October 2014 - Page 3 of 3

Trip the Light Fantastic With LSD-Inspired Art

January 14, 2022October 7, 2014 by

On April 16, 1943, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself with a miniscule amount of a new, virtually unknown, clinically-synthesized compound, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25 becoming, in the process, the first human being to trip on acid. A few days later, Hofmann experienced a full-blown intentional acid trip when he self-administered 250 micrograms.

The 250 micrograms with which Hofmann dosed himself represented what he believed to be a “threshold” amount, i.e., a dose that would spark a noticeable and perhaps even quantifiable response in the test subject. Subsequent clinical studies indicate that a threshold dose of LSD is actually closer to 20 micrograms.

Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of artworks created in the 1960s by a group calling itself USCO (an abbreviation for “the Us Company, ” or “the Company of Us”) a collective of artists, film makers, engineers, poets and other creative folks who staged interactive, acid-inspired art shows in lofts, galleries and museums around the country. In its September 9, 1966 issue, LIFE reported on the then-new phenomenon of what it called “LSD Art” through the lens of a show at New York’s Riverside Museum:

Amid throbbing lights, dizzying designs, swirling smells, swelling sounds, the world of art is “turning on.” It is getting hooked on psychedelic art, the latest, liveliest movement to seethe up from the underground. Its bizarre amalgam of painting, sculpture, photography, electronics and engineering is aimed at inducing the hallucinatory effects and intensified perceptions that LSD, marijuana and other psychedelic (or mind-expanding) drugs produce but without requiring the spectator to take drugs. [Viewers] . . . become disoriented from their normal time sense and preoccupations and are lifted into a state of heightened consciousness. In effect, the art may send them on a kind of drugless “trip.”

Psychedelic art is not all new. It derives from earlier innovations of art and electronics, as well as from such old-fashioned devices as the kaleidoscope and slide projector. Some of it even incorporates ancient Oriental philosophies and American Indian lore. But what is new about the art is its complex integration of these techniques and elements as well as its overall purpose. “We try to vaporize the mind,” says a psychedelic artist, “by bombing the senses.”

Of the show at the Riverside Museum and other trippy USCO exhibitions, LIFE wrote that the art found “its most receptive audience at colleges. Young people who grew up with TV and transistor radios and who take electronic equipment for granted have no difficulty in attuning themselves to the audio-visual bombardment. Older people,” the LIFE article concluded, “who prefer what is called rational sequential experience, i.e., just one movie or a single radio station at a time, tend to freak out.”

LSD Art, LIFE magazine, 1966

Yale Joel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With Dizzy Gillespie: Rare and Classic Portraits of a Playful Genius

December 3, 2020October 5, 2014 by

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, who would have celebrated his 103rd birthday on Oct. 21, was the very model of the modern American musical genius: a brilliant instrumentalist and stylistic innovator, he was also an extroverted performer with a wicked sense of humor.

One of the primary creators of bebop in the mid-1940s and an unparalleled trumpeter, Dizzy was a populist who wanted his music to be understood, appreciated and enjoyed. Audiences may have associated him with signature visual clues the beret and goatee he sported in the 1940s, and the trumpet with the upturned bell he began playing in the 1950s and adored his onstage clowning and dancing, but anyone with ears could tell how seriously he always took the music. An international star until his death on January 6, 1993 (the same day as Rudolph Nureyev), Gillespie was as fervently respected by fellow musicians, as he was beloved by generations of listeners.

A spread by LIFE photographer Allan Grant in our October 11, 1948 issue, during bebop’s glory days. Conspicuous in his absence is Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop, and the man whom Dizzy called “the other side of my heartbeat,” but Gillespie’s vivacious personality was far more palatable to the mainstream. To see this magnificent musician in his youth, ready to convince the world that the music he and his not-yet-understood peers were making was the sound of the future, is still a glorious thing to behold.

Steve Futterman is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie greeting fellow musician Benny Carter, 1948.

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie. 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Crooner Mel (Velvet Fog) Torme happily bites on his finger while he and a model, June Bright, watch Dizzy Gillespie (reflected in mirror), 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Drummer Chano Pozo, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Actress Ava Gardner dons beret and specs and pretends to wear goatee at Billy Berg’s Hollywood nightclub as Dizzy (left) grins.

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie signing autographs, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Dizzy Gillespie, 1948

Allan Grant / The LIFE Picture Collection

Rita Hayworth: Hollywood Legend, Pinup Icon

August 25, 2023October 1, 2014 by

With the possible exception of Betty Grable and her fabled legs no single Hollywood star was more popular with American troops during World War II than the actress and dancer Rita Hayworth. Thanks to a photo made by Bob Landry that ran in LIFE magazine in August 1941, months before the U.S. officially entered the war, Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn on Oct. 17, 1918) was the face and the lingerie-clad body of arguably the single most famous and most frequently reproduced American pinup image ever.

