1.
Arts
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The arts represent an outlet of expression that is usually influenced by culture in society and which in turn helps to change culture. As such, the arts are a manifestation of peoples internal creative impulse. Some art forms combine a visual element with performance or artwork with the written word, from prehistoric cave paintings to modern day films, art serves as a vessel for storytelling and conveying humankinds relationship with its environment. A debate exists in the arts and video game cultures over whether video games can be counted as an art form. In its most basic definition, art is a documented expression of a sentient being through or on an accessible medium so that anyone can view. The act itself of producing an expression can also be referred to as a certain art, or as art in general. If this solidified expression, or the act of producing it, is good or has value depends on those who access and rate it and this public rating is dependent on various subjective factors. Merriam-Webster defines the arts as painting, sculpture, music, theater, literature, etc. considered as a group of activities done by people with skill, and the study and application of the arts to the human environment. In Ancient Greece, all art and craft was referred to by the same word, thus, there was no distinction between the arts. Ancient Greek art brought the veneration of the form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features, in Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths. Eastern art has worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning. A characteristic of this style is that the colour is often defined by an outline. This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet, religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead. The Artes Mechanicae were practised and developed in guild environments, the modern distinction between artistic and non-artistic skills did not develop until the Renaissance. In modern academia, the arts are usually grouped with or as a subset of the humanities, some subjects in the humanities are history, linguistics, literature, theology, philosophy, and/or logic. Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a variety of tools. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax colour pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers
Arts
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Hans Rottenhammer, Allegory of the Arts (second half of the 16th century).
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Arts
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Lawrence Alma-Tadema 's Catullus-at-Lesbia's (1865)
Arts
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The
Mona Lisa is one of the most recognizable artistic paintings in the
Western world.
Arts
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The
Parthenon on top of the
Acropolis,
Athens,
Greece
2.
Washington, D.C.
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Washington, D. C. formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D. C. is the capital of the United States. The signing of the Residence Act on July 16,1790, Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Congress and the District is therefore not a part of any state. The states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, named in honor of President George Washington, the City of Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land ceded by Virginia, in 1871. Washington had an population of 681,170 as of July 2016. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the population to more than one million during the workweek. The Washington metropolitan area, of which the District is a part, has a population of over 6 million, the centers of all three branches of the federal government of the United States are in the District, including the Congress, President, and Supreme Court. Washington is home to national monuments and museums, which are primarily situated on or around the National Mall. The city hosts 176 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of international organizations, trade unions, non-profit organizations, lobbying groups. A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973, However, the Congress maintains supreme authority over the city and may overturn local laws. D. C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, the District receives three electoral votes in presidential elections as permitted by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1961. Various tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Piscataway people inhabited the lands around the Potomac River when Europeans first visited the area in the early 17th century, One group known as the Nacotchtank maintained settlements around the Anacostia River within the present-day District of Columbia. Conflicts with European colonists and neighboring tribes forced the relocation of the Piscataway people, some of whom established a new settlement in 1699 near Point of Rocks, Maryland. 43, published January 23,1788, James Madison argued that the new government would need authority over a national capital to provide for its own maintenance. Five years earlier, a band of unpaid soldiers besieged Congress while its members were meeting in Philadelphia, known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the event emphasized the need for the national government not to rely on any state for its own security. However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital, on July 9,1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River. The exact location was to be selected by President George Washington, formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, the initial shape of the federal district was a square measuring 10 miles on each side, totaling 100 square miles. Two pre-existing settlements were included in the territory, the port of Georgetown, Maryland, founded in 1751, many of the stones are still standing
Washington, D.C.
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Clockwise from top left:
Smithsonian Institution Building,
Rock Creek Park,
National Mall (including the
Lincoln Memorial in the foreground),
Howard Theatre and the
Frederick Douglass National Historic Site
Washington, D.C.
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Map of the District of Columbia in 1835, prior to the
retrocession
Washington, D.C.
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Ford's Theatre in the 19th century, site of the 1865
assassination of
President Lincoln
Washington, D.C.
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Crowds surrounding the
Reflecting Pool during the 1963
March on Washington
3.
National Endowment for the Arts
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The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U. S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the NEA had its offices in Washington, D. C. It was awarded Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre in 1995, in March of 2017, a proposal to eliminate all federal funding for the program was put forward by the Trump administration. The NEA is dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established, bringing the arts to all Americans, and providing leadership in arts education. Between 1965 and 2008, the agency has made in excess of 128,000 grants, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Congress granted the NEA an annual funding of between $160 and $180 million. In 1996, Congress cut the NEA funding to $99, since 1996, the NEA has partially rebounded with a 2015 budget of $146.21 million. For FY2010, the reached the level it was at during the mid-1990s at $167.5 million. The NEA is governed by a Chairman appointed by the President to a four-year term and this body consists of 14 individuals appointed by the President for their expertise and knowledge in the arts, in addition to six ex officio members of Congress who serve in a non-voting capacity. On June 12,2014, Dr. Jane Chu was confirmed as the 11th Chair of the NEA by the Senate, the NEA offers grants in the categories of, 1) Grants for Arts Projects, 2) National Initiatives, and 3) Partnership Agreements. The NEA also grants individual fellowships in literature to creative writers and translators of exceptional talent in the areas of prose, the NEA has partnerships in the areas of state and regional, federal, international activities, and design. The state arts agencies and regional organizations are the NEAs primary partners in serving the American people through the arts. Forty percent of all NEA funding goes to the state arts agencies, the NEA also manages the National Medal of Arts, awarded annually by the President. The NEA is the largest grantmaker to arts organizations in the nation, artist William Powhida has noted that in one single auction, wealthy collectors bought almost a billion dollars in contemporary art at Christies in New York. He further commented, If you had a 2 percent tax just on the auctions in New York you could double the NEA budget in two nights. Upon entering office in 1981, the incoming Ronald Reagan administration intended to push Congress to abolish the NEA completely over a three-year period, another proposal would have halved the arts endowment budget. In 1989, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association held a press conference attacking what he called anti-Christian bigotry, in an exhibition by photographer Andres Serrano. The work at the center of the controversy was Piss Christ, republican Senators Jesse Helms and Al DAmato began to rally against the NEA, and expanded the attack to include other artists. Prominent conservative Christian figures including Pat Robertson of the 700 Club, on June 12,1989, The Corcoran cancelled the Mapplethorpe exhibition, saying that it did not want to adversely affect the NEAs congressional appropriations
National Endowment for the Arts
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National Endowment for the Arts
4.
George W. Bush
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George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009. He was also the 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000 and he is the eldest son of Barbara and George H. W. Bush. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, Bush married Laura Welch in 1977 and ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election and he is the second president to assume the nations highest office after his father, following the lead of John Quincy Adams. He is also a brother of Jeb Bush, a former Governor of Florida who was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 presidential election, the September 11 terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bushs first term as president. Bush responded with what became known as the Bush Doctrine, launching a War on Terror, a military campaign that included the war in Afghanistan in 2001. He also promoted policies on the economy, health care, education, Social Security reform and his tenure included national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, and torture. In the 2004 Presidential race, Bush defeated Democratic Senator John Kerry in another close election. After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the spectrum for his handling of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina. Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections, Bush left office in 2009, returning to Texas where he purchased a home in Crawford. He wrote a memoir, Decision Points and his presidential library was opened in 2013. His presidency has been ranked among the worst in historians polls published in the late 2000s and 2010s. George Walker Bush was born on July 6,1946, at Grace-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, as the first child of George Herbert Walker Bush and his wife, the former Barbara Pierce. He was raised in Midland and Houston, Texas, with four siblings, Jeb, Neil, Marvin, another younger sister, Robin, died from leukemia at the age of three in 1953. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U. S and his father, George H. W. Bush, was Ronald Reagans Vice President from 1981 to 1989 and the 41st U. S. President from 1989 to 1993. Bush has English and some German ancestry, along with more distant Dutch, Welsh, Irish, French, Bush attended public schools in Midland, Texas, until the family moved to Houston after he had completed seventh grade. He then spent two years at The Kinkaid School, a school in Houston. Bush attended high school at Phillips Academy, a school in Andover, Massachusetts
George W. Bush
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George W. Bush
George W. Bush
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Lt. George W. Bush while in the
Texas Air National Guard
George W. Bush
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George W. Bush with his father outside the White House, April 29, 1992
George W. Bush
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Governor Bush (right) with father, former president
George H. W. Bush and wife, Laura, in 1997
5.
United States Congress
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The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States consisting of two chambers, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the Capitol in Washington, D. C, both senators and representatives are chosen through direct election, though vacancies in the Senate may be filled by a gubernatorial appointment. Members are usually affiliated to the Republican Party or to the Democratic Party, Congress has 535 voting members,435 Representatives and 100 Senators. The House of Representatives has six non-voting members in addition to its 435 voting members and these members can, however, sit on congressional committees and introduce legislation. Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the members of the House of Representatives serve two-year terms representing the people of a single constituency, known as a district. Congressional districts are apportioned to states by using the United States Census results. Each state, regardless of population or size, has two senators, currently, there are 100 senators representing the 50 states. Each senator is elected at-large in their state for a term, with terms staggered. The House and Senate are equal partners in the legislative process—legislation cannot be enacted without the consent of both chambers, however, the Constitution grants each chamber some unique powers. The Senate ratifies treaties and approves presidential appointments while the House initiates revenue-raising bills, the House initiates impeachment cases, while the Senate decides impeachment cases. A two-thirds vote of the Senate is required before a person can be forcibly removed from office. The term Congress can also refer to a meeting of the legislature. A Congress covers two years, the current one, the 115th Congress, began on January 3,2017, the Congress starts and ends on the third day of January of every odd-numbered year. Members of the Senate are referred to as senators, members of the House of Representatives are referred to as representatives, congressmen, or congresswomen. One analyst argues that it is not a solely reactive institution but has played a role in shaping government policy and is extraordinarily sensitive to public pressure. Several academics described Congress, Congress reflects us in all our strengths, Congress is the governments most representative body. Congress is essentially charged with reconciling our many points of view on the public policy issues of the day. —Smith, Roberts, and Wielen Congress is constantly changing and is constantly in flux, most incumbents seek re-election, and their historical likelihood of winning subsequent elections exceeds 90 percent
United States Congress
United States Congress
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United States Congress
United States Congress
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In 1868, this committee of representatives prosecuted president
Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial, but the Senate did not convict him.
United States Congress
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George Washington presiding over the signing of the
United States Constitution.
6.
President of the United States
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The President of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president directs the executive branch of the government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. The president is considered to be one of the worlds most powerful political figures, the role includes being the commander-in-chief of the worlds most expensive military with the second largest nuclear arsenal and leading the nation with the largest economy by nominal GDP. The office of President holds significant hard and soft power both in the United States and abroad, Constitution vests the executive power of the United States in the president. The president is empowered to grant federal pardons and reprieves. The president is responsible for dictating the legislative agenda of the party to which the president is a member. The president also directs the foreign and domestic policy of the United States, since the office of President was established in 1789, its power has grown substantially, as has the power of the federal government as a whole. However, nine vice presidents have assumed the presidency without having elected to the office. The Twenty-second Amendment prohibits anyone from being elected president for a third term, in all,44 individuals have served 45 presidencies spanning 57 full four-year terms. On January 20,2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th, in 1776, the Thirteen Colonies, acting through the Second Continental Congress, declared political independence from Great Britain during the American Revolution. The new states, though independent of each other as nation states, desiring to avoid anything that remotely resembled a monarchy, Congress negotiated the Articles of Confederation to establish a weak alliance between the states. Out from under any monarchy, the states assigned some formerly royal prerogatives to Congress, only after all the states agreed to a resolution settling competing western land claims did the Articles take effect on March 1,1781, when Maryland became the final state to ratify them. In 1783, the Treaty of Paris secured independence for each of the former colonies, with peace at hand, the states each turned toward their own internal affairs. Prospects for the convention appeared bleak until James Madison and Edmund Randolph succeeded in securing George Washingtons attendance to Philadelphia as a delegate for Virginia. It was through the negotiations at Philadelphia that the presidency framed in the U. S. The first power the Constitution confers upon the president is the veto, the Presentment Clause requires any bill passed by Congress to be presented to the president before it can become law. Once the legislation has been presented, the president has three options, Sign the legislation, the bill becomes law. Veto the legislation and return it to Congress, expressing any objections, in this instance, the president neither signs nor vetoes the legislation
President of the United States
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Incumbent
Barack Obama since January 20, 2009 (2009-01-20)
President of the United States
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Presidential Seal
President of the United States
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Obama signing legislation at the
Resolute desk
President of the United States
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Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, successfully preserved the
Union during the
American Civil War
7.
Robert Graham (sculptor)
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Robert Graham was a sculptor based in the state of California in the United States. His monumental bronzes commemorate the human figure, and are featured in places across America. Graham was born in Mexico City, Mexico on Aug.19,1938, Roberto Pena died when his son was six years old, and the boy, his mother Adelina, his grandmother Ana, and his aunt Mercedes left Mexico and moved to San Jose, California. Robert Graham began his art training at San Jose State University where he was taught by artist Frederick Spratt. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in California, robert married his first wife Joey Graham in 1959, they have one son Steven, born in 1963. By the late 1960s, Graham had one-man exhibitions of his sculpture at important contemporary art galleries in Palo Alto, Los Angeles, New York City, London, Cologne, and Essen, Germany. He, along with family members Joey and Steven, lived in London for a period before settling in Los Angeles in the early 1970s and his first solo exhibition in a museum was at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1972. Since then he has had dozens of shows, including several at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Graham used a range of materials and scales in his work, in the 1970s he created very small wax sculptures in miniature dioramas, depicting people interacting in various contemporary environments, such as a living room or a beach scene. Some of these interactions included sexual congress, grahams 1986 monument to the boxer Joe Louis is a 24 feet bronze fist and forearm. He has created hundreds of figures and groupings in intermediate scales. Grahams first major commission was the ceremonial gateway for the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. He also designed the silver dollar for the event. The gateway featured two bronze torsos, male and female, modeled on contestants in the games, the gateway was a major design element of an Olympiad noted for its lack of new construction. To the surprise of many, the nudity of the torsos became an issue in the media, after 1984, Graham received many other commissions for monumental works, such as The Great Bronze Doors of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Graham married actress Anjelica Huston in 1992 and they resided in a dwelling in Venice. Huston refused to move to the area unless Graham built them a fortress to live in. The result was a giant, windowless structure behind an opaque 40-foot fence, Graham made a cameo appearance in Hustons movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as the Venezuelan general near the beginning of the film standing on the deck of the ship
Robert Graham (sculptor)
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Detail of front doors of
Spalding House, the
Honolulu Museum of Art, cast bronze, 1988
Robert Graham (sculptor)
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Fountain Figures No. 1, 2, 3 (1983), bronze,
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Robert Graham (sculptor)
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Social Programs (1997), bronze,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, D.C.
