Page 99 – LIFE

LIFE Goes to a School For Kid Geniuses, 1948

January 16, 2020November 1, 2014 by

Americans are on a never-ending quest for the best way to educate their children, trying different approaches to teaching, and sometimes different kinds of schools. Seven decades ago, LIFE visited what might be called a genius school at Hunter College—a school filled 450 apparently well-adjusted, engaged kids from ages three to 11, who just happened to enjoy IQs averaging around 150. (Post-graduate students, by comparison, generally fall in the 120-130 range.)

As LIFE noted in a March 1948 feature on the school:

The school they go to is P.S. 600, part of New York’s public-school system and the only institution in the U.S. devoted entirely to the teaching and study of gifted children. It is held in a wing of the college’s main building, in whose long corridors the bright little kids from 3 to 11 years old like to stop off for between-class chats.
Offhand, young geniuses would seem to present no immediate problems because they are usually bigger, healthier and even happier than average children. However, an educational problem exists simply because they are too bright for their age. If they are promoted rapidly through school on the basis of their studies they will end up as social misfits, unable to enjoy the society of children their own age. On the other hand, if they are held back with their own age group, their quick minds are apt to stagnate.
Hunter children know they are smart, but they are more humble than cocky about their intelligence. . . . Although their interest are advanced, their plans for the future have a refreshing normality. There is a 9-year-old who wants to be a fur trapper, an 8-year-old who wants to be a babysitter and a 7-year-old who wants to be president of the Coca-Cola Company.

Here, LIFE.com presents photos from the feature in the magazine, as well as pictures that never ran in LIFE.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Sandy, 7, lectured the science club on the behavior of neutrons in uranium. The diagram was left by the previous lecturer, a chemist.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A public “genius school” for 3-to-11-year-olds at New York’s Hunter College, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Genius school, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A study of time was made by 6-year-olds. Addressing the class, Lucy (standing, left) told what she found out in the library about old-fashioned candle clocks, and her remarks were copied on the blackboard with other students’ observations. The students were critical of each other’s work.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Building with blocks, instead of aimlessly stacking them, four-year-olds worked together to construct an apartment building with doormen, tenants and a garage.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Genius school, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roy spun a yarn for his friends.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roy spun a yarn for friends.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Playing chess, David (wearing glasses) moved a piece for Lennie. Both are seven and a half. David learned the game from his father, then he taught Lennie how to play.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Directing the orchestra, a 10-year-old girl received a lesson in conducting from the teacher. Students also had a choral society. Three-year-olds had rhythm bands.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Genius school, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ralph, 11, planned to become a doctor.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a class in practical conversation in French for nine-year-olds, a waiter asked gentleman to approve the wine, as the lady consulted the French menu.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This hairdo was designed by two five-year-olds, Joan (left) and Florence. They also liked to make candy and cookies in the school’s miniature kitchen.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Genius school, 1948.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Five-year-old Johnny, who taught himself to read, took from the library The Ring of the Nibelung. The library also included simpler books like the Bobbsey Twins.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In a hallway of New York’s Hunter College, two three-year-olds stopped to talk. The little girl carried a poster inviting students to see the latest block exhibit.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe: Rare Early Photos, 1950

January 16, 2020November 1, 2014 by

Few stars of the 1950s were so compelling, so singular, that they came to define the era in which they lived and in which they created their most enduring work. Marilyn Monroe was one of those stars.

From her earliest days as an actress until late in her career when she had, against her will, been cast in the public eye as Hollywood’s ultimate Sex Goddess, Marilyn posed for LIFE magazine’s photographers. Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of pictures—none of which ran in the magazine—by LIFE’s Ed Clark, a Tennessean with a profound talent for capturing the essence of people, both famous and obscure. His pictures of Marilyn offer a rare glimpse into the early days of an eventual pop-culture icon’s career, when a young actress was blissfully unaware of what the coming years would bring and was, it seems, just happy to be in “the industry” and getting noticed.

[Buy the LIFE book, Remembering Marilyn]

In a 1999 interview with Digital Journalist, Clark described how, in 1950, he received a call from a friend at 20th Century Fox about “a hot tomato” the studio had just signed: one Marilyn Monroe.

“She was almost unknown then, so I was able to spend a lot of time shooting her,” Clark recalled. After all, it was still early in her career, and she’d only just begun to gain attention: Three months before this shoot, she appeared as a crooked lawyer’s girlfriend in The Asphalt Jungle; two months later, she had a small role as an aspiring starlet in All About Eve.

“We’d go out to Griffith Park [in Los Angeles] and she’d read poetry. I sent several rolls to LIFE in New York, but they wired back, ‘Who the hell is Marilyn Monroe?'” (Three years later, Marilyn appeared on the cover of LIFE in a now-famous Clark photo, posing with her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes co-star, Jane Russell.)

Why LIFE never published the gold mine of photos seen in this gallery after Marilyn became a bona fide superstar, however, remains a mystery. The only clue: a brief note about the shoot in the LIFE archives, addressed to LIFE’s photo editor, indicating that “this take was over-developed and poorly printed.”

Whatever the reason, one thing remains perfectly clear: at 24 years old, in 1950, Marilyn Monroe was already something special.

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed ClarkLife Pictures/Shutterstock

Georgia O’Keeffe: Invincible

November 15, 2020October 30, 2014 by

Few major American artists have been as productive, for so long, in so many media, as Georgia O’Keeffe was during her extraordinary career. From her early, accomplished drawings which caught the eye of her future husband, Alfred Steiglitz, in 1916 through her firm studies of urban life and architecture in the 1920s and well into her gorgeous later works inspired by the natural beauty of New Mexico, O’Keeffe forged a unique, solitary path through the landscape of modern art.

Born during the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (1887), the span of O’Keeffe’s life (she died in 1986, at 98, in New Mexico) seemingly encompassed not mere decades, but ages: the invention of the airplane, two world wars, the Cold War, the Space Race and the introduction of the personal computer. So much of her work the huge flowers; the sun-bleached skulls; the brilliant, near-abstract nature studies; the sensuous pottery is so distinctive that categorizing her, or placing her in one school or another, is impossible.

If any artist ever followed her own vision, no matter where it took her, it was O’Keeffe.

Here, LIFE.com looks at a single photograph John Loengard‘s astonishing 1967 portrait of the artist as an old woman that somehow manages to suggest, in one frame, Georgia O’Keeffe’s willful isolation, her breathtaking self-possession and her singular place in the American consciousness.

Loengard’s unforgettable picture made on the roof of O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch home in northern New Mexico is far more than just a study, or a sketch, of a formidable figure. Framed against the sky and desert, seated before a chimney that feels, in its simplicity, almost totemic, the black-clad O’Keeffe seems carved into the photograph, as much a part of the severe Western landscape as the rocks, sand and sagebrush that surrounded her. She might have been sitting there for an hour, or for a thousand years.

Of the many, many fine and not infrequently iconic portraits that LIFE magazine published through the years, Loengard’s picture of O’Keeffe is one of the very greatest.

In a March 1968 cover story on O’Keeffe (Loengard’s rooftop portrait graced the issue’s cover), LIFE devoted more than a dozen pages to the artist, hoping to illuminate for its readers what the magazine called “the interlocking of her life and art”:

Light edges over the darkened cliffs. Through the sage a woman walks silently, a stick in her hand to ward off snakes. She scans the mists in the far-off mountains. She picks up a stone and smooths it, touches the twisted branch of a piñon tree, toes a patch of lichen. Two smoke-toned chows watch and sniff, then jounce knowingly after their mistress. Another day has begun for Georgia O’Keeffe.

For the better part of three decades, this has been the ritual of one of the most distinguished pioneers of modern American art, a painter still vigorous in her 81st year. Ranging between her two homes in New Mexico an adobe “villa” in Abiquiu and a desert ranch to the north George O’Keeffe renews each day her passionate ties to the land. From these encounters has come a steady outpouring of paintings, many of them now classics in U.S. museums. Whether emphatically realistic or starkly abstract, fantasies of nature or landscapes of the mind, these works distill not only her experience but something of her strong, adventurous spirit.

