Biographies / Charles M Shulz

 

Charles M. Schulz

Charles M. Schulz

The American newspaper cartoonist Charles M. Schulz is world famous as the creator of 'Peanuts' (1950-2000). Preceded by his similar first feature 'Li'l Folks' (1947-1950), the 'Peanuts' series revolves around the unlucky boy Charlie Brown, his idiosyncratic dog Snoopy and a gang of other kids. Their daily antics and anxieties ran in over 2,600 newspapers, making it the most widespread comic strip on the planet. 'Peanuts' owes its success to its gentle comedy, humanity and psychological-philosophical themes. Its universe is filled solely with children and animals, used by Schulz as a satirical metaphor for the adult world. His characters express doubts and worries, suffer from bullying, depression and other emotional turmoils and wonder about life and their existence: complexities unprecedented in gag-a-day comics at the time. Schulz pulled it off with four daily panels, a simple graphic style and witty punchlines, touching both mainstream readers and intellectuals. The characters have appeared in animated films and on truckloads of merchandising, making Schulz one of the rare billionaire cartoonists. However, he kept his personal touch by creating every episode of his sophisticated newspaper comic singlehandedly over the course of 49 years. Together with Walt Disney and Hergé, Charles M. Schulz remains one of the most analyzed, referenced and influential cartoonists in the world.

Biographies / Dik Browne

 

Dik Browne

Dik Browne

Dik Browne was an American cartoonist, best remembered as the creator of the newspaper gag comic 'Hägar the Horrible', about a Viking chief, his crew and his family. Browne is also known as the original illustrator of 'Hi and Lois' (1954- ), a family gag strip scripted by Mort Walker. Both became some of the longest-running, widest distributed and most beloved newspaper comic features in the world. For Boys' Life, Browne was also the creator of the scouting comic 'The Tracy Twins'.

The curious world of Walter Potter / In pictures

Monkey riding a goat

Potter's museum charmed and delighted locals and tourists alike for almost 150 years. Although most famous for his anthropomorphic tableaux, there were several other pieces that captured the public imagination. One of the favourite items with visitors, and the subject of one of the museum's coloured postcards, was the Monkey Riding a Goat: a vervet monkey rather improbably depicted carrying a riding crop and seated astride a goat. According to the Bramber Museum's guidebook, both animals had come to an untimely end. The monkey, probably an escaped pet, reportedly died of shock when a bucket of cold water was thrown over him. The goat lived in a nearby park but frequently escapedPhotograph: Alan Kolc/Pat Morris/Joanna Ebenstein

The curious world of Walter Potter – in pictures

Walter Potter (1835-1918) was an amateur taxidermist who built tableaux that became icons of Victorian whimsy. A new book by historian of taxidermy Dr Pat Morris and New York-based artist and curator Joanna Ebenstein seeks to preserve and celebrate the now-dispersed collection with new photographs of his best-loved works

Kate Carter
Friday 13 September 2013

Walter Potter / The Man Who Married Kittens

Walter Potter : The Man Who Married Kittens

Walter Potter’s Twisted Taxidermy

The creations of Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter, who once upon a time was famous for his elaborate, awwwww-inspiring, ew-provoking tableaux of dead baby animals aping human behavior—kittens playing croquet, bunnies going to school, and so on. In Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy (Blue Rider Press), out this week, these works may seem quintessentially Victorian in their merging of kitsch and morbidity—almost to the point of parody. But they also have a zany pop quality, as if conjured by Beatrix Potter (no relation) during an acid trip. Read more about Walter Potter’s work in a review by Bruce Handy. Below, a selection of photographs from the book, which makes a great Easter basket treat.

