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
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
Rocking a bowtie in a shot by Philippe Halsman from 1966
"I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show."
With Billie Holiday in Arthur Lubin's New Orleans, 1947:
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
📷 Haywood Magee, 1956
"Pops, music is music. All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song."
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
Satchmo at his Corona.
📷 Dennis Stock, 1958
"We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter."
- Allen Ginsberg
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
📷 Herman Leonard, 1960
"To understand his impact, you need to listen carefully to jazz before Armstrong, and then gauge what Louis added."
- @tedgioia
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
📷 John Loengard for Life, 1965
"You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played."
- Miles Davis
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
Relaxing after a concert at the Latin Casino
📷 Dennis Stock, 1958
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
📷 Woodward's Studio, c. 1928 @Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
Louis Armstrong & his Hot Seven, Wild Man Blues, 1927:
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
📷 Philippe Halsman, 1966 @Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington, "Duke's Place", on The Ed Sullivan Show, December 17, 1961
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
📷 Anton Bruehl, 1935
"Night after night through the 1930s, he loosed off more fearsomely demanding trumpet virtuosity throughout full-length concerts than the creative spirit should have been able to handle."
- John Fordham
For Louis Armstrong's birthday, my favourite portraits
I can't forget this:
Tony Bennett presents his painting of Louis Armstrong to Satchmo at the Savoy Hotel, 1970
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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
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