“The Subterraneans”,  2007, watercolor/gouache, 15"-14" by Marc Salz. When you scratch the surface of the earth and continue going deeper, who knows what life lives beneath it.

“Black Angels”(for Ornette Coleman) ,2008, watercolor/gouache, 15”-14”. I have had the luck and pleasure to see Ornette perform a few times, possibly five or six. The first was in the early seventies on the lower East Side at “Slugs” a club where trumpeter Lee Morgan was later shot by his girlfriend. The other concerts were more formal some being in colleges or concert halls. His music, traditional jazz or electric, always made me feel uplifted. My kind of music and my kind of visual art. A black angel’s.

"Cinderella Ball", a photo by Weegee(1941). My mother posed for this while in her motorized peacock costume for a benefit at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. She was dancing in Radio City Music Hall at the time and used the stage name Marina Lord instead of her Ballets Russes name Marina Franca. The costume consisted of 827 rare Australian feathers while the size of the fan tail was eleven feet high by fourteen feet wide.

Marina Lord(Salz) in her peacock costume for Radio CityMusic Hall(photo by Bruno of Hollywood).

A drawing by Al Hirschfeld of my mother, stage name Marina Lord, in her peacock costume, for the New York Herald Tribune, 1941.

Marina Lord's(Salz's) peacock dance at Radio City Music Hall.

In 1940 my mother left the Ballets Russes only to find out that her figure and style of dancing did not fit into choreographer George Balanchine's requirements. She was a Dutch woman alone in New York with her relatives in Europe during the war trying to find a new outlet for her dancing talents. Her stage name at the time was Marina Franca but she decided to change it to Marina Lord. She tried sending publicity photos to Hollywood and even did a commercial to promote ballet slippers but nothing seemed to materialize as a viable alternative. Finally through an agent she was hired to perform a dance in a peacock costume at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The job was humiliating for her since she had received so much classical ballet training in Paris with Russian teachers. For the peacock dance, she was required to wear a huge construction of feathers behind her back with a motor that activated the moving feathers when she bent forward. For publicity, she was photographed with the costume in the peacock cage of the Central Park Zoo. The famous cartoonist Al Hirshfeld did a drawing of her for the Herald Tribune. The New York documentary photographer WeeGee did a picture of her in the costume titled "Cinderella Ball".

A painting donation to the White House.

Around 1962, Sam Salz (my father) donated a painting to the Kennedy White House titled "The Signing of The Declaration of Independence" by the French artist Charles Edouard Armand Dumaresq(1826-1895). He wanted to give a gift to America for having welcomed him after his escape from Nazi dominated Europe. In the late eighties, First Lady Barbara Bush decided to hang the painting over the fireplace in the Cabinet Room. It has been there ever since. Jacqueline Kennedy also bought a Monet for the White House but with Kennedy funds. It's also still there in the White House. It was President Clinton's favorite painting. "The Signing...." painting hung above my bed when I was twelve years old before it was donated (photo from TIME magazine). For more on this painting from Wikipedia go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Signing_of_Declaration_of_Independence_by_Armand-Dumaresq,_c1873.png or the White House web site at: http://www.whitehouseresearch.org/assetbank-whha/action/viewAsset?id=35