When Alfred Stieglitz found out that his protégé Georgia O’Keeffe had accepted a commission to paint the women’s powder room at Radio City Music Hall without his approval he was furious.
Having met Diego Rivera and his wife Frieda Kahlo and was entranced with the idea of working on a monumental scale. Stieglitz on the other hand referred to such works as the ‘Mexican Disease.’
Donald Deskey, the interior designer of the new Radio City Music Hall thought her by then well known floral designs would be a perfect fit for the women’s powder room of that masterpiece of art deco architecture and invited her to do the murals. He was aware that Stieglitz would probably object and had Edith Halpert negotiate with her directly.
The fee he could offer, $1500.00 was nominal even in the days of the Great Depression but it was the same amount he had been allotted for all of the artists working on the project.
When he returned to New York and discovered what he described to their friends as ‘a betrayal’ he went to Deskey and demanded that her fee be increased. Deskey refused, pointing out that the contract had been signed and was binding.
Stieglitz responded by claiming that O’Keeffe was a “child” and not responsible for her actions but Deskey held his ground.
In the summer of 1932 O’Keeffe decided to forgo her usual trip to New Mexico and stay in New York to work on the mural design and keep her eye on the frequently straying Alfred.
The work came to symbolize the ongoing power struggle between the two headstrong artists and when neither would yield became a non-verbal war.
When they went to their vacation house at Lake George to escape the summer heat of the City, Stieglitz invited a coterie of younger writer friends including Ralph Flint, Frederick Ringel, and Cary Ross with the sole purpose of undermining O’Keeffe’s determination to go through the mural.
In her journal she wrote, “No one in my world wants me to do it, but I want to do it.”
Throughout the summer, Stieglitz kept up the pressure and when she returned to the City she was also distressed to discover her sister Catherine Klenert was displaying her own flower paintings that were noticeably similar to Georgia’s.
In October Georgia returned to Lake George to be alone for the month where she wrote, “My Gawd won’t I get Hell if I can’t make a go of it.”
The powder room was not ready until November 16th, sis weeks before the scheduled Christmas opening of Radio City. While she and Deskey were in the powder room discussing her ideas the canvas surface that had been applied to the walls for her mural began to peel away from the walls.
“O’Keeffe became hysterical and left in tears,” Deskey reported. “The next day Stieglitz telephoned to say that she had had a nervous breakdown, was confined to a sanitorium and hence would be unable to fulfill her contract.”
He brought in Japanese American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi to complete the mural that is still in place today:
On March 1st, 1933 Frieda Kahlo wrote this letter to her fellow artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The American artist had been hospitalized with ‘psychoneurosism’ and been despatched to Bermuda to recover. She would not paint until 1934 after a 13-month hiatus.
Kahlo, staying in Detroit while her husband Diego Rivera worked on 27 frescoes at the Institute of the Arts, heard of O’Keefe’s malaise.
The artists had met in 1931, when Kahlo and Rivera can come to New York for a retrospective on Rivera’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art.
Kahlo, who had not long before miscarried, been hospitalised and buried her mother, wrote in the spirit of comradeship:
Georgia,
Was wonderful to hear your voice again. Every day since I called you and many times before months ago I wanted to write you a letter. I wrote you many, but every one seemed more stupid and empty and I torn them up. I can’t write in English all that I would like to tell, especially to you. I am sending this one because I promised it to you. I felt terrible when Sybil Brown told me that you were sick but I still don’t know what is the matter with you. Please Georgia dear if you can’t write, ask Stieglitz to do it for you and let me know how are you feeling will you ? I’ll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you
every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn’t know sad things now. After all I shouldn’t complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can’t imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers, but it is so difficult to find the ones I would like for you. I would be so happy if you could write me even two words. I like you very much Georgia.
Frieda
Colorful Aurora over Iceland Image Credit & Copyright: Sigurdur William Brynjarsson; Annotation Advice: Sævar Helgi Bragason
Explanation: You don’t always see a scene this beautiful when you hike to an ancient volcano — you have to be lucky. When the astrophotographer realized that auroras were visible two-weeks ago, he made a night-time run for the top of the caldera to see if he could capture them also reflected in the central lake. When he arrived, he found that … the northern lights were even brighter and more impressive than before! And his image of them is the featured 13-frame panoramic mosaic. The crater lake in the center is called Kerid (Icelandic: Kerið) and is about 3,000 years old. The aurora overhead shows impressive colors and banding, with the red colors occurring higher in the Earth’s atmosphere than the green.