LIFE.com remembers the star of films as varied as Pal Joey, Strawberry Blonde, Orson Welles’s Lady From Shanghai and the 1946 noir classic, Gilda in which she played one of moviedom’s most devastatingly sexy femmes fatale. Hayworth could play comedy, was stellar in dramatic roles and danced well enough that none other than Fred Astaire, with whom she starred in two hits for Columbia Pictures in the early 1940s, asserted that she was as talented a partner as any he’d ever had.

Hayworth’s offscreen life, meanwhile, was frequently tough. She married five times; she struggled with alcoholism; and for the last years of her life she suffered from a disease that was only diagnosed (and given a name) a few years before she died: Alzheimer’s.

For countless Americans of a certain age, however, and for movie fans around the world, Rita Hayworth remains one of those rarest of creatures: a bona fide movie star from a classic era the Hollywood of the 1940s and ’50s that will never come again.

Rita Hayworth on August 11, 1941 LIFE Cover

Bob Landry (LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth, 1945.

Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth in Gilda, 1946

Columbia Pictures

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth with husband Orson Wells and daughter Rebecca, 1946

Peter Stackpole (LIFE Picture Collection)

LIFE at the Circus: Behind the Scenes With Ringling Brothers, 1949

January 25, 2024October 1, 2014 by

LIFE.com celebrates the legendary entertainment juggernaut that Charles Edward Ringling (Dec. 2, 1863 – Dec. 3, 1926) and several other Ringlings owned and operated through the years: the Ringling Brothers Circus (later the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the “Greatest Show on Earth”). Here are photographs by LIFE’s Nina Leen, chronicling the lives lived behind the scenes by the huge extended family that made up the traveling extravaganza in the late 1940s.

In fact, Charles Edward’s nephew, John Ringling North, was the larger-than-life focus of the LIFE feature for which these photos were originally made. (Very few of the photographs ran in the magazine.)

Of all the marvels, human and animal, which populate the Ringling Bros.’ circus [LIFE wrote], none can match John Ringling North, the man who runs it, in sheer, brassy flamboyance. It is the considered judgment of a large following of friends and enemies that the sustained private performance given by North, a former stock-and-bond salesman who hacked his way through a financial jungle to become president and majority stockholder of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc., is easily as spectacular as any that takes place under the Big Top of The Greatest Show on Earth.

The 1949 article goes on to portray a man of outsize appetites, remarkable talents (“He tap dances, plays the saxophone and cornet, juggles lighted torches and sings songs of his own composition. . .”) and boundless, near-manic energy who somehow was able to put his stamp on a massive pop-culture phenomenon while, if the article is to believed, he rarely slept, constantly boozed it up in his private Pullman train car and galloped around on a stallion named Stonewall’s Pride.

Under the Big Top or outside of it, they just don’t make ’em like that any more.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

NINA LEEN

Ringling Brothers Circus 1949

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The 1918 Flu Pandemic: Scenes From a Cataclysm

November 2, 2020October 1, 2014 by

The COVID-19 outbreak has already caused more than 1 million deaths in 2020 and put much of the world into quarantine. The race now is to keep COVID-19 from becoming as devastating as the 1918 flu pandemic (the “Spanish Flu”) that infected an estimated half a billion people around the globe and, by most estimates, killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people—at the time, three to five percent of the world’s population.

In America, in one year the average life expectancy in the United States dropped by 12 years, according to the United States’ National Archives. All told, more than 675,000 men, women and children in the U.S. died of the virus.

Here, we remember what the world looked like as the post-World War I pandemic ran its lethal course before ending, almost as rapidly as it began, in the early summer of 1919.

These Red Cross volunteers fought the flu pandemic, 1918.

Apic

The St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps was on duty during the influenza pandemic, 1918.

Universal History Archive/UIG via Shutterstock

Influenza victims crowded into an emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kans., 1918.

AP Photo National Museum of Health

A patient wore a “flu mask” during the influenza pandemic which followed the First World War.

Topical Press Agency—

Unidentified baseball players wore masks that they thought would keep them from getting the flu, 1918.

Underwood And Underwood/The LIFE Images Collection

A doctor inoculated Mayor Andrew Peters of Boston against the Influenza virus during the pandemic, 1918.

Hulton Archive—

Inspecting Chicago street cleaners for influenza, 1918.

Bettmann/Corbis

Court was held outdoors in a park due to the influenza pandemic, San Francisco, 1918.

Hulton Archive—

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