Frank Beacham's Journal

Frederic Remington, artist of the American West, was born 161 years ago today

Frederic Remington, artist of the American West, was born 161 years ago today.

Born in Canton, New York, Remington was the son of a comfortable, if not wealthy, family. He was one of the first students to attend Yale University's new School of Fine Arts. At Yale, he became a skilled painter, but he focused his efforts largely on the traditional subjects of high art — not the Wild West.

When he was 19, Remington's father died, leaving him a small inheritance that gave him the freedom to indulge his interest in traveling in the West. As with other transplanted upper-class easterners like Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister, Remington quickly developed a deep love for the West and its fast disappearing world of cowboys, Indians and wide-open spaces.

Eventually buying a sheep ranch near Kansas City, Remington continued to travel around his adopted western home, endlessly drawing and painting what he saw.

In 1884, Remington sold his first sketches based on his western travels, and two years later his first fully credited picture appeared on the cover of Harper's Weekly. After that, his popularity as an illustrator grew steadily, and he returned to New York in order to be closer to the largely eastern market for his work.

Frequent assignments from publishers, though, ensured that Remington was never away long from the West, and gave him the opportunity to closely observe and sketch his favorite subjects: U.S. Cavalry soldiers, cowboys and Native Americans.

Remington's output was enormous, and during the last 20 years of his life he created more than 2,700 paintings and drawings and published illustrations in 142 books and 42 different magazines.

Though most of his paintings were created in his studio in New York, Remington continued to base his work on his western travels and prided himself on accuracy and realism-particularly when it came to horses. He even suggested that he would like his epitaph to read, "He Knew the Horse."

When he died in 1909 in Connecticut, from acute appendicitis, Remington left a body of work that was popular with the public, but largely ignored by "serious" museums and art collectors.

Since then, though, Remington's paintings, drawings and illustrations have become prized by collectors and curators around the world, and prominent museums like the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (Cody, Wyoming) and the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art (Tulsa, Oklahoma) have created large permanent exhibitions of his work.

Frederic Remington's “A Dash for the Timber” (1889) depicts cowboys in the Southwest shooting at Apaches in the rear.

One of the eight riders is already wounded but remains on his horse.

Juke Joint, Belle Glade, Florida, 1941

Painting by Earl Klatzel

(Inspired by a photo by Marion Post Wolcott)

Miles Davis

Painting by Debra Hurd

Al Capp, cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip, Li'l Abner, was born 113 years ago today

Al Capp, 1946

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt

Al Capp, cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip, Li'l Abner, was born 113 years ago today.

Capp created the strip in 1934 and continued writing and (with help from assistants) drawing until 1977. He also wrote the comic strips, Abbie an' Slats (in the years 1937-45) and Long Sam (1954).

He won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year, and their 1979 Elzie Segar Award (posthumously) for his "unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning."

Comic strips dealt with northern urban experiences until the year Capp introduced "L'il Abner," the first strip based in the South.

Although Capp was from Connecticut, he spent 43 years teaching the world about Dogpatch, reaching an estimated 60 million readers in over 900 American newspapers and 100 foreign papers in 28 countries.

M. Thomas Inge says Capp made a large personal fortune on the strip and "had a profound influence on the way the world viewed the American South.”

Thomas Nast, who was born 182 years ago today, is widely considered the father of American political cartooning

Thomas Nast, who was born 182 years ago today, is widely considered the father of American political cartooning.

As a regular contributor to Harper’s Weekly, he wielded enormous influence, skewering corrupt officials and politicians he opposed.

He introduced the Republican elephant in 1874, popularized the donkey as a symbol for Democrats, and was the first to depict Uncle Sam as we know him today, with a beard, top hat and pinstripe suit.

“He was a tremendous force in American politics for more than two decades,” The New York Times wrote in 1940, for the centennial of Nast’s birth. “He helped to win a war and to elect three presidents of the United States” — Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant (twice) and Rutherford B. Hayes, whom he later abandoned.

Nast also helped bring down the New York politician, William M. Tweed, the boss of the rapacious Democratic machine, Tammany Hall. His tactics might seem familiar. “He did it by heaping contempt and ridicule upon the opposing forces and the rival candidates,” The Times said.

Nast, who was born in Germany, was a defender of many immigrants and of black Americans, and he was a confirmed foe of the Ku Klux Klan. In addition to politics, he also gave America its modern vision of Santa Claus. His depiction of Santa Claus was on the cover of the January 3, 1863, issue of Harper's Weekly. The image stuck in American minds.

Thanks New York Times!

Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 92 years ago today

Shel Silverstein, circa 1968

Photo by Alice Ochs

Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 92 years ago today.

