Frank Beacham's Journal

Brigitte Bardot visits Pablo Picasso at his studio near Cannes, 1956

F for Fake, the iconic documentary by Orson Welles, was released 48 years ago today

F for Fake, the iconic documentary by Orson Welles, was released 48 years ago today.

Known as Truths and Lies in French, F for Fake was directed by and starred Welles and co-written with Oja Kodar, his companion. It focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger.

de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Loosely a documentary, the film operates in several different genres and has been described as a kind of film essay.

Far from serving as a traditional documentary on Elmyr de Hory, the film also incorporates Welles's companion, Oja Kodar, notorious "hoax-biographer" Clifford Irving and Welles as himself.

In addition to the 85-minute film, Welles also shot and edited a self-contained nine-minute short film as a "trailer," almost entirely composed of original material not found in the main film itself.

Several narratives are woven together throughout the film, including those of de Hory, Irving, Welles, Howard Hughes and Kodar. About de Hory, we learn that he was a struggling artist who turned to forgery out of desperation, only to see the greater share of the profits from his deceptions go to doubly unscrupulous art dealers.

As partial compensation for that injustice, he is maintained in a villa in Ibiza by one of his dealers. What is only hinted at in Welles's documentary is that de Hory had recently served a two-month sentence in a Spanish prison for homosexuality and consorting with criminals. de Hory would commit suicide a few years after the release of Welles' film, on hearing that Spain had agreed to turn him over to the French authorities.

Irving's original part in F for Fake was as de Hory's biographer, but his part grew unexpectedly at some point during production. There has not always been agreement among commentators over just how that production unfolded, but the now-accepted story is that the director, François Reichenbach, shot a documentary about de Hory and Irving before giving his footage to Welles, who then shot additional footage with Reichenbach as his cinematographer.

In the time between the shooting of Reichenbach's documentary and the finishing of the Welles film, it became known that Irving had perpetrated a hoax of his own, namely a fabricated "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes (the hoax was later fictionalized in the film, The Hoax).

This discovery prompted the shooting of still more footage, which then got woven into F for Fake. Interweaving the narratives even more, there are several pieces of footage in the film showing Welles at a party with de Hory, and, at one point, de Hory even signs a painting with a forgery of Welles' signature.

Some of Hughes' career is outlined in the form of a parody of the "News on the March" sequence in Citizen Kane.

Welles also draws parallels between the de Hory and Irving hoaxes and his own brush with early notoriety by including a recreation of part of his 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama, which had simulated a newscast about a Martian invasion and sparked panic among some listeners.

Exactly one hour before narrating Kodar's story, Welles promises that everything in the next hour of his film will be true. Exactly one hour later, the film tells a story where Kodar sits for a series of nudes for Pablo Picasso after getting him to agree to give her the finished portraits, and then selling not those very portraits but fake Picassos in their place.

The story climaxes with Welles and Kodar re-enacting a tense exchange between Picasso and Kodar's grandfather, the alleged forger of the paintings, before Welles reminds the viewer that he only promised to tell the truth for an hour and that "for the last 17 minutes, I've been lying my head off."

Here is the trailer for Orson Welles F for Fake

Shel Silverstein, poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books, was born 91 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 91 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 — 96 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

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

Photo by Nickolas Muray

On September 17, 1925 — 96 years ago today — 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 147 years ago today

Arnold Schoenberg, composer and painter, was born 147 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.

On this day in 1910 — 111 years ago — Alice B. Toklas became the lifetime house mate of avant-garde writer, Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (on left) with Alice B. Toklas outside their home, 1944, with their poodle, Basket

Photo by Carl Mydans

On this day in 1910 — 111 years ago — Alice B. Toklas became the lifetime house mate of avant-garde writer, Gertrude Stein.

Stein, who shared a house with her brother, Leo, for many years, met Toklas in 1907. She began staying with Stein and Leo in Paris in 1909, then moved in permanently in 1910. Stein's brother, Leo, moved out in 1914.

Toklas' love and support of Stein was so important that when Stein wrote her autobiography in 1933, she titled it, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, adopting Toklas' persona as the narrator of her own memoirs.

The two women turned their Parisian home at 22 rue de Fleurus into an important artistic and literary salon, where they entertained Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and many other artists of the day. Stein's own avant-garde writing attempted to create a Cubist literature that used words like the strokes of a paintbrush.

Stein was born in Pennsylvania in 1879 and traveled around Europe with her parents and four siblings. The family settled in Oakland when she was seven, and she spent much of her childhood raised by a governess.

Very attached to her older brother, Leo, she followed him to Harvard and studied psychology with William James. She then followed Leo to Johns Hopkins, where she studied medicine for a year, then gave it up.

The siblings moved to Paris in 1903. Her best-known works include the novels Three Lives (1909) and The Making of Americans (1925), her autobiography, and the experimental work, Tender Buttons (1914).

Stein and Toklas survived the German occupation of Paris and later befriended many American servicemen in the city. After the success of her opera, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), Stein launched a successful U.S. lecture tour.

Stein is considered one of the most influential thinkers and writers of her time.

She died in France in 1946.

Her last words, according to Toklas, were: "What is the answer? ... In that case, what is the question?"

Thanks History.com

Gertrude Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris was a Mecca for young artists. Painters, poets, writers and sculptors sought out her advice and companionship.

Her apartment became a "salon" on Saturday night, and attracted the avant garde. She seemed to have her finger on the pulse of all of the artists and expats.

She was particularly good at spotting talented young painters. She would buy their paintings at bargain prices — invest in them — and wait until the paintings became valuable.

In the photo, Stein (right) and Toklas in their apartment in 1922

Photo by Man Ray

“Grandma Moses,” American painter, was born on this day in 1860

“Grandma Moses,” American painter, was born on this day in 1860.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses, an upstate New York farm wife, began painting seriously in her 70s. She was discovered by a collector who saw her colorful, precise paintings of rural scenes in a drugstore window.

After her first show, she was seized on by the press, who loved her countrified ways. An early reviewer nicknamed her “Grandma Moses.”

The New York Times highlighted her folksiness when she visited Manhattan in 1940: “Modest ‘Grandma Moses’ declared, ‘If they want to make a fuss over me, I guess I don’t mind.’”

But Moses was no naïf. A believer in women’s autonomy, she said in her autobiography: “Always wanted to be independent. I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting down and Thomas,” her husband, “handing out the money.”

Her “primitive” painting style was carefully conceived: “I like to paint something that leads me on and on in to the unknown something that I want to see away on beyond,” she wrote.

She died at 101, having created some 2,000 paintings and received two honorary doctorates.

“All Americans mourn her loss,” President John F. Kennedy said.

Above, Grandma Moses in 1946.

Photo by Associated Press

John Cage was born 109 years ago today

John Cage was born 109 years ago today.

A composer, music theorist, writer and artist, Cage was pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music and non-standard use of musical instruments. He was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde.

Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer, Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound. Musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title.

The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance.

Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

On August 11, 1992, while preparing evening tea for himself and Cunningham, Cage suffered a stroke. He was taken to the nearest hospital, where he died on the morning of August 12. He was 80.

Here is “Dream,” written for piano by Cage in 1948

 

Eyes - Rien Que les Heures, 1926

Image by Alberto Cavalcanti