hepburn once described what each of them brought their successful partnership: “Fred gave Ginger class, and Ginger gave Fred sex.”

Off-screen, Astaire was known for his relentless pursuit of perfection. He thought nothing of rehearsing a scene for days, and Rogers eventually tired of the grueling schedule. The pair went their separate ways after 1939’s The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Years later, they reunited once more for 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway.

After the split with Rogers in 1939, Astaire performed with such leading ladies as Rita Hayworth, Cyd Charisse, Judy Garland, Leslie Caron and Audrey Hepburn. Some of his most famous musicals from his later career include Easter Parade with Garland and Funny Face with Hepburn.

As his movie roles tapered off, Astaire worked more in television. He often appeared as himself for special tribute shows. Astaire had a growing interest in dramatic parts, working on such series as Dr. Kildare. He also worked with another legendary dancer, Gene Kelly, on the documentary That’s Entertainment, which explored the golden era of the movie musical.  Around this time, Astaire received his only Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in the 1974 disaster film The Towering Inferno. He also won an Emmy Award for his work on the television special A Family Upside Down in 1978. More accolades soon followed. Astaire received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1981.

A few years later, Astaire was hospitalized for pneumonia. He died on June 22, 1987, in Los Angeles, California. With his passing, Hollywood had lost one of its greatest talents. Former actor and president Ronald Reagan, upon learning the news, called Astaire “an American legend” and “the ultimate dancer.” Ginger Rogers said Astaire “was the best partner anyone could ever have.”

Off-screen, Astaire was more casual than his upper-crust characters. He was devoted to his family. Astaire and his first wife, socialite Phyllis Baker Potter, married in 1933 and had two children together, Fred Jr. and Ava. He also helped raise her son from an earlier union. Fred and Phyllis remained a couple until her death in 1954.

Astaire shocked friends and family when he remarried in 1980. His second wife was Robyn Smith, a famous jockey. Despite a more than 40-year age difference, the pair’s mutual interest in horses and racing turned into romance. After his death in 1987, his widow has been a fierce protector of his name and image. She has filed numerous lawsuits to prevent any unauthorized uses of his likeness or name. In 1997, however, she granted permission for film clips of Fred Astaire to be changed and used for a series of vacuum cleaner commercials.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (25-Sep-1984) · Himself
Ghost Story (15-Dec-1981) · Ricky Hawthorne
The Man in the Santa Claus Suit (23-Dec-1979)
The Purple Taxi (21-May-1977)
The Amazing Dobermans (24-Nov-1976)
That’s Entertainment, Part II (16-May-1976) · Himself
The Towering Inferno (10-Dec-1974) · Harlee Claiborne
That’s Entertainment! (23-May-1974) · Himself
Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (14-Dec-1970) [VOICE]
The Over-the-Hill Gang Rides Again (17-Nov-1970)
Midas Run (7-May-1969)
Finian’s Rainbow (9-Oct-1968) · Finian McLonergan
The Notorious Landlady (13-Apr-1962)
The Pleasure of His Company (1-Jun-1961) · Biddeford Poole
On the Beach (17-Dec-1959)
Silk Stockings (18-Jul-1957) · Steve Canfield
Funny Face (13-Feb-1957)
Daddy Long Legs (5-May-1955) · Jervis Pendleton
The Band Wagon (7-Aug-1953) · Tony Hunter
The Belle of New York (22-Feb-1952) · Charles Hill
Royal Wedding (8-Mar-1951) · Tom Bowen
Let’s Dance (29-Nov-1950) · Donald Elwood
Three Little Words (12-Jul-1950) · Bert Kalmar
The Barkleys of Broadway (4-May-1949) · Josh Barkley
Easter Parade (30-Jun-1948) · Don Hewes
Blue Skies (16-Oct-1946) · Jed Potter
Ziegfeld Follies (8-Apr-1946) · Imposter
Yolanda and the Thief (20-Nov-1945) · Johnny Parkson Riggs
The Sky’s the Limit (13-Jul-1943) · Fred Atwell
You Were Never Lovelier (5-Oct-1942) · Robert Davis
Holiday Inn (4-Aug-1942)
You’ll Never Get Rich (25-Sep-1941) · Robert Curtis
Second Chorus (3-Dec-1940) · Danny O’Neill
Broadway Melody of 1940 (9-Feb-1940) · Johnny Brett
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (29-Mar-1939) · Vernon Castle
Carefree (2-Sep-1938) · Tony Flagg
A Damsel in Distress (19-Nov-1937) · Jerry Halliday
Shall We Dance (7-May-1937) · Petrov
Swing Time (28-Aug-1936) · John Garnett
Follow the Fleet (20-Feb-1936) · Bake Baker
Top Hat (30-Aug-1935) · Jerry Travers
Roberta (8-Mar-1935) · Huck
The Gay Divorcee (12-Oct-1934) · Guy Holden
Flying Down to Rio (22-Dec-1933) · Fred Ayres
Dancing Lady (24-Nov-1933) · Himself

Source: Fred Astaire – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Fred Astaire – Dancer – Biography.com

Source: Fred Astaire – Biography – IMDb

Source: Fred Astaire

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Today is the 121th birthday of the mysterious heiress recluse Hugette Clark.  Everyone loves a recluse, she is no exception. The mystery, the reasons why, the exceptionally endless wealth. It’s a great story. The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Huguette Marcelle Clark
DATE OF BIRTH: June 9, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH: Paris, France
DATE OF DEATH: May 24, 2011
PLACE OF DEATH: New York City, NY

BEST KNOWN FOR: Huguette Marcelle Clark was an heiress and philanthropist, who became well known again late in life as a recluse, living in a hospital for more than 20 years while her mansions remained empty.

The youngest daughter of former United States Senator and industrialist William A. Clark, she lived a reclusive life after 1930 and her activities were virtually unknown to the public. Upon her death in 2011, Clark left behind a vast fortune, most of which was donated to charity. Substantial sums were also left to her longtime nurse, her goddaughter, some employees and her attorney. Her accountant and her attorney are part of a criminal investigation concerning suspicions of mishandling Clark’s assets.

Huguette Clark was born in Paris, France, the second daughter of William A. Clark and his second wife, the former Anna Eugenia La Chapelle (1878–1963). Clark was a former U.S. Senator from Montana and businessman involved in mining and railroads.

In addition to her older sister, Louise Amelia Andrée Clark (1902-1919), she had five half siblings from her father’s first marriage to Catherine Louise Stauffer:

Mary Joaquina Clark (1870–1939; married Everett Mallory Culver, Charles Potter Kling, and Marius de Brabant)

Charles Walker Clark (1871–1933; married Katharine Quin Roberts and Cecelia “Celia” Tobin)

William Andrews Clark, Jr. (1877–1934; married Mabel Foster and Alice McManus)

Francis Paul Clark (1880–1896)

Katherine Louise Clark (1882–unknown; married Dr. Lewis Rutherford Morris)

Following the death of her father in 1925, Clark and her mother moved from a mansion at 962 Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a borough of New York City, New York, to a nearby twelfth-floor apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue. She later purchased the entire eighth floor in the building.

In 1928, she agreed to donate $50,000 (equivalent to $634,981 in 2010 dollars to excavate the salt pond and create an artificial freshwater lake across from Bellosguardo, her 23-acre (93,000 m2) estate on the Pacific Coast in Santa Barbara, California. She stipulated that the facility would be named the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, after her sister, who had died of meningitis.

The daughter of a former staff member described Clark and her mother as not “odd or strange” but rather “quiet, loving, giving ladies”. Over the years, she developed a distrust of outsiders, including her family, because she thought they were after her money. She preferred to conduct all of her conversations in French so that others were unlikely to understand the discussion.

Clark was a musician and an artist who, in 1929, exhibited seven of her paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, located in Washington, D.C. The last known photograph of her was taken in 1930, and she was rarely seen in public following the death of her mother in 1963. She reportedly had a very small group of friends. Her closest friend and former employee, Suzanne Pierre, died of Alzheimer’s disease in February 2011.

On August 18, 1928, in Santa Barbara, Clark married law student William MacDonald Gower, a Princeton University graduate who was a son of one of her father’s business associates, William Bleakly Gower. The couple separated in 1929 and divorced in Reno, Nevada, on August 12, 1930, the bride claiming Gower had deserted her, while the groom claimed the marriage had not been consummated.

In February 2010, Clark became the subject of a series of reports by msnbc.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman, who found that caretakers at her three residences had not seen her in decades, and that her palatial estates in Santa Barbara and New Canaan, Connecticut, had lain empty throughout that time, although the houses and their extensive grounds were meticulously maintained by their staff. Dedman, who is writing a book on the Clark family, determined that she was in the care of a New York City hospital, and that some of her personal possessions had been quietly sold. Possessions sold included a rare 1709 violin called La Pucelle (or The Virgin) made by Antonio Stradivari, and an 1882 Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting entitled In the Roses. Building staff reported that she was frail but not ill when Clark left her Fifth Avenue cooperative apartment in an ambulance in 1988. Initially she took up residence at the Upper East Side’s Mount Sinai Hospital to be more comfortable, but was later transferred to Beth Israel Medical Center.

Clark died at Beth Israel Medical Center, in New York City, two weeks short of her 105th birthday. She had been moved a month earlier to an intensive-care unit and later to a room with hospice care. She had been living at Beth Israel under pseudonyms; the latest was Harriet Chase. The room was guarded and she was cared for by part-time private nurses. Her room on the third floor had a card with the fake room number “1B” with the name “Chase” taped over the actual room number.

Source: Huguette Clark – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Inside Heiress Huguette Clark’s California Mansion, Frozen in Time for 60 Years – NBC News

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Today is the 114th birthday of the photographer Margaret Bourke-White.  I didn’t know a lot about her before I started to research on iconic photographs and the photographers that created them, then I kept seeing her name pop up attached to all these beautiful images.  After reading some of her story, I felt like my arts education was incomplete, not knowing her name and story.  She worked for Life magazine during the period that it’s most beautiful images were being printed.  The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Margaret Bourke-White
DATE OF BIRTH: June 14, 1904, The Bronx, New York City, NY
DATE OF DEATH: August 27, 1971, Stamford, CT
BOOKS: Portrait of Myself, Eyes on Russia, Portrat of Myself
EDUCATION: University of Michigan, Columbia University, Cornell University

BEST KNOWN FOR: The first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry, the first American female war photojournalist, and the first female photographer for Henry Luce’s Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover.

