"Papa Was A Rodeo" Kelly Hogan and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. Bloodshot Records.

It seems rather odd that I had not ran across this amazing cover of this Magnetic Fields song. But I did and thats all that matters. The Pine Valley Cosmonauts are an ever changing group of super talented Nashville and Austin musicians with roots in Americana and traditional country music. Jon Langford is one of the founders and also one of my very favorite outsider artists. His art can be found at Yard Dog Art Gallery in Austin. The band also includes Bobby Bare Jr.


Kelly Hogan is simply amazing. Here is a bit about her from her record labels website:
Kelly's voice is so versatile it can wrap itself around any song, in any style, be it torchy jazz, country weepers, soul-fueled bump and grinders or long-lost pop nuggets, and transform them into something all her own.  Hell, just her compilation appearances could be their own "Best of..." collection. She's that good.   Like the Heat Miser, whatever she touch, becomes too much, and starts to melt in her clutch...I mean, she covers a haunting, chilling, world-ending ballad like "I'll Go To My Grave Loving You" on Because It Feel Good AND turn the kids' bath time diddy "Rubber Duckie" from The Bottle Let Me Down into a steamy, sexed-up invite...now THAT'S versatility.  Think of her music as existential countrypolitan soul with a world class voice.

Kelly was born and raised in Atlanta where her dad is a policeman and her mom can make a pickle out of anything. She's been singing as long as she can remember. Her brother used to punch her in the arm for constantly harmonizing with the radio, yet she could not put a sock in it. Hogan began to hone her mellifluously spooky welter of torch songs and honky tonk anthems when she fronted the legendary peg-legged cabaret quartet, The Jody Grind, and then fanned the flames of her bummer-rock fixation while playing guitar for Orbisonic southern gothic punks, The Rock*A*Teens. Then she got ants in her pants and she moved north to Chicago in 1997 where she became Bloodshot's first paid employee ($500 a month!).  After Bloodshot Rob saw her get up and sing with Dale Watson at Schubas, he promptly fired her and demanded she get back to singing.

Her stint in our busy little hive was marked by two solo albums, appearances on some clever and popular Bloodshot compilations, a split single with fellow dirtybird Neko Case, and appearances on albums by the Sadies, Nora O'Connor, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Wee Hairy Beasties, Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys, Robbie Fulks, Roger Knox, Jon Langford, Alejandro Escovedo and, are we missing somone?  Probably.  Everybody wants Kelly on their records.
To whit, the past few years has seen Kelly singing with fellow Georgians the Drive-By Truckers, gospel legend Mavis Staples, Iron and Wine, Jakob Dylan, the hopped up jazz combo The Wooden Leg and recording and touring with Neko Case as her back up singer (a match made in heaven, let us tell you). There's prolly a lot more we're missing, but we can guarantee if Hogan is on it or with it, you're gonna love it.

The incredible tapestries of British artist Grayson Perry (b. 1960)

These huge tapestries may be the coolest things I have stumbled upon in a long time. For more details of Grayson's interesting life and compelling work go here

Incredible portrait by South African artist Irma Stone (1894-1966). Arab in Black. Discovered on a house call by Hannah O'Leary of Bonhams London.

Arab in Black by Irma Stern, which was donated to fund Nelson Mandela’s legal defence in the 1950s, found covered in bills and letters in a London flat.(courtesy The Guardian)

An art expert has spotted a painting valued at up to £1m, which was once sold to help fund Nelson Mandela’s legal defense, being used as a noticeboard in a London flat. The painting, Arab in Black, a 1939 work by Irma Stern – regarded as South Africa’s leading artist, whose works have recently been soaring in value – was recognised by Hannah O’Leary, a specialist in South African art at Bonhams auction house, during a valuation visit to the flat.
“I spotted this masterpiece hanging in the kitchen covered in letters, postcards and bills. It was a hugely exciting find, even before I learned of its political significance,” she said.

Stern died in 1966, and her old home in Cape Town is now a museum. Prices for her work have been rising steadily. Another of her paintings of subjects from Zanzibar, similarly framed in heavy, antique, carved timber, set a new world record at Bonhams in 2011 when it sold for £3.1m.

In the late 50s, the painting was given by the collector Betty Suzman – sister-in-law of the anti-apartheid activist and politician Helen Suzman – to a charity auction to raise funds for Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress activists, including Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, who were on trial for high treasonand faced the death penalty. In 1961, the case was dismissed after the trial had dragged on for five years, but three years later Mandela, Sisulu and others were re-arrested and given life sentences for treason. Mandela was eventually freed in 1990, and went on to become his country’s president.

Giles Peppiatt, director of Bonhams South African art department, said: “This painting was a significant part of Mandela’s defence fund – there were other works of art given to the auction, but they were very minor. This was by far the most important piece.”
The heavy, ornate frame that protected the painting in pristine condition during its noticeboard years is itself a rare and valuable thing, made from the timbers of elaborately carved antique door cases from Zanzibar, which are now barred from export. Stern, who was born in 1894 in the Transvaal into a German Jewish family, spent several periods working in Zanzibar in the 30s and 40s, and used the frames for what she considered her best works.

The parents of the present owner emigrated to the UK in the 70s, bringing their auction prize painting with them. “The words ‘shocked’ and ‘astonished’ would both apply to the present owners,” Peppiatt said. “They loved the painting and they knew it had some value, but they had no idea it was such an important work. In some ways they are very sorry to see it go, but it would be a great luxury to keep a million-pound painting hanging on a kitchen wall.”
The painting will be sold at the Bonham’s auction of South African Art in London on 9 September.

Archives from the Detroit Public Library now available digitally. Tens of thousands of awesome old sports, automotive, architectural and cultural photographs and ephemera available for free viewing and download.

The Detroit Public Library just completed the digitalizing of all of the historical photos and ephemera in their extensive collection. It is available here

From the Ernie Harwell Sports archives:

From the National Historic Automotive Collection archives:

Antique Austrian enamelware souvenir cup from the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair. This cup commemorates the Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Jefferson.

This is a neat and inexpensive way to start a collection of Americana or Worlds Fair memorabilia. It is not in perfect condition. Interestingly, the cup was made and the transfer ware artwork was done in Austria but it was sold at Norvell-Shapleigh Hardware Co. in St. Louis, Mo. It is available for purchase here

One of my very favorite American paintings. "The Janitor Who Paints" by Palmer Hayden (1890-1973). Property of The Renwick Gallery in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

 Harlem Renaissance ca. 1930

Luce Center Label

Palmer Hayden was known for his paintings of the African American scene. In a 1969 interview he described The Janitor Who Paints, created around 1930, as "a sort of protest painting" of his own economic and social standing as well as that of his fellow African Americans. Hayden said his friend Cloyd Boykin, an artist who, like Hayden, had supported himself as a janitor, inspired this piece: "I painted it because no one called Boykin the artist. They called him the janitor." Details within the cramped apartment—the duster and the trashcan, for example—point to the janitor's profession; the figure's dapper clothes and beret, much like those Hayden himself wore, point to his artistic pursuits. Hayden's use of perspective was informed by modern art practices, which favored abstraction and simplified forms. He originally exaggerated the figure's facial features, which many of his contemporaries criticized as African American caricatures, but later altered the painting. He maintained the janitor as the protagonist as it represented larger civil rights issues within the African American community. (John Ott, "Labored Stereotypes: Palmer Hayden's 'The Janitor Who Paints,'" American Art 22, no.1, Spring 2008)

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941): The Indian Frida Kahlo by Kathryn Hughes. London Telegraph.

The daughter of a Sikh aristocrat and a Hungarian opera singer was never going to be ordinary. But Amrita Sher-Gil – in her art, in her adventuress life, and in the photographs taken of her by her pioneering father in the early 1900s – proved truly remarkable. 

Amrita with her sister Indira (left), circa 1923

The woman’s body is luscious but self-contained, suggesting that this is not an erotic pose, not quite. She is naked from the waist up, her heavy breasts seeming to offer an invitation, yet her thoughtful glance, staring out beyond the picture, suggests that she has other things on her mind.

The painting, titled Self-Portrait as Tahitian, poses a question. If the artist isn’t Tahitian, nor, as her dark skin and full lips suggest, European, what are her origins?

In fact, this painting is the work of the important, but now little-known, 20th-century Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil, whose brief and brilliant career ended with her tragic death at the age of 28. Sixty years before Tracey Emin, Sher-Gil scandalised audiences around the world by putting women’s bodies – her own, her friends’ and those of ordinary Indians – at the centre of her extraordinary art.