8.
Maya Lin
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Maya Ying Lin is an American designer and artist who is known for her work in sculpture and land art. She first came to fame at the age of 21 as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio. Her parents migrated to the United States from China, her father in 1948 and her mother in 1949 and her father, Henry Huan Lin, born in Fuzhou, Fujian, was a ceramist and former dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts. Her mother, Julia Chang Lin, born in Shanghai, is a poet and she is the niece of Lin Huiyin, who is said to be the first female architect in China. Lin Juemin and Lin Yin Ming, both of whom are among the 72 martyrs of the Second Guangzhou Uprising was a cousin of her grandfather, Lin Chang-min, a Hanlin of Qing dynasty, the emperors teacher, was the father of Lin Hui-yin and great-grandfather of Maya Lin. Lin graduated from Yale University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 and she has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Yale University, Harvard University, Williams College, and Smith College. She was among the youngest at Yale University to receive an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 1987, Lin is married to Daniel Wolf, a New York photography dealer. They have two daughters, India and Rachel, Lin is the youngest of her generation, and has an older brother, the poet Tan Lin. Growing up, she did not have friends and stayed home a lot. She loved school and loved to study, when she was not studying, she took independent courses from Ohio University and spent her free time casting bronzes in the school foundry. In 1981, at age 21 and while still an undergraduate, Lin won a design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The black cut-stone masonry wall, with the names of 57,661 fallen soldiers carved into its face, was completed in late October 1982, the wall is granite and V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument. Lins conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers, the design was initially controversial for what was an unconventional and non-traditional design for a war memorial. Opponents of the design also voiced objection because of Lins Asian ethnicity, her being female, in 2007, the American Institute of Architects ranked the memorial #10 on their list of Americas Favorite Architecture. Lin believes that if the competition had not been blind, with designs submitted by name instead of number and she received harassment after her ethnicity was revealed. Prominent businessman and later third party presidential candidate Ross Perot called her an egg roll after it was revealed that she was Asian, Lin defended her design in front of the United States Congress, and eventually a compromise was reached. A bronze statue of a group of soldiers and an American flag was placed off to one side of her design, in 1994, she was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin, A Strong Clear Vision. The title comes from an address she gave at Juniata College in which she spoke of the monument design process, according to Maya Lin, art should be an act of every individual willing to say something new and that which is not quite familiar
Maya Lin
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Lin at the
Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington (2007)
Maya Lin
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Vietnam War Memorial original design submission by Maya Lin
Maya Lin
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Sculpture made of multiple wood 2x4 pieces, on display at the
De Young Museum in San Francisco (2009)
Maya Lin
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Maya Lin's 'Women's Table' in front of the
Sterling Memorial Library commemorating the role of women at
Yale University
9.
Frank Stella
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Frank Philip Stella is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York, Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian descent. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was an artistically inclined housewife who attended a fashion school, early visits to New York art galleries fostered his artistic development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation and he is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. He is heralded for creating paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting. As of 2015, Stella lives in Greenwich Village and keeps an office there but commutes on weekdays to his studio in Rock Tavern, Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961-1969. Around this time he said that a picture was a surface with paint on it - nothing more. This was a departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch, many of the works are created by simply using the path of the brush stroke, very often using common house paint. This new aesthetic found expression in a series of new paintings, die Fahne Hoch. is one such painting. It has been suggested that the title has a meaning, referring also to Jasper Johns paintings of flags. In any case, its emotional coolness belies the contentiousness its title might suggest, Stella’s art was recognized for its innovations before he was twenty-five. In 1959, several of his paintings were included in Three Young Americans at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1960 Stella began to produce paintings in aluminium and copper paint which, however they use a wider range of colors, and are his first works using shaped canvases, often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series. Also in the 1960s, Stella began to use a range of colors. These paintings are named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s, the Irregular Polygon canvases and Protractor series further extended the concept of the shaped canvas. Stella began his engagement with printmaking in the mid-1960s, working first with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G. E. L. Stella produced a series of prints during the late 1960s starting with a print called Quathlamba I in 1968, Stellas abstract prints used lithography, screenprinting, etching and offset lithography
Frank Stella
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1964 photo of Frank Stella by
Ugo Mulas
Frank Stella
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Frank Stella La scienza della pigrizia (The Science of Laziness) 1984,
oil,
enamel paint and
alkyd paint on
canvas, etched
magnesium,
aluminum and
fiberglass,
National Gallery of Art Washington DC
Frank Stella
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Frank Stella,
Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959,
Whitney Museum of American Art
Frank Stella
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Frank Stella Harran II 1967
10.
Philip Johnson
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In 1978 he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and in 1979 the first Pritzker Architecture Prize. Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July 8,1906 and he was descended from the Jansen family of New Amsterdam, and included among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. In 1928 he met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The meeting formed the basis for a relationship of both collaboration and competition In 1930, Johnson joined the architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he arranged for American visits by Gropius and Le Corbusier, in 1932, working with Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, he organized the first exhibition on Modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. The show and their published book International Style, Modern Architecture Since 1922 played an important part in introducing modern architecture to the American public. When the rise of the Nazis in Germany forced the modernists Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe to leave Germany, in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression, he left the Museum of Modern Art for a brief venture into journalism and politics. In his 1994 biography of Johnson, Schultze wrote, In politics he proved to be a model of futility and he was never much of a political threat to anyone, still less an effective doer of either political good or political evil. In 1941, at the age of 35, Johnson abandoned politics and journalism and enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in 1941, Johnson designed and actually built his first building, a house still existing at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house, strongly influenced by Mies van der Rohe, has a wall around the lot which merges with the structure, after the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Johnson enlisted in the Army. He spent his service during the war in the United States. In 1946, after he completed his service, Johnson returned to the Museum of Modern Art as a curator. At the same time, he began working to establish his architectural practice and he built a small house, in th style of Mies, in Saaponack, Long Island in 1946. This was followed by one of this most famous buildings, which he built for himself, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, completed in 1949, which has become a landmark of modern architecture. Johnson had curated an exhibit of Mies van der Rohes at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, the house is a 56 foot by 32 foot glass rectangle, sited at the edge of a crest on Johnsons estate overlooking a pond. The buildings sides are glass and charcoal-painted steel, the floor, of brick, is not flush with the ground, the interior is an open space divided by low walnut cabinets, a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling. The New York Times described it in 2005 as one of the 20th centurys greatest residential structures, Johnson continued to add to the Glass House estate during each period of his career. After completing the Glass House, he completed two more houses in New Canaan in a similar to that of Mies, the Hodgson House
Philip Johnson
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Philip Johnson at age 95 in his office,
Seagram Building, Manhattan with his model of a 30' by 60' sculpture created for a
Qatari collector. (2002)
Philip Johnson
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Chapel of St. Basil (1992) on the Academic Mall at the
University of St. Thomas in
Houston, Texas.
Philip Johnson
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Gate of Europe (Puerta de Europa) in
Madrid (1989)
Philip Johnson
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A model of the
Glass House (1949) on display at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City
11.
Texaco
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Texaco, Inc. is an American oil subsidiary of Chevron Corporation. Its flagship product is its fuel Texaco with Techron and it also owns the Havoline motor oil brand. Texaco was an independent company until its operations merged into Chevron Corporation in 2001. It began as the Texas Fuel Company, founded in 1901 in Beaumont, Texas, by Joseph S. Cullinan, Thomas J. Donoghue, Walter Benona Sharp, and Arnold Schlaet upon the discovery of oil at Spindletop. For many years, Texaco was the company selling gasoline under the same brand name in all 50 US states, as well as Canada. It was also one of the Seven Sisters which dominated the petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. Its current logo features a star in a red circle. The company was headquartered in Harrison, New York, near White Plains, Texaco gasoline comes with Techron, an additive developed by Chevron, as of 2005, replacing the previous CleanSystem3. The Texaco brand is strong in the U. S and it has a presence in Europe as well, for example, it is a well-known retail brand in the UK, with around 1,100 Texaco-branded service stations. Texaco was founded in Beaumont, Texas as the Texas Fuel Company in 1901, in 1905, it established an operation in Antwerp, Belgium, under the name Continental Petroleum Company, which it acquired control of in 1913. The next year, Texaco moved to new offices in Houston on the corner of San Jacinto, in 1928, Texaco became the first U. S. oil company to sell its gasoline nationwide under one single brand name in all 48 states. In 1931, Texaco purchased Indian Oil Company, based in Illinois and this expanded Texacos refining and marketing base in the Midwest and also gave Texaco the rights to Indians Havoline motor oil, which became a Texaco product. It was promoted through a program over NBC hosted by Ed Wynn. In 1936, the Texas Corporation purchased the Barco oil concession in Colombia, over the next three years the company engaged in a highly challenging project to drill wells and build a pipeline to the coast across mountains and then through uncharted swamps and jungles. During this time, Texaco also illegally supplied the fascist Gen. Franco faction in Spanish Civil War, despite a federal fine, the next year, Texaco commissioned industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague to develop a modern service station design. In 1938, Texaco introduced Sky Chief gasoline, a premium fuel developed from the ground up as a high-octane gasoline rather than just a regular product. ”This espionage easily enabled Hitler to destroy the ships. During the war, Texaco ranked 93rd among United States corporations in the value of military production contracts, in 1947, Caltex expanded to include Texacos European marketing operations. That same year, Texaco merged its British operation with Trinidad Leaseholds under the name Regent, it gained control of Regent in 1956
Texaco
–
Gippsland Motor Garage,
Old Gippstown, with 1930s Texaco gasoline pump and signage
Texaco
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Antique Texaco advertising, Gippsland Motor Garage,
Old Gippstown
Texaco
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1939 Texaco tanker truck by
Dodge on display at the
Henry Ford Museum.
Texaco
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A Texaco fuel station in
Miami Beach, Florida
12.
James Michener
–
Michener was known for the popularity of his works, he had numerous bestsellers and works selected for Book of the Month Club. He was also known for his meticulous research behind the books and his non-fiction works include Iberia, about his travels in Spain and Portugal, his memoir titled The World Is My Home, and Sports in America. Return to Paradise combines fictional short stories with Micheners factual descriptions of the Pacific areas where they take place. His first book was adapted as the popular Broadway musical South Pacific by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein and he also wrote an analysis of the Electoral College system of the United States in a book which condemned it, entitled Presidential Lottery, The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System. It was published in 1969, and republished in 2014 and 2016, Michener wrote that he did not know who his biological parents were or exactly when or where he was born. He said he was raised a Quaker by a mother, Mabel Michener, in Doylestown, Bucks County. Michener graduated from Doylestown High School in 1925 and he attended Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where he played basketball and was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. After graduating summa cum laude in 1929 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History, Michener took a job as a high school English teacher at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. From 1933 to 1936, he taught English at George School in Newtown and he attended Colorado State College of Education in Greeley, Colorado, in 1970 renamed the University of Northern Colorado, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in Education. After graduation, he taught at the university, and at College High School for several years, the library at the University of Northern Colorado was later named after him in October 1972. In 1935, Michener married Patti Koon and he accepted a Guest Lecturer position at Harvard, from 1939 to 1940, but left to join Macmillan Publishers as their social studies education editor. Michener was called to duty during World War II in the United States Navy. He traveled throughout the South Pacific Ocean on various assignments which he gained because his base commanders mistakenly thought his father was Admiral Marc Mitscher and his experiences during these travels inspired his stories published in his breakout work Tales of the South Pacific. In 1960, Michener was chairman of the Bucks County committee to elect John F. Kennedy, in 1962, he unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic candidate for a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, a decision he later considered a misstep. My mistake was to run in 1962 as a Democratic candidate for Congress, kept saying, Dont do it, dont do it. I lost and went back to writing books, in 1968, Michener served as the campaign manager for twice-elected US senator Joseph S. Clarks third-term run. Michener was later Secretary for the 1967–68 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, also that year, Michener was a member of the Electoral College, serving as a Pennsylvania Democrat. He wrote about that experience in Presidential Lottery, The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System, in it, he suggested alternate systems, including a direct popular vote
James Michener
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Author James A. Michener in 1991
James Michener
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Michener's typewriter at the
James A. Michener Art Museum in
Doylestown, Pennsylvania
13.
Altria Group
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Altria Group, Inc. is an American corporation and one of the worlds largest producers and marketers of tobacco, cigarettes and related products. It operates worldwide and is headquartered in Henrico County, Virginia, Altria is the parent company of Philip Morris USA, John Middleton, Inc. Philip Morris Capital Corporation, and Chateau Ste, Philip Morris International was spun off in 2008. Altria maintains a 28. 7% stake in the UK-based brewer SABMiller plc and it is a component of the S&P500 and was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average until February 19,2008. On January 6,2009, Altria acquired UST Inc. a smokeless tobacco manufacturer, which also owned wine producer Ste Michelle Wine Estates, the onset of rebranding of Philip Morris Companies to Altria took place in 2003. Philip Morris executives thought a change would insulate the larger corporation. The rebranding took place amidst social, legal and financially troubled circumstances, in 2003 Altria was ranked Fortune number 11, and has steadily declined since. In 2010 Altria Group ranked at Fortune number 137, whereas its former asset, in 2006, a United States court found that Philip Morris publicly. Disputed scientific findings linking smoking and disease knowing their assertions were false, on March 30,2007, Altrias 88. 1% stake in Kraft Foods Inc was spun off, through a distribution of the remaining stake of shares to Altria shareholders. That same year, Altria began selling all its shares of Philip Morris International to Altria stockholders, again in 2007 the company began the acquisition of cigar manufacturer John Middleton Co. from Bradford Holdings, Inc. which was complete in 2008. In 2008, Altria officially moved its headquarters from New York City to Richmond, with a few exceptions, all manufacturing, commercial, and executive employees had long been based in and around Richmond. The layoffs beginning in 2007 affected thousands of Altria, Altria Client Services, Philip Morris USA, in 2009, Altria finalized its purchase of UST Inc. whose products included smokeless tobacco and wine. This ended an era of competition between the new Marlboro smokeless tobacco products such as snus, and those produced by UST Inc. Altria Group, Inc. owns 100 percent of Philip Morris USA, John Middleton, Inc. and it also owns 28. 7% SABMiller PLC, one of the worlds largest brewing companies, where it has 3 seats on the 11-person board of directors. Before the recent restructuring, the net revenue of Altria Group, Inc. came predominantly from its tobacco business, Altrias share of SABMillers revenue and profits is not included in the table below because its holding are too small to be consolidated in the group accounts. Coca-Cola, General Motors and Grand Metropolitan W. Leo Kiely III, retired CEO, MillerCoors LLC, Golden, CO, formerly with Frito-Lay Kathryn B. Sakkab, retired SVP, corporate research and development, Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, OH Prior to being based in Virginia, Philip Morris had its headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, in 2003, Philip Morris announced that it would move its headquarters to Virginia. The company said that it planned to keep around 750 employees in its former headquarters, brendan McCormick, a spokesperson for Philip Morris, said that the company estimated that the move would save the company over $60 million each year
Altria Group
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Altria Group, Inc.
