Happy Hour Friday - Sam Phillips

The video I really wanted to share with you won't allow embedding, so I'll link to it here, in the remote chance that there is anyone else out there who is a Sam Phillips fan. She is this Sam Phillips, no this Sam Phillips. It gets  a little confusing...

Here is a video I did find by Sam Phillips for a song off the album Martinis and Bikinis, from 1994.

 When I Fall by Sam Phillips

ABC Wednesday - G

G if for George Grosz
(July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959)
 German-born, American artist known for painting, drawing and caricatures

George Grosz gave a fantastic testimony of Berlin life during a terrible period, divided between fascism and communism. He was active in the communist party but had an anarchist’s fascination for the characters of underground life. Military figures, prostitutes and violence abound, and fascinate the viewer.

 Self-Portrait

  The Love Sick Man
 1916

 The Suicide
 1916

In 1921 his album "Gott mit uns" (God with us) brought Grosz charges of defaming the Reichswehr (army); in 1924 he was prosecuted for offences against public morality by his album "Ecce Homo" (the album was confiscated as being pornographic); in 1928 for his drawing "Shut up and keep serving the cause" he was accused of blasphemy. All these scandals only helped consolidate his fame. Olga's Gallery

.

1921

 Remembering Uncle August
1919

 The White Slave
 1918


"I don't even like to talk about it. I hated being a number and not merely because I was a very small one. I let them bellow at me for just as long as it took me to find enough pluck to bellow back at them."

 Eclipse of the Sun
 1926

 Artist and Model
1928

In the early 1930's,  Grosz was invited to lecture at the Arts Student League in NY, after being forced to flee from Nazi Germany. In 1938, Grosz's wife and sons joined him. He became a naturalized citizen in 1938.
Here is what Grosz had to say about that period of work in the United States:

  "My motto was now to give offense to none and be pleasing to all. Assimilation is straightforward once one overcomes the greatly overvalued superstition concerning character. To have character generally means that one is distinctly inflexible, not necessarily for reasons of age. Anyone who plans to get ahead and make money would do well to have no character at all. The second rule for fitting in is to think everything beautiful! Everything – that is to say, including things that are not beautiful in reality." 

Note:  I had a difficult time finding an example of what Grosz may have meant when he referred to work with "no character" , which appears to distinguish his period of work in from the early 1930's until just before his return to Berlin in the late 1950's.  I found an image of the painting below, which may or may not be what he was referring to and what critics called an uninteresting time in his career. Certainly, his early paintings are the stand-outs, in my opinion. But then again, I am a huge fan of expressionism and I find the Dad movement fascinating. 

 Nude in the Dunes

 1948

 Eva Grosz

(the artist's wife)

1940

 The Survivor" by George Grosz 

1944

Private Collection

"I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it. "
George Grosz

George Grosz sketches or caricatures of The Weimer Republic

"The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity."
George Grosz

Sources

Olga's Gallery

Exposición de Pintura blog

Spartacus Educational

MoMA

Brainy Quotes

ABC Wednesday

Look it up here

Ruby Tuesday Travels Back in Time

I was inspired by Ralph of Airhead 55 (out of Connecticut), who often posts photos from his childhood and of his own children. Thanks, Ralph!  Here are The Girls going for a walk up a country road.  The one in white is the older sister, but by only sixteen months! This was taken in Spring of '92. They were three and four. Now they are twenty-two and twenty-three.  Yikes.

" We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. "

~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860

What's been going on with all of you? How did February decide to treat you?
Fondly, PS

To see other Ruby Tuesday participants, click here

Pagan Sphinx Entertainment Highlight

  

A Very Long Engagement

directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
France 2004

I love the Jeunet/Caro collaborations Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. The film , Amélie, 

starring  the sweet and evocative Audrey Tautou, was a huge hit among everyone I know when it first premiered. I don't know why it took me so long but I finally got around to seeing her in A Very Long Engagement.  I loved the film and was pleasantly surprised to see one of my favorite American actors, Jodi Foster, in a rare, French-speaking role.  I usually don't pay much attention to the private lives of actors but I once saw Jodie Foster interviewed (Charlie Rose?) where she spoke about having attended Le Lycee Francais in Los Angeles, CA , where all the subjects were taught in French. She later graduated magna cum laude from Yale, with a degree in English literature. A brainy woman!

Unfortunately, the only clip I've run across of Foster's role in A Very Long Engagement, is of a love scene which is taken out of context and therefore looks rather tawdry. But here is a still of Jodie Foster, from the movie. 

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