if a picture equals a thousand words

...this is a fine one for today.

Sunshine After a Snowstorm -- Walter Launt Palmer (1854-1932)

painting of the month

Skating in Central Park -- Agnes Tait, 1934 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

jean and cane

Today would have been the birthday of author Jean Toomer, born on December 26, 1894 in Washington, D.C. You can read more about Toomer's unusual life here, and one of my favorite books is a short collection of stories and moments called Cane that Toomer published in 1923. It's really beautiful writing, with a haunting moodiness and resonant characters. Like Fern, who watches the world from her rural Georgia porch, her eyes resting "idly where the sun, molten and glorious, was pouring down between the fringe of pines...If it were dusk, then they'd wait for the search-light of the evening train which you could see miles up the track before it flared across the Dixie Pike, close to her home...Like her face, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes."

I didn't see the recent Lifetime Georgia O'Keeffe bio-pic starring Joan Allen, but O'Keeffe knew Jean Toomer and in the Joan Allen version Toomer was played by Henry Simmons. To me, Giancarlo Esposito always seems like the perfect actor to play Jean Toomer, but I'll have to Netflix Henry Simmons' take on the role and maybe he'll change my mind.

christmas morning, breakfast

Christmas Morning, Breakfast -- Horace Pippin, 1945 (Cincinnati Art Museum)

painting of the month

The Fortune Teller -- Georges de La Tour, ca. 1633 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

rivera at the rock

I just finished writing a Suite101 article about Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural in the old RCA now GE Building a/k/a 30 Rock, and how he somehow thought that he could showcase a major tribute to Lenin in 1930s Bolshevik-hating Depression-era midtown Manhattan. Nelson A. Rockefeller on behalf of the Rockefeller Dynasty said no way, and though Rivera was able to keep his commission, the work was ordered demolished.

Rivera wanted to take photos of the mural for future reference but was barred from going near the site again, although one of his assistants--the intriguingly talented Lucienne Bloch--snuck in and managed to snap some pictures herself. Rivera later replicated the project at Mexico City's Palacio de las Bellas Artes and José Maria Sert took over in New York to produce a non-controversial backdrop for the Rockefellers and their Center.

This incident was part of the storylines of Tim Robbins' The Cradle Will Rock, with Ruben Blades as Rivera, and in Salma Hayek's Frida, which cast Alfred Molina as the Mexican mural master. Rivera has been played by a variety of actors, but my favorite painted portrait of him was done by Modigliani when Rivera was younger and looks sort of roundly kind-hearted and mischievous at the same time.

(Pictured: Portrait of Diego Rivera -- Amedeo Modigliani, 1914)

happy halloweening

Pictured: Sorceress -- Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer