Waiting for a timeless celebration, some New Year's pictures with all the charm of the past.

(Source:  http://www.giornalettismo.com/archives/683327/lo-spirito-dei-capodanni-passati-2/)

I am in Aalborg (DK) at the moment, for my MA studies. It's snowing, beautifully and slowly. On the fb page of Aalborg Kommune, I found these wonderful picture of an winter in Aalborg, dated 1940/1950!

(Vesterbro, 1942, photographer: H. Dalby)

(Budolfi Cathedral, 1950, photographer: unknown)

(Strandvejen, 1945, photographer: H. A. Kirkegaard)

("Snerydning i Vadum", 1940, photographer: unknown)

The poet Ezra Pound was born in 1885 and died in 1972. The promoter of modernist aesthetism, after contributing, in his early works, to Imagism. Strongly influenced by classic Japanese poetry, his peotry was short, fast, coincise, a glimpse of what's going on in the poet's mind. 

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet black bough."

"I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever and forever."

"The eyes of this lady speak to me

Fore here was love, was not to be drowned out.

And here desire, not to be kissed away.

The eyes of this lady speak to me."

(Ezra Pound)

 

Surprisingly enough, a man of such vision, such wisdom, so romantic at times, was a declared fascist, spent a period of time in jail and was eventually declared mentally ill.

He said: "Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne D'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views".

I would have declared him mentally ill as well.

Still, magnificent poetry.

Grant DeVolson Wood. An American painter. Born in 1891, died in 1942.

This man has produced a series of extremely different, in my opinion, paintings. His way of painting is very particular, and even more peculiar is the different feelings I personally feel when watching those paintings of his portraing people, or landscapes. 

His landscapes are absolutely marvelous, it's like is actually possible to feel the heat radiating from the sunset's rays, or the chill of the night. 

("Near sundown")

("City Iowa")

("Hoover Wood")

("The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere")

But when it comes to portraits, that's a different story. Perfect, silky, but still, there is something extremely annoying, extremely wrong, in those faces, in their clothes, in their posture. I can't define it, but it's there. And I would never want one of those faces staring at me from a wall. 

("American Gothic")

("Arnold Comes of Age")

After WWII, the world saw the first artistic movement born in the U.S.A., named Abstract Expressionism.

 (Jackson Pollock)

(Jane Frank)

The movement was welcomed as the first real American avant-garde, matured during the Thirties, all artists influenced by the Great Depression, social realism and the Regionalist movement. 

 (Aaron Siskind, photograph)

 

 (F. Depero)

There was a brave lady, 57 years ago, who had the courage to dare doing something unthinkable at the time: refuse to leave her sit on a bus to a white person. Her name was Rosa Louise Parks.

That year, 1955, she was 42 years old and worked as a seamstress. That day, December the 1st, she was on the bus, going back home from work. She was seating on the first sit behind the 10 ones reserved to white people. 

A white man got in, all the sits were occupied, and the bus drive asked Rosa and the other 3 persons, sitting on the sits for black people, to stand up, and let the man sit. Rosa refused. 

She was arrested and accused to have violated the laws of segretation. 

That day, that refusal, initiated a revolution. And on that bus, history reached a turning point. Lady Parks appealed her conviction, openly breaking the laws that made segregation perfectly legal. The bus system, Montgomery, was boycotted. That was the beginning of a non-violent protest supporting civil rights.

"I'd see the bus pass every day. But to me, that was a way of life. We had no choice but to accept what was the custom. 

The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world, and a white world."

(Rosa. L. Parks)