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Category / People / Icons / Muses

What David Bowie Learned from the Gugging Psychiatric Institution

By 1994 David Bowie’s musical career was in a bit of a quiet phase, let’s say. He hadn’t managed to recreate the massive success of his 1983 album Lets Dance. Ziggy Stardust had long since departed back to the cosmos, The Thin White Duke had been retired, and Bowie’s latest incarnation, Tin Machine, had disbanded.…

Birkin and Gainsbourg: Dusting off the Family Album

For anyone who still dreams of the swinging sixties with its wild child chain-smoking rockstars and sexually charged style icons, here’s something that might feed your flame. Taschen has released a new nostalgia-filled photo book, Jane & Serge: A Family Album. Jane’s brother, screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, is behind the camera and all the…

The Fantastical World of Mingering Mike, the Imaginary Legend of Soul

When you were young, what did you want to be? An astronaut, a princess, maybe a superhero or president of the world. Mike Stevens dreamt of being a soul super star, he wanted to tour the world, to write and produce award-winning albums and run his own record label. He would star in, write and…

Journey to the North Pole in a Hot Air Balloon

This is the forgotten story of a brave (and perhaps slightly mad) scientist and his two men, who made a perilous one way journey to the furthest ends of the earth. And if an expedition to the North Pole in itself wasn’t dangerous enough, they decided they would do it in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty-three…

Why Did this Celebrated Surrealist Talent Get Cancelled?

In 1943, the New York art world was abuzz about a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The esteemed institution was hosting a show featuring one Morris Hirshfield, an immigrant who had found success as a tailor and then shoe designer before becoming a self-taught artist. His work was praised by the…

A Compendium of Native American Tipi Decoration circa 1900

I found an online treasure chest of gas lantern slides today in Yale’s digital rare book library today. There are thousands of hand-coloured slides of the Blackfoot community in northwestern Montana at the turn of the 19th century and reflect the photographer’s particular interest in the unique decorative and artistic styles of the Native American…

History’s Quietest Icon: The Many Faces Pierrot

“I’m Pierrot,” once said the late, great David Bowie: “I’m Everyman”. We all know his face: white like the moon, his only friend, with sad black lines drawn around the eyes, smudged by a teardrop or two. He’s dressed in an oversized white shirt with ruffles and pompoms and a little white pointed hat. Pierrot…

Digging Up Egypt’s Not So Ancient WWII Surrealist Movement

Cairo, 1938. Around 140,000 British troops occupied the city, and World War II was ready to burst. Thirty-seven artists and writers gathered to fight against a rising Fascist ideology, British colonial rule, and the local conservative art scene. The first inklings of Surrealism already simmered under Egypt’s troubled surface, as artists and writers corresponded with…

Meet the Fallen Queen of the Moulin Rouge

The world knew her as la Goulue — literally, “the Glutton” — because her appetite for mischief was bar-none in Belle Epoque Paris. It was a nickname she earned in high-kicks and unmatched can-can skills, but it was won at a high price. Today, her rise to the top as “the Queen of Montmartre” has become…

MADE IN PARIS: The Statue of Liberty 1877-1885

A lot of us, even the French, tend to forget that one of America’s most iconic symbols was a gift from France as a memorial to their independence, 100 years after the American Revolution. The statue was built in Paris and fully funded by the French people– everyone from wealthy businessmen to schoolchildren chipped in…

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