Margaret Keane was an American artist known for her kitschy paintings of subjects with big eyes.
A resurgence of interest in Margaret Keane’s work followed the release of Tim Burton’s biopic Big Eyes (2014).
Tag Archives: 1927
RIP George Lamming (1927 – 2022)
George Lamming was a Barbadian novelist known for such novels as In the Castle of My Skin (1953).
1953 also saw the appearance of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Junkie by William Burroughs, Watt by Samuel Beckett, The Portrait of an Englishman in His Chateau by André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.
RIP Norman Gimbel (1927 – 2018)
This happened in 2018 but I’ve only just found out.
Norman Gimbel was an American lyricist of popular songs, television and movie themes known for the lyrics of such songs as “¿Quién será?” (1953), “Meditation” (1961), “How Insensitive” (1963), “Água de Beber” (1963), “Summer Samba” (1964), “The Girl from Ipanema” (1964) and “Killing Me Softly with His Song” (1972).
RIP Sidney Poitier (1927 – 2022)
Sidney Poitier was a Bahamian-American actor famous for such performances as in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).
RIP Vladimir Naumov (1927 – 2021)
Vladimir Naumov was a Russian film director, best-known in my universe for Legend of Thiele. This film is an episode in the Till Eulenspiegel legend.
I’ve known Eulenspiegel since my youth but I recently stumbled upon him again in that wonderful history of irreverence: Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) by Peter Sloterdijk.
RIP Frans Zwartjes (1927 – 2017)
Frans Zwartjes was a Dutch artist and filmmaker.
RIP Juliette Gréco (1927 – 2020)
Juliette Gréco was a French actress and singer.
She first appeared on my radar in 2010 in the Gainsbourg movie Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life where she is played by Anna Mouglalis.
Below the song “L’Accordéon” (1962) in which she plays her own black-clad body as an instrument. Very French and sensual.
While cycling to work, it dawned upon me that “L’Accordéon” reminded me of the Mary Poppins song “Chim Chim Cher-ee” (1964).
RIP Vittorio Gregotti (1927 – 2020)
And the first covid-19 victims start to come in.
Vittorio Gregotti was an Italian architect. He contributed the essay “Kitsch and Architecture” to Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (1968) by Gillo Dorfles.
While the essay references Googie architecture and the kitsch of the roadside attraction, it fails to cite God’s Own Junkyard (1964).
It also fails to foreshadow the positive view of kitsch in Learning from Las Vegas (1972).
RIP Monique van Vooren (1927 – 2020)
Monique van Vooren was a Belgian-born American actress and dancer, perhaps best-known for her part in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (1973), also known as Flesh for Frankenstein.
In that film she is baroness Frankenstein, wife and sister of baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier). The film’s pretty awful but the gore is marked by high production values and it features Van Vooren nude in a duo with Joe Dallesandro with some ridiculously loud armpit slurping.