Frank Beacham's Journal

On June 24, 1901 — 121 years ago — the first major exhibition of Pablo Picasso's artwork opened at a gallery on Paris' rue Lafitte, a street known for its prestigious art galleries

The Old Guitarist, 1903

Painting by Pablo Picasso

On June 24, 1901 — 121 years ago — the first major exhibition of Pablo Picasso's artwork opened at a gallery on Paris' rue Lafitte, a street known for its prestigious art galleries.

The precocious 19-year-old Spaniard was at the time a relative unknown outside Barcelona, but he had already produced hundreds of paintings. The 75 works displayed at Picasso's first Paris exhibition offered moody, representational paintings by a young artist with obvious talent.

Picasso, widely acknowledged as the dominant figure in 20th century art, was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain. His father was a professor of drawing and bred Picasso for a career in academic art. He had his first exhibit at age 13 and later quit art school so he could experiment full-time with modern art styles.

He went to Paris for the first time in 1900, and in 1901 he returned with 100 of his paintings. His goal was to win an exhibition. He was introduced to Ambroise Vollard, a dealer who had sponsored Paul Cezanne, and Vollard immediately agreed to a show at his gallery after seeing the paintings.

From street scenes to landscapes, prostitutes to society ladies, Picasso's subjects were diverse. The young artist received a favorable review from the few Paris art critics who saw the show. He stayed in Paris for the rest of the year and later returned to Paris to settle permanently.

The work of Picasso, which comprises more than 50,000 paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures and ceramics produced over 80 years, is described in a series of overlapping periods.

His first notable period — the "blue period" — began shortly after his first Paris exhibit. In works such as The Old Guitarist (1903), Picasso painted in blue tones to evoke the melancholy world of the poor. The blue period was followed by the "rose period," in which he often depicted circus scenes, and then by Picasso's early work in sculpture.

In 1907, Picasso painted the groundbreaking work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which, with its fragmented and distorted representation of the human form, broke from previous European art.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon demonstrated the influence on Picasso of both African mask art and Paul Cezanne and is seen as a forerunner of the Cubist movement founded by Picasso and the French painter, Georges Braque, in 1909.

In Cubism, which is divided in two phases — analytical and synthetic — Picasso and Braque established the modern principle that artwork need not represent reality to have artistic value. Major Cubist works by Picasso included his costumes and sets for Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (1917) and The Three Musicians (1921).
Picasso and Braque's Cubist experiments also resulted in the invention of several new artistic techniques, including collage.

After Cubism, Picasso explored classical and Mediterranean themes, and images of violence and anguish increasingly appeared in his work. In 1937, this trend culminated in the masterpiece, Guernica, a monumental work that evoked the horror and suffering endured by the Basque town of Guernica when it was destroyed by German war planes during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation but was fervently opposed to fascism. After the war, he joined the French Communist Party. His work after World War II is less studied than his earlier creations, but he continued to work feverishly and enjoyed commercial and critical success.

He produced fantastical works, experimented with ceramics and painted variations on the works of other masters in the history of art. Known for his intense gaze and domineering personality, he had a series of intense and overlapping love affairs in his lifetime.

He continued to produce art with undiminished force until his death in 1973 at the age of 91.

Thanks History.com

Bob Dylan performs “Tangled Up in Blue”

Al Hirschfeld was born 119 years ago today

Al Hirschfeld in his studio on the top floor of his Manhattan townhouse on December 4, 1991

Photo by Jill Krementz

Al Hirschfeld was born 119 years ago today.

Hirschfeld was an American caricaturist best known for his black and white portraits of famous people.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he moved with his family to New York City, where he received his art training at the Art Students League of New York. In 1924, Hirschfeld traveled to Paris and London, where he studied painting, drawing and sculpture.

When he returned to the United States, a friend and Broadway press agent, Richard Maney, showed one of Hirschfeld's drawings to an editor at the New York Herald Tribune. This got Hirschfeld commissions for that newspaper and then, later, The New York Times.

Hirschfeld's style is unique and he is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary drawing and caricature. He influenced countless artists, illustrators and cartoonists. His caricatures are almost always drawings of pure line in black ink, into which Hirschfeld dipped not a pen, but a genuine crow’s quill.