14.
Dayton Hudson
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Target Corporation is the second-largest discount store retailer in the United States, behind Walmart, and a component of the S&P500 Index. The first Target store opened in Roseville, Minnesota in 1962 while the parent company was renamed the Dayton Corporation in 1967, the company has found success as a cheap-chic player in the industry. The parent company was renamed the Target Corporation in 2000 and divested itself of its last department store chains in 2004, as of 2017, Target operates 1,806 locations throughout the United States. Target is often recognized for its emphasis on the needs of its younger, image-conscious shoppers, the Westminster Presbyterian Church from downtown Minneapolis burned down during the Panic of 1893. Without insurance coverage to cover the loss, the congregation found itself unable to rebuild. The store was renamed the Dayton Dry Goods Company in 1903, Dayton died in 1938 and was succeeded by his son Nelson as the president of the $14 million business. Nelson died in 1950 and was replaced by his own son Donald, the company acquired the Lipmans department store company during the 1950s and operated it as a separate division. John F. Geisse developed the concept of upscale discount retailing while working for the Dayton Company. Using his concepts, the company opened its first Target discount store at 1515 West County Road B in the Saint Paul suburb of Roseville, Minnesota, Douglas Dayton was its first president. The name Target originated from publicity director Stewart K. Widdess and it opened three additional units in the first year, and reported its first gain in 1965 with sales reaching $39 million. Later that decade, B. Dalton Bookseller was formed as a subsidiary of the Dayton Company, the parent company acquired the jewelers Shreve & Co. and J. E. Caldwell, the Pickwick Book Shops, and the electronics and appliances chain Lechmere. It also went public with its first offering of common stock, in 1969, the Dayton Company itself merged with the Detroit-based J. L. Hudson Company, and together formed the Dayton-Hudson Corporation. The new company, at the time the 14th-largest retailer in the United States, consisted of Target and the department stores Daytons, Diamonds, Hudsons, John A. Brown, Target reached $200 million in sales while Dayton-Hudson acquired Team Electronics and the jewelers C. D. Peacock, Inc. and Jessop and Sons in the 1970s, Target reported a decrease in profits in 1972, due to the rapid pace of expansion with the purchase and conversion of several former Arlans department store locations. New management marked down merchandise to reduce its overstock and only opened one new location that year, Dayton-Hudson was established as the seventh-largest general merchandise retailer in the United States with its acquisition of Mervyns in 1978. It sold the Dayton-Hudson Jewelers subsidiary to Henry Birks & Sons of Montreal, Target was established as the dominant retailer in southern California after purchasing fifty Gemco stores in the state in 1986, that year, Dayton-Hudson sold B. Dalton Bookseller to Barnes & Noble. The acquisition of several Gold Circle and Richway stores assisted its expansion into northwestern and southeastern United States, later that year, Dayton-Hudson sold Lechmere to a group of investors. In 1990, Dayton-Hudson acquired Marshall Fields and opened its first Target Greatland store in Apple Valley and it started the Everyday Hero clothing specialty store with two locations in Minneapolis in 1992, although they were closed in 1997
Dayton Hudson
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A Target store in
Lexington, Kentucky.
Dayton Hudson
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Target Corporation
Dayton Hudson
–
A typical Target store in
Charlotte, North Carolina.
Dayton Hudson
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A newer Target store in
Overland Park, Kansas.
15.
Elliott Carter
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Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was an American composer who was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, then returned to the United States, after an early neoclassical phase, his style shifted to an emphasis on atonality and rhythmic complexity. His compositions are known and performed throughout the world, they include orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental and he was productive in his later years, publishing more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100, and over 20 more after he turned 100 in 2008. He completed his last work, Epigrams for piano trio, on August 13,2012, Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was born in Manhattan on December 11,1908, the son of a wealthy lace importer. Carters father was Elliott Carter Sr. and his mother was the former Florence Chambers, as a teenager, he developed an interest in music, and received encouragement in this regard from Charles Ives. While he was a student at the Horace Mann School, he wrote an letter to Ives. In 1924, a 15-year-old Carter was in the audience when Pierre Monteux conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the New York première of The Rite of Spring, according to a 2008 report. When Carter attended Harvard, starting in 1926, Ives took him under his wing and made sure he went to the BSO concerts conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, although Carter majored in English at Harvard College, he also studied music there and at the nearby Longy School of Music. His professors at Harvard included Walter Piston and Gustav Holst and he sang with the Harvard Glee Club and did graduate work in music at Harvard, from which he received a masters degree in music in 1932. He then went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, Carter worked with Boulanger from 1932 to 1935, and in that year received a doctorate in music. Later that same year, he returned to the US and wrote music for the Ballet Caravan, on July 6,1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones. They had one child, a son, David Chambers Carter, from 1940 to 1944, he taught in the program, including music, at St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland. During World War II, he worked for the Office of War Information and he later held teaching posts at the Peabody Conservatory, Columbia University, Queens College, New York, Yale University, Cornell University and the Juilliard School. In 1967, he was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts, in 1981, he was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, in 1985 the National Medal of Arts. In 1983 Carter was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony and he lived with his wife in the same apartment in Greenwich Village from the time they bought it in 1945 to her death in 2003. Carter composed his only opera What Next. in 1997-1998 at the behest of conductor Daniel Barenboim for the Berlin State Opera. The work premiered in Berlin in 1999 and had its first staging in the United States at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2006 under the baton of James Levine. He later considered writing operas on the themes of suicide and a story by Henry James
Elliott Carter
–
Contents
16.
Ralph Ellison
–
Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and he also wrote Shadow and Act, a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory. For The New York Times, the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him among the gods of Americas literary Parnassus, a posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death. Ralph Waldo Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born at 407 East First Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap, on Saturday March 1,1913. He was the second of three brothers, firstborn Alfred died in infancy, and younger brother Herbert Maurice was born in 1916. The elder Ellison loved literature, and doted on his children, in 1921, Ellisons mother and her children moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother. According to Ellison, his mother felt that my brother and I would have a chance of reaching manhood if we grew up in the north. She did not find a job and her brother lost his, the returned to Oklahoma, where Ellison worked as a busboy, a shoeshine boy, hotel waiter. From the father of a friend he received free instructions for playing trumpet and alto saxophone. Ida remarried three times after Lewis died, however, the family life was precarious, and Ralph worked various jobs during his youth and teens to assist with family support. While attending Douglass High School, he found time to play on the schools football team. He graduated from school in 1931. He worked for a year, and found the money to make a payment on a trumpet, using it to play with local musicians. At Douglass, he was influenced by principal Inman E. Page and his daughter, Ellison applied twice for admission to Tuskegee Institute, the prestigious all-black university in Alabama founded by Booker T. Washington. He was finally admitted in 1933 for lack of a player in its orchestra. Ellison hopped freight trains to get to Alabama, and was soon to find out that the institution was no less class-conscious than white institutions generally were. Ellisons outsider position at Tuskegee sharpened his satirical lens, critic Hilton Als believes, in passages of Invisible Man, he looks back with scorn and despair on the snivelling ethos that ruled at Tuskegee. Tuskegees music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, Ellison also was guided by the departments piano instructor, Hazel Harrison
Ralph Ellison
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Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison
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Ralph Ellison monument in front of 730
Riverside Drive
17.
Martha Graham
–
Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her influence on dance has been compared with the influence of Picasso on modern visual arts, the influence of Stravinsky on music, and she danced and choreographed for over seventy years. Graham was the first dancer to perform at the White House, travel abroad as an ambassador, and receive the highest civilian award of the US. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from the Key to the City of Paris to Japans Imperial Order of the Precious Crown and she said, in the 1994 documentary The Dancer Revealed, I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. Its permitting life to use you in an intense way. Her style, the Graham technique, fundamentally reshaped American dance and is taught worldwide. Graham was born in Allegheny City – later to become part of Pittsburgh and her father George Graham practiced as what in the Victorian era was known as an alienist, a practitioner of an early form of psychiatry. Dr. Graham was a third-generation American of Irish descent and her mother Jane Beers was a second-generation American of Irish, Scots-Irish, and English descent and was also a sixth-generation descendant of Myles Standish. While her parents provided an environment in her youth, it was not one that encouraged dancing. The Graham family moved to Santa Barbara, California when Martha was fourteen years old, in 1911, she attended the first dance performance of her life, watching Ruth St. Denis perform at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. In the mid-1910s, Martha Graham began her studies at the newly created Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, at which she would stay until 1923. In 1925, Graham was employed at the Eastman School of Music where Rouben Mamoulian was head of the School of Drama, among other performances, together Mamoulian and Graham produced a short two-color film called The Flute of Krishna, featuring Eastman students. Mamoulian left Eastman shortly thereafter and Graham chose to leave also, in 1926, the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance was established. On April 18 of the same year Graham debuted her first independent concert and this performance took place at the 48th Street Theatre in Manhattan. She would later say of the concert, Everything I did was influenced by Denishawn, on November 28,1926 Martha Graham and others in her company gave a dance recital at the Klaw Theatre in New York City. One of Grahams students was heiress Bethsabée de Rothschild with whom she became close friends, when Rothschild moved to Israel and established the Batsheva Dance Company in 1965, Graham became the companys first director. Grahams technique pioneered a principle known as Contraction and Release in modern dance, in 1936, Graham created Chronicle which brought serious issues to the stage in a dramatic manner. That same year, she declined Hitlers invitation to perform at the International Arts Festival,1938 became a big year for Graham, the Roosevelts invited Graham to dance at the White House, making her the first dancer to perform there
Martha Graham
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Martha Graham by
Yousuf Karsh (1948)
Martha Graham
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Martha Graham with Bertram Ross (1961)
18.
Louise Nevelson
–
Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century, Nevelson learned English at school, as she spoke Yiddish at home. By the early 1930s she was attending art classes at the Art Students League of New York, a student of Hans Hofmann and Chaim Gross, Nevelson experimented with early conceptual art using found objects, and dabbled in painting and printing before dedicating her lifework to sculpture. Usually created out of wood, her sculptures appear puzzle-like, with multiple intricately cut pieces placed into wall sculptures or independently standing pieces, a unique feature of her work is that her figures are often painted in monochromatic black or white. A figure in the art scene, Nevelson was showcased at the 31st Venice Biennale. Her work is seen in collections in museums and corporations. Nevelson remains one of the most important figures in 20th-century American sculpture, Louise Nevelson was born Leah Berliawsky in 1899 in Perislav, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire, to Minna Sadie and Isaac Berliawsky, a contractor and lumber merchant. Even though the family lived comfortably, Nevelsons relatives had begun to leave the Russian Empire for America in the 1880s, the Berliawskys had to stay behind, as Isaac, the youngest brother, had to care for his parents. While still in Europe, Minna gave birth to two of Nevelsons siblings, Nathan and Anita, on his mothers death, Isaac moved to the United States in 1902. After he left, Minna and the moved to the Kiev area. According to family lore, young Nevelson was so forlorn about her fathers departure that she became mute for six months, in 1905, Minna and the children emigrated to the United States, where they joined Isaac in Rockland, Maine. Isaac initially struggled to establish himself there, suffering from depression while the family settled into their new home and he worked as a woodcutter before opening a junkyard. His work as a lumberjack made wood a consistent presence in the family household, eventually he became a successful lumberyard owner and realtor. The family had another child, Lillian, in 1906, Minna overly compensated for this, dressing herself and the children up in clothing regarded as sophisticated in the Old Country. Her mother wore flamboyant outfits with heavy make-up, Nevelson described her mothers dressing up as art, her pride, Nevelsons first experience of art was at the age of nine at the Rockland Public Library, where she saw a plaster cast of Joan of Arc. Shortly thereafter she decided to study art, taking drawing in high school and she painted watercolor interiors, in which furniture appeared molecular in structure, rather like her later professional work. In school, she practiced her English, her second language, unhappy with her familys economic status, language differences, the religious discrimination of the community, and her school, Nevelson set her sights on moving to high school in New York. She graduated from school in 1918, and began working as a stenographer at a local law office
Louise Nevelson
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Louise Nevelson and granddaughter
Neith Nevelson, c. 1965
Louise Nevelson
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Nevelson (fourth from left) posing for a class portrait with her classmates, 1913, unidentified photographer. Louise Nevelson papers,
Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.
Louise Nevelson
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Clown tight rope walker by Louise Nevelson, 1942? / John D. Schiff, photographer. Louise Nevelson papers,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Louise Nevelson
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Black Zag X by Louise Nevelson, 1969,
Honolulu Museum of Art
19.
