Source: Comic Strip Library – Digital Collection of Classic Comic Strips
December 24: CHRISTMAS EVE
Edward Ruscha: Born December 16, 1937
Stopping off in New York City on his way back [from Europe], he paid a call on Leo Castelli, whose gallery showed Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. No introduction, no calling beforehand—he just walked in with the Paris paintings under his arm. Castelli, all European charm and suavity, said that Ruscha’s work looked interesting, and told him to stay in touch. Ruscha stayed in touch for twelve years, visiting the gallery on his occasional trips to New York, and in 1973 Castelli became his New York dealer. Ruscha never seriously considered moving East. “That was too big a decision, and too big a jump,” he told me. “It just didn’t feel like it was meant to be.” He wanted to live in Los Angeles, and by the time he returned from Europe he knew that the only thing he could possibly be was an artist. “I could see I was just born for the job, born to watch paint dry,” he said.
FROM http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/01/ed-ruschas-l-a
Biography~ http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/edward-ruscha-1882
Where is Rocky II?~ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/documentary-mysterious-ed-ruscha-work-gets-north-american-premiere-at-lacma-962057
Edward Ruscha’s Deadpan Artistry~ http://broadstreetonline.org/2015/01/edward-ruschas-deadpan-artistry/
How Kandinsky helped create abstract art
Lyrical (from Sounds) (1911) by Wassily Kandinsky
Facts within art history aren’t always as solidly verifiable as we would like them to be. Can we say with certainty that Wassily Kandinsky, born on this day, 16 December [4 Dec. Old Style], in 1866, was the first abstract painter?
Read more here: How Kandinsky helped create abstract art | Art | Agenda | Phaidon
Ray Eames: Born December 15, 1912
Ray-Ray was the nickname given to Bernice Alexandra Kaiser by her family. Beyond that, little is known of her childhood in Sacramento, although Ray’s artistic talent was evidently recognized early on. After high school she left California with her widowed mother for New York City, where she studied with the German Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann and exhibited her paintings. After her mother’s death, Ray left New York for further training at the Art Academy in Cranbrook, Michigan, where Charles Eames was one of her teachers and mentors. After divorcing his first wife, Charles married Ray in 1941 in Chicago. The couple left immediately for Southern California, where they opened a design office.
An extraordinary personal and artistic collaboration began with this move, an unusually creative partnership that resulted in innovative designs for furniture, houses, monuments, exhibitions — even toys.
FROM http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/ray-eames/
Eames Foundation~ http://eamesfoundation.org/
Official site of Ray and Charles Eames~ http://www.eamesoffice.com/eames-office/charles-and-ray/
Frank Sinatra: Born December 12, 1915
Francis Albert Sinatra [was born] in Hoboken, New Jersey. Although his mother had hoped that he would be the first person in the family to attend college and was disappointed that he did not finish high school, she encouraged his ambition to be a singer. His father, on the other hand, was opposed and insisted that he should find a job. The young Sinatra worked briefly as a truck driver for a newspaper, a riveter in a Hoboken shipyard, and a fruit hauler. By 1932, he had decided that he wanted to be a professional singer.
FROM http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1803570His break came in 1937, when he and three instrumentalists, billed as the Hoboken Four, won on the Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour. After some touring, the group disbanded. Harry James signed Sinatra to sing with his orchestra, and on July 13, 1939, two weeks after his debut as a big-band vocalist at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore, Sinatra cut his first disc, “From the Bottom of My Heart,” with the orchestra.
FROM https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/an-appreciation-of-frank-sinatra-1915-1998-59176/
James graciously freed Sinatra from his contract when the singer received a more lucrative offer from bandleader Tommy Dorsey in December 1939. By 1942 Sinatra’s fame had eclipsed that of Dorsey, and the singer yearned for a solo career.
FROM https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frank-SinatraBetween 1943 and 1946, Sinatra’s solo career blossomed as the singer charted a slew of hit singles. Sinatra made his movie acting debut in 1943. In 1945, he won a special Academy Award for The House I Live In, a 10-minute short made to promote racial and religious tolerance on the home front. Sinatra’s popularity began to slide in the postwar years (but) in 1953, he made a triumphant comeback, winning a supporting actor Oscar for From Here to Eternity.
