Jackie Kennedy in the Early ’60s: An American Icon

It was in those brief, heady years or perhaps it was really just one year, during the campaign and election of 1960 when John F. Kennedy and his young, beautiful wife were fast becoming national and then international celebrities that the legend of Jackie was born.

Looking back, even in the light of all we know about her fraught, strained, “storybook” marriage to an obsessively philandering husband, there seems to be something special about Jackie Kennedy. Maybe it’s that the camera loved her. Maybe she was so intriguing to so many people simply because, set beside the other prominent women in Washington, DC, in the early 1960s, she was young (barely in her 30s), chic and, with her Irish and French ancestry, indefinably and refreshingly “exotic.”

Whatever the reasons behind her appeal, for millions of women around the globe and across generations, Jackied Kenneedy—the woman in the White House in the Oleg Cassini outfits (made expressly for her), throwing formal dinner parties for artists, scientists and diplomats, and traveling the world—was the face of a new era and of a new type of American woman. Jackie was, somehow, at once warm and elegant, youthful and sophisticated, fun-loving and serious and on top of it all, self-deprecatingly funny.

“The one thing I do not want to be called is ‘first lady,'” she once said. “It sounds like a saddle horse.”

Her husband, for his part, not only took his wife’s enormous popularity in stride, but humbly acknowledged that, at times, he necessarily played second fiddle. After Jackie (who spoke fluent French) enjoyed a rapturous reception during a May 1961 trip to Paris, John Kennedy famously joked at a dinner: “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.”

Here, LIFE.com offers a selection of pictures from that time in her life when she was first known to a rapt world, simply, as Jackie.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died of complications from cancer in 1994 at just 64 years old. “My mother died surrounded by her friends and her family and her books, and the people and the things that she loved,” her son, the late John Jr., said. “She did it in her own way, and on her own terms, and we all feel lucky for that.”

Buy the LIFE special edition: The Day Kennedy Died]

Jackie Kennedy in India, 1962.

Jackie Kennedy in India, 1962.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy during a campaign dinner, 1960.

Jackie Kennedy during a campaign dinner, 1960.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy watches a televised debate between the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, and her husband, John F. Kennedy, 1960.

Jackie Kennedy watched a televised debate between the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, and her husband, John F. Kennedy, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy reads to her daughter Caroline at the Kennedy family home in Hyannis Port, Mass., 1960.

Jackie Kennedy read to her daughter Caroline at the Kennedy family home in Hyannis Port, Mass., 1960.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The mayor of New York City, Robert Wagner Jr., speaks to Jackie Kennedy during a campaign dinner in 1960.

The mayor of New York City, Robert Wagner Jr., spoke to Jackie Kennedy during a campaign dinner in 1960.

Ed Clark Time/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy in 1960.

Jackie Kennedy in 1960.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy in 1960.

Jackie Kennedy in 1960

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President-elect John Kennedy with Jackie in January 1961.

President-elect John Kennedy with Jackie in January 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy at a formal dinner, 1960.

Jackie Kennedy at a formal dinner, 1960.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy in 1960.

Jackie Kennedy in 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy in 1960.

Jackie Kennedy in 1960

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy in India, 1962.

Jackie Kennedy in India, 1962.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Roll Another One: LIFE Goes Bowling

There’s a lot to be said for bowling. It’s loud. It involves a kind of controlled violence. It requires strength, coordination and genuine technique. And it’s damn fun.

Here, for no other reason than we like the sport and because the pictures are pretty cool, LIFE.com presents photographs of men, women and kids bowling. Some of the bowlers are serious. Some are what we might call hobbyists. Some are clearly awful. But what they all share is the evident desire to smash the pins. To make that improbable spare. To nail a convincing, resounding, unmistakable strike.

Ready to roll?

Pins scatter as they fall after being struck by a bowling ball

Pins Scatter As They Fall

Mark Kauffman-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A bowler leans his body in the direction of the ball.

A Bowler Leans With The Ball

Ralph Morse-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A bowler makes facial expressions and wiggles his body in hopes of shifting the ball while watching his ball roll down the lane.

Body Language

Ralph Morse-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A man watches his ball roll down the lane with a cigar hanging from his mouth.

Have A Cigar

Ralph Morse-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pat Patterson kneels down on one knee as he watches his ball roll down the lane.