American photographer known for her extensive contributions to photojournalism, particularly for her Life magazine work. She is recognized as having been the first female documentary photographer to be accredited by and work with the U.S armed forces.

Margaret White was the daughter of an engineer-designer in the printing industry. She attended Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), and Cornell University. During that period she took up photography, first as a hobby and then, after leaving Cornell and moving to New York City, on a professional freelance basis. She combined her own last name with her mother’s maiden name (Bourke) to create her hyphenated professional name. Beginning her career in 1927 as an industrial and architectural photographer, she soon gained a reputation for originality, and in 1929 the publisher Henry Luce hired her for his new Fortune magazine. In 1930 Fortune sent Bourke-White to photograph the Krupp Iron Works in Germany, and she continued on her own to photograph the First Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union. She became one of the first four staff photographers for Life magazine when it began publication in 1936, and her series of photographs of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam was featured on the cover and used in the feature story of the first issue.

Throughout the 1930s Bourke-White went on assignments to create photo-essays in Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as the Dust Bowl in the American Midwest. Those experiences allowed her to refine the dramatic style she had used in industrial and architectural subjects. Those projects also introduced people and social issues as subject matter into her oeuvre, and she developed a compassionate humanitarian approach to such photos. In 1935 Bourke-White met the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell, to whom she was married from 1939 to 1942. The couple collaborated on three illustrated books: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), about Southern sharecroppers; North of the Danube (1939), about life in Czechoslovakia before the Nazi takeover; and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941), about the industrialization of the United States.

Working directly with the U.S. armed forces, Bourke-White covered World War II for Life. While crossing the Atlantic to North Africa, her transport ship was torpedoed and sunk, but Bourke-White survived to cover the bitter daily struggle of the Allied infantrymen in the Italian campaign. She then covered the siege of Moscow, which she wrote about in her book Shooting the Russian War (1942). Toward the end of the war, she crossed the Rhine River into Germany with General George Patton’s Third Army troops. Her photographs of the emaciated inmates of concentration camps and of the corpses in gas chambers stunned the world.

After World War II Bourke-White traveled to India to photograph Mohandas Gandhi and record the mass migration caused by the division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. During the Korean War she worked as a war correspondent and traveled with South Korean troops.

Stricken with Parkinson disease in 1952, Bourke-White continued to photograph and write and published several books on her work as well as her autobiography, Portrait of Myself (1963). She retired from Life magazine in 1969.

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Today is the 208th birthday of the man who created The Greatest Show on Earth: P.T. Barnum. The man had hustle. He has this phrase he would use to describe his pranks and hoaxes, he would call them humbugs. Meaning, people like to be frightened if they know deep down they are not in danger. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: P.T. Barnum
BIRTH DATE: July 5, 1810
DEATH DATE: April 7, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH: Bethel, Connecticut
PLACE OF DEATH: Bridgeport, Connecticut
FULL NAME: Phineas Taylor Barnum

BEST KNOWN FOR: American P.T. Barnum was an immensely successful promoter who founded the circus he coined “The Greatest Show on Earth” in 1871.

P.T. Barnum was born Phineas Taylor Barnum on July 5, 1810, in Bethel, Connecticut. A natural salesman, he was peddling lottery tickets and cherry-rum to soldiers by age 12. Barnum moved to New York City as a young man and tried his hand at a variety of businesses, including newspaper publishing and running a boarding house.

In 1835, P.T. Barnum’s knack for promotion surfaced when he paid $1,000 for an elderly slave named Joice Heth, who claimed to be 161 years old and a former nurse for George Washington. Barnum exhibited her throughout the northeast region, raking in upwards of $1,000 per week.

Barnum bought Scudder’s American Museum in lower Manhattan in December 1841 and reopened it as Barnum’s American Museum, where he displayed the “Feejee Mermaid” and other oddities of dubious authenticity among its 500,000-plus exhibits.

In 1842, Barnum met 4-year-old Charles Sherwood Stratton, who stood 25 inches high and weighed 15 pounds. Sensing another potential windfall, Barnum trained the boy to sing and dance and revealed him to the public as “General Tom Thumb.” The massive popularity of the exhibit led to a traveling tour of Europe, which included an audience with England’s Queen Victoria.

Barnum became famous for championing the weird and wacky, but one of his most successful ventures came with the promotion of Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind. After hearing about her sold-out concerts in Europe, Barnum made “the Swedish Nightingale” an offer of $1,000 per performance for 150 shows in the United States and Canada, a tour which earned him a profit of more than $500,000.

In addition to his show-business career, Barnum sought to transform his adopted hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a thriving metropolis. He went bankrupt after attempting to lure the doomed Jerome Clock Company to Bridgeport, but repaired his financial standing through public-speaking engagements and additional touring with General Tom Thumb, and went on to serve two terms in the Connecticut Legislature and one term as mayor of Bridgeport.

Barnum closed his American Museum for good after it burned down from a fire in 1868, but he recruited many of his old performers and opened P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus in Brooklyn on April 10, 1871. Referring to it as “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Barnum found a permanent home for his extravaganza in 1874 at the New York Hippodrome, later known as Madison Square Garden.

