pre-raphaelite mother's day

Earth Mother -- Sir Edward Burne-Jones, 1882 (Worcester Art Museum)

studs centennial

Activist, author, and great talker Studs Terkel would have been 100 on May 16th, had he not signed off forever on Halloween of 2008. Studs was born in New York with a given name of Louis; he came to Chicago when he was eight years old with his parents and made the city his home base for the rest of his life.

Studs had a long-running radio show on Chicago’s WFMT, on which he did many an interview in his characteristic raspy voice. Terkel also wrote several books, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and he often used the oral history format in order to keep the full power of a person’s words and experiences.

In Terkel’s Coming of Age, he conducted interviews with a wide range of older Americans to give a collective portrait of how they felt about growing older, and what they had witnessed in their particular slice of the 20th century. One of the interviews in Coming of Age is with Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), the prolific African-American artist who created such great works as the Migration of the Negro series, as well as portraits of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and another series detailing the life of abolitionist John Brown.

Since May is Older Americans Month, and since Studs sadly isn’t around to remind us about his book, an excerpt from Jacob Lawrence’s interview seems apropos:

How I became an artist? In elementary school, we were given crayons, poster paint, and were encouraged to put down color. In the great 1930s, I heard stories from older people…[t]hey’d talk about Marcus Garvey, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. I’d walk the streets of Harlem and hear corner orators talk about these people. It inspired me. I realized I couldn’t tell their lives in one story, so I painted a series of their lives....

When I was a youngster growing up, a person would never attack an older person, a weaker person, because of the fear of God. Now an older person is vulnerable because of something lost, a sense of morality, of ethics…I’m not pessimistic. I think about these things. I talk about them. I feel as long as there’s one person or two people who are aware of the quality, of our capacity to think and feel, we’re on pretty sound ground. I hope so.

From Coming of Age, Studs Terkel (St. Martin’s Press edition, 1995)

painting of the month

Red Kimono on the Roof -- John Sloan, 1912 (Indianapolis Museum of Art)

cooper and the carpathia

Philadelphia-born artist Colin Campbell Cooper was on board the RMS Carpathia in April of 1912 when the Titanic made its fateful voyage; the Carpathia became a rescue ship for 710 Titanic survivors and Cooper memorialized the event in this featured painting.  Cooper and his wife, artist Emma Lampert Cooper, were also kind enough to offer their own cabin so that at least a few of the traumatized Titanic passengers could have some peace after their ordeal.

painting of the month

Nuns on the Roof -- Marjorie Phillips, 1922 (The Phillips Collection)

northside algren

Chicago author Nelson Algren would have marked a 103rd birthday today, if he hadn't left our sphere in 1981 after suffering a heart attack. Though Algren was born in Detroit, his family moved to Chicago when he was a child and he would be emotionally and artistically linked with the city for the rest of his life. He did abandon Chicago for the East Coast in his later years, feeling that he wasn’t appreciated by his hometown despite the fame he had achieved through publication of such novels as The Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning.  Apparently at the time he left you could barely find his books in the Chicago Public Library, though they are certainly there now.

Algren was streetwise yet poetic, turning blighted urban views into hauntingly beautiful scenes. He could also peer into the soul of a desperate man or woman and find a whole range of experiences and emotions -- and what had led them to turn to the needle or the bottle, or to a life of crime. He wasn’t much of a schmoozer and called things as he saw them, which often led to his disenfranchisement from the literati of his day. He had a long-time affair with French writer Simone de Beauvoir, but that ended with a bittersweet (generally more bitter than sweet) resentment, much like his departure from Chicago.

Reading Algren’s works is a great way to learn about the man and the Chicago neighborhood in which he found his writing “zone,” the then-predominantly Polish area called The Triangle. Algren probably wouldn’t recognize much of his gentrified, hipped-up Triangle now, but a fine way to go back in time beyond reading Algren’s fiction is to check out Call Northside 777, a film based on the real case of a Chicago man imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit. It has an unusually low-key tone for a 1948 movie, with Jimmy Stewart playing a reporter unraveling errors of justice. Stewart's quest leads him to the Polish corners of the South side, but Call Northside 777 also hits the titled North side as well, offering a cinematic window into some of the bars, streets, and people of the Triangle area and truly bringing Algren’s words to life.

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing ever since. -- Salvador Dali