Kneel Down

Ralph Morse-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Thiluia Barker finishes bowling her turn with a grimace.

Grimace

Ralph Morse-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Art Gebhart covers his eyes after releasing the ball.

Averted Eyes

Ralph Morse-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

United States Bowling Congress Hall of Famer Joe Falcaro in midair, 1940.

Midair Attention

Gjon Mili-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women's Bowling Champion Catherine Fellmeth is pictured mid-windup.

Women’s Bowling Champion

George Skadding-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Twinkle Watts, a child bowler and ice skater, is pictured mid-stride

Twinkle Watts Hits Her Stride

Bernard Hoffman-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A female bowling team member wears a shirt representing her team and sponsor.

Team Sponsor

Ralph Morse-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bowler Phyllis Mercer is pictured as she releases the ball down the lane.

The Windup

Stan Wayman-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mercer turns frustratedly away from the lane after watching her ball miss the pins.

Frustration

Stan Wayman-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Florence Wilson and other women at a bowling alley in Teaneck, New Jersey, in 1947.

Bowling in Teaneck

Gjon Mili-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Men cheer a fellow team member's shot at a bowling alley.

Cheering Section

Gjon Mili-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women bowl in two of the four bowling alleys located under the chapel of New York's Riverside Church.

Church Bowling

Margaret Bourke-White-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dorothy Crouch, balanced on one foot at the end of her stride, releases the ball in a preliminary match during a nine-day championship tournament.

Championship Stride

Francis Miller-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marion Ladewig, the "Queen of Bowling," dabs at her eyes after losing a championship tournament.

The Queen of Bowling

Francis Miller-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women at a bowling alley bar celebrate their high-scoring game with a round of drinks.

Women Celebrate at a Bowling Alley Bar

Stan Wayman-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Women are pictured in a beauty shop adjoining the Cotton Bowl lanes, for the benefit of women bowlers who can have their hair set between games.

A Beauty Shop In A Bowling Alley

Stan Wayman-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Children play with a plastic bowling ball and pins, provided in order to prevent them from interrupting their mothers as they bowl, at a nursery at the Hart Bowl

Children Bowling

Stan Wayman-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Archers shoot arrows alongside bowlers at the Sunnyside Bowl

Archers and Bowlers at the Sunnyside Bowl

J. R. Eyerman-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An apprentice geisha in a kimono and full make-up smiles as she bowls on a lane, watched by several other geisha in Kyoto, Japan.

A Geisha Bowling in Kyoto

Larry Burrows-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A bowler watches his ball approach the pins.

A Bowler Watches His Ball

Thomas D. McAvoy-Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Teenage Wasteland: Portraits of Japanese Youth in Revolt, 1964

The teenage years can be hard anywhere. That said, in very few societies is the idea of youth as fraught as it is in Japan, with its culture of conformity.  

In 1964, LIFE photographer Michael Rougier and correspondent Robert Morse spent time documenting one Japanese generation’s age of revolt, and came away with an astonishingly intimate, frequently unsettling portrait of teenagers hurtling willfully toward oblivion.

In Rougier’s photos—pictures that seem to breathe both reckless energy and acute despair—we don’t merely glimpse kids pushing the boundaries of rebellion. Instead, this generation of lost boys and girls seem to be trying to tell us something something reproachful and perplexing about the world we’ve made.

The teens and other young adults portrayed in Rougier’s pictures, Morse noted in a 1964 LIFE special issue on Japan (where some of these images first appeared), are “part of a phenomenon long familiar in countries of the Western world: a rebellious younger generation, a bitter and poignant minority breaking from [its] country’s past.”

All through that past, a sense of connection with the old traditions and authority has kept Japanese children obedient and very close to the family. This sense still controls most of Japan’s youth, who besiege offices and factories for jobs and the universities for education and gives the whole country an electric vitality and urgency. But as its members run away from the family and authority, this generation in rebellion grows.

In notes that accompanied Rougier’s film when it was sent to LIFE’s, Morse delved even deeper into the lives, as he perceived them, of runaways, “pill-takers” and other profoundly disengaged Tokyo teens:

Nowhere in the world does youth seem to dominate a nation as they do in Japan. They are overwhelming and everywhere, surging, searching, experimenting, ambitious at some times, helpless and without hope at others. Isolated on a tight little island, they have not, except on the surface, become international like their counterparts in freewheeling Europe.

