An Arts Fuse regular feature: the arts on stamps of the world.

By Doug Briscoe

John Wayne (born Marion Morrison; 26 May 1907 – June 11, 1979) has one US stamp all to himself and one for his appearance in the classic Stagecoach (1939). I suspect the Marshall Islands issue honors him for his part in rescuing the islands from the Japanese. As for the Hungarian stamp, it’s one of three saluting (with gentle mockery) the US soccer team in 1994 (did they win something that year?). Care to guess whose images are on the other two? You got it: Marilyn Monroe and Elvis.

The US stamp for Miles Davis (1926 – September 28, 1991) came out just five years ago, the one from Guinea-Bissau the year before that. Miles grew up in quite comfortable circumstances, his father being a dental surgeon who had earned three college degrees before Miles was born, owned a 200-acre estate in Arkansas, and later ran for a seat on the Illinois legislature! It was a friend of this extraordinary man who gave Miles his first trumpet. (His mother, who played the violin, was not pleased.)

No, it’s not Cardinal Richelieu’s birthday, but rather that of the artist who made this famous portrait of him, Philippe de Champaigne (26 May 1602 – 12 August 1674). (Actually, it is one of eleven portraits of the cardinal by this artist.) He was born in poverty in Brabant but rose to paint kings and potentates and become a founding member of the Académie de peinture et de sculpture. Besides the Richelieu stamp, we see Young Girl (Anne-Marie De Chevreuse) with Falcon, The Dream of Elijah (1650-55), and portraits of Prince Honoré II of Monaco and Louis XIII.

This is also the birthday of Swiss composer and music publisher Hans-Georg Nägeli (26 May 1773 – 26 December 1836), who published some of Beethoven’s piano works (not to Beethoven’s satisfaction). Nägeli himself composed keyboard pieces and songs, besides writing copiously on music.

Literature and art critic Edmond de Goncourt (May 26, 1822 – July 16, 1896) collaborated on a number of books, including half a dozen novels, with his brother Jules until the latter’s death in 1870. Both brothers are honored together on one of a pair of 1953 stamps from Monaco. At left is one for the first unexpurgated edition of the brothers’ journal; its companion issue celebrates the Académie Goncourt, established by Edmond in a bequest. Some winners of the Prix Goncourt, awarded since 1903, have been Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras.

The stamp for Romanian painter Eugeniu Voinescu (1842 – 6 May 1909) is representative of his maritime art, though he also executed portraits, historical, biblical, and genre pieces. Destined for the law and/or literature, Voinescu met Courbet in Paris and took up painting from nature. He did not abandon his legal studies, however, and served as a consul general in Budapest, Istanbul, and Odessa. In Russia he met Ivan Aivazovsky, who stimulated Voinescu’s interest in seascapes.

The birth name of Al Jolson was Asa Yoelson. He was born near Kaunas in Lithuania on May 26, 1886. His father relocated to New York in 1891, but it was only in 1894 that he could afford to bring the family over. Asa worked with his brother Hirsch as “Al” and “Harry”. By the 1930s he was the highest-paid entertainer in America. Now often criticized for his frequent performances in blackface, he always took a strong stand against prejudice, for example, by supporting the first all-black cast production on Broadway in 1911. One critic of the day wrote: “Is there any incongruity in this Jewish boy with his face painted like a Southern Negro singing in the Negro dialect? No, there is not. Indeed, I detected again and again the minor key of Jewish music…the cry of anguish of a people who had suffered. The son of a line of rabbis well knows how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world’s history.” Today Jolson’s most famous accomplishment was starring in the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (1927). He deserves to be remembered for his the tireless efforts in support of U.S. troops in wartime. He was the first star to entertain troops overseas in both World War II and the Korean War. Indeed he caught malaria while touring in the Pacific and had to have a lung removed; in the later war, he overexerted himself to the point that he succumbed to a heart attack on October 23, 1950, shortly after his return from Korea. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Merit by then Defense Secretary George Marshall.

One of the most immediately recognizable of American photographic images, Migrant Mother (1936), was taken by Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965). It encapsulates the anxiety of the Great Depression in the face—and hand—of Florence Hill (née Christie, later Florence Owens Thompson). A picture is worth a thousand words, but this one was worth 20,000 pounds of food, which is what the US Government donated after the San Francisco News ran the picture with a story documenting the plight of migrant workers. A second Lange stamp shows a photo taken a year earlier, Ditched, Stalled, and Stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California, 1935. She was born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in New Jersey and took her mother’s maiden name after her father abandoned the family when she was 12. A polio victim, afflicted with a permanent limp, Lange studied photography at Columbia and opened a studio in San Francisco in 1919. She also documented the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

An artist of the same generation, African-American Aaron Douglas (May 26, 1899 – February 3, 1979) was a product of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Topeka, he was en route to Paris when persuaded to stay in New York. He worked with W. E. B. Du Bois at The Crisis, as well as providing illustrations for Opportunity, Vanity Fair, and others. Douglas was commissioned to provide murals for Nashville’s Fisk University Library, Chicago’s Sherman Hotel, and Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he executed a piece centering on Harriet Tubman. He finally did get to Paris in 1931, studying sculpture and painting at the Académie Scandinave for a year. His poignant paintings and illustrations concentrated almost exclusively on the Black experience. The stamp offers The Prodigal Son, a work in Douglas’s characteristic style of silhouetted figures against Art Deco backdrops.

The father of the prolific Czech writer Vítězslav Nezval (26 May 1900 – 6 April 1958) was a student of Janáček, and Nezval himself learned piano and composition. (A few of his poems were later set by the distinguished Czech composers Hans Krása and Vítězslava Kaprálová.) A member of the avant-garde group Devětsil (The Nine), he developed close friendships with André Breton and Paul Éluard, which led to the founding of The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934, one of the first surrealist groups to be formed outside France. Nezval left poetry, novels, plays, essays, and translations.

Canadian graphic artist Robert L. Peters (born May 26, 1954) is the co-founder (1976) of Circle Design Incorporated, which has been responsible for several Canadian postage stamp designs. One set of these celebrates Canadian recording artists, one of whom, Bruce Cockburn, has a birthday tomorrow. For today we show another of Circle’s stamp projects, for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Two very well-known English actors share this birthday, Hammer Films regular Peter Cushing (26 May 1913 – 11 August 1994) and Helena Bonham Carter (born 26 May 1966), both of whom were awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Cushing as an OBE (Officer, 1989), Bonham Carter as a CBE (Commander, 2012). Ironically, it was on this day in 1897 that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published. Peter Cushing acted in at least five Dracula films, playing Van Helsing in four of them. The stamp, though, gives us one of his turns as Sherlock Holmes. Bonham Carter’s stamps recall her performances in the Harry Potter series (as Bellatrix Lestrange) and as the Red Queen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010). Last year she reprised the role in the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass

A graduate of the University of Massachusetts with a B.A. in English, Doug Briscoe worked in Boston classical music radio, at WCRB, WGBH, and WBUR, for about 25 years, beginning in 1977. He has the curious distinction of having succeeded Robert J. Lurtsema twice, first as host of WGBH’s weekday morning classical music program in 1993, then as host of the weekend program when Robert J.’s health failed in 2000. Doug also wrote liner notes for several of the late Gunther Schuller’s GM Recordings releases as well as program notes for the Boston Classical Orchestra. For the past few years he’s been posting a Facebook “blog” of classical music on stamps of the world, which has now been expanded to encompass all the arts for The Arts Fuse.