Barnum joined forces with fellow circus managers James Bailey and James Hutchinson in 1881. The following year they introduced “Jumbo,” an enormous 11 1/2-foot, 6-1/2 ton elephant from the Royal Zoological Society in London. As with many of Barnum’s previous exhibits, Jumbo was a hit with audiences until his death in 1885.

In 1887, an aging Barnum agreed to cede everyday control of the circus, which was rebranded Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.

Confined to his Bridgeport home after suffering a stroke in 1890, Barnum died on April 7, 1891. A businessman to the end, he allegedly asked about the previous night’s gate receipts with his final words.

The Barnum & Bailey show was bought by the rival Ringling brothers in 1907, and in 1919 the two were incorporated into the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, The Greatest Show on Earth.

Thanks in part to the continued success of the circus, Barnum is celebrated as a brilliant promoter and a man who transformed the nature of commercial entertainment in the 19th century. He is also remembered for his philanthropic contributions and investments in the city of Bridgeport, where exhibits of his life and the curiosities he brought to the public are featured at the Barnum Museum.

Source: P.T. Barnum – – Biography.com

Source: P. T. Barnum – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: 10 Things You May Not Know About P.T. Barnum – History in the Headlines

It's Words To Live By July on my instagram account! 
I will be posting a quote that I love every day for the month of July. 
@TheRealSPA

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Today is the 107th birthday of the actress and dancer Ginger Rogers. I love Gold Diggers of 1933, The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Roxie Hart, and Harlow to name just a few. She did it backwards and in high heels, for sure and is quoted as saying “The only way to enjoy anything in this life is to earn it first.” Longevity. Reinvention. Hard work. The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Ginger Rogers
OCCUPATION: Theater Actress, Dancer, Film Actress, Television Actress, Classic Pin-Ups
BIRTH DATE: July 16, 1911
DEATH DATE: April 25, 1995
PLACE OF BIRTH: Independence, Missouri
PLACE OF DEATH: Rancho Mirage, California
AKA: Ginger Rogers
ORIGINALLY: Virginia Katherine McMath
OSCAR for Best Actress 1941 for Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman
HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME: 6778 Hollywood Blvd.

BEST KNOWN FOR: Ginger Rogers was a prolific Oscar-winning actress, singer and dancer who was revered for her cinematic footwork with Fred Astaire.

Actress, singer and dancer Ginger Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath on July 16, 1911, in Independence, Missouri, to Lela Owens and William McMath. The couple divorced soon after their daughter’s birth. Virginia eventually received her nickname, “Ginger,” from a cousin who was unable to pronounce her full name; the surname “Rogers” came from her stepfather, John Rogers.

Ginger Rogers performed stage work as a child in Fort Worth, Texas, where her family had relocated, and won a major Charleston contest in which she was awarded her own vaudeville tour. Lela became her manager, and Rogers would later largely credit her mother for her showbiz success. After a short-lived marriage to dancer Jack Culpepper, Rogers eventually made her way to New York City as a solo performer. There she was hired for the Broadway production Top Speed.

Rogers’ initial stage work led to a role in the Paramount film Young Man of Manhattan (1930), and she acted and sang the same year on Broadway in Girl Crazy, co-starring Ethel Merman. Rogers began to do both stage and film work simultaneously, working on Paramount’s movie stages in Queens during the day and performing live at night. She then moved back to Hollywood and starred in several films before landing the memorable part of Anytime Annie in classic movie-musical 42nd Street (1933) and a prominent role in Gold Diggers of 1933 with the tune “We’re in the Money.”

At 22, she was cast in the hit 1933 film Flying Down to Rio with Fred Astaire. Though the two were supporting characters, their dancing chemistry was magnificent and showcased intricate footwork with expert craft. They co-starred over the next few years in eight more films, dancing in notable numbers to songs like “Night and Day” from The Gay Divorcee (1934), “Cheek to Cheek” from Top Hat (1935) and “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” from Follow the Fleet (1936). Though Rogers and Astaire were a winning film combo, with Rogers often embodying the shimmering glamour of the age, the two weren’t close off-screen.

Rogers took on many additional film roles outside of her dancing partnership, including a turn in Stage Door (1937) opposite Katharine Hepburn. Rogers was determined to tackle serious fare, and in 1941 won a lead actress Academy Award for her dramatic title role in the film Kitty Foyle. Afterwards she starred in several films—also becoming the highest-paid woman in America—before reuniting with Astaire for the 1949 hit The Barkleys of Broadway. After a variety of film work in the ’50s, including Monkey Business (1952) with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe, Rogers’ last film was the 1965 biopic Harlow, in which she played the mother of 1930s actress Jean Harlow.

In 1965, Rogers succeeded Carol Channing as the star of Hello, Dolly! on Broadway and played the role for two years, garnering further acclaim. Rogers also went on to star in Mame in London, and during the 1970s made TV appearances and successfully hit the nightclub circuit. Years later, in 1991, she published her autobiography, Ginger: My Story. She died at age 83 in 1995 at her home in Rancho Mirage, California.