Seeing the well-scrubbed faces of the black uniformed male students and middy-bloused girls swarming through Tokyo, physical-fitness minded young men galloping through the Ginza, and the bright young things clamoring after a teen-age idol, it would seem to the casual observer that here is a country with a youth as wholesome and happy as a hot fudge sundae.

This is not true at all.

A large segment of Japanese young people are, deep down, desperately unhappy and lost. And they talk freely about their frustrations. Many have lost respect for their elders, always a keystone of Japanese life, and in some cases denounce the older people for “for having gotten us into a senseless war.”

Having sliced the ties that bind them to the home, in desperation they form their own miniature societies with rules of their own. The young people in these groups are are bound to one another not out of mutual affection in many cases the “lost ones” are incapable of affection but from the need to belong, to be part of something.

Both the article in LIFE and the story told in Morse’s ruminative and, in some ways, far more devastating notes make clear that this “lost generation” was not even remotely monolithic. While they might, to varying degrees, have shared a genuinely nihilistic outlook toward their own and their country’s future, the runaways, rock and roll fanatics (the “monkey-dance, Beatles set,” Morse calls them), pill-poppers, “motorcycle kids” and innumerable other subsets of Japan’s youth-driven subculture attest to the breadth and depth of teen disaffection to be found in 1964 Tokyo.

That Michael Rougier, meanwhile, was able to so compassionately portray not only that disaffection, but also captured moments of genuine fellowship and even a fleeting sort of joy among these desperately searching teens, attests to the man’s talent and his dedication to share the story of what he saw.

—Liz Ronk edited this photo gallery for LIFE.com.

"Kako, languid from sleeping pills she takes, is lost in a world of her own in a jazz shop in Tokyo."

Kako, languid from sleeping pills, was in a world of her own in a jazz shop in Tokyo.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The teen in the center is the 17-year-old leader of a pill-popping crew of jazz fans. He's known only by his nickname, "Naron," a popular sleeping pill brand. Morse wrote in his notes that Naron was "bright and amusing when he's off the pills."

The teen in the center was the 17-year-old leader of a crew of jazz fans. He was known only by his nickname, “Naron,” a popular sleeping pill brand.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Yoko, 17 years old, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A group of "motorcycle kids," one of numerous subsets of teen subcultures in Tokyo, 1964.

These motorcycle kids were one of numerous subsets of teen subcultures in Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Listening to jazz, Tokyo, 1964.

Listening to jazz, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lost in the music, Tokyo, 1964.

Lost in the music, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

"They find violent release in homegrown Japanese Beatles."

These fans rocked to the Tokyo Beatles.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dancing to the "Tokyo Beatles," 1964.

Fans danced to the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rocking out with the "Tokyo Beatles," 1964.

Rocking out with the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Rocking out with the "Tokyo Beatles," 1964.

Rocking out with the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A fan (right) and a "Tokyo Beatle," 1964.

A fan (right) and a “Tokyo Beatle,” 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Screaming for the "Tokyo Beatles," 1964.

Fans screamed for the Tokyo Beatles, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

"Tokyo Beatles" backstage, 1964.

The Tokyo Beatles backstage, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

"Tokyo Beatles" backstage, 1964.

The Tokyo Beatles backstage, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

MMichael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

[Yoko] often ends her long nights sprawled on a futon in a friend's room."

Yoko often ended her long nights sprawled on a futon in a friend’s room.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

"Naron" (at left, stretching) and friends at dawn after an all-night party at the beach.

“Naron” (at left, stretching) and friends at dawn after an all-night party at the beach.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Naron” (at left, stretching) and friends at dawn after an all-night party at the beach.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

"Naron" and an unidentified girl at dawn after an all-night beach party, Tokyo, 1964.

“Naron” and an unidentified girl at dawn after an all-night beach party, Tokyo, 1964.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

"Sometimes [Yoko] goes down to the port in Yokohama to watch the ships sail off to the places she only wishes she cold go. At sunset, her 'day' begins again."

Sometimes Yoko went down to the port in Yokohama to watch the ships sail off to the places she only wished she cold go.

Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Japanese youth, Tokyo, 1964.