The background sky is filled with icons of the northern night including Polaris, the Pleiades star cluster, and the stars that compose the handle of the Big Dipper.
Source: APOD: 2017 March 6
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA
Explanation: What’s causing those odd rings in supernova 1987A? Thirty years ago, in 1987, the brightest supernova in recent history was seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
At the center of the featured picture is an object central to the remains of the violent stellar explosion. Surrounding the center are curious outer rings appearing as a flattened figure 8.
Although large telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope monitor the curious rings every few years, their origin remains a mystery. Pictured here is a Hubble image of the SN1987A remnant taken in 2011.
Speculation into the cause of the rings includes beamed jets emanating from an otherwise hidden neutron star left over from the supernova, and the interaction of the wind from the progenitor star with gas released before the explosion.
Source: Astronomy Picture of the Day
Using Lego bricks, students from Osaka University built a 1:560-scale model of the Nintoku-ryo burial mound.
The Osaka University Lego Club members used 3-D computer graphics to faithfully reproduce the moat around, and the slopes of, the giant keyhole-shaped burial mound in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture.The project required 10,000 Lego bricks.
It took them two weeks to work out the design by using modeling software that is distributed by the Lego Group.
It took about a month to assemble and the project was completed in December. The cost of the bricks was 300,000 ¥ ($2,700).
The resulting Lego burial mound is 150 cm (5 ft) long by 100 cm (3 ft) wide and 8 cm (4″) tall. White bricks were used for the left half of the model, where miniature “haniwa” clay figurines were placed, to show what the burial mound probably looked like after it had been built. The right half was modeled after the current, thickly wooded mound.
The club members were such perfectionists they placed a stone coffin, swords and glassware in chambers within the square and circular parts of the mound.
Source: Osaka students use 10,000 Lego bricks to build Nintoku’s tomb：The Asahi Shimbun
And here’s some more fun with bricks:
Two views I’ve never seen of the aftermath of the Quake and Fire of 1906.
“Russian and Telegraph hills from roof of Ferry P.O., San Francisco.”
Just over 103 years later:
The same view from September of 2009.
The Monadnock Building at far right was still under construction when the 1906 earthquake hit. It not only survived that and the fire, but 2 separate attempts by the US Army to dynamite it in order to create a firebreak to protect the Palace Hotel.
At the left edge, the 1889 De Young Building survives, or at least its restored façade does, and also the historic Lotta’s Fountain, both seen in this photo taken on March 1, 2015.
Source: Shorpy Historic Picture Archive
Unfortunately there is nothing in this video that provides a scale to judge the size of, or distance to, this iceberg. Using the speed of sound (343 mps/1125 fps) and the YouTube counter, it appears to be about 300 meters of 1000 feet away.
That still doesn’t reveal how big it is but given the echoing boom of the ice hitting the water is must be huge.
And here’s an album of images from the lovely blue orb we inhabit:
Four Quasar Images Surround a Galaxy Lens Image Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, Sherry Suyu et al.
Explanation: An odd thing about the group of lights near the center is that four of them are the same distant quasar. This is because the foreground galaxy — in the center of the quasar images and the featured image — is acting like a choppy gravitational lens.
A perhaps even odder thing is that by watching these background quasars flicker, you can estimate the expansion rate of the universe. That is because the flicker timing increases as the expansion rate increases. But to some astronomers, the oddest thing of all is that these multiply imaged quasars indicate a universe that is expanding a bit faster than has been estimated by different methods that apply to the early universe.
And that is because … well, no one is sure why.
Reasons might include an unexpected distribution of dark matter, some unexpected effect of gravity, or something completely different. Perhaps future observations and analyses of this and similarly lensed quasar images will remove these oddities.
Source: APOD: 2017 February 27 – Four Quasar Images Surround a Galaxy Lens
I just finished watching this exquisite little movie and want to share it with the world. I imagine you will too:
The Truthiness Shall Set You Freak
Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness 