Rogers was a devout Christian Scientist and was married five times. She preferred a more quiet life as opposed to partying and was said to be conservative in her politics, though it’s also been argued she was generally following the ideologies of her mother. Yet it is Rogers’ presence on-screen that has most defined her legacy. She appeared in more than 70 films, and has been celebrated by generations of filmgoers as an icon of dance.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (25-Sep-1984) · Herself
Harlow (14-May-1965)
Cinderella (22-Feb-1965)
Quick, Let’s Get Married (1964)
Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (22-Feb-1957)
Teenage Rebel (1-Nov-1956)
The First Traveling Saleslady (Aug-1956) · Miss Rose Gillray
Tight Spot (19-Mar-1955) · Sherry Conley
Black Widow (28-Oct-1954) · Lottie Marin
Twist of Fate (13-Jul-1954) · Johnny Victor
Forever Female (Aug-1953) · Beatrice Page
Monkey Business (5-Sep-1952) · Edwina Fulton
Dreamboat (25-Jul-1952) · Gloria
We’re Not Married! (11-Jul-1952) · Ramona
The Groom Wore Spurs (14-Mar-1951) · A. J. Furnival
Storm Warning (3-Mar-1951) · Marsha Mitchell
Perfect Strangers (11-Mar-1950) · Terry Scott
The Barkleys of Broadway (4-May-1949) · Dinah Barkley
It Had to Be You (22-Oct-1947) · Victoria Stafford
Magnificent Doll (Nov-1946)
Heartbeat (10-May-1946) · Arlette
Weekend at the Waldorf (5-Oct-1945) · Irene Malvern
I’ll Be Seeing You (5-Jan-1945) · Mary Marshall
Lady in the Dark (10-Feb-1944)
Tender Comrade (29-Dec-1943) · Jo Jones
Once Upon a Honeymoon (12-Nov-1942) · Katie O’Hara
The Major and the Minor (16-Sep-1942)
Tales of Manhattan (5-Aug-1942)
Roxie Hart (20-Feb-1942) · Roxie Hart
Tom Dick and Harry (13-Jun-1941) · Janie
Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman (27-Dec-1940) · Kitty Foyle
Lucky Partners (2-Aug-1940) · Jean
Primrose Path (22-Mar-1940) · Ellie May Adams
5th Ave Girl (25-Aug-1939) · Mary Grey
Bachelor Mother (30-Jun-1939) · Polly Parrish
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (29-Mar-1939) · Irene Castle
Carefree (2-Sep-1938) · Amanda Cooper
Having Wonderful Time (1-Jun-1938) · Teddy
Vivacious Lady (13-May-1938) · Francey
Stage Door (8-Oct-1937) · Jean Maitland
Shall We Dance (7-May-1937) · Linda Keene
Swing Time (28-Aug-1936) · Penelope Carroll
Follow the Fleet (20-Feb-1936) · Sherry Martin
In Person (22-Nov-1935)
Top Hat (30-Aug-1935) · Dale Tremont
Star of Midnight (11-Apr-1935) · Donna Mantin
Roberta (8-Mar-1935) · Scharwenka
Romance in Manhattan (11-Jan-1935) · Sylvia Dennis
The Gay Divorcee (12-Oct-1934) · Mimi
Change of Heart (10-May-1934)
Finishing School (4-May-1934)
Upperworld (28-Apr-1934) · Lilly
Twenty Million Sweethearts (27-Apr-1934) · Peggy
Flying Down to Rio (22-Dec-1933) · Honey Hale
Sitting Pretty (24-Nov-1933)
Chance at Heaven (27-Oct-1933) · Marjorie Harris
Rafter Romance (1-Sep-1933) · Mary
A Shriek in the Night (22-Jul-1933)
Professional Sweetheart (9-Jun-1933)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (27-May-1933) · Fay
42nd Street (2-Feb-1933) · Ann
You Said a Mouthful (18-Nov-1932) · Alice Brandon
The Thirteenth Guest (9-Aug-1932)
The Tenderfoot (23-May-1932)
Carnival Boat (1932) · Honey
Suicide Fleet (20-Nov-1931) · Sally
The Tip-Off (16-Oct-1931) · Baby Face
Honor Among Lovers (28-Feb-1931)

Source: Ginger Rogers – Theater Actress, Dancer, Film Actress, Television Actress, Classic Pin-Ups – Biography.com

Source: Ginger Rogers – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Ginger Rogers fly fishing on her ranch in Oregon | BEGUILING HOLLYWOOD

Source: Ginger Rogers

It's Words To Live By July on my instagram account! 
I will be posting a quote that I love every day for the month of July. 
@TheRealSPA

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Today is the 82nd birthday of Yves Saint Laurent. His style and innovation are current and iconic. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Yves Saint Laurent
OCCUPATION: Fashion Designer
BIRTH DATE: August 1, 1936
DEATH DATE: June 1, 2008
PLACE OF BIRTH: Oran, Algeria
PLACE OF DEATH: Paris, France
FULL NAME:  Yves Henri-Donat-Mathieu Saint Laurent

REMAINS: Cremated (ashes scattered)
MILITARY SERVICE: French Army (drafted, 1960)

BEST KNOWN FOR: Yves Saint Laurent was best known as an influential European fashion designer who impacted fashion in the 1960s to the present day.