JFK on the Campaign Trail, 1960: A President in the Making

In stark, revealing contrast to the glamorous, effortless Kennedy of popular myth, John F. Kennedy on the stump was a tough, savvy campaigner. Well aware that much of the country distrusted almost everything about him—his Massachusetts-liberal politics, his Boston accent, his Roman Catholicism—he set about winning over skeptics by employing the very gifts that generated such suspicion in those who knew little about him. He charmed. He cajoled. At times (in back-room negotiations with other pols) he browbeat and he bullied.

Buy the LIFE book, The Day Kennedy Died.

And on November 8, 1960, John Kennedy was elected president of the United States, defeating Richard Nixon in one of the closest national elections of the 20th century. At 43, Kennedy was (and remains) the youngest person elected to the office, and it was largely this quality in the man and his family—an engaging, youthful dynamism—that captured the imagination of millions across the country and, ultimately, the world.

As Kennedy and his team ran a heady, propulsive campaign unlike any America had seen, LIFE’s best photographers (Paul Schutzer, Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Silk and others) were there, chronicling the grind of never-ending public appearances and the quieter moments JFK spent with advisers, with Jackie and rarest of all alone, with his own thoughts.

Here, LIFE.com presents photographs—none of which ran in LIFE magazine—chronicling an enigmatic, intensely ambitious man making history.

John F. Kennedy discusses strategy during his presidential campaign, 1960.

John F. Kennedy discussed strategy during his presidential campaign, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Scene from John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign.

Scene from John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Scene in West Virginia from John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign.

John F. Kennedy, West Virginia, 1960

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

JFK fans, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, 1960.

John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Scene in West Virginia from John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign.

John F. Kennedy spoke in West Virginia during his 1960 presidential campaign.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Scene from John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign.

John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A JFK and LBJ supporter in Mount Clemens, Michigan, October 1960.

A JFK and LBJ supporter in Mount Clemens, Michigan, October 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy and unidentified boy, 1960.

John F. Kennedy and unidentified boy, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy in Grand Prairie, Texas, September, 1960.

John F. Kennedy spoke in Grand Prairie, Texas, September, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960.

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Richard Nixon, telephone booth, 1960.

Richard Nixon, telephone booth, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

John F. Kennedy, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, Texas, 1960.

John F. Kennedy campaign, Texas, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy braves an autumn chill while campaigning in an open car at night in Illinois, 1960.

John F. Kennedy braved an autumn chill while campaigning in an open car at night in Illinois, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jackie Kennedy, 1960.

Jackie Kennedy, 1960.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John and Jackie Kennedy, Massachusetts, 1960.

John and Jackie Kennedy, Massachusetts, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy during his campaign for president, 1960.

John F. Kennedy during his campaign for president, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

On a drive through Illinois, Paul Schutzer turns his camera on his colleagues in the press, 1960.

On a drive through Illinois, Paul Schutzer turned his camera on his colleagues in the press, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy on the stump, October, 1960.

John F. Kennedy on the stump, October, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy gazes out on New York Harbor from a ferry, October 1960.

John F. Kennedy gazes out on New York Harbor from a ferry, October 1960.

Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy, 1960.

John F. Kennedy, 1960

Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy campaign, 1960.

John F. Kennedy, 1960 campaign

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The day after an election in which he bested Nixon by a miniscule 113,000 votes out of more than 68 million ballots cast, president-elect Kennedy gave a brief victory speech at the Hyannis Armory, Nov. 1960.

The day after an election in which he bested Nixon, president-elect Kennedy gave a brief victory speech at the Hyannis Armory, Nov. 1960.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

[Note: This gallery contains graphic images.]

Some photographs are so much of their time that, as years pass, they acquire an air of genuine authority about an event, a person, a place and even, perhaps, an air of inevitability. This is what it was like, these pictures seem to say. This is what happened. This is the moment. This is what we remember.

Of the many indispensable photos made during the Second World War, Margaret Bourke-White’s portrait of survivors at Buchenwald in April 1945 “staring out at their Allied rescuers,” as LIFE magazine put it, “like so many living corpses” remains among the most haunting. The faces of the men, young and old, staring from behind the wire, “barely able to believe that they would be delivered from a Nazi camp where the only deliverance had been death,” attest with an awful eloquence to the depths of human depravity and, perhaps even more powerfully, to the measureless lineaments of human endurance.