Leontyne Price
–
Mary Violet Leontyne Price is an American soprano. Born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi, she rose to acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s. Time magazine called her voice Rich, supple and shining, it was in its capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C. A lirico spinto soprano, she was considered well suited to the roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. After her retirement from the stage in 1985, she continued to appear in recitals. In October 2008, she was one of the recipients of the first Opera Honors given by the National Endowment for the Arts, Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Mississippi. Her father James worked in a mill and her mother Katie was a midwife who sang in the church choir. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride, given a toy piano at the age of three, she began piano lessons with a local teacher. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the payment on an upright piano. At 14, she was taken on a trip to hear Marian Anderson sing in Jackson. Meanwhile, she visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged the early piano playing. During World War II, Price worked as a maid in the Chisholms household where she was allowed to play the piano. Mrs. Chisholm noticed her singing voice and accompanied her in several early recitals. Aiming for a career, Price enrolled in the music education program at the all-black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce. Her success in the club led to solo assignments. She sang in the choir with another singer, Betty Allen. With the help of the Chisholms and the famous bass Paul Robeson and she won a scholarship and was admitted to the studio of Florence Page Kimball, who would remain her principal teacher and advisor throughout the 1960s
Leontyne Price
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Leontyne Price, 1994
Leontyne Price
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Price in 1951
Leontyne Price
–
Price from Porgy and Bess 1953
Leontyne Price
–
Price, 1981
20.
Lincoln Kirstein
–
Lincoln Edward Kirstein was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, philanthropist, and cultural figure in New York City, noted especially as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. He developed and sustained the company with his ability and fundraising for more than four decades. According to the New York Times, he was an expert in fields, organizing art exhibits. Kirstein was born in Rochester, New York to Jewish parents and his sister was Mina Kirstein and his paternal grandparents were Jeanette and Edward Kirstein, a successful Rochester clothing manufacturer who ran E. Kirstein and Sons, Company. He grew up in a wealthy Jewish Bostonian family and attended the private Berkshire School, along with George Platt Lynes and he then attended Harvard, where his father, the vice-president of Filenes Department Store, had also attended, graduating in 1930. His maternal grandfather was Nathan Stein, an executive at the Stein-Bloch & Co. in Rochester. In 1927, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, Kirstein was annoyed that the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate would not accept his work. With a friend Varian Fry, who met his wife Eileen through Lincolns sister Mina, he convinced his father to finance their own literary quarterly, after graduation, he moved to New York in 1930, taking the quarterly with him. His interest in ballet and Balanchine started when he saw Balanchines Apollo performed by the Ballets Russes, Kirstein became determined to bring Balanchine to America. In October 1933, together with Edward Warburg, a classmate from Harvard, in 1934, the studio moved to the fourth floor of a building at Madison Avenue and 59th Street in New York City. Warburgs father, Felix M. Warburg, invited the group of students from the class to perform at a private party. The ballet they performed was Serenade, the first major ballet choreographed by Balanchine in the United States, just months later Kirstein and Warburg founded, together with Balanchine and Dimitriew, the American Ballet which became the resident company of the Metropolitan Opera. That arrangement was unsatisfactory because the Opera would not allow Balanchine, Kirsteins theatrical career was interrupted by the United States entry into World War II. After enlisting in 1943, before going overseas he started working on a gathering and documenting soldier art. He eventually developed this as the exhibit and book Artists Under Fire, the section was devoted to rescuing and preserving European art. Soon after in January 1945, Kirstein was promoted to Private First Class in Pattons Third Army, Kirstein was personally involved with retrieving artworks around Munich and from the salt mines at Altaussee. His article The Quest for the Golden Lamb about the quest was published in Town & Country in September 1945, in 1946, Balanchine and Kirstein founded the Ballet Society, which was renamed the New York City Ballet in 1948. In a letter that year, Kirstein stated, The only justification I have is to enable Balanchine to do exactly what he wants to do in the way he wants to do it, Kirstein went on to serve as the companys General Director from 1946 until 1989
Lincoln Kirstein
–
Lincoln Kirstein by
Walker Evans
21.
Paul Mellon
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Paul Mellon was an American philanthropist and an owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses. He is one of five people ever designated an Exemplar of Racing by the National Museum of Racing. He was co-heir to one of Americas greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank created by his grandfather Thomas Mellon, his father Andrew W. Mellon, Mellons autobiography, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, was published in 1992. He died at his home, Oak Spring, in Upperville, Virginia and he was survived by his wife, Rachel, his children, Catherine Conover and Timothy Mellon, and two stepchildren, Stacy Lloyd III and Eliza, Viscountess Moore. Paul Mellon was the son of Andrew W. Mellon, US Secretary of the Treasury from 1921 to 1932, and Nora McMullen of Hertfordshire and brother of Ailsa Mellon-Bruce. He was a benefactor of his alma maters, donating the Mellon Arts Center and the Mellon Science Center to Choate. After graduating from Yale he went to England to study at Clare College, Cambridge, receiving a BA in 1931, in 1930 he was a founding member, alongside Sir Timothy William Gowers, of the CRABS, the Clare Rugby And Boating Society. In 1938 he received an MA from Clare College and he was a major benefactor to Clare Colleges Forbes-Mellon library, opened in 1986. Mellon returned to Pittsburgh, to work for Mellon Bank and other businesses for six months, in 1935, he married Mary Conover Brown and the couple, who had two children, Catherine and Timothy, moved to Virginia. He enrolled at St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland in 1940 but six months later joined the United States Army, Mellon served with the Office of Strategic Services in Europe. He rose to the rank of major and was the recipient of four Bronze Stars, after his wife Marys death in 1946 from an asthma attack, he married Rachel Lambert Lloyd, known as Bunny, the former wife of Stacy Barcroft Lloyd Jr. She was a descendant of the Lambert family who formulated and marketed Listerine, Bunny Mellon was an avid horticulturist and gardener, whose fondness for French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, as well as American art, Mellon came to share. By this marriage, he had two stepchildren, Stacy Lloyd III and Eliza Lambert Lloyd, while Mellon did not share his fathers interest in business, the two found common ground in their love of art and philanthropy. Shortly before Andrew Mellons death in 1937, construction began on the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, four years later Paul Mellon presented both the building by John Russell Pope and his fathers collection of 115 paintings to the nation. He served on the board for more than four decades, as trustee, as president, as board chair. Mellon commissioned I. M. Pei to build the East Building and, with his sister Ailsa, over the years he and his wife Bunny donated more than 1,000 works to the National Gallery, among them many French and American masterworks. In 1936 Mellon purchased his first British painting, Pumpkin with a Stable-lad by George Stubbs, beginning in the late 1950s, with the help of English art historian Basil Taylor, Mellon amassed a major collection by the mid-1960s. London art dealer Geoffrey Agnew once said of his acquisitions, “It took an American collector to make the English look again at their own paintings. ”Mellon granted his extensive collection of British art, rare books, and related materials to Yale University in the 1960s, along with the funding to create an appropriate museum to house it
Paul Mellon
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Paul Mellon
Paul Mellon
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Paul Mellon (
William Orpen, 1924)
Paul Mellon
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Plaque to Paul Mellon,
American philanthropist and galloping
anglophile within
St George's, Bloomsbury
22.
Alice Tully
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Alice Bigelow Tully was an American singer of opera and recital, music promoter, patron of the arts and philanthropist from New York. She was a cousin of the American actress Katharine Hepburn. Alice Tully was born in Corning, Steuben County, New York and she spent her high school years at the Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut. Tully began her career as a mezzo-soprano, then became a soprano and she studied in Paris and made her debut in 1927 with the Pasdeloup Orchestra. In 1933, she appeared in Cavalleria rusticana in New York City, Tully chaired the board of directors of the New York Chamber Music Society, and served on the boards of the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and the Juilliard School. In 1970, Tully was awarded the Handel Medallion for her contributions to the life of New York City. Her most famous commission was for Olivier Messiaen who composed Des canyons aux étoiles, which had its first performance in the Alice Tully Hall in 1974. In 1985, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, William Schuman, Gian Carlo Menotti and Riccardo Malipiero dedicated works to her. Tully never married, she suffered a stroke in 1991, and died in New York in 1993, fuller, A. Alice Tully, An Intimate Portrait,1999, University of Illinois Press. Kozinn, A. Alice Tully Is Dead at 91, Lifelong Patron of the Arts, available online Alice Tully - philanthropist - Obituary, Dance Magazine, March 1994. Available online via findarticles. com Lifetime Honors - National Medal of Arts
Alice Tully
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Alice Tully (right), and her sister, Marion Tully.
23.
Hallmark Cards
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Hallmark Cards, Incorporated is a privately owned American company based in Kansas City, Missouri. Founded in 1910 by Joyce Hall, Hallmark is the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States, in 1985, the company was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Joyce Clyde Hall became captivated by a salesman who stopped by his familys store in 1906 in Norfolk, driven by the postcard craze of 1903, Hall decided to venture from retail of various products to wholesale of postcards. He moved his business to the market of Kansas City. As time went on, Hall became convinced that greeting cards would become more prominent than postcards. Greeting cards, according to J. C. Hall, represented class, promised discretion and they were more than a form of communication—they were a social custom. ”By 1915, the company was known as Hall Brothers and sold Valentines Day and Christmas cards. In 1917, Hall and his brother Rollie invented modern wrapping paper when they ran out of traditional colored tissue paper, in 1922, the company expanded throughout the country. The staff grew from 4 to 120 people, and the line increased from holiday cards to include everyday greeting cards. In 1928, the company adopted the name Hallmark, after the symbol used by goldsmiths in London in the 14th century. In the same year, the became the first in the greeting card industry to advertise their product nationally. Their first advertisement appeared in Ladies Home Journal and was written by J. C. Hall himself. In 1931, the Canadian William E. Coutts Company, Ltd. a major card maker, became an affiliate of Hall Brothers, in 1944, it adopted its current slogan, When you care enough to send the very best. It was created by C. E. Goodman, a Hallmark marketing and sales executive, the card is on display at the company headquarters. In 1951, Hall sponsored a program for NBC that gave rise to the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Hallmark now has its own television channel, the Hallmark Channel which was established in 2001. For a period of about 15 years, Hallmark owned a stake in the Spanish language network Univision, in 1954, the company name was changed from Hall Brothers to Hallmark. In 1958, William E. Coutts Company, Ltd. was acquired by Hallmark, until the 1990s, in 1998, Hallmark made a number of acquisitions, including Britain-based Creative Publishing, and U. S. based InterArt. Worldwide, Hallmark has 11,000 full-time employees, about 3,100 Hallmarkers work at the Kansas City headquarters
Hallmark Cards
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Hallmark corporate headquarters entrance.
Hallmark Cards
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Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Hallmark Cards
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A Hallmark Gold Crown Store in Evansville, Indiana.
Hallmark Cards
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A Hallmark Store in Canada
24.
Marian Anderson
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Marian Anderson was an American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. Music critic Alan Blyth said, Her voice was a rich, most of her singing career was spent performing in concert and recital in major music venues and with famous orchestras throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965. Although offered roles with many important European opera companies, Anderson declined and she preferred to perform in concert and recital only. She did, however, perform opera arias within her concerts and she made many recordings that reflected her broad performance repertoire of everything from concert literature to lieder to opera to traditional American songs and spirituals. Between 1940 and 1965 the German-American pianist Franz Rupp was her permanent accompanist, Anderson became an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused permission for Anderson to sing to an audience in Constitution Hall. The incident placed Anderson into the spotlight of the community on a level unusual for a classical musician. She sang before a crowd of more than 75,000 people and her performance as Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdis Un ballo in maschera at the Met was the only time she sang an opera role on stage. She participated in the civil movement in the 1960s, singing at the March on Washington for Jobs. Marian Anderson was born on February 27,1897, in Philadelphia, the daughter of John Berkley Anderson and her father sold ice and coal at the Reading Terminal in downtown Philadelphia and eventually opened a small liquor business as well. Prior to her marriage, Andersons mother had attended the Virginia Seminary. As she did not obtain a degree, Annie Anderson was unable to teach in Philadelphia under a law that was applied only to black teachers and she therefore earned an income caring for small children. Marian was the eldest of the three Anderson children and her two sisters, Alice and Ethel, also became singers. Ethel married James DePreist and their son, James Anderson DePreist was a noted conductor. Andersons parents were both devout Christians and the family was active in the Union Baptist Church in South Philadelphia. Marians aunt Mary, her fathers sister, was active in the churchs musical life and, noticing her nieces talent. In that role she got to perform solos and duets, often with her aunt Mary, Marian was also taken by her aunt to concerts at local churches, the YMCA, benefit concerts, and other community music events throughout the city. Anderson credited her aunts influence as the reason she pursued a singing career, beginning as young as six, her aunt arranged for Marian to sing for local functions where she was often paid 25 or 50 cents for singing a few songs
Marian Anderson
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Marian Anderson in 1940, by
Carl Van Vechten
Marian Anderson
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Anderson at the Department of the Interior in 1943, commemorating her 1939 concert
Marian Anderson
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Anderson christens
Liberty ship SS Booker T. Washington, 1942
Marian Anderson
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Anderson entertains a group of overseas veterans and
WACs on the stage of the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium, 1945
25.
Frank Capra
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Frank Russell Capra was an Italian-American film director, producer and writer who became the creative force behind some of the major award-winning films of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Italy and raised in Los Angeles from the age of five, during World War II, Capra served in the U. S. Army Signal Corps and produced propaganda films, such as the Why We Fight series. After World War II, Capras career declined as his films such as Its a Wonderful Life. In succeeding decades, however, these films have been favorably reassessed, outside of directing, Capra was active in the film industry, engaging in various political and social issues. He served as President of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, worked alongside the Screenwriters Guild, Capra was born Francesco Rosario Capra in Bisacquino, Sicily, a village near Palermo. He was the youngest of seven children of Salvatore Capra, a grower. The name Capra, notes Capras biographer Joseph McBride, represents his familys closeness to the land, and means goat. For Capra, the journey, which took 13 days, remained in his mind for the rest of his life as one of his worst experiences, very few people have trunks or anything that takes up space. They have just what they can carry in their hands or in a bag, theres no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. Its the most degrading place you could ever be, Capra remembers the ships arrival in New York Harbor, where he saw a statue of a great lady, taller than a church steeple, holding a torch above the land we were about to enter. He recalls his fathers exclamation at the sight, Ciccio, look, thats the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem. The family settled in Los Angeless East Side which Capra described in his autobiography as an Italian ghetto, Capras father worked as a fruit picker and young Capra sold newspapers after school for 10 years, until he graduated from high school. Instead of working after graduating, as his parents wanted, he enrolled in college and he studied chemical engineering and graduated in the spring of 1918. Capra later wrote that his education had changed his whole viewpoint on life from the viewpoint of an alley rat to the viewpoint of a cultured person. Soon after graduating college, Capra was commissioned in the US Army as a second lieutenant, in the Army, he taught mathematics to artillerymen at Fort Point, San Francisco. His father died during the war in an accident, in the Army, Capra contracted Spanish flu and was medically discharged to return home to live with his mother. He became a naturalized U. S. citizen in 1920, living at home with his siblings and mother, Capra was the only family member with a college education, yet he was the only one who remained chronically unemployed. After recovering at home, Capra moved out and spent the few years living in flophouses in San Francisco and hopping freight trains
Frank Capra
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Frank Capra circa 1930s
Frank Capra
Frank Capra
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Walter Brennan,
Gary Cooper,
Irving Bacon,
Barbara Stanwyck, and
James Gleason in Meet John Doe
Frank Capra
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Receiving medal from General
George C. Marshall, 1945
26.
