Chávez, Carlos (13 June 1899–02 August 1978), influential Mexican composer/conductor, author, and educator, of Spanish and some Indian descent, was born Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez in Mexico City, the seventh son of Augustin Chávez, an inventor, and Juvencia Ramírez, a teacher. His mother supported the children after her husband’s death in 1902. Chávez began his musical studies at an early age and studied piano, first with his elder brother Manuel, then with Asunción Parra, and later with composer and pianist Manuel M. Ponce (1910–1914) and pianist and teacher Pedro Luis Ogazón (1915–1920). Chávez credited Ogazón with introducing him to the best classical and Romantic music and with developing his musical taste and technical formation. He received little formal training in composition, concentrating instead on the piano, analysis of musical scores, and orchestration. Chávez’s maternal grandfather was Indian, and from the time Chávez was five or six his family frequently vacationed in the ancient city-state of Tlaxcala, the home of a tribe that opposed the Aztecs. He later visited such diverse Indian centers as Puebla, Jalisco, Nayarit, and Michoacan in pursuit of Indian culture, which proved a significant influence on his early works....
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Chávez, Carlos (1899-1978), influential Mexican composer/conductor, author, and educator, of Spanish and some Indian descent
Robert Rollin
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Hartmann, Sadakichi (08 November 1867?–21 November 1944), art critic
Marjorie A. Walter
Hartmann, Sadakichi (08 November 1867?–21 November 1944), art critic, was born Carl Sadakichi Hartmann in Nagasaki, Japan, the son of Carl Herman Oscar Hartmann, a German government official and businessman, and a Japanese woman, Osada. His mother died within several months of his birth, and Sadakichi was sent to live with relatives in Germany. His formal education ended at fourteen when he ran away from military school. Hartmann’s father responded by sending him to the United States to live with a family in Philadelphia, but he struck out on his own within a year. Hartmann schooled himself and cultivated relationships with local art and literary figures, including ...
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Heap, Jane (1883-1964), artist and editor
Holly Baggett
Heap, Jane (01 November 1883–16 June 1964), artist and editor, was born in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of George Heap, an engineer, and Emma (maiden name unknown). Interested in art from an early age, Heap attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1901 until 1905 and later studied mural design in Germany. By the century’s second decade Chicago was in the midst of a “Renaissance” in art and literature. Writers and artists influenced by Nietzsche, Shaw, Picasso, and Gauguin attacked the straitlaced conservatism of the Victorian genteel tradition. Young midwesterners with artistic aspirations traveled to Chicago where they embraced and expressed an American modernism that owed much to European philosophies. Heap was among them....
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Phillips, Duncan (1886-1966), art collector, writer, and museum founder
Ann Lee Morgan
Phillips, Duncan (26 June 1886–09 May 1966), art collector, writer, and museum founder, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Duncan Clinch Phillips, a business executive, and Eliza Laughlin Phillips, the daughter of James Laughlin, a banker and cofounder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. In 1896 the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Phillips attended private schools. In 1908 he received a B.A. in English literature from Yale University. There he had published essays and reviews on esthetic matters. After graduation, he made his home in Washington while continuing to educate himself in the visual arts through reading, collecting, extended sojourns in New York, and travel to Asia and Europe. In 1912 he published his first article in a professional art magazine, and two years later a group of essays appeared as his first book, ...