Yves Henri Donat Matthieu Saint Laurent was born on August 1, 1936, in Oran, Algeria, to Charles and Lucienne Andrée Mathieu-Saint-Laurent. He grew up in a villa by the Mediterranean with his two younger sisters, Michelle and Brigitte. While his family was relatively well off—his father was a lawyer and insurance broker who owned a chain of cinemas—childhood for the future fashion icon was not easy. Saint Laurent was not popular in school, and was often bullied by schoolmates for appearing to be homosexual. As a consequence, Saint Laurent was a nervous child, and sick nearly every day.

He found solace, however, in the world of fashion. He liked to create intricate paper dolls, and by his early teen years he was designing dresses for his mother and sisters. At the age of 17, a whole new world opened up to Saint Laurent when his mother took him to Paris for a meeting she’d arranged with Michael de Brunhoff, the editor of French Vogue.

A year later, Saint Laurent, who had impressed de Brunhoff with his drawings, moved to Paris and enrolled at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, where his designs quickly gained notice. De Brunhoff also introduced Saint Laurent to designer Christian Dior, a giant in the fashion world. “Dior fascinated me,” Saint Laurent later recalled. “I couldn’t speak in front of him. He taught me the basis of my art. Whatever was to happen next, I never forgot the years I spent at his side.” Under Dior’s tutelage, Saint Laurent’s style continued to mature and gain still more notice.

In 1960 Saint Laurent was called back to his home country of Algeria to fight for its independence. He managed to secure an exemption based on health grounds, but when he returned to Paris, Saint Laurent found that his job with Dior had disappeared. The news, at first, was traumatic for the young, fragile designer. Then it became ugly, with Saint Laurent successfully suing his former mentor for breach of contract, and collecting £48,000.

The money and the freedom soon presented Saint Laurent with a unique opportunity. In cooperation with his partner and lover, Pierre Berge, the designer resolved to open his own fashion house. With the rise of pop culture and a general yearning for original, fresh designs, Saint Laurent’s timing couldn’t have been better.

Over the next two decades, Saint Laurent’s designs sat atop the fashion world. Models and actresses gushed over his creations. He outfitted women in blazers and smoking jackets, and introduced attire like the pea coat to the runway. His signature pieces also included the sheer blouse and the jumpsuit.

By the 1980s, Yves Saint Laurent was a true icon. He became the first designer to have a retrospective on his work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Under the direction of Berge, who continued to manage Saint Laurent’s firm even though the two had broken up in 1986, the fashion house flourished as a money making venture.

But Saint Laurent struggled. He became reclusive, and fought addictions to alcohol and cocaine. Some in the fashion world complained that the designer’s work had grown stale.

In the early 1990s, Saint Laurent found firmer footing. His designs were rediscovered by a fashion elite that had grown tired of the grunge movement that dominated the runways. Saint Laurent, too, seemed to have conquered his demons. By the end of the decade, with Saint Laurent slowing down his work pace, he and Berge had sold the company they’d started, netting the two men a fortune.

In January 2002, Saint Laurent participated in his final show and then retired for good in Marrakech. Five years later, Saint Laurent’s imprint and importance on French culture was cemented when he was appointed Grand Officer of the Legion d’honnerur by French President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Yves Saint Laurent passed away in Paris on June 1, 2008 after a brief illness.

Source: Yves Saint Laurent (designer) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Yves Saint Laurent – Fashion Designer – Biography.com

Source: Yves Saint Laurent

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Today is the 115th birthday of the photographer Margaret Bourke-White.  I didn’t know a lot about her before I started to research on iconic photographs and the photographers that created them, then I kept seeing her name pop up attached to all these beautiful images.  After reading some of her story, I felt like my arts education was incomplete, not knowing her name and story.  She worked for Life magazine during the period that it’s most beautiful images were being printed.  The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Margaret Bourke-White
DATE OF BIRTH: June 14, 1904, The Bronx, New York City, NY
DATE OF DEATH: August 27, 1971, Stamford, CT
BOOKS: Portrait of Myself, Eyes on Russia, Portrat of Myself
EDUCATION: University of Michigan, Columbia University, Cornell University

BEST KNOWN FOR: The first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry, the first American female war photojournalist, and the first female photographer for Henry Luce’s Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover.

American photographer known for her extensive contributions to photojournalism, particularly for her Life magazine work. She is recognized as having been the first female documentary photographer to be accredited by and work with the U.S armed forces.

Margaret White was the daughter of an engineer-designer in the printing industry. She attended Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), and Cornell University. During that period she took up photography, first as a hobby and then, after leaving Cornell and moving to New York City, on a professional freelance basis. She combined her own last name with her mother’s maiden name (Bourke) to create her hyphenated professional name. Beginning her career in 1927 as an industrial and architectural photographer, she soon gained a reputation for originality, and in 1929 the publisher Henry Luce hired her for his new Fortune magazine. In 1930 Fortune sent Bourke-White to photograph the Krupp Iron Works in Germany, and she continued on her own to photograph the First Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union. She became one of the first four staff photographers for Life magazine when it began publication in 1936, and her series of photographs of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam was featured on the cover and used in the feature story of the first issue.

Throughout the 1930s Bourke-White went on assignments to create photo-essays in Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as the Dust Bowl in the American Midwest. Those experiences allowed her to refine the dramatic style she had used in industrial and architectural subjects. Those projects also introduced people and social issues as subject matter into her oeuvre, and she developed a compassionate humanitarian approach to such photos. In 1935 Bourke-White met the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell, to whom she was married from 1939 to 1942. The couple collaborated on three illustrated books: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), about Southern sharecroppers; North of the Danube (1939), about life in Czechoslovakia before the Nazi takeover; and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941), about the industrialization of the United States.

