Ida Lupino’s search for greater creative control after acting in movies from the 1940-50s, led her to founding a production company with her husband. Serving as producer and director for films she was known to produce movies with controversial content.
Source Cited: http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue05/reviews/idalupino.htm
Hildegard of Bingen (painter and composer)
I was born in 1098 in the Rhine District of Germany where my rich parents promised my life to the anchorite nuns who must remain in their cells, known as lock boxes until their death. They strove to stop the religious visions that I had had since a child, to call my mind into obedience by condemning me to a one-room, one-window enclosure at the Disibodenburg Monastery.
What they did not know is that they had locked me in with a natural genius, my mentor and mother figure, a woman named Jutta who was to share the cell with me for the rest of her life. Jutta taught me the classics, how to read and write in Latin and German, as well as music. She was my teacher until the day of her death.
I blossomed under her care, and after her death, so many women had voluntarily joined the monastery that there were no more rooms as they flowed in to listen to my teachings. Unable to stem the tide of hunger for learning that had come alive in all these women, the older nuns of the monastery change their tactic and allowed me to be, a nun of their order.
At age 42 I had a major vision…”A blinding light of the exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it can build my whole heart and dressed like a flame, not the burning but warming. . . And suddenly I was able to taste of the understanding of books …”
I soon no longer restricted myself to writings on theology, and branched out to natural history, herbal healing, mystery plays, books of poetry and an opera.
Source cited: “Uppity Women of Medieval Times”. Leon,Vicki. MJF Books.1997.NY,NY.pg. 169.
To The Dance of Life!
Diane Tegarden
Marie Kiéné Bigot de Morogues (1786-1820) was a leading performer of her day who championed the works of her friends Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. The fifty-six page volume contains her four-movement Sonata and the Suite d’etudes.
Sources Cited: www.vivacepress.com/1803.html
I am Fanny Mendelssohn, born in Hamburg, Germany on November 14, 1805. I grew up in Berlin in well to do family, with my younger siblings; 2 brothers, Felix and Paul and my sister Rebecca. Our parents loved us very much, and we grew up with music always in the home.
My mother began my earliest training, giving me my first piano lessons. During my childhood I also studied under the masters: Marie Bigot de Morogues, a favorite of Haydn and Beethoven, in 1816 while in Paris; with Ludwig Berger in Berlin, and in 1818 I began studying composition under Carl Friedrich Zelter.
Once I became of marrying age my father, Abraham, discouraged me to consider composing as a profession, and begged I consider more womanly interests. After I successfully married Wilhelm Hensel in 1829, we began to present concerts featuring my compositions in our home which were attended by the likes of the Humboldt brothers, Franz Liszt, Clara Wieck-Schumann, Johanna Kinkel and Heinrich Heine.
I composed piano solos, lieders, duets, choral songs, sonatas and cantatas, which I was allowed to personally conduct. From 1839-40 our family lived/stayed in Italy where I was finally able to branch out musically and become published under my own name. Charles Gounod and Robert von Keudall both encouraged me to be brave and print my work for public viewing. Those were sweet years.
One of my proudest moments? When I found out that after Felix played for Queen Victoria in 1846, she liked my song “Italian” better than any other composition he performed and he was gracious enough to let her know I had written it!
I died of a stroke during a rehearsal for a concert on May 14, 1847 in Berlin, doing what I loved best.
Sources Cited: http://www.fannyhensel.de/hensel_eng/biografie01.html http://musiced.about.com/od/famousmusicians1/p/fmendelssohn.html?p=1
To The Dance of Life!!
Frida Kahlo (1907- 1954) was a Mexican painter/writer, suffered over 30 operations over a lifetime due to a serious bus accident when she was only 18 years old.
The following is a first person presentation that I gave as part of a show Joy Judy Jones and I recorded, which is available to download from my website at www.firewalkerpublications.com.
“I was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon July 6, 1907 in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, but I always celebrate it on July 7th. I had polio as a child, which allowed me to build great patience with the slow healing processes of the body. That’s when I became fascinated with the human body, not just as a tool to serve me, but as a study in the complexity and wonder that is in its functioning.