TIME’s Richard Lacayo, meanwhile, had this to say about O’Keeffe on the occasion of a major 2009 show of her work at the Whitney in New York:

The Whitney’s colorful show puts aside the Georgia O’Keeffe we know best the Gray Lady of New Mexico to retrieve an O’Keeffe we ought to know better, the young woman who went fearlessly down the road of entirely abstract art in 1915, when it was a fresh idea with which only a few artists anywhere in the world were experimenting. Her taut vertical thunderbolts and giant crests of rainbow colors are like campaign banners being unfurled by an artist who has set herself and the art of painting entirely free.

Freedom from cliché, from stasis, from the expected and the tame has always been the aim and the spur of the greatest artists. In Loengard’s elemental portrait of a woman who long ago slipped the bonds of convention, that freedom is seen for what it truly is: sober, essential, invincible.

Georgia O’Keeffe photographed on the roof of her Ghost Ranch home in New Mexico, 1967.

John Loengard—The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘How a Wife Should Undress’: Dubious Advice From 1930s Strippers

November 2, 2020October 27, 2014 by

We’ve all met them: men and women who insist on claiming, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the world was a better, simpler, more civilized place “back then.” Exactly when “back then” might have been is, of course, always left a little unclear.

The fact is, not everything was better, simpler or more civilized for everyone back in the day. To take just one example of how things were hardly better or more civilized for a solid half of the adult population in America as recently as, say, 75 years ago, take a quick look at a feature from a 1937 issue of LIFE magazine. Now, we’re hardly prudes, and we always get a good laugh out of something as over-the-top as this series of pictures illustrating how a wife should (and should not!) undress for her husband.

At this point, we should state that LIFE.com believes that the entire phenomenon of the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing is an elaborate—and from a marketing standpoint quite brilliant—joke.

As LIFE informed its readers in its Feb. 17, 1937, issue:

Frankly as a social measure Allen Gilbert, who puts on shows for such topnotch burlesque houses as Manhattan’s Apollo and Philadelphia’s Schubert, is starting a School of Undressing in Manhattan this month. There wives, anxious to improve their marital manners, will learn the correct way to take off their clothes. Mr. Gilbert feels that many a marriage ends in divorce court because the wife grows sloppy and careless in the bedroom. “I am dedicating my school to the sanctity of the American home,” he says. The Gilbert faculty is recruited from the ranks of burlesque performers from all over. Already 48 wives who suspect there is something wrong with their disrobing methodology have signed up for the $30 Gilbert course of six lessons. From these they will learn how to make going to bed appear a thing of charm and pleasure rather than a routine chore.

Mr. Gilbert plans to put on a revue next spring entitled Sex Rears Its Ugly Head. It may be that this current lapse into pedagogy is partially motivated by the knowledge that advance publicity for the producer is not a bad thing.

Joke or no joke, hoax or no hoax, one thing is as true today as it was way back then: sex sells.

Professor Connie Fonzlau at the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing in New York demonstrated “the worst possible method of disrobing,” 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

School of Undressing professor Connie Fonzlau demonstrated the “unpardonable sin” of “working on two sides at once,” 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Burlesque star June St. Clair and Professor Connie Fonzlau demonstrated the right and wrong ways to disrobe.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Burlesque star June St. Clair and Professor Connie Fonzlau demonstrated the right and wrong ways to disrobe at the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing in New York, 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Burlesque star June St. Clair demonstrated “how wives should undress in front of their husbands” during a class at the Allen Gilbert School of Undressing in New York, 1937.

Peter Stackpole/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

How A Wife Should Undress

How A Wife Should Undress

LIFE Magazine, Feb. 15, 1937

Marilyn Monroe at Home in Hollywood: Color Portraits, 1953

December 4, 2025October 26, 2014 by

LIFE staff photographer Alfred Eisenstadt took these color photos of Marilyn Monroe at the movie legend’s Hollywood home more in the spring of 1953, when the actress was just 26. The blonde icon led a troubled life, but what’s perhaps most striking about these photos is how relaxed, self-possessed and (dare we say it?) how happy she looks.

