Ordinary finds

Elena Cornaro Piscopia (June 5, 1646 – 1684) was a Venetian mathematician of noble descent, and the first woman ever to receive a doctor of philosophy degree. The degree had been given to male scholars since 1150…

During her doctoral examination Lady Elena spoke for an hour in classical Latin, explaining difficult passages selected at random from the works of Aristotle. Elena had studied Latin and Greek since the age of seven, and in addition to her native Italian she also mastered Hebrew, Spanish, French and Arabic, earning the title of “Oraculum Septilingue”.

Ritratto di Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, Ignoto (sec. XVIII?), Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano.

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 1950 (TB)), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author. His work is marked by a profound consciousness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.

Considered “perhaps the 20th century’s best chronicler of English culture,” he wrote works in many different genres including novels, essays, polemic journalism, literary reviews, and poetry. His most famous works are the satirical novel Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

While I enjoy both his allegorical and anti-totalitarian novels, I think one should also read Homage to Catalonia which explains Orwell’s hatred of Soviet style Communism, as well as his anti-fascism; and Down and Out in Paris and London, which makes it clear why one must sympathize with the down-trodden working class…

Ingeborg Bachmann (June 25, 1926 – 1973) was an Austrian poet and author. While living in Austria she was a member of the legendary literary circle known as Gruppe 47, whose members also included Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll, Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Günter Grass.

“In 1953, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she spent the large part of the following years working on poems, essays, opera libretti and short stories which soon brought with them international fame and numerous awards. Her relationship with Max Frisch, the Swiss author who was 15 years older than her, took her to Switzerland and bestowed the role of the second protagonist in Frisch’s Mein Name sei Gantenbein upon her.” (Wiki)

Bachmann died a sad death in Rome as a result of a fire in her apartment, possibly exacerbated by her enforced drug withdrawal while in hospital with injuries incurred during the fire…

In The Storm of Roses

Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder
of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes,
rumbling at our heels.

See also on OF: 1 2 3 4

Yann Martel (b. June 25, 1963) is a Spanish-Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2001).

After Martel had his huge success with Life of Pi, he seems to have suffered massive writer’s block, although new novels are announced as forthcoming this year or next. Accusations of plagiarism have not exactly helped…

Eddie Floyd is a soul/R&B singer and songwriter, best known for his work on the Stax record label in the 1960s and 1970s and the song Knock on Wood. Floyd is 72 today!

Above: Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper

Below: 1967 video of Knock on Wood, live during a Stax tour of Britain

James Meredith (b. June 25, 1933) broke the university colour barrier in Mississippi in 1962 when he enrolled as the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi, an event that was a flash point in the American civil rights movement. Later Meredith protested against racism and in 1966 led a civil rights march, the March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi, during which he was wounded by sniper…

In later years, Meredith became a Republican politician and did all he could to distance himself from the radical Civil Rights activities of his youth and his associates at the time…. 

Photo: Darrell Blakely

More from the Civil Rights Era:

Staff at the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office have discovered arrest logs and photographs from the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56) and the Freedom Rides (1961). Selected pages from those volumes have been scanned by ADAH staff and are available for perusal here…

Above: The 1961 mugshot of Ralph Abernathy

Antoni Gaudi (June 25, 1852 - 1926) was a Spanish Catalan architect who belonged to the Modernist style (Art Nouveau) movement and was famous for his unique and highly individualistic designs. Major works include the (unfinished) Sagrada Familia in Barcalona and the wonderful roofs of Casa Milà, better known as La Pedrera - also in the Catalan metropolis…

Vincent Pepi (b. June 25, 1926): #504 Abstraction, 1950 - gouache and watercolor on paper (Smithsonian)

“Vincent Pepi is an abstract expressionist painter associated with the New York School. His contribution to American art includes some of the foremost examples of action painting, produced consistently over the course of the second half of the 20th century. His art parallels the works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Conrad Marca-Relli and others. He adapted the automatic techniques of the Surrealists and transformed it into his own kind of gesture painting.” (Wiki)

Vincent Pepi: Black Abstraction, 1951 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

Benton Spruance (June 25, 1904 - 1967): Memorial, 1951 - color lithograph (Smithsonian)

“A pioneer in color lithography, Benton Spruance spent most of his life in Philadelphia, where he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and became one of the city’s leading artists. In the twenties and thirties Spruance was known for prints that one critic described as his “velvety urban scenes and ‘social conscious’ series,” which chronicled the life of ordinary men and women at work and play. However, Spruance was also a painter and draftsman who during this period took advantage of two Guggenheim fellowships to travel throughout the United States and Europe and sketch landscapes.