 

In brief: The Man Who Died Twice; Aesop’s Animals; Breathtaking – reviews

Richard Osman’s second novel doesn’t disappoint. Plus, the science behind Aesop’s fables and on the Covid frontline with Dr Rachel Clarke

Hannah Beckerman
Sunday 12 September 2021

‘His characters are beautifully drawn’: Richard Osman. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

The Man Who Died Twice

Richard Osman
Viking, £18.99, pp432

TV presenter Osman’s highly entertaining second novel revisits the quartet of septuagenarians that made his debut, The Thursday Murder Club, a runaway hit. Ex-spy Elizabeth is visited by her former husband and colleague, Douglas, in need of help to escape the clutches of MI5 and the mafia, sending the pensioners on their next sleuthing adventure. Osman’s characters are beautifully drawn, perfectly balancing humour and pathos, and the result is a novel that’s pure pleasure to read.

Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables

Jo Wimpenny
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp368

Jo Wimpenny, a zoologist, questions whether there is any scientific reasoning behind Aesop’s depictions of animals in his collected morality tales. Her canvas is wide-ranging, incorporating personal reflections and research. In one chapter, The Dog and Its Shadow, she sweeps from Darwin to modern neuroscience by way of her own childhood desire to be a canine. Engaging and comprehensive, this is highly readable popular science.

Breathtaking

Rachel Clarke
Abacus, £9.99, pp240

Dr Rachel Clarke’s award-winning 2020 book Dear Life established her as a compassionate and lyrical voice within medical literature. With Breathtaking, the palliative care specialist turns her attention to Covid, in a raw and unflinching portrayal of life on the frontline of the pandemic. There is her fury at the government’s ineptitude – here we understand the terrifying reality of insufficient PPE – and an intimate portrayal of her colleagues on Oxford’s Covid wards. And there is her grief for the patients, and co-workers, she loses. Deeply humane, Breathtaking is a book replete with courage, resilience and empathy.

THE GUARDIAN

About Hägar the Horrible

 

About Hägar the Horrible

Hägar the Horrible broke all records when it was launched on Feb. 4, 1973, becoming the fastest growing comic strip ever.

Hägar the Horrible by Dik Browne / A Mother-in-Law

Hägar the Horrible

by Dik Browne

A MOTHER-IN-LAW

Hägar the Horrible by Dik Browne / Vikings are not like other people

Hägar the Horrible

by Dik Browne

VIKINGS ARE NOT LIKE OTHER PEOPLE

Italo Calvino / Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò

Il barone rampante sull'albero

Italo Calvino

Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò

IL BARONE RAMPANTE

Il barone rampante è il secondo romanzo della trilogia I nostri antenati, e viene pubblicato nel 1957 dalla casa editrice Einaudi. Il nuovo romanzo prosegue il tentativo di Calvino di unire l’ispirazione realistica del Neorealismo con la componente dell’invenzione fiabesca.

Alain Elkann interviews Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon

by Alain Elkann

From Napalm to Beautiful Women.

Richard Avedon is a small man. His face is sunken in and he hides behind his white mane of hair and large tortoise-shell glasses. He is dressed in black velvet and has shiney shoes. He’s in the middle of the Sala delle Cariatidi in the Palazzo Reale in Milan explaining how an image of his is to be hung. Together we walk through the rooms of his exhibition (to be inaugurated on 17 January 1995 and running through 5 March, with Kodak and Versace as sponsors). The show is called Evidence (1944 – 1994). He asks for a coffee, a bottle of mineral water, and a piece of gianduiotto (a chocolate and hazelnut candy from Piedmont).

Claudia Cardinale / My heart is in Africa and my head is in Europe

Cardinale enjoying a boat ride in Venice, 1967. She was first discovered at the Venice Film Festival in 1957, during a trip that she had won from a beauty contest in which she was crowned “The Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia.”

"My heart is in Africa and my head is in Europe"

Claudia Cardinale

by Alain Elkann

“My heart is in Africa and my head is in Europe. In Paris the Tunisian taxi drivers do not want to charge me for my fare because I am one of them, but I am also Italian and French.”

On a tour of Italian theatres in December 2002, the actress Claudia Cardinale discusses her roots and her work.

