September Morn |
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Harry Reichenbach is best known for the publicity stunts he used to bring crowds into early B-movies:
But he describes what was perhaps his most poetic hack in the book Phantom Fame: I applied for work at a small art shop that had printed a lithograph of a nude girl standing in a quiet pool. The picture sold at ten cents apiece but nobody would buy it. I could earn my month's rent if I had an idea for disposing of the two thousand copies in stock. It occurred to me to introduce the immodest young maiden to Anthony Comstock, head of the Anti-Vice Society and arch-angel of virtue. At first he refused to jump at the opportunity to be shocked. I telephoned him several times, protesting against a large display of the picture which I myself had installed in the window of the art shop. Then I arranged for other people to protest and at last I visited him personally. "This picture is an outrage!" I cried. "It's undermining the morals of our city's youth!" The painting, by Paul Chabas, went from being "rejected as a brewer's calendar," to being, for a time, a celebrated icon on par with the Mona Lisa. Curtis MacDougal, in Hoaxes, writes that there "were 'September Morn' dolls, statues, calendars and umbrella and cane heads; sailors had the modest, shivering damsel tattooed on their hairy chests and amateur artists drew their versions on bathroom floors," to which another commentator adds: "postcards, candy boxes, cigar bands, cigarette flannels, pennants, [and] suspenders." MacDougal ends by saying that "the most controversial nude of modern times went on public exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" in Manhattan where it can be seen to this day. |
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