What few people recall about Bourke-White’s survivors-at-the-wire image, however, is that it did not even appear in LIFE until 15 years after it was made, when it was published alongside other photographic touchstones in the magazine’s Dec. 26, 1960, special double-issue, “25 Years of LIFE.”

Pictures from Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and other camps that LIFE did publish made when Bourke-White and her colleagues accompanied Gen. George Patton’s Third Army on its storied march through a collapsing Germany in the spring of 1945 were among the very first to document for a largely disbelieving public, in America and around the world, the wholly murderous nature of the camps. (At the end of this gallery, see how the original story on the liberation of the camps appeared in the May 7, 1945, issue of LIFE, when the magazine published a series of brutal photographs by Bourke-White, William Vandivert and other LIFE staffers.)

Here, so many decades after the liberation of Buchenwald, LIFE.com presents a series of Bourke-White photographs most of which never ran in LIFE magazine from that notorious camp located a mere five miles outside the ancient, picturesque town of Weimar, Germany.

Her justifiably iconic picture of men at the Buchenwald fence suggests the horrors made manifest by the Nazi push for a “final solution”: the other Bourke-White photographs here, on the other hand, do not suggest, or hint at, the Third Reich’s horrors. Instead, they force the Holocaust’s nightmares into the unblinking light.

In Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly her devastating 1946 memoir, subtitled “A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Years'” Bourke-White recalls the ghastly landscape that confronted the Allied troops who liberated Buchenwald, and her own tortured response to what she, the Allied troops and her fellow journalists witnessed and recorded there:

There was an air of unreality about that April day in Weimar, a feeling to which I found myself stubbornly clinging. I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sight in the courtyard before me only when I had a chance to look at my own photographs. Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.

This whiteness had the fragile translucence of snow, and I wished that under the bright April sun which shone from a clean blue sky it would all simply melt away. I longed for it to disappear, because while it was there I was reminded that men actually had done this thing men with arms and legs and eyes and hearts not so very unlike our own. And it made me ashamed to be a member of the human race.

The several hundred other spectators who filed through the Buchenwald courtyard on that sunny April afternoon were equally unwilling to admit association with the human beings who had perpetrated these horrors. But their reluctance had a certain tinge of self-interest; for these were the citizens of Weimar, eager to plead their ignorance of the outrages.

In one of the signal moments of his long career and, indeed, of the entire war, an enraged General Patton refused to recognize that the Weimar citizens’ ignorance might be genuine or, if it was genuine, that it was somehow, in any moral sense, pardonable. He ordered the townspeople to bear witness to what their countrymen had done, and what they themselves had allowed to be done, in their name.

Margaret Bourke-White’s pictures of these terribly ordinary men and women appalled, frightened, ashamed amid the endless evidence of the terrors their compatriots had unleashed remain among the most unsettling she, or any photographer, ever made. Long before the political theorist Hannah Arendt introduced her notion of the “banality of evil” to the world in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Margaret Bourke-White had already captured its face, for all time, in her photographs of “good Germans” forced to confront their own complicity in a barbarous age.


—story by Ben Cosgrove


Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

LIFE Magazine

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

LIFE Magazine

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945

LIFE Magazine

LIFE With Picasso: Genius at Work and at Play, 1948-1967

There’s a reason or rather, there are innumerable reasons, in the form of paintings, sculptures, drawings, murals, pottery pieces and more why Pablo Picasso is the most famous artist of the past 100 years. For well over seven decades, right up until his death in 1973 at the age of 91, he created thousands of works, many of them instantly recognizable masterpieces, in a dizzying array of media and in seemingly countless styles that he himself either pioneered or perfected.

Of course, scores of towering 20th-century artists (Matisse, O’Keeffe, de Kooning, Chagall and on and on) enjoyed prolific, long-lived careers. But Picasso really is the face of 20th century art, the archetypal, self-reinventing creative force whose most renowned works Old Guitarist (1903), the gorgeous harlequin paintings of his Rose Period, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Guernica (1937) became defining, totemic emblems of the eras in which they were made.

Here, LIFE.com celebrates the Modernist master’s career with a series of pictures by photographer Gjon Mili made over roughly two decades in the middle part of the last century. Mili, a daring technical innovator himself, first visited Picasso at Vallauris, in the South of France, in 1949. When the photographer showed the artist some pictures he’d made of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates, leaping in the dark, the Spanish genius was intrigued and lent his own special twist to a series of portraits made with the same general technique. (See slides 10, 11 and 12.)

