“My hobbie (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape… My hobbie is to pick out different things during what I read and piece them together and make a little story of my own.”
Louis Armstrong said that, in a 1953 letter to a friend. You can now see the collages he made
in an exhibit at Jazz At Lincoln Center that opened on Saturday. It carries the wonderful title The Collage Aesthetic of Louis Armstrong: “In the Cause of Happiness.” (One of the works is at right.) Harry N. Abrams has just published a book of the creations called Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong. And the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, is mounting its own show of his collages called A Little Story of My Own: Louis Armstrong’s Collages.
Truth is, I haven’t seen the shows or the book yet. I’m calling attention to them because Armstrong seems to be one of those lucky people who are twice-talented, and I’m glad it’s being recognized.
There are other twice-talented people who’ve been drawn to visual arts. E.E. Cummings, for example, considered himself just as talented a painter as he was a poet. (I wrote about that, and the sad fate of some of his works, for The Wall Street Journal in 2007; you can read the article here.)
The one who comes
most to mind now, for me, is Winston Churchill. His “Chartwell: Landscape With Sheep” (left) sold at auction in 2007 for £1 million, a record for him.
It’s his joy in painting that is relevant here. Churchill didn’t start until he was 41, but he used it as a remedy for “mental overstrain” and as a relief from his intense responsibilities. He once said he couldn’t live without painting. As he wrote in Painting As A Pastime: “Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and color, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end, of the day.”
Such sentiment sounds schmaltzy nowadays. But Louis Armstrong was expressing something similar; he too seemed to have taken great joy in the creation of art.
Kudos to Jazz at Lincoln Center, in particular, for putting on the show: cross-disciplinary overtures — here, getting people interested in music to think about the visual arts — are always a good thing, and so is highlighting Pops’s other talent.
Photo credits: Jazz at Lincoln Center (top), Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum; Sotheby’s (bottom).