#Wm Randolph Hearst

[newyorkthegoldenage]

This office may have been known to the newspaper staff as "the chamber of horrors," but that didn't stop the illustrator Winsor McCay from sporting a boater hat, ca. 1920. The paper was the NY Journal American, owned by William Randolph Hearst. McCay is best known for the paper's Sunday color newspaper cartoon, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and the animated film short Gertie the Trained Dinosaur. Sports page cartoonist Joe McGurk is in the center; the other man unidentified.

Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images/Fine Art America

[scribblesartcollective]

William Edmondson was born sometimes in 1874 on a plantation in Tennessee. The exact date is unknown as it was recorded only in a family bible that was destroyed in a fire. He was born into the Jim Crow South to previously enslaved parents working as sharecroppers where they earned $12 a month. William had little or no education, as he lacked access to it given his social status. When his father died when he was 16, he left Davidson County for Nashville where he worked railway. Following an injury though, he began work as a custodian at a hospital and worked there until it closed in 1931. With those wages, he was able to buy a modest home where he lived with his mother and sister, and occasionally other relatives. You might find yourself asking where the art begins? It might surprise you to learn William would not enter the world of sculpture until he was 60 years of age. As a child, William would say he saw angels and god spoke to him, and as an older man he said that he began to sculpt following a vision from god.  "I was out in the driveway with some old sculptures of stone when I heard a voice telling me to pick up my tools and start to work on a tombstone. I looked up in the sky and right there in the noon daylight, he hung a tombstone out for me to make. I knowed it was God telling me what to do."

He began with tombstones made of discarded limestone from demolitions but soon began branching out into ornamentation and decoration. He even sold them. A sign in his front yard read "Tomb-Stones. For Sale. Garden. Ornaments. Stone Work WM Edmondson" As it should already be very clear, William was a deeply religious man and his work was greatly influenced by his faith as well as a nearby Calvinist Baptist congregation nearby. His work depicted biblical characters, animals and even local prominent community leaders such as lawyers and preachers. And also, popular figures like Jack Johnson and Eleanor Roosevelt. His largest and only architectural work, stood in his backyard. A sculpture of Noah's Ark, made of four carved tiers of limestone. One day, an art enthusiast from Peabody College, Sidney Hirsche happened to be wandering through Edgehill where William lived and came across the sculptures. A collector, Hirsche knew he had found something special, and became one of William's greatest supporters. His work which was largely given to and bought by friends and neighbors, was now being purchased by the elite of Nashville, for their gardens and offices. It gardened serious attention, from Harper's Bazaar to the Museum of Modern Art. But also adversity, a friend of a friend of Hirsche, photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe tried to publish her photographs of William's sculptures to William Randolph Hearst, but a racist, he would not publish the work of black artists. Luckily, better heads prevailed elsewhere. The Museum of Modern Art, in 1937 exhibited his work as a one man show. A first for a black artist.

William was incredibly prolific despite having a career of only about fifteen years, he's thought to have made some 300 works of art. He died in his home in Nashville after months confined to a bed from illness. He's buried in Nashville's oldest cemetery, Greenwood Cemetery (then Mount Ararat Cemetery), but the exact site of his final resting place, like the exact date of his birth, has been lost in a fire.

William, like many outsider artists, is sometimes buried under reductive adjectives such as primitive. But while his figures are stout and emphatic, they are in fact sophisticated, especially given how late and how short a career he had. If you would like to see more of William's work or learn more about his life: A ‘Holy Grail’ of American Folk Art, Hiding in Plain Sight SAAM - William Edmondson Curious Nashville: Where Famed ‘Outsider’ Artist William Edmondson Lived And What’s There Now The Sculpture Of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments And Stonework

[docnad]

Xmas in Coconino County for Wm Randolph Hearst Attempted Bloggery: #KrazyKat Specialty Pieces bit.ly/1DE0To4 https://www.instagram.com/p/B55oDdnhk9y/?igshid=1dku1lnb3bf5f

[masterqueen]

Our tour guide let Johnny go behind the ropes into Wm Randolph Hearst's personal bathroom off of his bedroom.