Working directly with the U.S. armed forces, Bourke-White covered World War II for Life. While crossing the Atlantic to North Africa, her transport ship was torpedoed and sunk, but Bourke-White survived to cover the bitter daily struggle of the Allied infantrymen in the Italian campaign. She then covered the siege of Moscow, which she wrote about in her book Shooting the Russian War (1942). Toward the end of the war, she crossed the Rhine River into Germany with General George Patton’s Third Army troops. Her photographs of the emaciated inmates of concentration camps and of the corpses in gas chambers stunned the world.

After World War II Bourke-White traveled to India to photograph Mohandas Gandhi and record the mass migration caused by the division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. During the Korean War she worked as a war correspondent and traveled with South Korean troops.

Stricken with Parkinson disease in 1952, Bourke-White continued to photograph and write and published several books on her work as well as her autobiography, Portrait of Myself (1963). She retired from Life magazine in 1969.

Today is the 85th birthday of Yoko Ono.  First, let’s think about how it is strange to attach an age to her, and now let’s talk about that is still creating art and music, like right now.  Her efforts to promote world peace and equality will be her legacy.  The world is very lucky that she is still in it.

NAME: Yoko Ono
OCCUPATION: Artist, Anti-War Activist
BIRTH DATE: February 18, 1933
EDUCATION: Sarah Lawrence College, The Peers School (The Gakushuin School)
PLACE OF BIRTH: Tokyo, Japan

BEST KNOWN FOR: Yoko Ono is a multimedia artist who became known worldwide in the 1960s when she married Beatles front man John Lennon.

Multimedia artist and performer Yoko Ono was born on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Japan, the eldest of three children born to Eisuke and Isoko, a wealthy aristocratic family. Her father, who worked for the Yokohama Specie Bank, was transferred to San Francisco, California, two weeks before she was born. The rest of the family soon followed. Her father was transferred back to Japan in 1937, and she susbequently enrolled at the elite Peers School (formerly known as the Gakushuin School) in Tokyo.

The family moved to New York in 1940, then back to Japan in 1941, when her father was transferred to Hanoi on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Ono remained in Tokyo through World War II, including the great firebombing of 1945. At the age of 18, Ono moved with her parents to Scarsdale, New York. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College, but left to elope with her first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi.

Settling in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Ono developed an interest in art and began writing poetry. Considered too radical by many, her work was not well-received, but she gained recognition after working with American jazz musician/film producer Anthony Cox, who later became her second husband. Cox financed and helped coordinate her “interactive conceptual events” in the early 1960s.

Ono’s work often demands the viewers’ participation and forces them to get involved. Her most famous piece was the “cut piece” staged in 1964, where the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her clothing until she was naked, an abstract commentary on discarding materialism.

Ono first met John Lennon of the English rock band the Beatles on November 9, 1966, when he visited a preview of her exhibition at the Indica Gallery in London, England. Lennon was taken with the positive, interactive nature of her work. He especially cited a ladder leading up to a black canvas with a spyglass on a chain, which revealed the word “yes” written on the ceiling. The two began an affair approximately 18 months later. Lennon divorced his first wife, Cynthia (with whom he had a son, Julian, born in 1963), and married Ono on March 20, 1969.

The couple collaborated on art, film and musical projects, and became famous for their series of “conceptual events” to promote world peace, including the “bed-in” held in an Amsterdam hotel room during their honeymoon in 1969.

Ono and Lennon became parents in 1975 with the arrival of their son, Sean. Lennon quit the music business to raise Sean. When he returned to the spotlight in 1980, Lennon was shot by a deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, only a few feet from Ono. Sean Lennon has grown up to a well-known musician in his own right.

Since Lennon’s death, Ono has continued her career, recording albums, performing concert tours and composing two off-Broadway musicals. She exhibited her art internationally, and the first U.S. retrospective of her work opened in New York City in 2002.

Ono has also continued to honor Lennon’s memory with a number of different projects. On October 9, 2002, she inaugurated the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace Prize to commemorate what would have been Lennon’s 62nd birthday. On Lennon’s birthday in 2007, she unveiled the Imagine Peace Tower on Videy, an island in Iceland. This outdoor artwork, created by Ono, represents her and Lennon’s commitment to world peace.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2-Sep-2011) · Herself
Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) (2010) · Herself
The Universe of Keith Haring (Apr-2008) · Herself
The U.S. vs John Lennon (31-Aug-2006) · Herself
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (12-Oct-1996) · Herself
Imagine: John Lennon (7-Oct-1988) · Herself
Dynamite Chicken (20-Jan-1971) · Herself
Let It Be (13-May-1970) · Herself

Author of books:
Grapefruit (1964, non-fiction)
Acorn (2013, non-fiction)

Source: Yoko Ono – Wikipedia

Source: Yoko Ono

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Today is the 91st birthday of the graphic designer and artist Elaine Lustig Cohen. Finding recognition and prominence in the 50s and 60s in a male-dominated business is an accomplishment in itself. Her designs are so very emblematic of the era, you look at them and know exactly when they were created. The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Elaine Lustig Cohen
OCCUPATION: American graphic designer, artist and archivist
BIRTH DATE: March 6, 1927
DEATH DATE: October 4, 2016
PLACE OF BIRTH: Jersey City, New Jersey
PLACE OF DEATH: Manhattan, New York City, NY
REMAINS: Buried, Cimetière de Passy, Paris, France

BEST KNOWN FOR: Elaine Lustig Cohen was an American graphic designer, artist and archivist. She is best known for her work as a graphic designer during the 1950s and 60s, having created over 150 designs for book covers and museum catalogs.

