LWD Art Appreciation ~ March 2024

Welcome to the March edition of the LWD Art Appreciation series! This month we’ll delve into the genius of Hemingway, Andy Warhol, and Don Cherry. Our March film is a quirky charmer featuring a couple of “Old Hollywood” favorites.

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ART APPRECIATION
MARCH 2024

I’ve got some great selections for this month that I’m sure you’ll enjoy. The concise realism of Hemingway, the pop culture references of Warhol and the lyrical jazz of Don Cherry will add to our ongoing exploration of the arts. And for our film feature this month we’ve got a quirky one featuring a couple of my all-time favorite actors. Enjoy!

Short Story

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s writing style was unique in his emphasis on clean and direct word choice rather than wordy, flowery, poetic prose. Whether you like that approach or not, there is much to learn from his powerful ability to convey imagery in words a ten year old could understand.

This month we will read his short story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, first published in 1933.

Read it free here.

If you’d like a summary and analysis of this work, read the Cliffs Notes here. But do read the story itself first.

If you enjoy this story and would like to delve into more of Hemingway’s short stories, here is a complete collection: (I’m ordering this one myself.)

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

In this definitive collection of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s short stories, readers will delight in Hemingway’s most beloved classics such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection, totaling in sixty stories. This collection demonstrates Hemingway’s ability to write beautiful prose for each distinct story, with plots that range from experiences of World War II to beautifully touching moments between a father and son. For Hemingway fans, The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasury.

Artist

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was “an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).” Tate

Warhol

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is hailed as the most important proponent of the Pop art movement. A critical and creative observer of American society, he explored key themes of consumerism, materialism, media, and celebrity.

Drawing on contemporary advertisements, comic strips, consumer products, and Hollywood’s most famous faces, Warhol proposed a radical reevaluation of what constituted artistic subject matter. Through Warhol, a Campbell’s soup can and Coca Cola bottle became as worthy of artistic status as any traditional still life. At the same time, Warhol reconfigured the role of the artist. Famously stating “I want to be a machine,” he systematically reduced the presence of his own authorship, working with mass-production methods and images, as well as dozens of assistants in a studio he dubbed the Factory.

This book introduces Warhol’s multifaceted, prolific oeuvre, which revolutionized distinctions between “high” and “low” art and integrated ideas of living, producing, and consuming that remain central questions of modern experience.

The Andy Warhol Museum

Jazz Composer

Don Cherry

I must admit I was not familiar with this month’s jazz composer selection until my son mentioned him to me. The embarrassing part about it is that Don Cherry, a jazz trumpeter, was born in Oklahoma. It seems I should have known about him. But, better late than never, right?

Here is an interesting article about him:

‘The baddest technician’: how Don Cherry is still making jazz new

“In my view, there are three great trumpet and saxophone pairings in jazz history,” percussionist Kahil El’Zabar says. “Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who invented bebop; Miles Davis and John Coltrane, who evolved harmonic complexity and melodic agility; and then Ornette and Don, who created cacophony without hierarchy. For Don to keep up with Ornette made him one of the baddest technicians to ever play the instrument.”

Art Deco

Spotify Playlist

Screwball Comedy

My son and I watched this together recently and I loved it so much I knew I had to make it our March film selection. Honestly, how can you go wrong with a film starring Cary Grant and Kathryn Hepburn?

Holiday starring Cary Grant and Kathryn Hepburn

Two years before stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and director George Cukor would collaborate on The Philadelphia Story, they brought their timeless talents to this delectable slice of 1930s romantic-comedy perfection, the second film adaptation of a hit 1928 play by Philip Barry. Grant is at his charismatic best as the acrobatically inclined free spirit who, following a whirlwind engagement, literally tumbles into the lives of his fiancée’s aristocratic family—setting up a clash of values with her staid father while firing the rebellious imagination of her brash, black-sheep sister (Hepburn). With a sparkling surface and an undercurrent of melancholy, Holiday is an enchanting ode to nonconformists and pie-in-the-sky dreamers everywhere, as well as a thoughtful reflection on what it truly means to live well.