Aaron Copland
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Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the Dean of American Composers, the open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in an accessible style often referred to as populist. Works in this include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in other genres including chamber music, vocal works, opera. After some initial studies with composer Rubin Goldmark, Copland traveled to Paris and he studied three years with Boulanger, whose eclectic approach to music inspired his own broad taste. Determined upon his return to the U. S. to make his way as a composer, Copland gave lecture-recitals, wrote works on commission. He found composing orchestral music in the modernist style he had adapted abroad a financially contradictory approach and he shifted in the mid-1930s to a more accessible musical style which mirrored the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik, music that could serve utilitarian and artistic purposes. During the Depression years, he traveled extensively to Europe, Africa, during the late 1940s, Copland became aware that Stravinsky and other fellow composers had begun to study Arnold Schoenbergs use of twelve-tone techniques. After he had exposed to the works of French composer Pierre Boulez, he incorporated serial techniques into his Piano Quartet, Piano Fantasy, Connotations for orchestra. From the 1960s onward, Coplands activities turned more from composing to conducting and he became a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U. S. and the UK and made a series of recordings of his music, primarily for Columbia Records. Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14,1900 and he was the youngest of five children in a Conservative Jewish family of Lithuanian origins. While emigrating from Russia to the United States, Coplands father, Harris Morris Copland, Copland was however unaware until late in his life that the family name had been Kaplan, and his parents never told him this. His father was a staunch Democrat, the family members were active in Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes, where Aaron celebrated his Bar Mitzvah. Not especially athletic, the young man became an avid reader. Coplands father had no musical interest and his mother, Sarah Mittenthal Copland, sang, played the piano, and arranged for music lessons for her children. Of his siblings, oldest brother Ralph was the most advanced musically and his sister Laurine had the strongest connection with Aaron, she gave him his first piano lessons, promoted his musical education, and supported him in his musical career. A student at the Metropolitan Opera School and a frequent opera-goer, Copland attended Boys High School and in the summer went to various camps
Aaron Copland
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Aaron Copland as subject of a
Young People's Concert, 1970
Aaron Copland
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Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College (part of the City University of New York)
Aaron Copland
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Nadia Boulanger in 1925
Aaron Copland
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Carlos Chávez in 1937
27.
Willem de Kooning
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Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and moved to New York in 1927. Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on April 24,1904 and his parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced in 1907, and de Kooning lived first with his father and then with his mother. He left school in 1916 and became an apprentice in a firm of commercial artists, until 1924 he attended evening classes at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, now the Willem de Kooning Academie. In 1926 de Kooning travelled to the United States as a stowaway on the Shelley, a British freighter bound for Argentina and he stayed at the Dutch Seamens Home in Hoboken, New Jersey, and found work as a house-painter. In 1927 he moved to Manhattan, where he had a studio on West Forty-fourth Street and he supported himself with jobs in carpentry, house-painting and commercial art. De Kooning began painting in his time and in 1928 he joined the art colony at Woodstock. He also began to some of the modernist artists active in Manhattan. None of them were executed, but a sketch for one was included in New Horizons in American Art at the Museum of Modern Art, De Kooning met his wife, Elaine Fried, at the American Artists School in New York. She was 14 years his junior, thus was to begin a lifelong partnership affected by alcoholism, lack of money, love affairs, quarrels and separations. They were married on December 9,1943, at this time, de Koonings work borrowed strongly from Gorkys surrealist imagery and was influenced by Picasso. This only changed when de Kooning met the younger painter Franz Kline, Kline died young and he was one of de Koonings closest artist friends. Klines influence is evident in de Koonings calligraphic black images of this period, in the late 1950s, de Koonings work shifted away from the figurative work of the women and began to display an interest in more abstract, less representational imagery. He became a US citizen in 1961 and moved to East Hampton in 1963 and this became his primary residence and he remained there until the end of his life. On Long Island de Kooning, in addition to his painting, inspired in part by the work of Henry Moore, de Kooning created highly abstracted figurative sculpture very reminicent of his figurative paintings. It was revealed toward the end of his life that de Kooning began losing his memory in the late 1980s and had been suffering from Alzheimers disease for some time. This revelation has initiated considerable debate among scholars and critics about how responsible de Kooning was for the creation of his late work, succumbing to the progress of his disease, William de Kooning painted his final works in 1991. He passed away in 1997 at the age of 92, upon death William de Kooning was cremated. His final place of rest is publicly unknown, De Koonings paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s are abstract still-lifes characterised by geometric or biomorphic shapes and strong colours
Willem de Kooning
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De Kooning in his studio in 1961
Willem de Kooning
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Willem de Kooning, Woman V (1952–53),
National Gallery of Australia
Willem de Kooning
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Woman III, (1953), private collection
Willem de Kooning
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Willem de Kooning (1968)
28.
Agnes de Mille
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Agnes George de Mille was an American dancer and choreographer. Agnes de Mille was born in New York City into a family of theater professionals. Her father William C. deMille and her uncle Cecil B and her mother, Anna Angela George, was the daughter of Henry George, the economist. On her fathers side, Agnes was the granddaughter of playwright Henry Churchill de Mille and she had a love for acting and originally wanted to be an actress, but was told that she was not pretty enough, so she turned her attention to dance. As a child, she had longed to dance, but dance at time was considered more of an activity, rather than a viable career option. She did not seriously consider dancing as a career until after she graduated from college, when de Milles younger sister was prescribed ballet classes to cure her flat feet, de Mille joined her. De Mille lacked flexibility and technique, though, and did not have a dancers body, classical ballet was the most widely known dance form at this time, and de Milles apparent lack of ability limited her opportunities. One of de Mille’s earliest jobs, thanks to her father’s connections, was choreographing the Cecil B, deMilles dance director LeRoy Prinz clashed with the younger de Mille. Her uncle always deferred to Prinz, even agreeing to his nieces dances in advance. Although de Mille continued to choreograph nearly up to the time of her death—her final ballet, on the strength of Rodeo, de Mille was hired to choreograph the musical show Oklahoma. The dream ballet, in which dancers Marc Platt, Katherine Sergava, instead of functioning as an interlude or divertissement, the ballet provided key insights into the heroines emotional troubles. De Milles success on Broadway did not translate into success in Hollywood and her only significant film credit is Oklahoma. She was not invited to recreate her choreography for either Brigadoon or Carousel and her love for acting played a very important role in her choreography. De Mille revolutionized musical theatre by creating choreography which not only conveyed the emotional dimensions of the characters and her choreography, as a reflection of her awareness of acting, reflected the angst and turmoil of the characters instead of simply focusing on a dancers physical technique. Krupska, Mitchell, and Ray served as de Milles assistant choreographers, in 1973, de Mille founded the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre, which she later revived as Heritage Dance Theatre. De Mille developed a love for public speaking, becoming an advocate for dance in America. She spoke in front of Congress three times, once in the Senate, once in the House of Representatives, and once for the Committee for Medical Research. She was interviewed in the documentary series Hollywood, A Celebration of the American Silent Film primarily discussing the work of her uncle Cecil B
Agnes de Mille
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Agnes de Mille (1941)
29.
Eva Le Gallienne
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Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne consciously ended her work on Broadway to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theater, noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American Repertory Movement, which enabled todays Off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself, Le Gallienne also became a stage coach, director. Ms. Le Gallienne consciously devoted herself to the Art of the Theatre as opposed to the Show Business of Broadway and she ran the Civic Repertory Theatre Company for 10 years, producing 37 plays during that time. Le Gallienne was born in London to an English poet of French descent, Richard Le Gallienne, after Evas parents separated when she was four years old, she and her mother moved to Paris, where she spent her childhood shuttling back and forth between there and Britain. While in Paris, she was taken backstage to meet Sarah Bernhardt and she made her stage debut at the age of 15 with a walk-on role in a 1914 production of Maurice Maeterlincks Monna Vanna, then spent several months in a drama school. She left to perform in a comedy as a cockney servant. She then spent a season performing on the road and in summer stock, Le Gallienne consciously devoted herself to the Art of the Theatre as opposed to the Show Business of Broadway, and was a pioneer in the emerging American Repertory Theater. As head of the Civic Repertory Theatre, she rejected the admission of Bette Davis, whose attitude she described as insincere, the Civic Rep disbanded at the height of the Depression in 1934, having mounted 34 productions. Le Gallienne was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986, Le Gallienne never hid her lesbianism inside the acting community, but reportedly was never comfortable with her sexuality, struggling privately with it. She reportedly briefly considered arranging for a front marriage with actor Basil Rathbone. In 1918, while in Hollywood, she began an affair with the great actress Alla Nazimova, who was at her height of fame, the affair ended reportedly due to Nazimovas jealousy. Nonetheless, Nazimova liked Le Gallienne greatly, and assisted in her being introduced to influential people of the day. It was Nazimova who coined the phrase sewing circles, to describe the intricate, Le Gallienne was also involved for some time with actresses Tallulah Bankhead, Beatrice Lillie and Laurette Taylor during that time. In 1920, she became involved with poet, novelist and playwright Mercedes de Acosta about whom she was passionate for several years and she and de Acosta began their romance shortly after de Acostas marriage to Abram Poole which strained their relationship. Still, they vacationed and travelled together often, at times visiting the salon of famed writer, de Acosta wrote two plays for Le Gallienne during that time, Sandro Botticelli and Jehanne de Arc. They ended their relationship after five years, in 1960, when de Acosta was seriously ill with a brain tumour and in need of money, she published her memoir, Here Lies the Heart. The reviews were positive and many close friends praised the book, Le Gallienne was furious, denouncing de Acosta as a liar and claiming she invented the stories for fame
Eva Le Gallienne
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(c.1923-28)
30.
Alan Lomax
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Alan Lomax was an American field collector of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England and he collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John A. With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to out for a public role for folklore. He devoted much of the part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity. In the 1970s and 1980s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institutions Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about music, American Patchwork. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began, linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation. Because of childhood asthma, chronic ear infections, and generally frail health, in Dallas, he entered the Terrill School for Boys. Lomax excelled at Terrill and then transferred to the Choate School in Connecticut for a year, because of his mothers declining health, however, rather than going to Harvard as his father had wished, Lomax matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin. The hardest thing Ive had to learn is that Im not a genius, at the University of Texas Lomax read Nietzsche and developed an interest in philosophy. He joined and wrote a few columns for the paper, The Daily Texan. At this time he also he began collecting records and taking his dates to black-owned night clubs. During the spring term his mother died, and his youngest sister Bess, Although the Great Depression was rapidly causing his familys resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his sophomore year there. He enrolled in philosophy and physics and also pursued a long-distance informal reading course in Plato and he also became involved in radical politics and came down with pneumonia. His grades suffered, diminishing his financial aid prospects and he did his first field collecting without his father with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in the summer of 1935. He returned to the University of Texas that fall and was awarded a BA in Philosophy, summa cum laude, Alan Lomax married Elizabeth Harold Goodman, then a student at the University of Texas, in February 1937. They were married for 12 years and had a daughter, Anne, Elizabeth assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi. Elizabeth also wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music that were broadcast over the BBC Home Service as part of the war effort
Alan Lomax
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Lomax playing guitar on stage at the Mountain Music Festival,
Asheville, North Carolina, in the early 1940s.
31.
Lewis Mumford
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Lewis Mumford, KBE was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes, Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush. Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912 and he studied at the City College of New York and The New School for Social Research, but became ill with tuberculosis and never finished his degree. In 1918 he joined the navy to serve in World War I and was assigned as a radio electrician and he was discharged in 1919 and became associate editor of The Dial, an influential modernist literary journal. He later worked for The New Yorker where he wrote architectural criticism, Mumfords earliest books in the field of literary criticism have had a lasting impact on contemporary American literary criticism. Soon after, with the book The Brown Decades, he began to establish himself as an authority in American architecture and urban life, which he interpreted in a social context. In his early writings on life, Mumford was optimistic about human abilities and wrote that the human race would use electricity. He would later take a more pessimistic stance and his early architectural criticism also helped to bring wider public recognition to the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1963, Mumford received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association, Mumford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1975 Mumford was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, in 1976, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. In 1986, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts and he served as the architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over 30 years. His 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award, Lewis Mumford died at the age of 94 at his home in Amenia, New York on January 26,1990. Nine years later it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and his wife Sophia died in 1997, at age 97. In his book The Condition of Man, published in 1944, the term is an important one because it sets limits on human possibilities, limits that are aligned with the nature of the human body. Mumford never forgot the importance of air quality, of food availability, of the quality of water, or the comfort of spaces, technology and progress could never become a runaway train in his reasoning, so long as organic humanism was there to act as a brake. Mumfords respect for nature, that is to say, the natural characteristics of being human, provided him with a platform from which to assess technologies. Thus his criticism and counsel with respect to the city and with respect to the implementation of technology was fundamentally organized around the organic humanism to which he ascribed
Lewis Mumford
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Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
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Mumford's house in Amenia
Lewis Mumford
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Pentagon of Power picture and a quote from it.
32.
