October - 2019

The Gestapo Points to Guernica and Asks Picasso, “Did You Do This?;” Picasso Replies “No, You Did!”

History remembers Pablo Picasso first as an innovative painter, and second as an uninhibited personality. The latter especially generated many an anecdote in his long life, some surely apocryphal but most probably true. A short Guardian editorial on one of his most famous canvases begins with the story of when, "in occupied Paris, a Gestapo officer who had barged his way into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural, Guernica, asking: 'Did you do that?' 'No,'

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The Civil rights activist and Klan leader that attacked the same problem from opposite sides.

From 1971, the New York Times News Service. C. P. Ellis didn’t really want to go back to work last Thursday. The president of the Durham chapter of United Klans of America, had other things on his mind when he reported back to duty in the maintenance department at Duke University. Ellis had just spent 10 days serving as co-chairman of SOS – Save Our Schools – a series of open forums on school problems in Durham. The other SOS chairman was Mrs. Ann Atwater, acting chairman of

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Debbie Harry Painted by H.R. Giger

In the spring of 1980, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie met H.R. Giger at a party at the Hansen Gallery in New York City, which was showing an exhibit of Giger’s Alien paintings. Giger was actually on his way back from Los Angeles, where he had just received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in recognition of his groundbreaking work on the movie. Giger later gave the following account of the meeting: There I was introduced to a very beautiful woman, Debbie Harry

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The Chromatic Typewriter That Types in Colour

Washington-based painter Tyree Callahan modified a 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter, replacing the letters and keys with colour pads and hued labels to create a functional “painting” device called the Chromatic Typewriter. Callahan submitted the beautiful typewriter as part of the 2012 West Prize competition, an annual art prize that’s determined by popular vote. I don’t know how practical painting an image with a colour typewriter is, but if it is, Keira Rathbone can do it

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“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Photo Satirically Mocks Every Vice & Sin Censored by the Hays Film Censors

The history of Hollywood film before 1968 breaks down into two eras: "pre-Code" and "post-Code." The "Code" in question is the Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the "Hays Code," a reference to Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America president Will H. Hays. The organization we now know as the MPAA hired Hays in 1922, tasking the Presbyterian deacon and former chairman of the Republican National Committee and Postmaster General with "cleaning up" earl

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The Macabre Art of Baking ‘People Pies’

Spectators have long had a grotesque affinity for the fictional villain, Sweeney Todd, whose victims are ingeniously baked into human meat pies and sold by his baker accomplice, Ms. Lovett. But what happens when this Victorian “penny dreadful” serial takes a contemporary turn? Two oddities-loving artists have created their own “people pot pies” using very different media. Special effects artist Ashley Newman was the first to try her hand at making gory, decidedly inedi

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Betty Robinson: the fastest woman in the world who came back from the dead

As hard as 16-year-old Betty Robinson was running, there was no way she was going to get to the train before it pulled out of the station. Robinson’s biology teacher, Charles Price, a former track athlete, was sure she had left it too late. On a winter’s day in Chicago, 1928, it would be a bitterly cold wait for the next one on the elevated platform. Price stepped onto the commuter train and took his seat. But seconds later, having bounded up the steps, there was Robin

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