Cohen was born in 1927 in Jersey City, New Jersey to Herman and Elizabeth (née Loeb) Firstenberg. Herman was a Polish immigrant and worked as a plumber. Elizabeth, a Jersey City native, attended high school and secretary school before marrying Cohen’s father. Elizabeth instilled in Cohen from an early age the idea that being a woman was not a limitation and encouraged her to pursue her passions, paying first for drawing classes and eventually for her college education. As a teenager, she was exposed to the contemporary art world through Naomi Savage, a niece of Man Ray, and took frequent trips to New York City to visit galleries and museums, such as Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery and the MoMA.

After finishing high school, Cohen enrolled in the Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane University. Two years later, she transferred to the University of Southern California where she graduated in 1948 with a bachelor of fine arts degree. However, she did not intend to work as a fine artist, recalling that at that age, “the idea of being an artist never even occurred to me, […] Coming from a middle-class Jewish family, I didn’t know what it was to be an artist.”

In 1948 during an opening at the Modern Institute of Art in Los Angeles where she was a summer intern, Cohen met graphic designer Alvin Lustig. He was 12 years her senior, at age 32. The two were married in December 1948 and continued their relationship for seven years, until Alvin’s death in 1955. Alvin was diagnosed with diabetes as a teenager and died from complications of the disease.

Cohen and Lustig moved to New York in 1951 where she worked as his assistant. Lustig never intended to teach her graphic design, insisting that his assistants execute his work instead of creating their own designs. Despite this, carrying out Lustig’s artistic visions and observing his process taught Cohen various graphic design techniques. Shortly after her husband’s death in 1955, she was approached by architect Philip Johnson to complete a commission given to Lustig to create the signage for the Seagram Building. Johnson was so fond of her work on the signage that he later hired her to create catalogs and advertisements for the building’s rental spaces. Around the same time, Arthur Cohen, founder of Meridian Books and a friend of the Lustigs, insisted Elaine create cover art for the publisher’s new line of paperbacks. She and Arthur married in 1956. Of working for Arthur, she said, “Having a husband being your client is pretty easy. You never show them what you’re doing until late at night. They’re exhausted and they say, ‘I like it.'”This intimate working relationship gave her the opportunity to build upon what she observed in Lustig’s studio and create her own style distinct from that of her late husband’s.

When designing book covers and museum catalogs, one of her primary goals was to make sure the image on the cover reflected the voice of the work inside. Her modern approach was an alternative to the literal depiction of a book’s narrative that was more common during this time.

Other prominent clients of Cohen’s during her time as a graphic designer were General Motors, The Jewish Museum, the Museum of Primitive Art, and Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art. She designed catalogs, signage, and other printed materials. She often collaborated with architects to ensure that her designs reflected and enhanced the architecture. She continued her career as a graphic designer until 1969.

Arthur Cohen sold Meridian Books to World Publishing in 1960, and Elaine wished to turn to painting full-time. By the late 1960s, the two both left commercial work in order to focus on their creative pursuits and found themselves in need of additional income. They had a growing collection of early 20th century European avant-garde books, magazines, and periodicals. Arthur noticed they had many duplicates and decided to sell them; within one week, he sold everything from that first group. This experiment evolved into the founding of their rare book shop and gallery Ex Libris in 1973. They were some of the first Americans to sell European avant-garde materials, and found success in being one of the few dealers to meet the needs of this niche market. Their collection included works from various avant-garde movements including Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, and Constructivism. The couple created catalogs for the shop, with Arthur writing the text and Elaine designing the covers. Today these catalogs are considered collectibles. Ex Libris remained their primary source of income until Arthur’s death in 1986. Cohen eventually closed the store in 1998 upon having difficultly both finding materials to sell and making a significant enough profit.

In 1969, Cohen resigned from commercial design work, turning almost exclusively to painting. In the late 1970s, she began experimenting with mixed media, collage, sculpture and printmaking. Like her book cover designs, her work frequently incorporates typography and abstraction. During the latter part of her artistic career Cohen continued to produce works both by hand and digitally using Adobe Illustrator.

In 1995, the Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum hosted an exhibition celebrating Cohen’s career as a graphic designer, which featured over eighty examples of her work. In 2012, the AIGA had an exhibition in the AIGA National Design Center in New York City called, “The Lustigs: A Cover Story”. This was the first retrospective that featured the design work of both Alvin and Elaine together.

In 2011, Cohen received the AIGA medal, which is awarded to “individuals who have set standards of excellence over a lifetime of work or have made individual contributions to innovation within the practice of design.

Source: Pioneering Graphic Designer Elaine Lustig Cohen Dies At 89 | Co.Design | business + design

Source: Elaine Lustig Cohen – Wikipedia

Source: Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927–2016) – artforum.com / news

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