Eudora Welty
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Eudora Alice Welty was an American short story writer and novelist who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimists Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards including the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America and her house in Jackson, Mississippi has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum. Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13,1909 and she grew up with younger brothers Edward Jefferson and Walter Andrews. Eudora’s mother was a school teacher, Eudora soon developed a love of reading, reinforced by her mother who believed that any room in our house, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read to. Her father, who worked as an executive, was intrigued by gadgets and machines. She later would use technology for symbolism in her stories and would become an avid photographer. Near the time of her school graduation, Eudora moved with her family to a house built for them at 1119 Pinehurst Street. Hedrick designed the Weltys Tudor Revival style home, which is now known as the Eudora Welty House, from 1925 to 1927, Welty studied at the Mississippi State College for Women, then transferred to the University of Wisconsin to complete her studies in English literature. She studied advertising at Columbia University at the suggestion of her father, because Welty graduated at the height of the Great Depression, she struggled to find work in New York. Soon after Welty returned to Jackson in 1931, her father died of leukemia and she took a job at a local radio station and wrote about Jackson society for the Memphis newspaper Commercial Appeal. In 1935, she work for the Works Progress Administration. As a publicity agent, she collected stories, conducted interviews and she gained a wider view of Southern life and the human relationships that she drew from for her short stories. During this time she held meetings in her house with fellow writers and friends. Three years later, she left her job to become a full-time writer and she strengthened her place as an influential Southern writer when she published her first book of short stories, A Curtain of Green. Her new-found success won her a seat on the staff of The New York Times book review as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to France, England, Ireland, while abroad, she spent some time as a resident lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1960, she returned home to Jackson to care for her elderly mother, after Medgar Evers, president of the NAACP in Mississippi, was assassinated, she published a story, Where Is the Voice Coming From. She wrote it in the first person as the assassin, in 1973 she received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Optimists Daughter
Eudora Welty
–
The
Eudora Welty House
Eudora Welty
–
Welty's headstone at
Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi
33.
Dominique de Menil
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Dominique de Menil was a French-American art collector, philanthropist, founder of the Menil Collection and an heiress to the Schlumberger Limited oil-equipment fortune. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986, Dominique de Menil was born Dominique Isaline Zelia Henriette Clarisse Schlumberger, the daughter of Conrad and Louise Delpech Schlumberger. She also published articles on technology in the French journal La revue du cinéma. In 1930 she met the banker Jean de Menil, and they were married the next year, raised a Protestant, Dominique converted to Roman Catholicism in 1932. They had five children, Marie-Christophe, Adelaide, George de Menil, François, following the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, the de Menils emigrated from Paris to the United States of America. John and Dominique de Menil began collecting art intensively in the 1940s and they ultimately amassed more than 17,000 paintings, sculptures, decorative objects, prints, drawings, photographs, and rare books. The de Menils were particularly interested in modern European art, and a strength of the collection was the many Cubist, Surrealist. By the 1960s the de Menils had gravitated toward the major American post-war movements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, the de Menils, however, did not limit their acquisitions to modern art, and their eclectic tastes became a hallmark of their collecting practices. Influenced by the teachings of Father Couturier and Father Congar, the de Menils developed a particular humanist ethos in which they understood art as a part of the human experience. Their collection was motivated by their shared interest in the ways individuals over different cultures. After moving to Houston, the de Menils quickly became key figures in the citys developing cultural life as advocates of modern art, in 1949 they commissioned the architect Philip Johnson to design their home in the River Oaks neighborhood in Houston. The de Menils filled their home with art and hosted many of the artists, scientists, civil rights activists. In 1954 they founded the Menil Foundation, an organization dedicated to the support and advancement of religious, charitable, literary, scientific. They established the universitys Media Center in 1967, after being met with increasing resistance by the more traditional Basilian clergy at the University of St. The de Menils supported Rice University Professor of Astrophysics, Donald D, other filmmakers who visited the Media Center included Ola Balogun, Bernardo Bertolucci, James Blue, Jim McBride, and Colin Young. John and Dominique de Menil also shared an interest in photography, inviting photographers to come to Houston to document events in the city and exhibit their work. Photography became an important component of the collection, which works by Eve Arnold, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Danny Lyon, Hans Namuth. In addition to becoming known as collectors and patrons of art, John and their actions in Houston focused upon the Civil Rights Movement in particular
Dominique de Menil
–
Dominique de Menil
Dominique de Menil
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Strake and Jones Halls, designed by Philip Johnson, University of St. Thomas, Houston
Dominique de Menil
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Southeast corner of the Menil Collection, Houston
34.
Exxon Corporation
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Exxon Mobil Corporation is an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas. It is the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil Company, the worlds seventh largest company by revenue, ExxonMobil is also the seventh largest publicly traded company by market capitalization. The company was ranked ninth globally in the Forbes Global 2000 list in 2016, ExxonMobil was the second most profitable company in the Fortune 500 in 2014. ExxonMobil is the largest of the worlds Big Oil companies, or supermajors, with production of 3.921 million BOE. In 2008, this was approximately 3 percent of world production, when ranked by oil and gas reserves, it is 14th in the world—with less than 1 percent of the total. ExxonMobils reserves were 25.2 billion BOE at the end of 2013, ExxonMobil has a history of lobbying for climate change denial and against the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The company has also been the target of accusations of improperly dealing with rights issues, influence on American foreign policy. ExxonMobil was formed in 1999 by the merger of two oil companies, Exxon and Mobil. Both Exxon and Mobil were descendants of Standard Oil, established by John D. Rockefeller, in 1882, it together with its affiliated companies was incorporated as the Standard Oil Trust with Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and Standard Oil Company of New York as its largest companies. The Anglo-American Oil Company was established in the United Kingdom in 1888, in 1890, Standard Oil, together with local ship merchants in Bremen established Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum Gesellschaft. In 1891, a branch for the Netherlands and Belgium. At the same year, a branch for Italy, Società Italo Americana pel Petrolio, was established in Venice. The Standard Oil Trust was dissolved under the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1892, however, in 1893, the Chinese and the whole Asian kerosene market was assigned to Standard Oil Company of New York in order to improve trade with the Asian counterparts. In 1898, Standard Oil of New Jersey acquired controlling stake in Imperial Oil of Canada, in 1899, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey became the holding company for the Standard Oil Interests. The anti-monopoly proceedings against the Standard Oil were launched in 1898, by 1911, with public outcry at a climax, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Standard Oil must be dissolved and split into 34 companies. Two of these companies were Jersey Standard, which eventually became Exxon, and Socony, over the next few decades, Jersey Standard and Socony grew significantly. John Duston Archbold was the first president of Jersey Standard, Archbold was followed by Walter C. Teagle in 1917, who made it the largest oil company in the world, in 1919, Jersey Standard acquired a 50% share in Humble Oil & Refining Co. a Texas oil producer
Exxon Corporation
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ExxonMobil Building, former ExxonMobil offices in
Downtown Houston were vacated in early 2015.
Exxon Corporation
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Exxon Mobil Corp.
Exxon Corporation
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ExxonMobil refinery in
Baton Rouge
Exxon Corporation
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Map of the Yellowstone River watershed
35.
Romare Bearden
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Romare Bearden was an Afro-American artist. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, born in Charlotte, North Carolina, educated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bearden moved to New York City after high school and went on to graduate from NYU in 1935. He began his career creating scenes of the American South. Later, he endeavored to express the humanity he felt was lacking in the world after his experience in the US Army during World War II on the European front and he later returned to Paris in 1950 and studied Art History and Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1950. Beardens early work focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community and his lifelong support of young, emerging artists led him and his wife to create the Bearden Foundation to support young or emerging artists and scholars. In 1987, Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts and his work in collage led the New York Times to describe Bearden as “the nations foremost collagist” in his 1988 obituary. Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina and his family moved him to New York City as a toddler, and their household soon became a meeting place for major figures of the Harlem Renaissance. His mother, Bessye Bearden, played a role with New York Citys Board of Education. Bessye Bearden was also a New York correspondent for The Chicago Defender, young Romare Bearden traveled frequently, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and to visit family members in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1929 he graduated from Peabody High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he then enrolled in Lincoln University, the nations first Historically Black College and University founded in 1854. He later transferred to Boston University where he served as art director for Beanpot, Bearden studied art, education, science and mathematics, graduating with a degree in science and education in 1935. He continued his study under German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League in 1936 and 1937. During this period he supported himself as a political cartoonist for African-American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American, Bearden grew as an artist not by learning how to create new techniques and mediums, but by his life experiences. His early paintings were often of scenes in the American South, in 1935, Bearden became a case worker for the Harlem office of the New York City Department of Social Services. Throughout his career as an artist, Bearden worked as a case worker off, during World War II, Bearden joined the United States Army, serving from 1942 until 1945. After serving in the army, Bearden joined the Samuel Kootz Gallery, a commercial gallery in New York. He would return to Europe in 1950 to study philosophy with Gaston Bachelard, Bearden then traveled throughout Europe visiting Picasso and other artists. This completely changed his style of art as he started producing abstract representations of what he deemed as human and his works were exhibited at the Samuel M. Kootz gallery until his work was deemed not abstract enough
Romare Bearden
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Romare Bearden, in his army uniform, a photograph taken by
Carl Van Vechten, 1944
Romare Bearden
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Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, cut-and-pasted cloth and paper with synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 1970,
Museum of Modern Art
Romare Bearden
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Bearden (right) discussing one of his paintings, Cotton Workers, with Pvt.
Charles H. Alston, his first art teacher and cousin, in 1944. Both Bearden and Alston were members of the
372nd Infantry Regiment stationed in New York City.
Romare Bearden
–
Romare Bearden, The Calabash,
collage, 1970,
Library of Congress
36.
Ella Fitzgerald
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Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer often referred to as the First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz and Lady Ella. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, Fitzgeralds rendition of the nursery rhyme A-Tisket, A-Tasket helped boost both her and Webb to national fame. Taking over the band after Webb died, Fitzgerald left it behind in 1942 to start a career that would last effectively the rest of her life. With Verve she recorded some of her more noted works. These partnerships produced recognizable songs like Dream a Little Dream of Me, Cheek to Cheek, Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall, in 1993, Fitzgerald capped off her sixty-year career with her last public performance. Three years later, she died at the age of 79, Fitzgerald was born on April 25,1917, in Newport News, Virginia, the daughter of William Fitzgerald and Temperance Tempie Fitzgerald. Her parents were unmarried but lived together for at least two and a years after she was born. Initially living in a room, her mother and Da Silva soon found jobs. Her half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923, by 1925, Fitzgerald and her family had moved to nearby School Street, then a predominantly poor Italian area. She began her education at the age of six and proved to be an outstanding student. Fitzgerald had been passionate about dancing from third grade, being a fan of Earl Snakehips Tucker in particular, Fitzgerald and her family were Methodists and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she regularly attended worship services, Bible study, and Sunday school. The church provided Fitzgerald with her earliest experiences in music making. During this period Fitzgerald listened to recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby. Fitzgerald idolized the Boswell Sisters lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, My mother brought home one of her records, in 1932, her mother died from serious injuries she received in a car accident when Fitzgerald was 15 years of age. This left her at first in the care of her stepfather but before the end of April 1933, following these traumas, Fitzgerald began skipping school and letting her grades suffer. During this period she worked at times as a lookout at a bordello, Ella Fitzgerald never talked publicly about this time in her life. When the authorities caught up with her, she was first placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, in the Bronx. However, when the orphanage proved too crowded, she was moved to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York, eventually she escaped and for a time she was homeless
Ella Fitzgerald
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Fitzgerald in November 1946
Ella Fitzgerald
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A young Fitzgerald, photographed by
Carl Van Vechten in 1940
Ella Fitzgerald
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Fitzgerald performing with
Dizzy Gillespie,
Ray Brown,
Milt Jackson and
Timme Rosenkrantz in September 1947, New York
Ella Fitzgerald
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Fitzgerald shakes hands with
President Ronald Reagan after performing in the
White House, 1981
37.
Howard Nemerov
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Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964, for The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize. Nemerov was brother to photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus and father to art historian Alexander Nemerov, Professor of the History of Art, born on Leap Day in New York City, his parents were David Nemerov and Gertrude. The Nemerovs were a Russian Jewish couple who lived in New York City and owned Russeks and his younger sisters were the photographer Diane Arbus and sculptor/painter Renee Nemerov Sparkia Brown. The elder Nemerovs talents and interests extended to art connoisseurship, painting, philanthropy, young Howard was raised in a sophisticated New York City environment where he attended the Society for Ethical Cultures Fieldston School. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot, first in the Royal Canadian Air Force and he married in 1944, and after the war, having earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book. In 1999, Washington University dedicated a dormitory, The Howard Nemerov House and his novels have also been commended, they include The Homecoming Game, Federigo, Or the Power of Love, and The Melodramatists. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, in 1990 he was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. Nemerov died of cancer in 1991 in University City, Missouri, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award was instituted in 1994 to honor him, and by 2008 about 3000 sonnets were entered annually in the associated competition. He wrote almost exclusively in fixed forms and meter, while he is known for his meticulousness and refined technique, his work also has a reputation for being witty and playful. He is compared to John Hollander and Philip Larkin, a Primer of the Daily Round is his most frequently anthologized poem, and highly representative of Nemerovs poetic style. It is an archetypal Elizabethan sonnet, demonstrative of the prosodic creativity for which Nemerov is famous, another widely appreciated poem is The War in the Air, which draws on his wartime experience as a pilot. A critical review by Mary Kinzie said of it, the poem imperceptibly thickens itself out of the stream of prose, Howard Nemerov, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Recipient, Dies at 71. Louis St. Louis Walk of Fame Howard Nemerov Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Skylark The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland,1964 Accessed June 26,2012
Howard Nemerov
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Howard Nemerov
38.