“Two quarts of milk and a pint of cream!”
Frank Ridgeway
Ocotber 12, 1957

 

Cartoons: Bird Is the Word

These birds are absurd!

August 17, 2022

“Look lady, nobody’s perfect.”
Joseph Zeis
October 3, 1959

 

Amy Hwang / The Glasses

THE GLASSES

by Amy Hwang

“Have you seen the glasses I had on when I came in?”

The New Yorker, December 12, 2019

Diane Kruger / ‘Everything Changed With Motherhood’

Diane Kruger: 

‘Everything Changed 

With Motherhood’

A fresh fitness outlook became the actress’s only opportunity to reconnect with her spirit after having her daughter. Here’s how she found her way back to herself.

BY MOLLY CREEDEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY CALEB & GLADYS

PUBLISHED: DEC 21, 2021

New mothers—no shame to all those self-love adage sharers on Instagram—actually often do have goals that involve changing themselves.

Rita Moreno Talks Brando, Elvis And West Side Story

Listen to article7 minutes

Rita Moreno, SAG Life Achievement Award Winner, Talks Brando, Elvis And West Side Story

Ahead of her lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild this Saturday, Rita Moreno dishes on “West Side Story,” dating Marlon Brando and Elvis, and why she’s hit her prime at 82.

Sandra McElwaine

Updated Jul. 12, 2017 12:13PM ET / Published Jan. 15, 2014 5:45AM ET 

Moreno was stunned. “I just slammed on the brakes and damn near had an accident,” says the legendary singer, dancer and actress. She quickly pulled off the road and called SAG back to make sure she had heard the news correctly.

Jayne Mansfield / Blonde Ambition

Jayne Mansfield

Life wiht Jayne Mansfield

BLONDE AMBITION

The actress and singer Jayne Mansfield (born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933) was one of those quintessentially American pop-culture creations who helped define the country’s mood — playful, naive, expansive — in the middle part of the 20th century. That she was also, in large part, a self-created icon who reveled in publicity stunts only added, and still adds today, to her appeal: it’s difficult, after all, to dislike someone who so giddily pursues fame, and who so exuberantly embraces it once it’s attained.

The Reluctant Star /What Ava Gardner played best

 

Ava Gardner

The Reluctant Star

What Ava Gardner played best.

David Denbey

19 August 2013

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), a bitter fable about the movie business, gave the picture’s star one of the most craftily prepared entrances in the history of cinema. The setting is a night club in Madrid. A dancer named Maria Vargas is performing, but Mankiewicz shows us only the reactions of the crowd: the men rapt and ravenous; the women irritable. As Vargas finishes her act and goes backstage, three men from Hollywood arrive to meet her. She refuses to come out, but Harry Dawes, a down-on-his-luck writer and director (Humphrey Bogart), barges into her dressing room, where he notices her bare feet below a drawn curtain; she is embracing her lover. Dawes teases her, and, enraged, she yanks the curtain aside. Then, at last, we see her: Ava Gardner, with her thick black hair, bowed lips, cleft chin, and green eyes, wearing a scarlet necklace that matches her lipstick, and a white peasant blouse pulled off one shoulder. Admiration struggles against disbelief: how could anyone look that good?

 

Mearene Jordan photographs Ava Gardner in the mid-1950s.

Four decades by Ava Gardner’s side: love, movies and rebellion

‘Living with Miss G.’ is Mearene Jordan’s memoir of her time as the maid, assistant and confidant of the American actress, who starred in films such as ‘Mogambo’ and ‘The Night of the Iguana’

Gregorio Belinchón

Madrid, June 16, 2022

During a career spanning nearly half a century, Ava Gardner loved, fought, cried, laughed, suffered, had fun and, obviously, also acted. She was a star. Lauded by Hollywood as “the most beautiful animal in the world,” she battled against the norms of her time, and did what she could to improve the weak scripts that – by contract – she had to follow. She even fled to Europe to escape Hollywood’s conventionality.

