Seven sketches from Soissons by the war artist Charles Huard (1875 – 1965) as they first appeared in a fashionable American society magazine.
Click here to read additional article about the World War I artists.
An assortment of opinions gleaned from various interviews with German soldiers who all made remarks about the naked aggressiveness shared by the A.E.F.:
The French would not advance unless sure of gaining their objectives while the American infantry would dash in regardless of all obstacles and that while they gained their objectives they would often do so with heavy loss of life.
The 1917 publication of The life of Algernon Charles Swinburne
A bombshell that struck literary England a little past that last mid-century has been re-echoing in the recently published ‘Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne’ by Edmund Gosse. The shell was the volume called ‘Poems and Ballads’ a cursory knowledge of which probably places it in many minds as one of the bad books of literature…
This article from the late Fifties refers to the educational benefits that existed in the form of tape recordings, television, films and slide shows and what a glorious discovery it was that they came along when they did to aid in the teacher shortages of the time. Today we have decades of studies that show what among these tools has been useful and what has failed.
In the 1940s Color TV was Anticipated as a Tool with Which Art Students Could Learn…
Illustrations of fashion’s offering from the Fall of 1921: great coats, semi-great coats, overcoats and ulsters; raglan and otherwise.
The post-war publicity machine of French fashion designer Paul Poiret was in fine form when he saw to it that his minions invited the Paris-based correspondent from American VOGUE to his house for a grand fete, seated her comfortably, drink in hand, right on the fifty-yard line in order that she might be better able to report to her handlers back in New York that Paris was back.
The correspondent who was not invited was the fashion journalist from FLAPPER MAGAZINE; American flappers did not approve of Poiret one bit. Click here to read what they thought of him.
MEN’S WEAR MAGAZINE printed a few paragraphs on the heavy hand that the Duke of Windsor had in the world of manly attire:
No one completely personified English qualities in attire than the Prince of Wales…Whatever he chose to wear was considered correct and in good taste and was accepted by millions of others in America and elsewhere. Following are a few of the styles that can be traced right back to the Duke of Windsor, either because he wore them first or was responsible for their spread…
-they include such fashion innovations as the Panama hat, the spread collar and brown buckskin shoes among others.
More articles about the Duke of Windsor can be found on these pages.
The attached article, How Well Our Chemical Industry Has Been Mobilized for War is an abstract from a 1917 issue of THE JOURNAL OF COMMERCE which discussed how readily American chemists embraced their roll after the United States committed itself to the war.
There is much talk of the procurement of potash, toluol and trinitrotoluol which were necessary elements in the manufacture of gas.
Additional magazine and newspaper articles about Cold War spies can be read on this page.Read more …
Art alone survives the earthquake shocks of revolution, and Russian art has been doubly secure because of it’s deep-rooted imagination and it’s passionate sincerity.
That was the word from Oliver M. Sayler writing from Moscow as it starved during the Summer of 1919. Sayler, known primarily for his writings on Russian theater from this period, wrote enthusiastically about the Russian Suprematist Casimir Malyevitch, Futurist David Burliuk and The Jack of Diamonds Group; believing deeply in the Russian Revolution, he wrote not a word about how the Soviets mistreated the modern artists of Russia.
To listen to Paul Meltsner one would think that it was fun to be a painter. Looking at his pictures one is compelled to conclude that life is a grim business of industrial strife, with factories shut down or picketed…
A wise-cracker and a wit at the cafe table, Mr. Meltsner is a proletarian artist when he works, and he works hard, he says. Which is what a proletarian artist should do… He exhibits frequently. He sells lithographs when he isn’t selling paintings and is represented in a number of museum collections.
Click here to read a Paul Meltsner review from ART DIGEST.
The artist Paul R. Meltsner (1905 – 1966) was one of many WPA artists given to depicting sweaty, mal-nourished proletarians laboring in the fore-ground of smoke-plagued, industrial cityscapes and his work can be found today in the vaults of every major American museum. This is a 1936 art review covering his one-man show at the Midtown Galleries in New York:
Meltsner builds his pictures everyday scenes of industrial life, dedicating them to labor and the machine…He gets broad vitality in his forms and force in his compositions, relieving at the same time the usual drabness of such scenes by a tonic of color.
Another 1936 article about Paul Meltsner can be read here.
Attached is one of the first articles to be written about balletomanes Lincoln Kirstein (1907 – 1996) and his efforts with George Balanchine (1904 – 1983) and philanthropist Edward M.M. Warburg (1910 – 1992) to form the first American ballet company (the corps was later called the New York City Ballet).
The difficult task of wandering the war-torn countryside of Europe in search of fallen World War I American pilots fell to a U.S. Army captain named E.W. Zinn. A combat pilot himself, Zinn had roamed France, Belgium and Germany interviewing the local population to see what they knew of American crash sites:
Many times he has come upon a grave with a rude cross on which was scrawled:
‘Unidentified American Aviator’ or ‘Two Unidentified American Aviators’
Captain Zinn has found that in a great many cases American fliers were buried either by the Germans or by civilians with no mark of identification left on them.
Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.
The attached W.W. II magazine article tells the story of the hard-charging Goums – a detachment of French-Moroccan infantry who appeared to the American GIs as genuine curios (Wikipedia definition: Goumier is a term used for Moroccan soldiers, who served in auxiliary units attached to the French Army, between 1908 and 1956).
The Germans definitely don’t like the Goums. As for the Italians, they’re scared to death of them. In the Mateur and Bizerte sectors, where the Goums were attached to the Ninth Division, three Italian companies surrendered en masse as soon as they heard that the guys in front of them were Goums.
Instructions as to how American insignia was to be worn on the trench coat as well as the officer’s raincoat. An additional notice can be read concerning the Army’s wish that all Doughboys maintain a good, soldierly appearance while not serving in the zone of advance.
In Honolulu, where the war began for the U.S., the first news of it’s ending reached a sleepy-eyed Chinese-American radio technician shortly after 1200 hours (12:00 a.m.) when he had just finished making his regular weekly check on KGU’s station transmitter and was ready to leave for home.
Stand by for important news about the Potsdam ultimatum.
Flight nurse, WACs and GIs all streamed from their barracks and joined the howling procession…
Some of the highlights: Firecrackers, hoarded in Chinatown for eight years, rattled like machine guns… Servicemen and civilians played tug-of-war with fire hoses… Market Street, the wide bar-lined thoroughfare that has long been the center of interest for visiting GIs and sailors, was littered with the wreckage of smashed War Bond booths … A plump redhead danced naked on the base of the city’s Native Sons monument after servicemen had torn her clothes off. A sailor lent the woman a coat, and the pair disappeared.