Alwin Nikolais
–
Alwin Nikolais was an American choreographer. Nikolais studied piano at an age and began his performing career as an organist accompanying silent films. As a young artist, he gained skills in design, acting, puppetry. It was after attending a performance by the German dancer Mary Wigman that he was inspired to study dance. He received his dance training at Bennington College from the great figures of the modern dance world, Hanya Holm, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Louis Horst. In 1940, in collaboration with Truda Kaschmann, his first modern dance teacher, Nikolais received a commission to create Eight Column Line, his first ballet. The work was presented at one of the events of Hartford social season that counted Salvador Dalí, Nikolais relocated to New York City following the war and resumed studying with Hanya Holm. Eventually, he became Holms assistant, teaching at her New York school, in 1948, Nikolais was appointed director of the Henry Street Playhouse, which had been left in a state of transition and had to be entirely re-established. He formed the Playhouse Dance Company, which was later renamed and it was at Henry Street that Nikolais began to develop his own world of abstract dance theatre, portraying man as part of a total environment. Nikolais redefined dance, as the art of motion which, left on its own merits, becomes the message as well as the medium. It was also at Henry Street Playhouse that Mr. Nikolais was joined by Murray Louis, in 1956, the Nikolais Dance Theater was invited to its first of many appearances at the American Dance Festival. With the companys 1968 Paris season at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, following Paris, the company began performing around the world. Here began an artistic relationship with the Théâtre de la Ville which began in 1971. In 1978, the French National Ministry of Culture invited him to form the Centre Nationale de la Danse Contemporaine in Angers, in December 1980, he created his 99th choreographic work Schema, for the Paris Opera. At the same time, his choreography for an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti was being staged at the Vienna Staatsoper, Alwin Nikolais gave the world a new vision of dance and was named the father of multi-media theater. Often referred to as the American Patriarch of French modern dance, Nikolais is a knight of Frances Legion of Honor, in 2000 he was inducted into the National Museum of Dances Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame. Nikolais was granted five honorary degrees, was twice designated a Guggenheim Fellow. Mr. Nikolais and his work have featured in numerous films and television programs in the US
Alwin Nikolais
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Alwin Nikolais, photographed by Ralph E. Sandler
39.
Isamu Noguchi
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Isamu Noguchi was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. His work lives on around the world and at the Noguchi Museum in New York City, Yone had ended his relationship with Gilmour earlier that year and planned to marry The Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes. After proposing to Armes, Yone left for Japan in late August, settling in Tokyo and awaiting her arrival, their engagement fell through months later when she learned of Léonie, in 1906, Yone invited Léonie to come to Tokyo with their son. She at first refused, but growing anti-Japanese sentiment following the Russo-Japanese War eventually convinced her to take up Yones offer, the two departed from San Francisco in March 1907, arriving in Yokohama to meet Yone. Upon arrival, their son was given the name Isamu. However, Yone had married a Japanese woman by the time they arrived, after again separating from Yone, Léonie and Isamu moved several times throughout Japan. In 1912, while the two were living in Chigasaki, Isamus half-sister, pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement Ailes Gilmour, was born to Léonie, here, Léonie had a house built for the three of them, a project that she had the 8-year-old Isamu oversee. Nurturing her sons artistic ability, she put him in charge of their garden, however, they moved once again in December 1917 to an English-speaking community in Yokohama. In 1918, Noguchi was sent back to the U. S. for schooling in Rolling Prairie, after graduation, he left with Dr. Edward Rumely to LaPorte, where he found boarding with a Swedenborgian pastor, Samuel Mack. Noguchi began attending La Porte High School, graduating in 1922, during this period of his life, he was known by the name Sam Gilmour. As one of Borglums apprentices, Noguchi received little training as a sculptor, his tasks included arranging the horses and he did, however, pick up some skills in casting from Borglums Italian assistants, later fashioning a bust of Abraham Lincoln. At summers end, Borglum told Noguchi that he would never become a sculptor and he then traveled to New York City, reuniting with the Rumely family at their new residence, and with Dr. Rumelys financial aid enrolled in February 1922 as a premedical student at Columbia University. Another influence was his mother, who in 1923 moved from Japan to California, in 1924, while still enrolled at Columbia, Noguchi followed his mothers advice to take night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. The schools head, Onorio Ruotolo, was impressed by Noguchis work. Only three months later, Noguchi held his first exhibit, a selection of plaster and terracotta works and he soon dropped out of Columbia University to pursue sculpture full-time, changing his name from Gilmour to Noguchi. After moving into his own studio, Noguchi found work through commissions for portrait busts, during this time, he frequented avant garde shows at the galleries of such modernists as Alfred Stieglitz and J. B. Neuman, and took a particular interest in a show of the works of Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, in late 1926, Noguchi applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded the grant despite being three years short of the age requirement, Noguchi arrived in Paris in April 1927 and soon afterward met the American author Robert McAlmon, who brought him to Constantin Brâncușis studio for an introduction
Isamu Noguchi
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Isamu Noguchi, 1941
Isamu Noguchi
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The Garden of Peace,
UNESCO headquarters,
Paris. Donated by the Government of Japan, this garden was designed by Isamu Noguchi in 1958 and installed by Japanese gardener Toemon Sano.
Isamu Noguchi
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Heimar, 1968, at the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden,
Israel Museum,
Jerusalem,
Israel
Isamu Noguchi
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The Cry, 1959,
Kröller-Müller Museum Sculpture Park,
Otterlo,
Netherlands
40.
William Schuman
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William Howard Schuman was an American composer and arts administrator. Schuman was born into a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York City and he was named after the 27th U. S. president, William Howard Taft, though his family preferred to call him Bill. Schuman played the violin and banjo as a child, but his passion was baseball. He attended Temple Shaaray Tefila as a child, while still in high school, he formed a dance band, Billy Schuman and his Alamo Society Orchestra, that played local weddings and bar mitzvahs in which Schuman played string bass. In 1928 he entered New York Universitys School of Commerce to pursue a business degree and he also wrote popular songs with E. B. Marks Jr, a friend he had met long before at summer camp, around that time, Schuman met lyricist Frank Loesser and wrote some forty songs with him. Loessers first published song, In Love with a Memory of You, on April 13,1930, Schuman went with his older sister, Audrey, to a Carnegie Hall concert of the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. According to the Philharmonics archives, the included works by Brahms, Mendelssohn, Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Of this experience, Schuman later said, I was astounded at seeing the sea of stringed instruments, the visual thing alone was astonishing. I had never heard anything like it, the very next day, I decided to become a composer. Schuman dropped out of school and quit his job to study music at the Malkin Conservatory with Max Persin. From 1933 to 1938, he studied privately with Roy Harris, in 1935, he received a B. S. degree in music education from Teachers College at Columbia University. Harris brought Schuman to the attention of the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Schuman won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1943 for his Cantata No.2. A Free Song, adapted from poems by Walt Whitman, from 1935 to 1945, he taught composition at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1945, he became president of the Juilliard School, founding the Juilliard String Quartet while there and he left in 1961 to succeed John D. Rockefeller III as president of Lincoln Center, a position he held until 1969. He won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1985 citing more than half a century of contribution to American music as composer and educational leader and he died in New York City at age 81. Schuman left a body of work. His eight symphonies, numbered Three through Ten, as he put it
William Schuman
–
William Schuman
41.
Robert Penn Warren
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Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for his novel All the Kings Men and he is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, very near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, to Robert Warren, Robert Penn Warren graduated from Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. Warren pursued further study at Yale University from 1927 to 1928 and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the rule of Benito Mussolini and that same year he began his teaching career at Southwestern College in Memphis, Tennessee. He contributed The Briar Patch to the Agrarian manifesto Ill Take My Stand along with 11 other Southern writers and poets. However, Warren recanted these views in an article on the Civil Rights Movement, Divided South Searches Its Soul, a month later, Warren published an expanded version of the article as a small book titled Segregation, The Inner Conflict in the South. He subsequently adopted a profile as a supporter of racial integration. In 1965, he published Who Speaks for the Negro, Warrens interviews with civil rights leaders are at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, Warrens best-known work is All the Kings Men, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. All the Kings Men became a successful film, starring Broderick Crawford. A2006 film adaptation by writer/director Steven Zaillian featured Sean Penn as Willie Stark, the opera Willie Stark by Carlisle Floyd to his own libretto based on the novel was first performed in 1981. Warren served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1944–1945, Promises also won the annual National Book Award for Poetry. In 1974, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, Warrens lecture was entitled Poetry and Democracy. In 1977, Warren was awarded the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates, in 1980, Warren was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter. In 1981, Warren was selected as a MacArthur Fellow and later was named as the first U. S, poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry on February 26,1986
Robert Penn Warren
–
Warren in 1968
42.
Armand Hammer
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Hammers business interests around the world and his citizen diplomacy helped him cultivate a wide network of friends and associates. He appeared frequently on television, commenting on international relations or agitating for research into a cure for cancer. As of 2016, he has been the subject of six biographies—in 1975,1985, Weinberg 1989, Blumay 1992, Epstein 1996, and Alef 2009 and his art collection and his philanthropic projects were the subject of numerous publications as well. Hammer was born in New York City, to Russian-born Jewish immigrants, Julius and his father came to the United States from Odessa in the Russian Empire in 1875, and settled in the Bronx, where he ran a general medical practice and five drugstores. Hammer claimed that his father had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camélias, a novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. According to other sources, Hammer was named after the arm and hammer graphic symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America, later in his life, Hammer confirmed that this was the origin of his given name. Hammer attended Morris High School, Columbia College where he was a member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, in Hammers final year of medical school he was set to enter a residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, but events altered his plans. Due to socialist and communist activities Hammers father Julius had been put under federal surveillance, on July 5,1919 federal agents witnessed Marie Oganesoff enter Julius medical office located in a wing of his Bronx home. Oganesoff who had accumulated a life-threatening history of miscarriages, abortions, the surgical procedure took place in the midst of a great flu epidemic. Six days after the abortion Oganesoff died of pneumonia, four weeks after her death a Bronx County grand jury indicted Dr. Julius Hammer for first-degree manslaughter. In 1920 a judge sentenced Julius Hammer to 3 and a half years in Sing Sing prison, while most historians state that Julius had performed the abortion, an opposing position has been put forward by author Edward Jay Epstein. Epsteins claims come from interview comments made by Bettye Murphy who had been Armands mistress, epsteins take on events remains controversial and a minority position. After Julius was imprisoned he sent Armand Hammer to the Soviet Union to look after the affairs of his company Allied Drug, Hammer would travel back and forth from the Soviet Union for the next 10 years. According to Hammer, his first business success was in 1919 and this was extremely popular during prohibition, and the company had $1 million in sales that year. In 1921, while waiting for his internship to begin at Bellevue Hospital, although his career in medicine was cut short, he relished being referred to as Dr. Hammer. Hammers intentions in the 1921 trip have been debated since, in his passport application, Hammer stated that he intended to visit only western Europe. J. Edgar Hoover in the Justice Department knew this was false, a skeptical U. S. government watched him through this trip, and for the rest of his life. He moved to the USSR in the 1920s to oversee operations, especially his large business manufacturing and exporting pens
Armand Hammer
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Armand Hammer
Armand Hammer
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Sign of the Armand Hammer Golf Course in
Holmby Park in
Holmby Hills, Los Angeles
Armand Hammer
–
The Armand Hammer Family Tomb in Westwood Memorial Park, Westwood, Los Angeles, California
43.
Saul Bellow
–
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundations lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammlers Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldts Gift, widely regarded as one of the 20th centurys greatest authors, Bellow has had a huge literary influence. Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of Henderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself, Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a thick-necked rowdy, and an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellows fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, Bellows protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Corde called the big-scale insanities of the 20th century. This transcendence of the unutterably dismal is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a ferocious assimilation of learning and an emphasis on nobility. Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, two years after his parents, Lescha and Abraham Bellows, emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia, Bellows family was Lithuanian-Jewish, his father was born in Vilnius. Bellow celebrated his birthday in June, although he may have born in July. Of his familys emigration, Bellow wrote, The retrospective was strong in me because of my parents and they were both full of the notion that they were falling, falling. They had been prosperous cosmopolitans in Saint Petersburg and my mother could never stop talking about the family dacha, her privileged life, and how all that was now gone. She was working in the kitchen, there had been servants in Russia. But you could always transpose from your humiliating condition with the help of a sort of embittered irony, when Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, the city that formed the backdrop of many of his novels. Bellows father, Abraham, had become an onion importer and he also worked in a bakery, as a coal delivery man, and as a bootlegger. Bellows mother, Liza, died when he was 17 and he was left with his father and brother Maurice. His mother was religious, and wanted her youngest son, Saul. But he rebelled against what he called the suffocating orthodoxy of his religious upbringing. Bellows lifelong love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew, Bellow also grew up reading William Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century. In Chicago, he took part in studies at the Anthroposophical Society of Chicago
Saul Bellow
–
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
–
Saul Bellow (left) with
Keith Botsford, around 1992
44.
Helen Hayes
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Helen Hayes MacArthur was an American actress whose career spanned almost 80 years. She eventually garnered the nickname First Lady of American Theatre and was one of 12 people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, Hayes also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Americas highest civilian honor, from then-President Ronald Reagan in 1986. In 1988, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the annual Helen Hayes Awards, which have recognized excellence in professional theatre in greater Washington, DC, since 1984, are her namesake. In 1955, the former Fulton Theatre on 46th Street in New York Citys Broadway Theater District was renamed the Helen Hayes Theatre, when that venue was torn down in 1982, the nearby Little Theatre was renamed in her honor. Helen Hayes is regarded as one of the Greatest Leading Ladies of the 20th century theatre, Helen Hayes Brown was born in Washington, D. C. on October 10,1900. Her mother, Catherine Estelle, or Essie, was an actress who worked in touring companies. Her father, Francis van Arnum Brown, worked at a number of jobs, including as a clerk at the Washington Patent Office and as a manager, Hayes Irish Catholic maternal grandparents emigrated from Ireland during the Irish Potato Famine. Hayes began a career at an early age. She attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart Convent in Washington and her sound film debut was The Sin of Madelon Claudet, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She followed that with starring roles in Arrowsmith, A Farewell to Arms, The White Sister, What Every Woman Knows, however, Hayes did not prefer that medium to the stage. In 1951, she was involved with the Broadway revival of J. M. Barries play Mary Rose at the ANTA Playhouse, in 1953, she was the first-ever recipient of the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre, repeating as the winner in 1969. She returned to Hollywood in the 1950s, and her star began to rise. She starred in My Son John and Anastasia, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a stowaway in the disaster film Airport. She followed that up with roles in Disney films such as Herbie Rides Again, One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. Her performance in Anastasia was considered a comeback—she had suspended her career for years due to the death of her daughter Mary. In 1955, the Fulton Theatre was renamed for her, however, business interests in the 1980s wished to raze that theatre and four others to construct a large hotel that included the Marquis Theatre. Parts of the original Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway were used to construct the Shakespeare Center on the Upper Westside of Manhattan, which Hayes dedicated with Joseph Papp in 1982. In 1983 the Little Theater on West 45th Street was renamed the Helen Hayes Theatre in her honor, as was a theatre in Nyack, which has since been renamed the Riverspace-Arts Center
Helen Hayes
–
Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes
–
In the film What Every Woman Knows (1934)
Helen Hayes
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Riverside Shakespeare Company Shakespeare Center Dedication with Helen Hayes, 1982.