^{Amrita Sher-Gil in Self-Portrait as Tahitian. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.}

By the time she died in 1941 her paintings were only beginning to become popular in India and in Europe. ‘I hate cheap emotional appeal,’ she declared as she went about challenging the clichés of the ‘exotic East’ – bejewelled figures posing in splendour with an elephant somewhere in the mix – with her truthful painting, full of the heat and dust of 20th-century India as it emerged from a century of British rule.
Often referred to as ‘the Indian Frida Kahlo’ because of the revolutionary way she blended the outlines of modern European painting with ‘primitive’ forms, Amrita led a life as compelling and unorthodox as her art.
What makes her story even more fascinating is that her early years were recorded for posterity by her father, a photographer – and offer insights into both Amrita herself and European and Indian high society in the 1920s.
Born on the eve of the First World War, Amrita Sher-Gil grew up in Budapest. Her parents were Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, a Hungarian opera singer, and Umrao Sher-Gil, a Sikh aristocrat with a deep scholarly interest in Sanskrit and astronomy.
The pair first met in 1912, while Marie Antoinette was touring Lahore, and the following year moved to her home city, where they were forced to remain until the end of the war.
The Sher-Gil family lived an unconventional life – one filled with grand political connections and glittering diplomacy, as well as intellectual enquiry and artistic endeavour. With so many people displaced during the war, the Sher-Gils were less conspicuous in Budapest than they might otherwise have been.
None the less, Umrao, who was an early adopter of camera technology, became fascinated by the way he could use home photography to document the unusual circumstances of his family. One of the earliest pictures of Amrita was taken in 1913 and shows Marie Antoinette sitting up in bed proudly, an extravagant bow in her hair and her baby swaddled in a froth of broderie anglaise. To one side of this deeply conventional tableau sits the proud father, neatly dressed in a conservative Western suit, incongruously topped with a turban.


^{Amrita as a baby with her parents, 1913. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.} 
 
When Amrita was eight the Sher-Gils were finally able to return to the family estate at Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas. In this airy corner of the Punjab, the ruling British mingled with the Indian upper classes, and Umrao’s photographs are a blur of white dresses, nannies, piano practice, garden romps and Christmas trees.
In some images, Amrita and her sister Indira, in their white frocks, would not have looked out of place in Kensington. In others, they are swaddled in the rich fabrics and jewels that make them look like diminutive Indian princesses. All the photographs portray an idyllic, privileged lifestyle that is a world away from the India Amrita would go on to paint in later life.
In 1929, at the age of 16, she moved to Paris to study art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. There, Amrita – who had always displayed a rebellious streak (as a child she was expelled from her convent school for declaring herself an atheist) – plunged into everything that bohemian Paris had to offer.
The photographs taken by her father during his visits show her experimenting with her identity, sometimes wearing Western fashion and on other occasions opting for a sari. Others reveal a burgeoning sexuality, and it was in Paris that Amrita embarked on a lifelong pattern of sexual adventuring, conducting affairs with both men and women.
She could do so, according to one of her many lovers, because ‘she had that hard core of the artist that keeps itself aloof and untouched’. This, though, was about much more than disposable sex.


^{Amrita in Paris, circa 1930. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.}
 
Amrita’s intense physicality fed directly into her way of making art. ‘How can one feel the beauty of a form, the intensity or the subtlety of a colour, the quality of a line,’ she asked rhetorically, ‘unless sne is a sensualist of the eyes?’ Amrita’s early paintings from this Paris period show every sign of having been made in the Western tradition.
She had long been interested in Gauguin, whose influence was so evident in her Self-Portrait as Tahitian. But Modigliani, Cézanne and Renoir all became important, too.
In Young Girls (1932) Amrita’s sister Indira sits on the left dressed in fashionable European clothing, while the partially undressed figure in the foreground is a French friend. The two women, one poised and assured, the other more awkward with her face hidden beneath her messy hair, have been described as embodying different sides of Amrita herself.
Astounding in its technical competence – the critics were especially impressed by the way the young artist was able to convey so many tonal variations of the colour white – the picture was awarded a gold medal at the Grand Salon of 1933.
Despite this prestigious recognition, Amrita found herself increasingly longing for India, convinced that it held the key to her future career. Never one for false modesty, she declared, ‘Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others. India belongs only to me.’
Indian art traditionally tended to the sketchy and sentimental, but Amrita was determined to find a new way of showing the reality of the country that her father had taught her to love. ‘There are such wonderful, such glorious things in India, so many unexploited pictorial possibilities, that it is a pity that so few of us have ever attempted to look for them even (much less interpret them),’ she explained.