FROM https://www.biography.com/people/frank-sinatra-9484810
In the mid-’70s Sinatra’s career slowed down, but in mid-1980, after a five-year recording hiatus, he released Trilogy which included a version of “Theme From New York, New York” that the city fervently adopted. In 1985, he was accorded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Frank Sinatra died of a heart attack on May 14, 1998, in L.A.
FROM https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/an-appreciation-of-frank-sinatra-1915-1998-59176/
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JF Auburtin: Born December 2, 1866
Jean Francis Auburtin was a 19th Century Symbolist painter, an heir of Impressionism, influenced by Japonisme, and sometimes 
referred to as “the Symbolist of the Sea”. Born December 2, 1866, Auburtin was apprenticed early to the painter Louis-Theodore Devilly. He then enrolled at the Alsatian School of Paris in 1875 where he 
met his future wife Marthe Deloy, a sister of one of his classmates. After further education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Auburtin found himself attracted to painting the cliffs and the ever-changing effects of light on the sea and as a result lived in various locations that offered these views. Auburtin mainly painted in gouache and watercolor, depicting the Normandy coastline, the sea, and later in life figures of dancers. At the end of the 
nineteenth century, Auburtin became interested in Japanese art and began a small collection of 
prints, some painted by the famous Japanese painter Hokusaï, which influenced his own work in no small measure. Jean Francis Auburtin rose to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor. From 1904 onwards he lived in Varengeville; when he died in 1930 he was buried in the cliff-top cemetery of Varengeville-sur-Mer, which is also the final resting place of Georges Braque.
“In A First, Spain’s Prado Museum Puts The Spotlight On A Female Artist”
Spain’s national art museum, the Prado, has been around nearly 200 years and has one of the world’s biggest collections of Renaissance and Baroque art.
But only now has it devoted a solo exhibition to a female artist: the 17th century Flemish painter Clara Peeters.
Read more via link below:
In A First, Spain’s Prado Museum Puts The Spotlight On A Female Artist : Parallels : NPR
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre: Born November 18, 1787
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was born near Paris, France in 1787. The illusionistic painter Pierre Prevost asked him to join his team of panorama-painting artists when he was just twenty years old. Daguerre soon after became an assistant stage designer for a theater. He was a gifted illusionist in terms of his ability to design sets that dazzled his audiences. An artist who wanted his work to be as real as possible, Daguerre created amazingly life-like scenes right in the theater. These designs, which were able to simulate the passage of day into night, changes in weather, and even give viewers the feel of motion, Daguerre later coined as “dioramas,” or “dramas of light.” By 1825, Daguerre was a successful creator, proprietor, and promoter of a successful illusionistic theater in Paris that specialized in these dioramas. https://www.fi.edu/history-daguerreotype
Daguerre had been searching since the mid-1820s for a means to capture the fleeting images he saw in his camera obscura, a draftsman’s aid consisting of a wood box with a lens at one end that threw an image onto a frosted sheet of glass at the other. In 1829, he had formed a partnership with Nicéphore Niépce, who had been working on the same problem—how to make a permanent image using light and chemistry—and who had achieved primitive but real results as early as 1826. By the time Niépce died in 1833, the partners had yet to come up with a practical, reliable process.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htmNiépce died in 1833 before practical success was achieved. But Daguerre had learned important things
through the partnership, and by 1837 had worked out a solution to the puzzle. In brief, his method consisted of treating silver-plated copper sheets with iodine to make them sensitive to light, then exposing them in a camera and “developing” the images with warm mercury vapor. On the basis of its novelty, and difference from the pewter-and-resin based systems developed by Niépce, Daguerre claimed the invention as his own by naming it “The Daguerreotype.”
https://www.daguerreiansociety.org/
The Diorama: 19th century entertainment~
Daguerre’s Sole Extant Diorama, Recently Restored~
The Misty Miss Christy 