In the forties Spruance began producing moody, psychologically charged lithographic portraits of women, followed by mystically tinged work, based on biblical passages, that became increasingly subtle and sculptural in effect. Despite the demand for his work (he produced more than 500 lithographs during his career), Spruance continued to teach. At the time of his death, he was chairman of the art department at Beaver College and had recently retired from the chairmanship of the printmaking department at Philadelphia College of Art.” - National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).

Roderick Mead (June 25, 1900 - 1971): Trojan Horse, ca. 1940s-1950s - color engraving, aquatint and soft ground etching on paper (Smithsonian)

“Mead was born in New Jersey in 1900. He studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts and in New York at the Art Students’ League and the Grand Central School of Art with George Luks. Together with a group of other artists he moved to Majorca in 1931; there, he married New Mexico born Jarvis Kerr. Moving to Paris in 1934, they met Stanley William Hayter and Mead began to work at Atelier 17. 

In 1939, with the onset of World War II, the Meads left for Carlsbad, New Mexico where he spent the rest of his life. He continued to teach, paint and create prints and maintained a close connection with Atelier 17 in New York.” (Source)

Sam Francis (June 25, 1923 - 1994): Blue Balls, 1960 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

“Of the West Coast artists that Martha Jackson brought to New York, certainly the most celebrated and ultimately the most successful was a painter whose reputation was well established in Europe before Americans paid him much heed. Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California, and studied medicine and psychology at the University of California at Berkeley; in 1943 as a pilot for the Army Air Corps he suffered a serious spinal injury. Confined in a hospital for months, immobile except for his head and arms, he abandoned any thought of becoming a doctor and took up painting. In a wheelchair he visited the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and saw El Greco’s St. Peter, of which he recalled, “It knocked me out.… I probably would have died if it had not been for painting.… The picture by El Greco changed my life.” On his release from the hospital he studied painting with David Park, painted his first abstract work in 1947, received his BA and MA in art from Berkeley, and moved to Paris in 1950 where he studied briefly at the Academie Fernand Léger and had a painting in the VI Salon de Mai in Paris. Soon after arriving he established friendships with Al Held, Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, and John Hultberg—future Martha Jackson artists.” - Harry Rand. The Martha Jackson Memorial Collection (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution,1985).

Jack Beal (b. June 25, 1931): Figure in Black Tights, 1967 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

“An Abstract Expressionist when he left the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956, Beal has since become a dedicated realist who sees art as a potentially powerful moral force. He has great regard for Platonic ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness, and admires both the realism of seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the compositional authority of Renaissance art. Since moving to New York in the late 1950s with his wife, painter Sondra Freckelton, Beal has painted still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, although in recent years his most ambitious undertakings have been large-scale allegories and myths. In describing his approach, Beal calls himself a “life painter” and says he is committed to human over aesthetic concerns. Yet his intricate complexes of figures and surface patterns, along with his adroit handling of space, reveal his sophisticated, accomplished sense of composition.” - Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987).

Peter Blake (b. June 25, 1935) is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

During the late 1950s, Blake became one of the best known British pop artists. His paintings from this time included imagery from advertisements, music hall entertainment, and wrestlers, often including collaged elements. Blake was included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and had his first solo exhibition in 1960. It was with the ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition of 1961 where he was exhibited alongside David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj that he was first identified with the emerging British Pop Art movement. Blake won the (1961) John Moores junior award for his work Self Portrait with Badges. He first came to wider public attention when, along with Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, he featured in Ken Russell’s film on pop art, Pop Goes the Easel, which was broadcast on BBC television in 1962. From 1963 Blake was represented by Robert Fraser which placed him at the centre of swinging London and brought him into contact with leading figures of popular culture, including The Beatles. (Wiki)

Above: Self-Portrait with Badges

“People say, “Why do you paint?” and I say, to make magic.” - Peter Blake

Peter Blake:
Marcel Duchamp’s World Tour: He Meets the Spice Girls and Elvis 2000-5
© Peter Blake 2007. All rights reserved, DACS
Courtesy Waddington Galleries, London
Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, London

Margo Humphrey (b. June 15, 1942): The History of Her Life Written across Her Face, 1991 - color lithograph with metallic leaf and chine colle on paper 
(Smithsonian)

“Margo Humphrey studied printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts and received her MFA in printmaking from Stanford University. After her studies, she traveled in Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Africa. She taught art in Benin, Nigeria, and Uganda. A knowledge of various cultures and an interest in storytelling enliven Humphrey’s artwork. She currently teaches art at the University of Maryland.” - National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).

Avery C. Danziger (b. June 25, 1953): Coeur Fidele, “Poupette”, cibachrome print (Smithsonian)

(Artist’s web site)

Abbie Conant, trombone virtuoso (web)

- Robert Frank, Mabou, Nova Scotia 1995 (Source)

Bruce Barone: Tin Pan Alley, NYC (Source)

Rena Effendi: Young woman in a park across from Valiasr Street, Tehran, Iran, May 2008 (Source)