A model wears Art Smith’s “Modern Cuff” Bracelet, circa 1948. Art Smith (1917-1982) was a modernist jeweler born in Cuba to Jamaican parents who eventually emigrated to Brooklyn. He opened his first shop on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1946 - no small feat. According to the Brooklyn Museum (host of a 2008 exhibit of his work) he was one of the leading modernist jewelers of the mid-twentieth century. Along with being covered by magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, Smith, an avid jazz lover, once made cufflinks for Duke Ellington which included some notes from Mr. Ellington’s “Mood Indigo.” Mr. Smith was also a supporter of early Black modern dance groups and an active supporter of Black and gay rights. Art Smith was quoted in the 1969 catalog for his one man exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft: “A piece of jewelry is in a sense an object that is not complete in itself. Jewelry is a ‘what is it?’ until you relate it to the body. The body is a component in design just as air and space are. Like line, form, and color, the body is a material to work with. It is one of the basic inspirations in creating form.”
There are versatile artists, and then there is Geoffrey Holder. Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad in 1930, Mr. Holder danced with his brother Boscoe’s dance troupe as a child. He arrived in New York in 1952 at the invitation of the legendary choreographer, Agnes de Mille and, to pay his fare, he sold 20 of his paintings. He would go on to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting in 1957. A few years before, he was a principal dancer at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and appeared on Broadway in Truman Capote’s “House of Flowers,” where he would meet his wife of 57 years, the dancer Carmen de Lavallade.
In 1975, Mr. Holder won 2 Tony Awards in the same evening for directing and choreographing the Broadway musical, “The Wiz.” He is best known to most for his film and commercial roles: as Baron Samedi in the 1973 James Bond film, “Live and Let Die” and of course, as the “Un-cola Man” in the ubiquitous 1970s 7-Up commercials. Mr. Holder is still painting and creating art today and, the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago currently has an exhibition featuring Mr. Holder and Ms. de Lavallade. In this picture, Mr. Holder is sitting in front of one of his painting, sometime in the 1960s. Photo: Bradley Smith/Corbis.
Langston Hughes, always a Vintage Black Glamour favorite, was born 111 years ago today in Joplin, Missouri. This 1932 photograph was taken by his good friend, Carl Van Vechten and was eventually given as a gift by another friend, the illustrator Prentiss Taylor, to the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Legendary artist Jacob Lawrence in his days as a Coastguardsman on March 27, 1945 in Boston. He was at the Institute of Modern Art in Boston for a showing of his paintings (he is shown with one of his most famous works, “Ironers,” a gouache on paper from 1943. Photo: Bettman/Corbis
Jimi Hendrix by Barrie Wentzell. I am attending the opening reception for Barrie’s exhibit at The Morrison Hotel Gallery tonight. I have been there before - cool place. It’s an art gallery that specializes in music related art work.
Haile Selassie and Joe Louis, 1935, by the phenomenal Mexican painter, caricaturist and illustrator Miguel Covarrubias (more here). Photo: Library of Congress via Art Knowledge News.
Winold Reiss: “Sari Price Patton,” 1925. Private collection. © The Reiss Partnership.
I came across Winold Reiss’ painting of this chic young woman at the wonderful exhibition “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” at the Brooklyn Museum. I love the Patton’s trendy page-boy haircut and her loose-fitting, low-waisted black silk gown and the yellow pleated ruffled tie and cuffs. She’s fashionable and youthful. She’s also black: You don’t see very many portraits of middle-class black women — or men — in many major museum shows, so I was intrigued.
There is very little info available on Sari Price Patton, but she was the hostess at a popular Harlem salon run by A’Lelia Walker. A patroness of black artists, including Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes, Walker hosted black writers, sculptors, poets, painters, musicians and their friends at her house, serving food, champagne and gin. She and her friends decided to open a more formal salon, for conversation, poetry readings and art exhibitions, called ”The Dark Tower” (after the Countee Cullens poem). Yet the Dark Tower only lasted a year: partly because Walker had hoped to profit from the enterprise so started charging high prices the artists couldn’t afford. (The writer Bruce Nugent griped that “Colored faces were at a premium, the place filled to overflowing with with whites from downtown who had come up expecting that this was a new and hot nightclub.”*
But the club also lost money because our Sari Price Patton was caught embezzling some of the daily receipts. This was in 1927/1928, so before Reiss painted the chic young woman here.
* From “On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker” by A’Lelia Bundles
Painting from the Brooklyn Museum’s website
Winold Reiss: “Sari Price Patton,” 1925. Private collection. © The Reiss Partnership.
Via rlaneri: “I came across Winold Reiss’ painting of this chic young woman at the wonderful exhibition “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” at the Brooklyn Museum. I love the Patton’s trendy page-boy haircut and her loose-fitting, low-waisted black silk gown and the yellow pleated ruffled tie and cuffs. She’s fashionable and youthful. She’s also black: You don’t see very many portraits of middle-class black women — or men — in many major museum shows, so I was intrigued.
There is very little info available on Sari Price Patton, but she was the hostess at a popular Harlem salon run by A’Lelia Walker. A patroness of black artists, including Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes, Walker hosted black writers, sculptors, poets, painters, musicians and their friends at her house, serving food, champagne and gin. She and her friends decided to open a more formal salon, for conversation, poetry readings and art exhibitions, called ”The Dark Tower” (after the Countee Cullens poem). Yet the Dark Tower only lasted a year: partly because Walker had hoped to profit from the enterprise so started charging high prices the artists couldn’t afford. (The writer Bruce Nugent griped that “Colored faces were at a premium, the place filled to overflowing with with whites from downtown who had come up expecting that this was a new and hot nightclub.”*
But the club also lost money because our Sari Price Patton was caught embezzling some of the daily receipts. This was in 1927/1928, so before Reiss painted the chic young woman here.
* From “On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker” by A’Lelia Bundles
Painting from the Brooklyn Museum’s website”
(via lascasartoris)
Vintage Black Glamour remembers the great artist and activist Elizabeth Catlett, who died at her home in Mexico on April 2, 2012. She is pictured here circa 1949 in a photo by Mariana Yampolsky.
A Night Club Map of Harlem, illustrated by the legendary cartoonist E. Simms Campbell in 1932. Cab Calloway narrates an animation of the map in ”Cab Calloway: Sketches” on PBS’s American Masters.
Josephine Baker et Georges-Henri Rivière dans une vitrine de l’exposition sur la Mission Dakar-Djibouti au Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, 1933
Josephine Baker and Georges-Henri Rivière in a showcase exhibition on the Dakar-Djibouti Mission at the Ethnography Museum of the Trocadero, 1933 (translated from holdthisphoto’s French via Google Translator).
Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo. #Idie
Photo found via Facebook.
