*Richard Hamilton (February 24, 1922 – September 13, 2011) was an English painter and collage artist.
The White Album: How Richard Hamilton Brought Conceptual Art to the Beatles
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/the-white-album-how-richard-hamilton-brought-conceptual-art-to-the-beatles
In 1941 the National Park Service commissioned noted photographer Ansel Adams to create a photo mural for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. The theme was to be nature as exemplified and protected in the U.S. National Parks. The project was halted because of World War II and never resumed.
The holdings of the National Archives Still Picture Branch include 226 photographs taken for this project, most of them signed and captioned by Adams.
Since today is the birthday of Louis Comfort Tiffany, I thought it might be interesting to have a look at some of the magnificent examples of Tiffany design with which Baltimore has been favored.
Louis Comfort Tiffany’s career lasted from the 1870s through the 1920s. He was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany who founded Tiffany & Company, but chose not to join the family business, instead embarking on a career as a painter. Although he never stopped painting, Tiffany began in the late 1870s to concentrate on the decorative arts for which we remember him today. He and his studios worked in a vast array of mediums, including stained-glass windows, glass mosaics, lamps, ceramics, enamelwork, and jewelry.
Tiffany was appointed the first design director of Tiffany & Co. upon his father’s death in 1902. He also continued his association with Tiffany Studios, which did not cease operations until his own death in 1933.
http://www.firstunitarian.net/about-us/history/our-buildings/
The First Unitarian Church of Baltimore has one of the only three versions of this particular Tiffany glass mosaic design for the Last Supper known to exist. It was installed in 1897 and measures 18′ wide x 9′ tall. The designer was Frederick Wilson who worked for the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company.
http://www.browndowntown.org/index.php?s=tiffanywindows
Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church was dedicated in 1870; when it was enlarged in 1905 the church commissioned Tiffany Studios in New York City to create its stained glass windows. There are 11 documented Tiffany windows, including two transept windows which measure 40′ high by 16′ wide and dominate the interior.
http://www.stmarksbaltimore.org/st-marks-architecture.html
St. Mark’s Lutheran Church boasts a complete interior created by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The building was opened in 1898 and among its treasures are mosaics, lamps, and stained-glass windows. It is one of the few intact Tiffany-designed interiors left in the world.
I’ve never given any thought to who might have designed and/or illustrated Tarot Cards, I suppose because I figured they were something that evolved over time and were already established by the time card/game companies began printing them. The popular version that I am familiar with turns out to have been illustrated by one Pamela Colman Smith, an illustrator who attended (but did not finish) Pratt.
Pamela Colman Smith (16 February 1878 – 18 September 1951), also nicknamed Pixie, was an artist, illustrator, and writer. She is best known for designing the Waite-Smith deck of divinatory tarot cards (also called the Rider-Waite or the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) for Arthur Edward Waite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Colman_Smith
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the Yale University Library:
https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog?search_field=all_fields&q=Pamela%20Colman%20Smith
Armand Guillaumin (born February 16, 1841, Paris, France – died June 26, 1927, Paris) was a French landscape painter and lithographer who was a member of the Impressionist group.
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Armand-Guillaumin
“Put me down with people, and it’s just overwhelming,” Bubley exclaimed in an interview. Like most great photojournalists, she found her art in everyday life, and she successfully balanced her artistic ambitions with the demands of commercial publishing. Edward Steichen, curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art and the era’s arbiter of taste, was a great supporter of Bubley, whose work embodied his aesthetic ideal that photography “explain man to man and each to himself.” She was shown in several group shows at the Museum of Modern Art and was given a one-person show at the Limelight, Helen Gee’s legendary coffee house and the only gallery specializing in photography in New York during the 1950s. Bubley worked primarily for the printed page, however, and like her colleagues, can be only partially understood in the context of today’s gallery-oriented photography world, in which photographs are shown as isolated works of art.