^{Three Girls, 1935. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.}
 
A painting from 1935 illustrates this profound shift in sensibility. Three Girls shows three young Indian women sitting passively as if waiting for their future to appear. Unlike the resolutely urban figures in Young Girls, these are clearly rural women, dressed in brightly coloured saris. The mood, though, is far from joyful: the shadows on the wall suggest that the girls’ anticipated lives – complete with husbands and families – may not bring the happiness that their culture has taught them to expect.
It was not, though, until late 1937 that Amrita finally found the subject and the style that would come to define her art. Late in the year she embarked upon a three-month journey through the rural south, determined to investigate an India that could not have been more different from the colonial tea-party atmosphere of Simla.
As she travelled deeper into the dense perpetual sunlight, the colours became brighter while the bodies turned dark. Now was her chance to fill her canvases with farm workers, camel drivers and nurses. Steering clear of sentimentality, she developed a style that drew its inspiration as much from the bold shapes of European modernism as the rich cultures of mogul miniatures and the cave paintings of Ajanta.
The Wedding Party is a signature work from this time, capturing the isolated lives of women whose inner worlds seethe with boredom, resignation and frustrated desire. The painting shows a young bride surrounded by female relatives as she prepares for marriage, her pale attenuated body contrasting strongly with the rounded fecundity of the figure to the right.
The palette of ochres and ambers gives a reassuring earthy stability to this little scene. And yet, as always with any work by Amrita, ambiguity is never far away. Is the mood sacrificial or celebratory? Is this the end of life or its beginning? The blank, impassive faces of the women refuse to provide any easy answers.


^{The Wedding Party was painted during Amrita’s travels through the south of India. Photo: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink.}
 
Returning to India may have revolutionised Amrita’s art, but it did not interrupt her sexual experimentation and by her mid-twenties her exploits had become so well known that Marie Antoinette and Umrao, liberal though they were, took the decision to burn many of her intimate letters for fear of them getting into the wrong hands.
When Amrita, at the age of 25, declared her intention to marry, the announcement surprised everyone. But her mother’s joy was short-lived, for Amrita chose as her husband an impoverished cousin from the Hungarian side of her family. Victor Egan was a doctor who had enjoyed a special bond with Amrita since childhood.
He had managed to obtain abortions for her on at least two occasions, which perhaps gave Amrita the sense that he would always look after her. Sadly, though, there were limits even to Victor’s protective powers. In the closing days of 1941 Amrita haemorrhaged and died.
According to her most recent biographer, this was caused by yet another abortion gone wrong. Still only 28 at the time of her death, Amrita Sher-Gil left behind her a body of work that would become crucial to India’s growing sense of itself in the decades following independence. Neither sentimental nor bleak, her bold, vivid paintings of ordinary people, especially women, are now considered classics of both European and world art. But her significance goes further than this.
By figuring so centrally in her father’s photographic art, Amrita Sher-Gil helped forge a record of a hybrid culture, one that was nourished by both East and West yet managed to transcend both.

Awesome, vintage, folk art, glass-topped driftwood table. Made in northern Wisconsin late 1950's. Dry, crusty, original gray paint.

This is one of the coolest tables we have ever had. It is perfect for your cottage, lake house or cabin. Great rustic, camp Adirondack look. Solid as a rock, sturdy. Piece has no loose parts at all so it doesnt wobble. Very sound. It is 43" in diameter and 19" tall. See if you can find the carved deer head hidden in it. It is available for purchase here

The Shed Project: Lee John Phillips

Fascinating documentation of every single single item contained in the tool shed of the grandfather of artist John Lee Phillips. This is an ongoing, ever-changing, monumental task that can be followed here

Neat old studio card photo of a young lad in a floppy hat and knickers with a rugby ball.

Available for purchase here

Sonia DeLaunay (1885-1979): Reaping What She Sews by Emily Nathan courtesy artnet.com.

Just found an interesting article on an important fashion designer that started off as a painter in the Synchromism movement founded by Morgan Russell (1886-1953) and Stanton MacDonald Wright (1890-1973). (courtesy artnet)


Sonia Delaunay was born to a poor Ukrainian family in 1885, survived two World Wars, and died wealthy in Paris in 1979. In between, she co-founded the French avant-garde movement Orphism with her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, claimed the first retrospective for a living female artist at the Louvre, and conceived -- as a practical side venture -- a brand that helped define the style of sophisticated authors (Nancy Cunard), international performers (Diaghilev’s Madrid dancers) and, indeed, much of 20th-century cosmopolitan culture.

