Pageant Magazine

Articles from Pageant Magazine

Explaining Abstract Art
(Pageant Magazine, 1950)

WHY DO THEY DISTORT THINGS? CAN’T THEY DRAW? WHY DO THEY
PAINT SQUARES AND CUBES?


In an effort to help answer these and many other similar questions that are overheard in the modern art museums around the world, authors Mary Rathbun and Bartlett Hayes put their noodles together and dreamed up the book (that is available at Amazon) Layman’s Guide to Modern Artstyle=border:none, and we have posted some of the more helpful portions here, as well as 17 assorted illustrations to help illustrate their explanations.


The authors point out that abstract images are not simply confined to museums and galleries but surround us every day and we willingly recognize their meanings without hesitation:

Lines picturing the force and direction of motion are a familiar device in cartoons… The cartoonist frequently draws a head in several positions to represent motion. Everybody understands it. The painter multiplies the features in the same way… Everybody abstracts. The snapshot you take with your [camera] is an abstraction – it leaves out color, depth, motion and presents only black-and-white shapes. Yet its simple enough to recognize this arrangement of shapes as your baby or your mother-in-law or whatever…

The Unknown Jackie Kennedy
(Pageant Magazine, 1970)

Seven years must have seemed an appropriate amount of time to withhold information concerning the generally unpleasant character traits that were apparent in First Lady Jackie Kennedy – and so in 1970 Washington writers Lucianne Goldberg and Fred Sparks put pen to paper and recalled all the minutiae they could piece together regarding Her Elegance:

Jackie was master of deception. In the White House, she never wore her double-breasted mink coat when she could be photographed. But after her husband died, and she moved to New York, she wore the mink, as one fashion writer put it, ‘to do errands around Manhattan’.


This article appears on this site with the permission of Lucianne Goldberg

The Great Civil War Battles
(Pageant Magazine, 1958)

The second portion of Bruce Catton’s article (see above) concerning the necessary knowledge required in order to justifiably call your self a Civil War Buff was this short piece listing the greatest battles of the war. Accompanying the five brief thumb-nail summaries is a map of the South Eastern U.S., highlighted with red stars, which serve to identify where the blood poured.

Father and Son Over Pearl Harbor
(Pageant Magazine, 1970)

One morning a 17 year-old boy exclaimed to his amateur aviator father: Let’s fly around the island, Dad! – this article wouldn’t seem worthy of appearing on the internet if they lived on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, but the island in question was Honolulu and the morning was December 7, 1941…

Anita Colby
(Pageant Magazine, 1946)

For a time, Jinx Falknenburg shared the high ground as the best-paid fashion model with a lass named Anita Colby (1914 – 1992). She was restless and highly ambitious beauty who recognized that her exulted position in the fashion world was only a temporary one – and by the time that the clock ran out on her, Colby’s resume would boast of numerous high-profile positions such as publicist, syndicated columnist, movie studio executive and T.V. talk show hostess.


This article pertains to her brief stint at the Selznick Studios as some sort of perfumed Über-Stylist who lorded over all the other glam-squad proletarians on the lot.


Her book, Anita Colby’s Beauty Bookstyle=border:none, has become a classic on 1950s style.

‘Celebrity Services”
(Pageant Magazine, 1945)

Earl Blackwell and Ted Strongstyle=border:none founded a curious institution that they called Celebrity Services, Inc. in 1938 – figuring, as they did, that

Today America has more celebrities than it can keep track of and Celebrity Services aims, simply, to keep track of them.

Celebrity Services’ office is a busy hodge-podge of files, cross-files, indices, cards folders, stuffed pigeonholes, telephones, confidential memos address books, private dossiers and fat envelopes – all pertaining to the lives of 50,000 celeb-utopians.

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