Readers of The New York Times and other newspapers prior to the time they printed in color will be most familiar with the Hirschfeld drawings that are black ink on white illustration board. However, there is a whole body of Hirschfeld’s work in color. Hirschfeld’s full-color paintings were commissioned by many magazines, often as the cover.

Hirschfeld resided at 122 East 95th Street in Manhattan. He died, at age 99, of natural causes at his home on January 20, 2003.

Al Hirschfeld’s sketch of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick

Jerry Garcia

Before this day in 1986 — 36 years ago — a woman could not be a “Ms.” in the pages of The New York Times

Styles often change very slowly. Before this day in 1986 — 36 years ago — a woman could not be a “Ms.” in the pages of The New York Times.

That’s because a top editor had persuaded the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the usage was a passing fad. Reporters had to pry when interviewing women: Are you Miss or Mrs.? “It’s none of your damned business!” reporters were sometimes told.

In 1972, “Ms.” was accepted by the American Heritage School Dictionary. But it took protests, internal pressure, time and a smart strategy to persuade The New York Times to follow suit.

Paula Kassell, a feminist writer and publisher, bought Times stock so that she could raise questions about the policy at shareholders’ meetings. In April, 1986, Kassell persuaded Sulzberger to convene language experts — but then received word that the paper would allow “Ms.” without further discussion.

As The Times prepared its first edition using “Ms.,” Betsy Wade, a Times editor, wrote, “Gloria Steinem, Mary Thom and other editors of Ms. magazine walked into the city room with a basket of flowers for the editor” — A. M. Rosenthal — “and the copy editors and reporters applauded.”

Painting by Bob Dylan

Paul Gauguin, French Post-Impressionist artist, was born 174 years ago today

Self-portrait of Paul Gauguin painted in 1889

Paul Gauguin, French Post-Impressionist artist, was born 174 years ago today.

Gauguin was not well appreciated until after his death. He was later recognized for his experimental use of colors and synthesist style that was distinguished from Impressionism. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

Many of Gauguin’s paintings were in the possession of Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin.

Gauguin was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist and writer. His bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art.

Gauguin’s expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. Cloisonnism is a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours.

He was also an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

Paul Gauguin’s landscape at Pont-Aven, France, 1888

Pont-Aven is a commune of the Finistère département, in Brittany, northwestern France, some distance inland from where the River Aven meets the Atlantic Ocean.

From the 1850s, painters began to frequent the village of Pont-Aven, wanting to spend their summers away from the city on a low budget in a picturesque place not yet spoiled by tourism.

Gauguin first worked in Pont-Aven in 1886. The Pont-Aven School evolved, encompassing the works of art influenced by Pont-Aven and its surroundings. Originally the term applied to works created in the artists' colony at Pont-Aven which started to emerge in the 1850s and lasted until the beginning of the 20th century.

Many of the artists were inspired by the works of Gauguin who spent extended periods in the area in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Their work is frequently characterized by the bold use of pure color and their Symbolist choice of subject matter.

Laurie Anderson is 75 years old today

Laurie Anderson is 75 years old today.

Anderson is an experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s.

Throughout the 1970s, she did a variety of different performance-art activities. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached #2 on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave.

Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge.

In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.

Anderson started dating Lou Reed in 1992, and was married to him from 2008 until his death on October 27, 2013.

Here, Anderson performs “O Superman” from her 1982 album, Big Science

Laurie Anderson lectures on her art in Paris, 2015

Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed at Coney Island, New York, 1995

Photo by Annie Leibovitz

Harry Smith, visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian, mystic and largely self-taught student of anthropology, was born 99 years ago

Harry Smith, visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian, mystic and largely self-taught student of anthropology, was born 99 years ago.

Smith was an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City. Besides his films, Smith is widely known for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music, drawn from his extensive collection of out-of-print commercial 78 rpm recordings.

Throughout his life Smith was an inveterate collector. In addition to records, he collected artifacts that included string figures, paper airplanes, Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter eggs.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Smith spent his earliest years in Washington state in the area between Seattle and Bellingham. As a child, he lived for a time with his family in Anacortes, Washington, a town on Fidalgo Island, where the Swinomish Indian reservation is located. He attended high school in nearby Bellingham.