Sonia described her textiles as mere “exercises in color” that informed her true passion, painting. But her work in fashion and the applied arts, via her Maison Delaunay design atelier, may well be her broader legacy. Such is the argument of “Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay,” an exhibition co-curated by Matilda McQuaid and Susan Brown at the Cooper-Hewitt, where it is on view this spring. Presenting a lush collection of some 250 screen-printed, hand-sewn and embroidered patterns, the show contextualizes Sonia-the-Designer with a handful of photographs, drawings and ephemera that illustrate the trajectory of her creative beginnings.
Née Sarah Stern, the daughter of Jewish laborers, Delaunay was adopted by a wealthy Russian uncle at the age of five and raised in St. Petersburg among a multicultural elite. She excelled artistically and was sent to Paris to study, where she found herself consorting with a vibrant artistic community including Dadaist writer Tristan Tzara and French poet Blaise Cendrars, both of whom would later become her collaborators.

Even before she took up with Robert Delaunay in 1910, Sonia had experimented with “simultaneity,” a notion put forth by French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul in his seminal 1839 work The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors. As a description of the sensation of movement produced by juxtaposing starkly contrasting colors, the idea fascinated the young artist and would continually inflect her work, eventually becoming something of a fashion craze.

Her relationship to design began in 1917 Portugal -- where she and her family had fled from the horrors of World War I -- when straitened finances prompted her to found Casa Sonia, the first edition of her design house, which she later renamed. It was an immediate success; in the early ‘20s, as peace was temporarily settling over Europe, the Delaunays returned to Paris, the new seat of the global fashion empire.

Sonia effortlessly emerged as a leading figure in that world, liberating color, movement and form from two dimensions and uniting them off the canvas in beautiful things that she created for beautiful women to wear. Her Maison Delaunay was launched to enthusiastic public reception, and the workshop in which she labored simultaneously on textiles, costume and accessory design was trademarked as the Atelier Simultané. The designer and her designs were photographed frequently, for portraits taken by her husband and for glamorous black-and-white ads that featured models lounging poolside or strolling with parasols in the mid-afternoon sun. Her name became synonymous with luxurious scenes of female independence, a notion that was quickly transforming Europe.

It is not coincidental that Delaunay dedicated herself to fashion design, which bridges the practical and the impractical; her turn to textiles, after all, had largely been motivated by pragmatic considerations. The ornate flourishes of a distinctively empowering decorative scarf, the woolen swimsuit in navy, lemon and coral which asserted feminine agency but would likely not have survived an actual dip, and the series of hand-stitched motorist caps, meant to complement and preserve the progressive woman’s hairdo as she took to the open road (literally and figuratively) behind the wheel of a Citroen B12, all attest to Sonia’s competence in a sort of boundless, multifarious role, as both creative visionary and activist in the trenches.

In 1925, the renowned furrier Jacques Heim honored her with an invitation to design a display of her “simultaneous” fashions in a shop window for Paris’s iconic Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The Boutique Simultané -- which is replicated at the Cooper-Hewitt with a charming array of hats, scarves and fabrics in a palette of sea-greens and pumpkin oranges -- was a hit. Delaunay's label drew the attention of celebrities worldwide, including Gloria Swanson and the wives of Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Erich Mendelsohn.

Though she returned to painting in the 1930s, when her designs were in high demand and economic pressure had subsided, her work in textile continued to flourish through the late ‘60s through a partnership forged with Joseph de Leeuw, the owner of the avant-garde Dutch emporium Metz & Co. Over the years, Delaunay created more than 2,000 fabrics for the store, and "Color Moves" proffers a delicious sampling of juxtaposed swatches displayed in glass cases.
The parade of small, brightly patterned fabric squares, accompanied by preliminary drawings and paintings on paper, seems to parallel, or even anticipate, the course of 20th-century abstraction, from de Stijl and Paul Klee to Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland. Sonia Delaunay combined color and shape in every way possible -- or almost -- and even, possibly, knitted together the fine and applied arts into a timeless unity.
“Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay,” Mar. 18-June 5, 2011, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, New York, N.Y. 10128.

EMILY NATHAN is assistant editor at Artnet Magazine. She can be reached at