Articles from 1948
Men’s attire was more sensitive to depression than women’s, for even the most elemental sense of chivalry recognized the superior importance of fashion for wife and daughter.
More articles on 1930s fashion can be read here…
Artist and poet Jaime Sabartés (1881 – 1968) had been among the oldest and closest friends of Pablo Picasso since the two of them were 19-year-old artists in Barcelona. Throughout the course of their 40-year friendship Picasso had painted and drawn his pal on numerous occasions – Sabartés’ comments about those six portraits and his memories of those isolated moments appear on the attached pages. He recalled a day when Picasso energetically encouraged him to write down his thoughts, which in time lead to this article, that appeared in his 1948 book, PICASSO: an Intimate Portrait
I decided, therefore, to take these portraits as texts, to try to imbue with warmth Picasso’s pictures of me, to make them live anew, to enrich them with fragments from the life of their creator and shreds of my own.
A Picasso poem is included among the reminiscence (translator unknown).
A forgotten article from 1913 that degraded Picasso and other assorted Modernists can be read here.
A review of Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony written in 1948 by the respected Los Angeles music critic and historian Lawrence Morton (1908 – 1987):
…there can be no mistake about the Third. It is a solid structure, exceedingly rich and varied in expressiveness, large in concept, masterful in execution, completely unabashed and outspoken.
No wonder that Sergi Koussevitsky called it ‘the greatest American symphony.’
Unknown to the majority of women in this country, a steadily mounting feminist campaign is under way for Equal Rights for women under the Constitution. The average man will regard this statement with bewilderment.
Weary of restraints imposed by more than a decade of war followed by the austerity program…British women have now cast aside the old look, are stampeding West End shops for the built-in New Look.
This 1940s Hollywood journalist refrained from using the pejorative white cracker while condemning silent film director D.W. Griffith for his racial views -and yet at the same time did something rather bold in that he put in print his views that the man has been erroneously credited as the creator of various assorted film innovations that were pioneered by other filmmakers.
A remarkable 1948 photo essay from the pages of the defunct weekly SEE MAGAZINE illustrating the bullet-proof, 2-door, 4 passenger, Mercedes convertible roadster that was previously owned by Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göering (1893 – 1946). The car was purchased by the Danish industrialist Svend Vestergaard:
Vestergaard purchased the 8-cylinder, 240 h.p., under-slung speedster from British occupation authorities…The car was especially built according to the ostentatious Number 2 Nazi’s exacting specifications, the German-made product of Stuttgart’s famed Daimler-Benz Aktiengesellschaft is 11 feet long, weighs three truck-like tons,[and] has six forward speeds.
Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.
Clipped from the pages of a 1948 issue of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE were these four color pictures of skiers loafing about the slopes in a place that had just recently been discovered for such purposes; it was called Aspen, in Colorado.
You will no doubt notice that there is no real difference between the skiing togs worn by either gender; both wore only wool, jaunty ski sweaters and pegged trousers.
Click here if you would like to read the entire article about Aspen in 1948; there are additional color photographs.
ESPIONAGE is big business in Berlin and has it’s painstaking, pecuniary bureaucracy. It is practiced by small fry (who is willing to procure for you anything from the latest deployment plan of the Red Army to a lock of Hitler’s hair) and by big-time operators who deal nonchalantly and lucratively in international secrets.
This is a 1948 Soviet poster that foreign correspondents of the day reported as having been widely distributed across the Worker’s Paradise. A veiled piece of patriotic pageantry, it was clearly intended to intimidate the Western democracies; it made its appearance a few weeks into the Berlin Blockade (June, 1948 – May, 1949) – an international stunt that gained the Soviets nothing.
From Amazon:
Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin
