skip to main |
skip to sidebar
If it were not for Jann Haworth, MAE WEST would not have been on a Beatles album cover. The Fab Four chose no women but the clever American-born designer selected a few notable females. Now the artist-seamstress-sculptress is back in the spotlight in Salt Lake City.
• • Julie Checkoway interviewed the "Mom of Pop Culture" for The Salt Lake Tribune recently.
• • Julie Checkoway writes: Jann Haworth might be uncomfortable with critics using the term "domestic" to describe her art, yet gender is undoubtedly a key force in her aesthetic.
• • In a coffeehouse in downtown Salt Lake City, the artist recalls the moment when she first realized how to make her way " 'round the boys' club." After all, she said, "I knew I couldn't go through it."
• • One day in 1962, Haworth was in London "riding the No. 33 bus past Harrods" when she spotted in the window a sleeveless, ruffle-collared pink dress made of artificial silk.
• • "It was arch-feminine," she says now with a laugh over a cup of cappuccino. The dress was made of something Haworth, an excellent seamstress, knew more about than any male artist of her acquaintance: fabric. And in spying it, Haworth saw her artistic life unroll before her like yardage off an enormous colorful bolt of cloth.
• • Right then, she says, "I just knew what I was going to do next and next and next and next."
• • Soft sculpture: Next was an entirely new genre of art work termed "soft sculpture," three-dimensional pieces composed not of bronze or steel but of thread, cotton, wool, fur, and even vinyl.
• • Haworth, who had been raised in Hollywood, was inspired by the pop-culture icons of her youth. She sewed cloth doughnuts covered with fur, teacups of cotton and life-size stuffed figures of Mae West, Shirley Temple, and W.C. Fields.
• • Most significant, she flew in the face of traditional images of femininity by choosing as her signature piece an old woman slumped in a rocking chair, knees covered with an afghan — — a figure that would recur in her work throughout her life. ...
• • "POP PLASTIQUES" will be exhibited in the fourth-floor gallery of the Main Library, 210 E. 400 South, Salt Lake City, from Saturday to July 26. Jann Haworth will be the library's artist-in- residence June 16-20, and will hold workshops on June 17, 19 and 21 for 9- to 15-year-old artists. Info: 801-524-8200.
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Byline: Julie Checkoway
• • Published in: The Salt Lake Tribune
• • Published on: 31 May 2008
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
________
Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •
NYC
Mae West.
Perhaps Jann Haworth was inspired to create her collage of MAE WEST, W.C. Fields, and Shirley Temple after working on the male-dominated album cover for The Beatles. 
• • Clearly, we must thank Jann Haworth [born in 1942 in Hollywood] and Peter Blake [born in 1932 in the UK] for any female figures that appeared on the iconic "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in 1967.
• • Jann Haworth, Peter Blake's American wife and an artist in her own right confirmed: "To be perfectly honest, Peter and I chose about 60 percent of what's there because they didn't come up with enough. So we're to blame for some of the inequalities that were there. But having said that, the Beatles chose no women. The only women chosen were by Peter and I."
• • During 1967, Jann's father, the Oscar-winning art director and production designer Ted Haworth [1917—1993], was in London, working on the film "Half a Sixpence." When she visited him on the movie set, he advised her not to make a background piece for the album. He thought the idea was too Hollywood and too expensive for the budget. Consequently, Jann Haworth selected a simple blue paper for the sky and used black-and-white cut-out photographs for the heads and bodies.
• • The three-dimensional artist created an intriguing mixed media piece the same year fashioned out of fabric, wood, and plastic.
• • White-gloved Mae West makes an unlikely (and disinterested looking) mother to the moppet that dances on her lap: a white-socked Shirley Temple. Similarly white-gloved, W.C Fields looks stiff and sullen in his commanding paterfamilias pose. The piece is 50 inches high, 31 inches wide, and over 4 inches deep. The Mayor Gallery said that this work is still available for sale.
• • The Mayor Gallery: 22A Cork Street; London, W1S 3NA [UK].
• • Jann Haworth currently resides in the USA [in Sundance, Utah].• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
________
Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1967 • •
NYC
Mae West.
MAE WEST didn't think she belonged in a lonely hearts club. 
• • New England journalist James Sullivan muses on the events of forty years ago that reunited Mae with her Salvation Army musings, dramatized in "Diamond Lil," and her encounter with Britain's fab foursome in March of 1967.
• • James Sullivan writes: It was 40 years ago . . . today. On the evening of March 30, 1967, four young musicians gathered with a large group of artists and assistants in a London studio to shoot a photograph for an album cover. The album, to be called "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," would, of course, become synonymous with the creative revolution of the 1960s. The cover artwork, a photo-montage of the Beatles posing for photographer Michael Cooper among a gallery of several dozen celebrities ("People We Like," as the crew took to calling them) was itself a radical departure, with its elaborately designed "gatefold" layout, bonus insert, and printed song lyrics -- the latter a first in pop.
• • Behind the real-life Beatles, who were dressed in candy-colored military-band costumes and sported newly cultivated mustaches, the "crowd" was actually made up of wax figures and cardboard cutouts of singers, actors, writers, artists, athletes, and critical thinkers -- some of them (Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan) as familiar as the Beatles themselves, others (Bobby Breen?) now as obsolete as a monaural recording.
• • The cover concept was originally conceived by Paul McCartney and London art dealer Robert Fraser as a tableau for a fictitious Salvation Army-style brass band. But in the hands of its designers, then-husband-and-wife Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth (who ended up choosing more than half of the faces), it became a droll satire of celebrity and influence. While many of the famous figures in the gallery were heroes to the Beatles, others were chosen out of sheer, Beatlesque audacity. The group's record company, EMI, rejected three of John Lennon's suggestions -- Jesus, Gandhi, and Hitler.
• • Inspired by Victorian-era composite photographs, Dada collage artists, and Pop artist Richard Hamilton's surreal cut-and-paste suburban scenes, the "Sgt. Pepper" cover has become a visual touchstone. Haworth, now living in Utah, still has the Grammy she and her ex-husband shared for the graphic design: "I let the children play with it," she says with a laugh. "The trumpet fell off, and the dog chewed on it. It's been destroyed in an iconoclastic way."
• • • • James Sullivan is a frequent Globe contributor and the author of "Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon."
Some of the "People We Like" on the "Sgt. Pepper" cover:
• • 1. Sri Yukteswar Giri: Indian guru, one of four chosen for the cover by George Harrison.
• • 2. Aleister Crowley: Notorious mystic, polymath, and drug user - - chosen, designer Jann Haworth says, by John Lennon.
• • 3. Mae West: "What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?" she reportedly joked. Ringo Starr appeared in her 1978 film "Sextette."
• • 4. Lenny Bruce: By 1967, the Beatles shared some of the late comic's persecution complex.
• • 5. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Avant-garde composer who (though chosen by McCartney) once credited John Lennon as the crucial link between pop and "serious" music. . . .
- - excerpt - -
• • Source: Boston Globe - www.boston. com -
• • Published: 24 March 2007
• • Byline: James Sullivan
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/________
Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • Ringo Starr • • 1978NYC
Mae West.
