Author: alexandersanger

My Grandfathers at the 1913 Armory Show

| alexandersanger

by Alexander Sanger

One hundred years ago, a February day in 1913, two strangers, both fortyish, one in a formal black suit, wearing a black homburg, with carefully manicured nails, the other in a rumpled tweed suit, carrying in his oil-paint-stained hands a wide-brimmed brown fedora, stand alone in Gallery G of the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue (“The Armory Show”). Gallery G was the English, Irish and German room. A large painting, “The Garden of Love,” that has briefly brought the two men together, is by a Russian living in Munich, Vassily Kandinsky. It is mostly abstract, though some figures are vaguely discernible; it is the only abstract painting in the room — a colorful oil, with a blending of hues like a watercolor — vibrant and seething with energy. Gallery I, two galleries over, which contained, among other revolutionary abstract works, Duchamp’s “Nude Descending the Staircase,” was so crowded with gawkers that a visitor could barely see, much less absorb the revolutionary experience of the artworks. The two men had Gallery G and its one abstract painting, and ten realist ones, to themselves. The two men are my grandfathers. The better-dressed one, Edwin Campbell, a doctor turned businessman, lingers enthralled before the Kandinsky, while the other, William Sanger, an architect and sometime painter, though appreciative of Kandinsky’s painterly technique, moves on to the adjoining work, a non-abstract watercolor, “The Political Meeting,” by the Irish Jack Butler Yeats.
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Why The Rise and Fall in Teen Pregnancy?

| alexandersanger

Why The Rise and Fall in Teen Pregnancy?

Two news stories – one about Canada’s rising teen pregnancy rate and one about the falling US teen pregnancy rate, both blaming the same rotten economy, with Canadian observers stating that the dismal economic prospects lead girls to become mothers and US observers opining that lack of economic prospects deters early childbearing. While Canada overall has about half the teen pregnancy rate as the US, the state of Maine and the adjoining Province of New Brunswick have a virtually identical rate.
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