It may be why these images of Marilyn are among the best sellers at the LIFE print store. She was photographed by LIFE many times, but this is the photo session that stands out among all the rest. Other shoots are more revealing, but none are more intimate.

In 1953, her biggest, brightest roles in Bus Stop, The Seven Year Itch, and the American Film Institute’s greatest American comedy of all time, Some Like It Hot were still ahead of her, as were her unlucky marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller and her increasingly lonely, desperate last years. But it’s worth noting that she really does not resemble a legend, an icon or an idol in these pictures. Instead, she looks like a beautiful young woman evidently at peace with herself and her place in the world.

All of that, of course, would soon change, and change for the worse.

But not yet, Eisensteadt’s portraits seem to say. Not yet.

Marilyn Monroe at home, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A black-and-white contact sheet from Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1953 photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe posed casually at home, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe gazed into Alfred Eisenstaedt’s camera, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A black-and white-contact sheet from Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1953 photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe gazed into Alfred Eisenstaedt’s camera, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe at home, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A black-and-white contact sheet from Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1953 photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe at home, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A black-and-white contact sheet from Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1953 photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe at home, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A black-and-white contact sheet from Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1953 photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 1953.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Under a Mississippi Sun: Eisenstaedt’s Images of Sharecroppers

January 23, 2024October 23, 2014 by

In September 1936, two months before the debut issue of LIFE magazine hit newsstands, Henry Luce and his colleagues at Time Inc. produced an 80-page “dummy” issue of the as-yet-unnamed publication. Designed and produced, in large part, to spark interest among potential advertisers, the issue was the same sort of large-format, photo-driven entity that would soon become familiar to millions of readers around the world as a weekly called LIFE.

The dummy also featured the same combination of international news, celebrity coverage, science and tech reporting and downright goofy articles (one on playing golf in a massive rainstorm stands out) that LIFE would perfect in the coming decades. And, like countless issues of the magazine down through the years, the dummy included photographs by the one and only Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Eisenstaedt pictures (some of which made their way into another Time Inc. title, Fortune magazine, in 1937) chronicle the lives at work, at worship, at rest, at play of sharecroppers on “the world’s largest staple cotton plantation,” near Greenville, Mississippi.

Seen all these years later, what’s perhaps most astonishing about the photos, aside from their near-uniform excellence, is how companionable, and how intimate, they feel.

Made by a man born in what is now northern Poland; a World War I veteran who served in the German Army; a dapper figure who began his career as a photographer amid the heady cultural ferment of Weimar Germany and emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1930s to escape growing Nazi oppression, Eisenstaedt’s pictures of poor, Mississippi cotton workers suggest that this worldly European Jew was able as he was throughout his career, with virtually everyone he photographed to make the subjects of his pictures perfectly comfortable.

Whether he was making portraits of legendary actresses, powerful politicians, famous scientists, superstar athletes or the average man, woman or child on the street, Alfred Eisenstaedt had the enviable gift of putting people at ease. (One notable exception: A booze-soaked Ernest Hemingway, who “almost killed” Eisenstaedt in Cuba in 1952.)

Here, LIFE.com presents a number of Eisenstaedt’s photos of 48-year-old sharecropper Lonnie Fair and his family, friends and neighbors, working their plots of soil on the Delta & Pine Land Co. plantation in Scott, Miss., in the midst of the Great Depression. (“Lonnie Fair,” Fortune reported in its March 1937 issue, “is a paragon of good fortune, as U.S. sharecroppers go. Last year he got $1,001.10 from D.P.L.: credit–$482.76, cash–$518.34.”)

There is poverty in these pictures, and, to a degree that might be shocking to those unfamiliar with the post-Civil War plantation business, there is exploitation, as well. No photojournalist worth his or her salt least of all Alfred Eisenstaedt would romanticize or otherwise trivialize the harshness of a sharecropper’s life.

But through Eisenstaedt’s lens, and through the man’s capacity for seeing things both clearly, and empathetically, the far deeper reaction most of us will experience after spending time with his photos is a probably one part wonderment, and three parts gratitude.

After all, would could fail to be thankful that a photographer of Eisenstaedt’s talent and compassion was dispatched to chronicle and, in a real sense, to immortalize this era, and these lives?

Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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