January 29th (28th actually)

Today is the birthday

… of Alan Alda. He’s 72.

… of Barbie Benton. Hugh Hefner’s one-time main squeeze is 58.

… of Sarah McLachlan. She’s 40.

… of Bilbo Baggins. Elijah Wood is 27.

Lucien B. Maxwell sold the “Maxwell Land Grant” for $1,350,000 on this date in 1870. The grant was more than 1.7 million acres, the largest tract of privately owned land in the Western Hemisphere. (Source: New Mexico Magazine)

Jackson Pollock was born on this date in 1912. Click image for larger version.

In 1929, Pollock began studying under Thomas Hart Benton, the realist mural painter, at Manhattan’s Art Students League. Pollock said, “He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.” Pollock became deeply influenced by Pablo Picasso’s work and the work of other surrealist painters, and this led Pollock to experiment with his painting. He developed the “drip” technique, where he would draw or drip paint onto enormous canvases. Sometimes he applied paint directly from the tube, and other times he used aluminum paint to make his work more brilliant. He was so energetic in his attacks on the canvas that his approach to painting became known as “action painting.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded moments after takeoff on this date in 1986. Read about it from The New York Times.