“Picasso” LIFE magazine reported at the time, “gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space.”

Mili would revisit Picasso again through the years, each time encountering yet another side of the man while also documenting the artwork that seemed to pour forth in an unending torrent from Picasso’s tireless imagination.

In 1967, for example, Mili returned to the South of France, where Picasso was living, in Mougins, with his second wife, Jacqueline Roque. Inside the artist’s workshop, he found a few small metal monkeys that Picasso had fashioned, seemingly on a whim (see slide #8). LIFE described Picasso’s technique in creating these wonderful, playful sculptures: “He made paper cut-outs, then had the patterns transferred to sheet metal which he folded into animals with lively personalities, turning his paper-thin material into surprisingly substantial works of art.”

Meeting Picasso could be an overwhelming experience, as LIFE’s managing editor George P. Hunt wrote in a 1968 special issue of the magazine devoted entirely to the artist:

To see Picasso for the first time is to see, under that bald brow and pate, two extraordinary deep-brown eyes. They are strangely big for the face. And they change as you watch him talk and listen, so noticeably changing with the reflections of what passes through his mind, perhaps racing back into experience to enrich the present. They brood. They make mischief, they are friendly, offended, hostile, arrogant, bored, then suddenly interested. Mostly, during our visit, they laughed.

Like so many other artists, however, Picasso was hardly a saint. His long-time muse, Françoise Gilot (pictured in this gallery in slides 14 and 16), left Picasso in 1953, and in 1964 she wrote a tell-all memoir of their time together. With its less-than-flattering tales of his incessant affairs and titanic insecurities, her book so angered Picasso that he spitefully refused to see their children, Claude and Paloma, ever again. (By 1970, Gilot had married another world-famous genius: American virologist Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine.)

While hardly providing an exhaustive portrait of one of the West’s seminal creative figures, the pictures in this gallery nevertheless offer an inkling of Picasso’s protean genius, and an intimate look at some of the places where that genius bore such singularly influential, and beautiful, fruit.


Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Colleciton/Shutterstock

Interior of Picasso's workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Interior of Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Interior of Picasso's workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Interior of Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso's workbench with notes, Mougins, France, 1967.

Picasso’s workbench with notes, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso in a room displaying his pottery work, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Pablo Picasso in a room displaying his pottery work, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

'Woman With Baby Carriage,' Picasso's workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

‘Woman With Baby Carriage,’ Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

'Woman With Baby Carriage,' Picasso's workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso's workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Picasso’s workshop at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso "draws with light," 1949.

Pablo Picasso draws with light, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso "draws with light," 1949.

Pablo Picasso draws with light, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso "draws with light," 1949.

Pablo Picasso draws with light, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Bronze replicas of Picasso's elongated wood statuettes sit on a table in his Mougins workshop; out the window, a sculpture of a dog (1967).

Bronze replicas of Picasso’s elongated wood statuettes sit on a table in his Mougins workshop; out the window, a sculpture of a dog (1967).

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Françoise Gilot, Picasso's mistress, with their young son, Claude. She holds drawings of the boy by Picasso. Vallauris, France, 1949.

Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress, with their young son, Claude. She holds drawings of the boy by Picasso. Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Pablo Picasso, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, France, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picasso's one-time muse, the artist Françoise Gilot, poses with a red gladiola, France, 1949.

Picasso’s one-time muse, the artist Françoise Gilot, poses with a red gladiola, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Inside Picasso’s home in Mougins, flowers and paintings surround two portraits taken by LIFE photographer David Douglas Duncan—one of the artist (left) and one of his wife, Jacqueline Roque (1927 – 1986), and their dog.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso, Côte d'Azur, 1949.

Pablo Picasso, Côte d’Azur, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso's authorization for Gjon Mili to photograph his artworks, 1967.

Pablo Picasso’s authorization for Gjon Mili to photograph his artworks, 1967.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso in minotaur mask, Côte d'Azur, 1949.

Pablo Picasso in minotaur mask, Côte d’Azur, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pablo Picasso in minotaur mask, Côte d'Azur, 1949.

Pablo Picasso in minotaur mask, Côte d’Azur, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Double-exposure portrait of Pablo Picasso in his studio, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Double-exposure portrait of Pablo Picasso in his studio, Vallauris, France, 1949.

Gjon Mili/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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