When Ava Gardner kissed me

Ava Gardner in 1952.VIRGIL APGER
American actress Ava Gardner (1922 - 1990) spoke of her insatiable desire for sex

When Ava kissed me, I felt it in every fibre... but it was the tales of her lovers that really floored me: Secrets of Hollywood's most insatiable sex goddess, by her last confidant

By PETER EVANS FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 23:11 GMT, 21 June 2013 | UPDATED: 15:20 GMT, 22 June 2013

The smallest husband I ever had, and the biggest mistake — that was how Ava Gardner described Mickey Rooney, who’d once been Hollywood’s top box-office draw.

In Pictures: The Warm and Sensual Female Nudes of Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard’s celebrated and enduring photographs of the female nude feature in an upcoming Sotheby’s auction

BELLE HUTTON
JULY 10, 2020

Ruth Bernhard first began working in nude photography, the genre for which she would eventually become renowned as an image-maker, in 1934. Born in Berlin in 1905, she had moved to the USA in 1927, and was influenced by the likes of Edward Weston early in her photographic career (who she met in California in 1935 and became friends with). Bernhard’s work – often black and white Modernist nudes, with a sensual, sometimes erotic, focus on the female body – was accomplished and acclaimed during her decades-long career. She was prolific, and lived until 101. “My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify, and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity,” she said.

 

“Male Surfers” Carmel Ca. 1967 ARTOGRAPHY by KALI

‘The Vivian Maier Effect’: An Artist’s Unearthed Photos Reveal a Bygone L.A.

The new four-volume book KALI Ltd. Ed. chronicles Joan Archibald’s transformation from Long Island housewife to elusive artist

Patrick Folliard
October 12, 2021

In the early 1960s, photographer Joan Archibald abandoned suburban Long Island for the eternal summer of Southern California. Working at home from makeshift darkrooms in desert and canyon houses, she began creating striking, innovative photographs and adopted a Pop art sensibility that included changing her name to Kali.

Merry Alpern / Dirty Windows

Merry Alpern

DIRTY WINDOWS

Paul Bowles in Tangier

 

Me, Paul Bowles and that forgotten night in Tangier

A documentary on the American author triggered a memory of a disturbing night at the writer's apartment that had been suppressed for 40 years

Ronald Bergan

Tue 29 December 2009

In 1998, at the Edinburgh Film Festival, I was happily watching the documentary Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, when the weirdest thing happened to me. While the 87-year-old author was being interviewed in his apartment in Tangier, I had a strange feeling of deja vu. An African mask on the wall triggered the sense that I had been in that apartment before. Was that possible? Maybe I had seen a photo of it somewhere. I had come to the film without any pre-conceived notions, nor did I know much about Bowles, merely that he had written The Sheltering Sky, a book I had not read. I had seen Bernardo Bertolucci's film adaptation of it, which I had not much liked. That was the sum of my knowledge of Bowles.

Paul Bowles / The Outsider of the Avant-Garde

PAUL BOWLES THE OUTSIDER OF THE AVANT-GARDE

By Dennis Drabelle

June 11, 1989

AN INVISIBLE SPECTATOR 

A Biography of Paul Bowles 

By Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 

501 pp. $24.95 

A DISTANT EPISODE 

The Selected Stories B

y Paul Bowles The Ecco Press. 

352 pp. Paperback, $11.95 

IN THE INTRODUCTION to the 1980 edition of his second novel, Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles calls one of its characters, Richard Holland, "a caricature of myself." Holland, it turns out, occupies a mere handful of paragraphs in a book of almost 300 pages. So far as he is revealed, he strikes the reader as a chatty cynic, but only a psychic would feel confident of having fathomed him even as a sketch. That in itself -- the guardedness of Bowles' self-caricature -- speaks volumes about a man whose fiction Gore Vidal has trumpeted, whose music Ned Rorem reveres and whose biography Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno has told in this well-proportioned book.