It would surprise most people to know I was 15 and entered into the pre-med program at the National Preparatory School before the bus accident. I was 18 (1925) when the accident changed broke my body and my virginity, and changed the course of my life forever.
It has always been a mixture of my mother’s love of Mexico and all her bright colors, her starkness and tenderness of her Catholic/mestiza heritage combined with my father’s love of photography, catching life in images of black and white, his German/Austrian/Hungarian blood contributing to my love of science and medicine.
Life has been the grist for the mill of my creativity, so my paintings reflect it all, sex and sorrow, pain and laughter, nothing escapes my eye or my art.
I fell in love with Diego when I met him in 1922, he was painting a mural for the National Preparatory School where I was enrolled and we were married in 1929 (I had just turned 22).
After the accident I had to withdraw from medical prep school because I was laid up in bed for such a long convalescence. I got so bored, not being able to go anywhere that my father brought me paints and paper, pens and chalk, he opened up my sick room window and said look at the beautiful day out, paint what you see, what you feel, paint everything.
And I did, starting with my crippled right foot, which is my deepest enemy and oldest companion.
I miscarried my only child in July 1932 Diego was out carousing until the early hours, when I needed him he was gone with his whores. I’m glad I’ll never know which one it was or I’d be in jail for murder. Anyways, I was alone that night and was having such back pains, I couldn’t think of what to do, so I prayed and prayed, but around midnight I started bleeding out, so much blood. I knew, but I didn’t want to look. I knew I had lost our precious child, but there was nothing I could do. I went to sleep feeling as cold as if I was outside without any clothes on, I thought it would be the last thing I felt, I thought my life was flowing out of me then. But the next morning Diego found me and got the doctor. I lived. That’s all.
My first solo exhibition was at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938. Although I will always be grateful to El Norte, it will always hurt me a little that I had to leave the country of my birth in order to attain any recognition for my art.
The betrayal that hurt the most was when Diego slept with my sister Cristina, after we took her into our house because her husband was beating her. I sometimes wish I had never taken her in, but I should have known better. It wasn’t really her fault. Diego could never resist the attraction of a woman he hadn’t yet bedded. Finally I couldn’t take his infidelities and in 1934 we got separated/divorced, but later, when the pain of our separation far outweighed the pain of his wandering eye, I took him back and in 1940 we remarried. It was fate that I would love him until the moment I died. I can’t be sorry for that.”
***
Background Sources Cited:
General biographical information from: http://www.fridakahlo.com/bio.shtml
The Diary of Frida Kahlo-An Intimate Self Portrait. Introduction by Carlos Fuentes. Chronology, pg 288.Abrams, New York, NY.
Camille Claudel (sculptor) was born on December 8, 1864 in Fere-en-Tardenois, in northern France but her childhood home was Villanueve-sur-Fere. She had a brother and a sister, they grew up in Villanueve-sur-Fere. She was close to nature, the trees, stones and soil, being from farmers and landed gentry on her mother’s side. She studied sculpture and art at the Academie Colarossi with Monsieur Alfred Boucher. Her favorite schoolmate was a lifelong friend who had rented the workshop where the girls had stayed while studying at the Academie, her name was Jessie Lipscomb. She was the only person who ever visited Camille, later, when she was wrongly committed to an insane asylum by her brother. They held her captive there (against her will and the recommendation of her own doctors) until her death in 1943.
She first met Auguste Rodin in 1883, he taught sculpture to Camille and her friends who were boarding together in their workshop, and started working for him 1 year later in his workshop. It is incorrect to think that they lived together. Rodin would never allow it, because of his other children and his longstanding affair with Rose, the other woman in his life. Camille and Auguste continued to be close friends until 1898 when their paths separated. Her first art exhibition was in 1903 at the Salon des Artistes Francais, and in the early days she also exhibited at the Salon D’Automne.
Source Cited:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Claudel