Silverstein grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago and attended Roosevelt High School. Later, he went the University of Illinois before he was expelled. He then attended Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Roosevelt University for three years, until 1953 when he was drafted into the Army. He served in Japan and Korea.

Silverstein began drawing at age seven by tracing the works of Al Capp. "When I was a kid — 12 to 14, around there — I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls, but I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. I was also lucky that I didn't have anybody to copy, be impressed by,” he told Publisher’s Weekly.

“I had developed my own style. I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work till I was around 30. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me. Not that I wouldn't rather make love, but the work has become a habit."

After returning to Chicago, Silverstein began submitting cartoons to magazines while also selling hot dogs at Chicago ballparks. His cartoons began appearing in Look, Sports Illustrated and This Week.

In 1957, Silverstein became one of the leading cartoonists in Playboy, which sent him around the world to create an illustrated travel journal with reports from far-flung locales. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced 23 installments called "Shel Silverstein Visits..." as a feature for Playboy.

Employing a sketchbook format with typewriter-styled captions, he documented his own experiences at such locations as a New Jersey nudist colony, the Chicago White Sox training camp, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Fire Island, Mexico, London, Paris, Spain and Africa.

Silverstein's passion for music was clear early on as he studied briefly at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. His musical output included a large catalog of songs — a number of which were hits for other artists, most notably the rock group, Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.

He wrote Tompall Glaser's highest-charting solo single "Put Another Log on the Fire," "One's on the Way" (a hit for Loretta Lynn) and "25 Minutes to Go," sung by Johnny Cash, about a man on Death Row with each line counting down one minute closer.

Silverstein also wrote one of Johnny Cash's best known hits, "A Boy Named Sue." Other songs co-written by Silverstein include "the Taker" by Waylon Jennings and "On Susan’s Floor” by Gordon Lightfoot and a sequel to "A Boy Named Sue" called: "Father of a Boy Named Sue" which is less known, but he performed the song on television on The Johnny Cash Show.

He also penned a song entitled "F*** 'em" which is lesser known and contained a reference to "f*** children."

Silverstein styled himself as Uncle Shelby in some works. Translated into more than 30 languages, his books have sold over 20 million copies.

On May 10, 1999, Silverstein died at age 68 of a massive heart attack in Key West, Florida.

On September 17, 1925 — 97 years ago today — Frida Kahlo was riding in a bus that collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries

Frida Kahlo in the hospital, laying face down, 1946.

Photo by Nickolas Muray

On September 17, 1925 — 97 years ago today — Frida Kahlo was riding in a bus that collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries as a result of the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot and a dislocated shoulder.

Also, an iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, compromising her reproductive capacity. The accident left her in a great deal of pain while she spent three months recovering in a full body cast.

Although she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she had relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time. She had as many as thirty-five operations as a result of the accident — mainly on her back, her right leg and her right foot.

The injuries also prevented Kahlo from having a child because of the medical complications and permanent damage. Though she conceived three times, all her pregnancies had to be terminated.

Arnold Schoenberg, composer and painter, was born 148 years ago today

Arnold Schoenberg, composer and painter, was born 148 years ago today.

Schoenberg was an Austrian composer and painter, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's works — by 1938 — were labelled as degenerate music because he was Jewish. He moved to the United States in 1934.

Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has been one of the most influential of 20th century musical thought. Many European and American composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it.

Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most polemical feature of the period’s art music.

In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term “developing variation” and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Schoenberg was also a painter, an important music theorist and an influential teacher of composition. His students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner.

Many of Schoenberg's practices, including the formalization of compositional method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought.

His views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many significant musicologists and critics, including Theodor W. Adorno, Charles Rosen and Carl Dahlhaus, as well as the pianists Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, Eduard Steuermann and Glenn Gould.

Schoenberg's archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna. He died in July, 1951.

Above, Schoenberg in 1938

The Singing Butler, 1992

Painting by Jack Vettriano

An oil-on-canvas painting made by Scottish artist Vettriano in 1992, The Singing Butler sold at auction in 2004 for nearly a million U.S. dollars, which was the record at the time for any painting ever sold in Scotland.Reproductions of The Singing Butler make it the best-selling art print in the UK.

The painting depicts a couple dancing on the damp sand of a beach on the coast of Fife, with grey skies above a low horizon. To the left and right, a maid and a man hold up umbrellas against the weather. The dancers wear evening dress: a dinner jacket and a red ball gown; the woman also wears long red gloves but appears to have bare feet.

As a contemporary cultural icon, The Singing Butler has been compared to Grant Wood's American Gothic.

Vettriano has described the painting as an "uplifting fantasy" and chose the subject after being complimented on his paintings of beaches.

Summertime, 1943

Painting by Edward Hopper