Smith's parents, who didn't get along, lived in separate houses — meeting only at dinner time. Although poor, they gave their son an artistic education, including 10 years of drawing and painting lessons. For a time, it is said, they even ran an art school in their house.

Smith was a voracious reader and he recalled his father bringing him a copy of Carl Sandburg's folksong anthology, American Songbag. "We were considered some kind of 'low' family," Smith once said, "despite my mother's feeling that she was [an incarnation of] the Czarina of Russia."

Physically, Smith was undersized and had a curvature of the spine, which kept him from being drafted (a circumstance that later would disqualify him from benefitting from the G.I. Bill). During World War II, he took a job as a mechanic working nights on the construction of the tight, hard-to-reach interior of Boeing bomber planes, for which his short stature suited him.

Smith used the money he made from his job to buy blues records. It also enabled him to formally study anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle for five semesters between 1942 and the fall of 1944.

He concentrated on American Indians, making numerous field trips to document the music and customs of the Lummi, whom he had gotten know through his mother's work with them. When the war ended, Smith, then 22, moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco, then home to a lively bohemian folk music and jazz scene.

As a collector of blues records, he had already been corresponding with the noted blues record aficionado, James McKune. He now also began seriously collecting old hillbilly music records from junk dealers and stores which were going out of business and even appeared as a guest on a folk music radio show hosted by Jack Spicer, the poet.

Smith was especially drawn to bebop, a new jazz form which had originated during impromptu jam sessions before and after paid performances. He went to after hours clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker could be heard in San Francisco.

At this time, he painted several ambitious jazz-inspired abstract paintings (since destroyed) and began making animated avant garde films featuring patterns that he painted directly on the film stock and which were intended to be shown to the accompaniment of bebop music.

In 1950, Smith received a Guggenheim grant to complete an abstract film, which enabled him first to visit and later move to New York City. He arranged for his collections, including his records, to be shipped to the East Coast. He said that "one reason he moved to New York was to study the Cabala. And, 'I wanted to hear Thelonious Monk play'."

When his grant money ran out, he brought what he termed "the cream of the crop" of his record collection to Moe Asch, president of Folkways Records, with the idea of selling it.

Instead, Asch proposed that the 27-year-old Smith use the material to edit a multi-volume anthology of American folk music in long playing format — then a newly developed, cutting edge medium — and he provided space and equipment in his office for Smith to work in.

The recording engineer on the project was Péter Bartók, son of the renowned composer and folklorist. The resultant Folkways anthology, issued in 1952 under the title, American Folk Music, was a compilation of recordings of folk music issued on hillbilly and race records that had previously been released commercially on 78 rpm.

These early recordings featured the "golden age" of the commercial country music industry between 1927 and 1932. When the Depression halted folk music sales, many of the artists went into obscurity. Originally issued as budget discs marketed to rural audiences, the records had long been known, collected and occasionally reissued by folklorists and aficionados.

But this was the first time such a large compilation was made available to affluent, non-specialist urban dwellers. LP discs could hold much more material than the old three-minute 78s and had greater fidelity and far less surface noise. The Anthology was packaged as a set of three, boxed albums. Each box front had a different color: red, blue, or green — in Smith's schema, representing the alchemical elements.

Priced at $25.00 ($216.00 in 2012) per two-disc set, they were a luxury item.

A fourth album, comprising topical songs from the Depression era, was originally planned by Asch and his long-time assistant, Marian Distler. It was never completed by Smith. It was issued in 2000, nine years after Smith’s death in CD format by Revenant Records with a 95-page booklet of tribute essays to Smith.

The music on Smith's anthology was performed by such artists as Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, The Carter Family, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Buell Kazee and Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

It had a huge impact on the folk and blues revivals of the 1950s and 60s. The songs were covered by my artists including The New Lost City Ramblers, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Rock critic Greil Marcus, in his liner-note essay for the 1997 Smithsonian reissue, quoted musician Dave van Ronk's avowal that "We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated."

In addition to compiling the Folkways anthology, Smith was also instrumental in getting Folkways to produce (on its Broadside label) the The Fugs First Album (1965), now considered the first "folk rock" album.

