April 9 is the birthday of French decadent poet CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-2867)

"Love is a rose, every petal, an illusion, every thorn, a reality."

"L’amour est une rose, chaque pétale, une illusion, chaque épine, une réalité."

Baudelaire's "poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.

His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist." (Wikipedia)

April 9 is the birthday of photography and motion picture pioneer EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE (1830-1904).

"Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. In the 1880s, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements." (Wikipedia)

April 9 is the birthday of Czech architect JAN LETZEL (1880-1925).

After founding an architectural firm in Tokyo in 1910, Letzel designed over 40 buildings in Japan, probably the most famous being the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Hiroshima, which was heavily damaged by the atomic bomb dropped on the city in 1945. Today, the remnants of the building stand as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

April 9 is the birthday of New Orleans jazz trumpeter, bandleader and vocalist SHARKEY BONANO (1904-1972).

"According to one story, Arturo Toscanini heard Bonano in New York, then hired him to come to a rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic to play a couple of numbers unaccompanied for the orchestra to listen to. After Bonano did this, Toscanini berated his trumpet section at length about their inabilities to get tones out of their instruments like this jazz musician could." (Wikipedia)

April 9 is the birthday of Hungarian-French artist VICTOR VASARELY (1908–1997).

Vasarely "is widely accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the Op art movement. His work titled Zebras, created in 1937, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op art." (Wikipedia)

To see examples of Vasarely’s art, CLICK HERE.

On April 9, 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made the oldest known recording of an audible human voice on his phonautograph machine. In 2008, a group of researchers discovered the recording which was made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

On Easter Sunday, April 9. 1939, African-American singer Marian Anderson gave a concert at the Lincoln Memorial after being denied the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution.