Remembering Hedda Sterne on her birthday 🎂
📷 Gjon Mili for Life Magazine, 1950
"Covering a canvas is a very complicated and deadly serious game. There are strict rules and one can't possibly cheat."
Saul Steinberg & Hedda Sterne by Arnold Newman, 1951
"We looked at everything, everything. Every Sunday when there was no traffic, we went motoring through New York."
Remembering Hedda Sterne on her birthday 🎂
Saul Steinberg drew a picture of her as a cat. @Smithsonian @ArchivesAmerArt
Saul Steinberg sent Hedda Sterne this letter when he was in North Africa in 1944. The two married when he returned to the States. @smithsonian @ArchivesAmerArt
Here's the second page of Saul Steinberg's letter to Hedda Sterne
Hedda Sterne, when she heard of Mark Rothko's suicide, said "Who was this man, Rothko, who killed my friend?"
📷 Nina Leen, "The Irascibles", 1951. Rothko is sitting on the right, the only artist with glasses; guess which one is Sterne
Here's the caption for "The Irascibles". Cool that Nina Leen had Hedda Sterne overseeing this bunch of AE bros. An alternative group portrait might have included Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, & more. museumstore.sfmoma.org/women-of-abstr…
Hedda Sterne by Margaret Bourke-White, 1947
"Hedda was always searching, never satisfied. She had many ways; most artists just have one way to go."
- Betty Parsons
Hedda Sterne
Untitled from Metaphores and Metamorphoses Metaphores and Metamorphoses VIII
1967 @MuseumModernArt
Another shot of Hedda Sterne by Evelyn Hofer, c. 1952. She's in her garden at 171 West 71st Street.
"One of the hallmarks of Miss Sterne's paintings and drawings is her ambiguity. Never can we look at her work and pinpoint it with one word, one idea."
- David L. Shirey
Hedda Sterne by Inge Morath, 1959
"I see myself as a well-working lens, a perceiver of something that exists independently of me: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve found."
Hedda Sterne
Portrait of Barnett Newman, 1952
Oil on canvas
Collection of The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
Hedda Sterne
Self-Portrait, c. 1940
"Sometimes I react to immediate visible reality and sometimes I am prompted by ideas, but at all times I have been moved by the music of the way things are."
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For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits 🎂
📷 Eddie Adams, Opening Night, Las Vegas, 1970
"If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz & always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original."
- Duke Ellington
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
📷 Art Kane, 1958
I love his Satchmo With Style album from that year. Wonderful Gordon Jenkins arrangements.
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
Satchmo & Duke Ellington by Herman Leonard
Paris, 1960
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young by Tom Gundelfinger O'Neal, 1969, for their album Déja Vu @Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
Wait, you count six? Ahmet Ertegun convinced CS&N to add Neil Young, & on Déja Vu they added session musicians Greg Reeves & Dallas Woodrow Taylor Jr.
There's a different Tom Gundelfinger photo on the cover of Déja Vu, which had a very expensive design concept by Gary Burden. There was even a 4x5 tripod-mounted wooden tintype camera at the session, but this was apparently taken with a 35mm camera.
Not sure whose dog that is.
Happy 95th birthday to the great Tony Bennett 🎂
A great portrait by Herman Leonard, New York, 1950
"The thing about this guy is that he’s so positive — if I were as talented as him, I’d be positive, too."
- Alec Baldwin
From Tony Bennett's 1992 album Perfectly Frank, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. Tony sings the rarely heard verse!
With Ralph Sharon, piano, Paul Langosch, bass, & Joe LaBarbera, drums
The great portrait on the cover is by E. J. Camp
Listening to The Tony Bennett & Bill Evans Album, 1975
Remembering P. D. James on her birthday 🎂
🎨 Michael Taylor
oil on canvas, 1996 @NPGLondon
"I came to believe that it is perfectly possible to remain within the constraints & conventions of the genre & be a serious writer."
P. D. James by Dudley Reed
Kingsley Amis called her “Iris Murdoch with murder”.
P. D. James, Baroness James of Holland Park, by Nick Sinclair, 1992 @NPGLondon
"When you go to vote in the House of Lords there is a long corridor down which you walk & when I go down I often have people saying ‘shouldn’t you be off working on another novel?’."
"The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment, in the most beautiful manner."
- Max Beerbohm
Rossetti’s Courtship
A thread of caricatures
"A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth."
- Joseph Conrad
Stendahl by Bod
Jean Cocteau's caricature of Igor Stravinsky conducting The Rite of Spring