A regular visitor to the Peace Eye bookstore, in Manhattan's East Village on 10th St. between Avenues B and Ave C, founded in 1965 by poet Ed Sanders, Smith had advised Sanders which books about Native American studies the store ought to stock. When Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg formed the Fugs, they rehearsed at Peace Eye. "Thanks to Harry," writes Sanders, "the band was able to record an album within weeks of forming."

Peter Stampfel recalls that, as the album's editor and producer, "Harry's contribution to the proceedings were his presence, inspiration and best of all, smashing a wine bottle against the wall while we were recording 'Nothing.'"

Harry Smith lived at the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street in New York City from 1968 to 1975, after which he was "sometimes 'stranded' at hotels where he would owe so much money he couldn't leave, and he was too famous just to be thrown out."

This was the case at the Breslin Hotel at 28th and Broadway, where Smith lived until 1985, when his friend, poet Allen Ginsberg, took him into his home on East 12th Street.

While living with Ginsberg, Smith designed the cover for two of Ginsberg's books, White Shroud and Collected Poems, as well as continuing to work on his own films and to record ambient sounds. By this time, Smith was suffering from severe health and dental problems, as well as alcohol addiction. He proved a difficult guest.

Ginsberg's psychiatrist finally told him that Smith would have to leave because he was bad for Ginsberg's blood pressure (Ginsberg was already suffering from the cardiovascular disease that was to kill him).

In 1988, Ginsberg arranged for Smith to teach shamanism at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado. When Ginsberg, who was paying all of Smith's expenses, realized Smith was using the money he was sending him for rent to buy alcohol, he hired Rani Singh, then a student at Naropa, to look after him.

But this was not before Smith had amassed substantial debts that Ginsberg would be responsible for. Singh, now an author and art curator, has since devoted much of her life to furthering Smith's legacy.

In 1991, Smith suffered a bleeding ulcer followed by cardiac arrest in Room 328 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. His friend, poet Paola Igliori, described him as dying in her arms "singing as he drifted away." Smith was pronounced dead one hour later at St. Vincent's Hospital.

Smith's ashes were long in the care of his late friend, longtime participant in New York's Beat scene, Rosemarie "Rosebud" Feliu-Pettet, who was Smith's "spiritual wife."

Above photo by Gavin Friday

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Some Crazy Magic: Meeting Harry Smith

A animated interpretation of John Cohen’s first meeting with Harry Smith

On this day in 1897 — 125 years ago — writer Oscar Wilde was released from jail after two years of hard labor. His experiences in prison were the basis for his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

On this day in 1897 — 125 years ago — writer Oscar Wilde was released from jail after two years of hard labor. His experiences in prison were the basis for his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).

Wilde was born and educated in Ireland. He studied at Oxford, graduated with honors in 1878 and remained in London. He became a popular society figure valued at dinner parties for his witty remarks.

Embracing the late 19th century aesthetic movement, which embraced art for art's sake, Wilde adopted the flamboyant style of a passionate poet and self-published a volume of verse in 1881.

He spent the following year in the United States lecturing on poetry and art. Wilde's dapper wardrobe and excessive devotion to art were parodied in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, Patience, in 1882.

After returning to Britain, Wilde married and had two children. In 1888, he published a collection of fairy tales he wrote for his children. Meanwhile, he wrote reviews and became editor of Women's World. In 1891, his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published.

He wrote his first play, The Duchess of Padua, the same year and wrote five more before his arrest. His most successful comedies, including The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan, are still performed today.

In 1891, the Marquess of Queensbury denounced Wilde as a homosexual. Wilde, who was involved with the marquess' son, sued the Marquess for libel but lost the case when evidence supported the marquess' allegations. Because homosexuality was still considered a crime in England, Wilde was arrested. Although his first trial resulted in a hung jury, a second jury sentenced him to two years of hard labor.

After his release, Wilde fled to Paris and began writing again. He died of acute meningitis just three years after his release.

Ralph Steadman is 86 years old today

Ralph Steadman is 86 years old today.

A British cartoonist best known for his work with the writer, Hunter S. Thompson, Steadman was born in Wallasey, Cheshire and brought up in Abergele, North Wales.

