Jul 18 2025
Born on August 18, 1871, in Turin, Italy, Giacomo Balla became one of the artists most closely associated with Italian Futurism, a movement that attempted to create an artistic language for a world transformed by machines, electricity, automobiles, aviation, mass communication, and accelerating urban life. Balla was fascinated by things that earlier painters had rarely …
Jul 16 2025
Before Bob Marley became an international symbol of Jamaican music, Desmond Dekker was already helping audiences around the world discover the irresistible rhythms coming out of Kingston. With his distinctive high tenor, memorable melodies, sharp stage presence, and songs that drew on the language and everyday experiences of Jamaican life, Dekker became one of the …
Jul 15 2025
With her long blonde hair, dramatic eye makeup, striking clothes, and haunting teenage songs, Twinkle looked as though she had stepped directly out of the world of Swinging London. Yet there was something unusual about the young singer behind the image. While many teenage pop stars were handed carefully selected songs by professional writers, Twinkle …
Jul 14 2025
Woody Guthrie carried an America of dusty highways, freight trains, migrant camps, union halls, radio stations, city streets, and ordinary working people into his songs. With little more than a guitar, harmonica, plainspoken voice, and seemingly endless supply of words, he helped shape the image of the American folk singer as a wandering storyteller who …
Jul 12 2025
Born on July 12, 1917, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Andrew Wyeth became one of the most recognizable American painters of the twentieth century without ever following the century’s most fashionable artistic directions. While Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and other movements transformed the art world around him, Wyeth continued painting weathered houses, empty rooms, dry …
Jul 11 2025
Born on July 11, 1940, Toby Bluth built an unusually varied creative career that crossed animation, illustration, watercolor painting, theater, children’s books, production design, and Disney fine art. Although his older brother Don Bluth became more widely known as the director behind films such as The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail, Toby developed …
Jul 10 2025
Born in Paris on July 10, 1928, Bernard Buffet became one of the most famous—and eventually one of the most fiercely debated—French painters of the postwar era. His pictures were instantly recognizable: thin, angular figures; skeletal faces; spindly buildings; bare interiors; flowers that seemed almost brittle; and heavy black lines cutting across muted fields of …
Jul 09 2025
Born on July 9, 1929, in Mannford, Oklahoma, Lee Hazlewood spent much of his career somewhere between country music, pop, rock and roll, orchestral experimentation, and a wonderfully peculiar territory that was entirely his own. He wrote enormous hits for other singers, helped create the echo-heavy guitar sound that made Duane Eddy famous, transformed Nancy …
Jul 06 2025
Born on July 6, 1925, in Highland Park, Michigan, Bill Haley became one of the musicians who helped turn rock and roll from a collection of regional sounds into an international popular phenomenon. Long before rock music had settled into a recognizable formula, Haley was combining country, western swing, rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, and jump …
Jun 27 2025
Born on June 27, 1913, in Montreal, Philip Guston spent his career doing something artists are often warned not to do: changing direction when everyone expected him to keep going. He began as a socially engaged mural painter, became one of the celebrated figures of Abstract Expressionism in 1950s New York, and then abandoned the …
