Sep. 5 marks the birthday of Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840), German Romantic painter and epitome of the searcher for the sublime in lone communion between man and nature - God waiting in the wings to strike the artist with divine inspiration…
Here the so-called Tetschen Altar: Cross in the Mountains ,1808
Friedrich’s most referenced painting is The Wanderer Above the Mists, 1817-18
Click through The Wanderer for access to a vast gallery of Friedrich’s work
Jewish-Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, who later became a British subject was born September 5, 1905 (d. 1983). Koestler was proficient in math, philosophy, history and psychology; spoke several languges and wrote major works in 3 of them: Hungarian, German and English…
His 1940 prison novel Darkness at Noon is his best-known work - a critique of Communist ideology and its inhuman consequences. Koestler later created a foundation in Britain to help prisoners create art - click through his portrait to visit…
Some quotes:
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
The most persistent sound which reverberates through men’s history is the beating of war drums
If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out…
The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
True creativity often starts where language ends.
Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Birthday of John Cage (1912 - 1992), perhaps the most influential 20th C. composer…
“Left to itself art would have to be something very simple - it would be sufficient for it to be beautiful. But when it’s useful it should spill out of just being beautiful and move over to other aspects of life so that when we’re not with the art it has nevertheless influenced our actions or our responses.” - John Cage
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Cage is known for avantgarde experiments with music and silence, his most discussed piece being 4’33” - a ‘piano’ piece where he performer does not play the piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, so that the piece consists of whatever sound happens to be produced ambiently in the venue during that time, and nothing else…
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Cage was also a visual artist - here Variations III, no. 14, 1992.
Sep. 5 is also the birthday of noted actress and thinker, Rachel Welch…
Quotes:
“The mind can also be an erogenous zone.”
“Being a sex symbol was rather like being a convict.”
Buddy Miles - Sep. 5, 1947 - Feb. 26, 2008 - played drums with Hendrix in Band of Gypsys (Hendrix’ first all-black line-up) and Mike Bloomfield’s Electric Flag…
Let’s celebrate the designs of Danish 60s genius, Verner Panton, who passed away 10 years ago today…
Wire Cone Chair, 1958
Flower-pot Table Lamp, 1969
SPO Hanging lamp, 1969
1-2-3 Lounge Chair, 1973
On my cultural studies blog I recently mentioned artist Barbara Bloom’s work Playboy in Braille. Here is the poster for her current exhibition in Berlin…
And, yes, in case you were wondering - there really is a Braille edition of Playboy Magazine, produced free of charge by Library of Congress…
Click through the image to see more of artist Barbara Bloom’s ordinary finds.
Bauhaus! Oscar Schlemmer had his 120th birthday yesterday…
“Paintings are the revelation of the divine through the medium of man … through the language of forms, mystical in origin.”
Click through the image for a nice tribute slideshow.
(via carolynannahall)
Vanity Fair has published 20 or so sheets of notes and letters from Marilyn Monroe to various friends, family members and show-biz connections…
Click through the letter to see the VF slide show.
I found the most interesting portion to be the excerpt posted above - from a letter to Robert Miller, Arthur Miller’s son, in which Marilyn describes meeting Bobby Kennedy and quizzing him on the Civil Rights issue.
From Vanity Fair’s fascinating article about the ‘lost’ files of Marilyn Monroe…
Click through to read…
A photograph by Milton H. Greene taken at his house in 1956. Monroe lived there during the filming of Bus Stop.By Milton H. Greene/© 2008 Joshua Greene/
- note the luminosity of MM in this picture…
A sad collage of some of Marilyn’s prescriptions for drugs and medicine…
Gisèle de Lestrange w. her husband Paul Celan, who cheated on her systematically with Ingeborg Bachmann and twice attempted to murder her in the days of his madness…
Etching by Gisèle de Lastrange…
Austrian philosopher and poet Ingeborg Bachmann, whose emotional life was caught between her ‘safe’ relationship w. Max Frisch and a fatal attraction to Paul Celan…
The person who gave him the most, suffered the most and lost the most was Gisele de Lestrange, Celan’s extraordinary wife, whose distraught correspondence with Bachmann is also documented. Twice Celan tried to kill his wife in his madness; and yet she remained committed to him with her very being, even after his death. Her letters to Bachmann complete the shocking impression which lingers after reading this collection of letters. Although they don’t go into detail, perhaps out of timidity, the publishers talk convincingly about a “symptomatic correspondence”. Indeed, it not only covers the love, friendship and poetic parallels (such as their shared use of “sand” and “hair” as metaphors for death) between this long mythologised poet duo; it is always also about their illnesses. Bachmann’s illness, her overwhelming anxiety, her heavy addiction to tablets and alcohol, which also led to long stays in clinics, had not yet surfaced at the time when she was exchanging letters with Celan - it may well have been triggered by her separation from Max Frisch in 1962.
Elsa Triolet, Robert Delaunay, Claire & Yvan Goll, Valentine Khodassevitch, Maiakowski - photo from the happier days of early surrealism, before Breton accused Goll in the 1st Surrealist Manifesto (1924) of traditionalism and too direct an adherence to Apollinaire’s ideas. (Apparently Goll and Breton even had a little fist fight at a dance performance)
Many years later Paul Celan ran afoul of Claire Goll who accused him of systematic plagiarism of her late husband Yvan Goll’s (d. from leukemia, 1950) work. This put additional strain on Celan’s fragile mind and was instrumental in driving him to suicide in 1970…
Ina Hartwig:
“But Celan is utterly defenceless against the attacks of his critics and at the same time, hugely demanding of his friends - cumulating in the Goll affair. Yet even in its darkest hour, Celan undoubtedly received support from Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz and others. They published a letter to the “Neue Rundschau” in response to the untenable charges of plagiarism which Claire Goll, herself of Jewish origin, maliciously put about in the world, saying that Celan had helped himself poetically to the work of her deceased husband, Ivan Goll. For Celan, this was a traumatic compounding of his persecution complex.”