Steadman attended Ysgol Emrys Ap Iwan (high school and then later East Ham Technical College and the London College of Printing during the 1960s, doing freelance work for Punch, Private Eye, the Daily Telegraph, The New York Times and Rolling Stone during this time.

Renowned for his political and social caricatures, cartoons and picture books, Steadman has won awards for his work including the Francis Williams Book Illustration Award for Alice in Wonderland, the American Society of Illustrators' Certificate of Merit, the W. H. Smith Illustration Award for I Leonardo, the Dutch Silver Paintbrush Award for Inspector Mouse, the Italian Critica in Erba Prize for That's My Dad, the BBC Design Award for postage stamps, the Black Humor Award in France and several Designers and Art Directors Association Awards.

He was voted Illustrator of the Year by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1979.

Steadman had a long partnership with the American journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, drawing pictures for several of his articles and books. He accompanied Thompson to the Kentucky Derby for an article for the magazine Scanlan's, to the Honolulu Marathon for the magazine Running and illustrated both Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

Much of Steadman's artwork revolves around Raoul Duke-style caricatures of Thompson: bucket hats, cigarette holder and aviator sunglasses. He appears in a documentary, Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, which was made by the BBC in 1978.

It showed Thompson planning the tower and cannon that his ashes would later be blasted from after his death. The cannon was atop a 153-ft. tower of Thompson's fist gripping a peyote button. Thompson demands that Steadman gives the fist two thumbs, "Right now."

As well as writing and illustrating his own books and Thompson's, Steadman has worked with writers including Ted Hughes, Adrian Mitchell and Brian Patten. He also illustrated editions of Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Animal Farm, the English translation of Flann O'Brien's Gaelic-language classic, The Poor Mouth, and most recently, Fahrenheit 451.

In 2011, Steadman began publishing prose and poetry in Kotori Magazine. He also contributed to the BirdLife International's Preventing Extinctions program with an image of critically endangered Northern Bald Ibis.

A major documentary about Steadman's career, For No Good Reason, directed by Charlie Paul, was released at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival in the "Mavericks" program.

Here is a video segment on Steadman

Jasper Johns is 92 years old today

Jasper Johns in his Stony Point, NY studio

Photo by Hans Namuth

Jasper Johns is 92 years old today.

A painter and printmaker, Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, and spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina, and thereafter spent several years living with his aunt, Gladys, in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia.

Johns completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother. Recounting this period in his life, he once said, "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in."

Johns studied a total of three semesters at the University of South Carolina, from 1947 to 1948. He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949. In 1952 and 1953, he was stationed in Sendai, Japan, during the Korean War.

In 1954, after returning to New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long-term lovers. For a time they lived in the same building as Rachel Rosenthal. In the same period, he was strongly influenced by the gay couple Merce Cunningham (a choreographer) and John Cage (a composer). Working together, they explored the contemporary art scene and began developing their ideas on art.

In 1958, Leo Castelli, the gallery owner, discovered Johns while visiting Rauschenberg's studio. Castelli gave him his first solo show. It was here that Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased four works from this show.

In 1963, Johns and Cage founded Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, now known as Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City.

Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut, and on the Island of Saint Martin. Until 2012, he lived in a rustic 1930s farmhouse with a glass-walled studio in Stony Point, New York. He first began visiting St. Martin in the late 1960s and bought the property there in 1972.

The architect Philip Johnson is the principal designer of his home — a long, white, rectangular structure divided into three distinct sections.

Johns is best known for his painting Flag (1954–55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly. He is famous for incorporating such media as encaustic and plaster relief in his paintings.

Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.

Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the abstract expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the end, they had simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure painted surface could declare itself.

For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could suffice – for example, in Andy Warhol's silkscreens or in Robert Irwin's illuminated ambient works.

Since the 1980s, Johns typically produces only four to five paintings a year; some years he produces none. His large-scale paintings are much favored by collectors and because of their rarity are extremely difficult to acquire. His works from the mid to late 1950s, typically viewed as his period of rebellion against abstract expressionism, remain his most sought after.

Map, 1961

Painting by Jasper Johns