FROM http://www.estherbubley.com/bio_frame_set.htm
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/womphotoj/bubleyintro.html
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0012.html
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/tender-moments-in-the-maelstrom-of-war/
The painting endures, Biel concludes, because it is both itself and a parody of itself. Its meaning has more to do with the viewer’s perception than Wood’s intention. In this, Biel is identifying something common to all visual material. Paintings (like films) never change, but they are subject to differing responses and interpretations as times change. Those that survive cultural, aesthetic and historical shifts share the characteristics that can be seen in ”American Gothic.” It’s simple — two people and a house — and easily remembered. It’s ambiguous and thus can evoke the ambivalent. Wood’s choice of clothing, hairstyle, color and sober posture denies specifics, yet suggests a time, a place and an attitude. It opens the door to popularity (anyone can enjoy it for any reason); argument (does it criticize Middle America or affirm its values?); hatred (it’s an ugly cliché and she’s got rickrack on her dress); parody (the Barbie and Ken or Mickey and Minnie Mouse versions); rebellion (Gordon Parks’s photograph of a black cleaning woman uses the pose to remind us of its basic whiteness); commerce (Paul Newman and his daughter posing on their organic snack packages); politics (representations of a long line of American presidents and their first ladies); and endless pop cultural references (the small-town tableau of ”The Music Man” or the credits for ”Green Acres”)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/books/review/10BASSING.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[Daumier died on February 10, 1879]
Reconstructed skeletons of dinosaurs and life-size models of how they may once have appeared are now commonplace. But until the British artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created such things in the second half of the nineteenth century, dinosaurs and their kin were poorly understood and of little interest to anyone but a handful of professional paleontologists. Hawkins was responsible for designing public displays both in Great Britain and in the United States depicting prehistoric life…The beginnings of Hawkins’s lasting influence in paleontology can be traced to September 1852, when he earned an extraordinary commission: to fashion a group of life-size sculptures of “antediluvian monsters” for London’s Crystal Palace.
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/master.html?http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/1208/1208_feature.html
In order to refute the nascent stirrings of evolutionary theory, Owens pressed Hawkins to transform the iguanodon from the huge, low-to-the-ground lizard that scientists had guessed at since its discovery nearly twenty years earlier into a majestic quadruped that walked rather than slithered, built like a grotesquely oversized dog or pig.
…
Mistakes of that sort abounded in Hawkins’s models, driven in most cases less by ideology than by understandable lack of knowledge. As any contemporary visitor to Dinosaur Court will instantly grasp, these dinosaurs are … off. Awkwardly, humorously so.
http://editions.nymoon.com/post/22591159984/wrongosaurus-dinosaurs-at-the-crystal-palace-by
Following his success with the Crystal Palace Exhibition, Hawkins came to New York City with the intent of recreating on one side of the Atlantic what had been so successful on the other…The plan was to set them up in a “Paleozoic Museum” in Central Park, which was then being landscaped under the direction of Frederick Law Olmstead, an ex-engineer officer in the Union army.
…
However, in 1871, before either the park or the dinosaurs were finished, New York City politics intervened. The corrupt Tammany Hall-Boss Tweed machine took control of city politics, and Hawkins and his dinosaurs were out.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/geology/chamber/hawkins.html
The Central Park Conservancy’s historian, Sara Cedar Miller, told us this morning: “The dinosaur models were made of concrete and metal so their ‘bones’ would basically be unidentifiable if found. The remains were thrown into the Pond, not under sod…and the Pond has been dredged for restoration restored many times and it is quite unlikely that anything would be there now.”
http://gothamist.com/2014/09/23/no_there_are_no_dinosaurs_buried_in.php
The link below leads to a collection of images from an album of manuscripts, clippings, and images assembled over time by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins: Collection 803. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins Album. Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. http://www.ansp.org/research/library/archives/0800-0899/hawkins803/
“Iconic images of Dr. King from the Smithsonian collection”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/martin-luther-king-jr-iconic-photos-180949401/
Photo: National Portrait Gallery