45.
Gordon Parks
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Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was an American photojournalist in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African-Americans—and in glamour photography. He is best remembered for his photos of poor Americans during the 1940s, for his photographic essays for Life magazine. Parks also was an author, poet and composer, Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of Sarah and Jackson Parks, on Nov.30,1912. He was the youngest of fifteen children and his father was a farmer who grew corn, beets, turnips, potatoes, collard greens, and tomatoes. They also had a few ducks, chickens, and hogs and he attended a segregated elementary school. Parks related in a documentary on his life that his teacher told him that his desire to go to college would be a waste of money, when Parks was eleven years old, three white boys threw him into the Marmaton River, knowing he couldnt swim. He had the presence of mind to duck underwater so they wouldnt see him make it to land and his mother died when he was fourteen. He spent his last night at the family home sleeping beside his mothers coffin, seeking not only solace, soon after, he was sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with a sister and her husband. He and his uncle argued frequently and Parks was finally turned out onto the street to fend for himself at age 15, struggling to survive, he worked in brothels, and as a singer, piano player, bus boy, traveling waiter, and semi-pro basketball player. In 1929, he worked in a gentlemens club, the Minnesota Club. There he not only observed the trappings of success, but was able to read books from the club library. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought an end to the club, he jumped a train to Chicago, while working as a waiter in a railroad dining car, he began seeing the portfolios of photographers in picture magazines, and decided to become a photographer. At the age of 25, Parks was struck by photographs of migrant workers in a magazine and he bought his first camera, a Voigtländer Brillant, for $7.50 at a Seattle, Washington, pawnshop and taught himself how to take photos. The photography clerks who developed Parks first roll of film applauded his work and prompted him to seek a fashion assignment at a clothing store in St. Paul, Minnesota. Those photographs caught the eye of Marva Louis, wife of boxing champion Joe Louis. She encouraged Parks to move to Chicago in 1940, where he began a portrait business and he began to chronicle the citys South Side black ghetto and, in 1941, an exhibition of those photographs won Parks a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration. Upon viewing the photograph, Stryker said that it was an indictment of America, and he urged Parks to keep working with Watson, however, which led to a series of photographs of her daily life. After the FSA disbanded, Parks remained in Washington, D. C. as a correspondent with the Office of War Information and he was unable to follow the group in the overseas war theatre, so he resigned from the O. W. I
Gordon Parks
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Parks at the
Civil Rights March on Washington, 1963
Gordon Parks
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American Gothic, Washington, D.C. – a well-known photograph by Parks
Gordon Parks
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A later photograph in the FSA series by Parks shows Ella Watson and her family
Gordon Parks
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Films
46.
I.M. Pei
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Ieoh Ming Pei, FAIA, RIBA, commonly known as I. M. Pei, is a Chinese-American architect. In 1948, Pei was recruited by New York City real estate magnate William Zeckendorf, Pei retired from full-time practice in 1990. Since then, he has taken on work as an architectural consultant primarily from his sons architectural firm Pei Partnership Architects and he went on to design Dallas City Hall and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. He returned to China for the first time in 1975 to design a hotel at Fragrant Hills, and designed Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong, a skyscraper in Hong Kong for the Bank of China fifteen years later. In the early 1980s, Pei was the focus of controversy when he designed a glass-and-steel pyramid for the Musée du Louvre in Paris. He later returned to the world of the arts by designing the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, the Miho Museum in Japan, the Suzhou Museum in Suzhou, in 1983, he won the Pritzker Prize, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of architecture. Peis ancestry traces back to the Ming Dynasty, when his family moved from Anhui province to Suzhou, finding wealth in the sale of medicinal herbs, the family stressed the importance of helping the less fortunate. Ieoh Ming Pei was born on April 26,1917 to Tsuyee Pei and Lien Kwun, the family eventually included five children. As a boy, Pei was very close to his mother and she invited him, his brothers, and his sisters to join her on meditation retreats. His relationship with his father was less intimate and their interactions were respectful but distant. Peis ancestors success meant that the family lived in the echelons of society. The younger Pei, drawn more to music and other forms than to his fathers domain of banking. I have cultivated myself, he said later, at the age of ten, Pei moved with his family to Shanghai after his father was promoted. Pei attended Saint Johns Middle School, run by Protestant missionaries, academic discipline was rigorous, students were allowed only one half-day each month for leisure. Pei enjoyed playing billiards and watching Hollywood movies, especially those of Buster Keaton and he also learned rudimentary English skills by reading the Bible and novels by Charles Dickens. Shanghais many international elements gave it the name Paris of the East, the citys global architectural flavors had a profound influence on Pei, from the Bund waterfront area to the Park Hotel, built in 1934. He was also impressed by the gardens of Suzhou, where he spent the summers with extended family and regularly visited a nearby ancestral shrine. The Shizilin Garden, built in the 14th century by a Buddhist monk, was especially influential and its unusual rock formations, stone bridges, and waterfalls remained etched in Peis memory for decades
I.M. Pei
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in Luxembourg, 2006
I.M. Pei
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As a child, Pei found the
Shizilin Garden in
Suzhou to be "an ideal playground".
I.M. Pei
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Pei describes the architecture of Shanghai's
Bund waterfront area (seen here in a 2006 photo) as "very much a colonial past".
I.M. Pei
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Pei said that "
Bing Crosby 's films in particular had a tremendous influence on my choosing the United States instead of England to pursue my education."
47.
Jerome Robbins
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Jerome Robbins was an American choreographer, director, dancer, and theater producer who worked in classical ballet, on Broadway, and in films and television. He received two Academy Awards, including the 1961 Academy Award for Best Director with Robert Wise for West Side Story, Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz in the Jewish Maternity Hospital at 270 East Broadway on Manhattan’s Lower East Side – a neighborhood populated by many immigrants. The Rabinowitz family lived in an apartment house at 51 East 97th Street at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue. Known as Jerry to those close to him, Robbins was given a name that reflected his parents patriotic enthusiasm for the then-president. In the early 1920s, the Rabinowitz family moved to Weehawken and his father and uncle opened the Comfort Corset Company in Union City, New Jersey. The family had many business connections, including vaudeville performers. In the 1940s, their name was changed to Robbins. Robbins began studying dance in high school with Alys Bentley. Said Robbins later, What gave me immediately was the freedom to make up my own dances without inhibition or doubts. ”After graduation he went to study chemistry at New York University but dropped out after a year for financial reasons. He joined the company of Senya Gluck Sandor, a exponent of expressionistic modern dance. While a member of Sandor’s company Robbins made his debut with the Yiddish Art Theater. Robbins had also begun creating dances for Tamiment’s Revues, some comic and some dramatic, topical, one such dance, later also performed in New York City at the 92nd Street Y, was “Strange Fruit, ” set to the song performed indelibly by Billie Holiday. In 1946, Robbins joined Ballet Theatre, Robbins created and performed in Fancy Free, a ballet about sailors on liberty, at the Metropolitan Opera as part of the Ballet Theatre season in 1944. One of Fancy Frees inspirations was Paul Cadmus 1934 painting The Fleets In, however, Robbins scenario was more lighthearted than the painting. Robbins commissioned a score for the ballet from the then-unknown Leonard Bernstein, with Fancy Free, Robbins created a dance that integrated classic ballet, 1940’s social dancing, and a screwball plotline. Later that year, Robbins conceived and choreographed On the Town, a musical inspired by Fancy Free. Bernstein wrote the music and Smith designed the sets, the book and lyrics were by a team that Robbins would work with again, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and the director was the Broadway legend George Abbott. Because Robbins, as choreographer, insisted that his chorus reflect the diversity of a New York City crowd
Jerome Robbins
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Jerome Robbins
Jerome Robbins
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Robbins in Three Virgins and a Devil, 1941
Jerome Robbins
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The Fleet's In!, painted by
Paul Cadmus, 1934, the inspiration for the ballet,
Fancy Free (1944)
Jerome Robbins
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Rehearsals for West Side Story, 1961
48.
Rudolf Serkin
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Rudolf Serkin was a Bohemian-born pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Beethoven interpreters of the 20th century, Serkin was born in Eger, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire, to a Russian Jewish family. His father, Mordko Serkin, had been a Russian basso, from 1918 to 1920 he studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg and participated actively in Schoenbergs Society for the Private Performance of Music. In 1921, at age 17, he made his Berlin debut performing in Mr Buschs ensemble as the keyboard soloist in the Brandenburg Concerto no.5, at the end of the concert, Busch told Serkin to play an encore to the enthusiastic audience. Serkin later reported that he asked Busch, What shall I play, and Busch as a joke told him to play the Goldberg Variations and I took him seriously. When I finished there were four people left, Adolf Busch, Artur Schnabel, Alfred Einstein. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Serkin performed throughout Europe both as soloist and with Busch and the Busch Quartet, with the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933, Serkin and the Busches left Berlin for Basel, Switzerland. In 1933, Serkin made his first United States appearance at the Coolidge Festival in Washington, in 1936, he launched his solo concert career in the USA with the New York Philharmonic under Arturo Toscanini. The critics raved, describing him as an artist of unusual and impressive talents in possession of a technique, plenty of power, delicacy. In 1937, Serkin played his first New York City recital at Carnegie Hall, from 1968 to 1976 he served as the Institutes director. He lived with his family, first in New York, then in Philadelphia, as well as on a dairy farm in rural Guilford. In 1951, Serkin and Adolf Busch founded the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Marlboro, Vermont, with the goal of stimulating interest in and performance of chamber music in the United States. He made numerous recordings from the 1940s into the 1980s, including one at RCA Victor of Beethovens Piano Concerto No.4 in 1944, most of his recordings were made for Columbia Masterworks, although in the 1980s he also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon and Telarc. Serkin admired the music of Max Reger, which he discovered while working with Adolf Busch, in 1959, he became the first pianist in the United States to record Regers Piano Concerto, Op.114, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Serkin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and in March 1972 celebrated his 100th appearance with the New York Philharmonic by playing Johannes Brahms Piano Concerto No.1, in 1986, he celebrated his 50th anniversary as a guest artist with the orchestra. He is also regarded as one of the interpreters of the music of Beethoven in the 20th century. He died of cancer on 8 May 1991, aged 88 and he and Irene were the parents of seven children, including pianist Peter Serkin and cellist Judith Serkin. They also had fifteen grandchildren, including the composer David Ludwig, Irene Busch Serkin died in 1998
Rudolf Serkin
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Rudolf Serkin in 1962
49.
Virgil Thomson
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Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the American Sound in classical music, Virgil Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. As a child, he befriended Alice Smith, great-granddaughter of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saint movement. After World War I, he entered Harvard University thanks to a loan from Dr. Fred M. Smith, the president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and his tours of Europe with the Harvard Glee Club helped nurture his desire to return there. At Harvard, Thomson focused his studies on the work of Erik Satie. He studied in Paris on fellowship for a year, and after graduating and he eventually studied with Nadia Boulanger and became a fixture of Paris in the twenties. His most important friend from this period was Gertrude Stein, who was a collaborator and mentor to him. His writings on music, and his reviews of performances in particular, are noted for their wit and his definition of music was famously that which musicians do, and his views on music are radical in their insistence on reducing the rarefied aesthetics of music to market activity. He even went so far as to claim that the style a piece was written in could be most effectively understood as a consequence of its income source. In 1969, Thompson composed Metropolitan Museum Fanfare, Portrait Of An American Artist to accompany the Museums Centennial exhibition New York Painting And Sculpture, 1940–1970. Women composers were not part of circle, and some have suggested that, as a critic, he pointedly ignored their works. Thomsons score for The River was used in the 1983 ABC made-for-television movie The Day After. C, Thomson was a recipient of Yale Universitys Sanford Medal. In 1988, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts and he was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity. Virgil Thomson died on September 30,1989, in his suite at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan, hitchcock, H. Wiley, and Robert Fussell, eds. Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts. Music of the United States of America vol, New York, NY, The Library of America. Thomson interviewed by Vivian Perlis excerpt DVD with Two Thomson film scores reviewed by Roger Hall
Virgil Thomson
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Virgil Thomson, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1947
50.
Roger L. Stevens
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Roger Lacey Stevens was an American theatrical producer, arts administrator, and a real estate executive. He was the founding Chairman of both the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts, born in Detroit, Michigan, Stevens was educated at The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. He was about to enter Harvard University but his fathers financial difficulties ended his plan and he attended the University of Michigan for a year before dropping out. He then worked on a Ford assembly line and at a gas station during the Depression, in 1934, he joined a Detroit real estate firm. By 1937, before he was 30, his real work had made him a small fortune of about $50,000. He led a syndicate bought the Empire State Building in 1951 for $51 million, then a titanic sum. In politics, he made a mark as chairman of the Democratic Partys finance committee in 1956 and he produced more than 100 plays and musicals over his career, including West Side Story, Bus Stop, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In 1971, he received Special Tony Award for his body of work and he became known for introducing plays by such adventurous writers as Harold Pinter, Arthur Kopit and Tom Stoppard. In 1965, he received an appointment from President Lyndon Johnson as first Chairman of the National Council on the Arts later named the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1986, Stevens was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. On January 13,1988, Stevens was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan, in 1988, he was also awarded the National Medal of Arts. Stevens was married to Christine Gesell Stevens, founder of the Animal Welfare Institute in 1951 and he served as the organizations treasurer until his death in 1998. He had his first heart attack in 1970, in 1993, he suffered strokes that left him partly paralyzed and deprived him of much of his speech. Roger Stevens died of pneumonia on February 2,1998 at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, new Drama Group Has Million Stock. The National Endowment for the Arts 1965-2000, A Brief Chronology of Federal Support for the Arts, Washington, DC, National Endowment for the Arts. Roger L. Stevens, Real Estate Magnate, Producer and Fund-Raiser, Is Dead at 87
Roger L. Stevens
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Roger Stevens
