ABC News In-depth (May 29, 2023) – On Easter Saturday, 95-year-old artist John Olsen made the final touches to four paintings and feeling unwell, laid down his paintbrush for the last time. A stroke had finally felled the old master.
On the day of his state funeral, Australian Story revisits the Olsens, a family forged by their father’s passion and drive for painting. As John became a darling of the art world in the 60s and 70s, his obsessive focus on dedication to his work often cast a long shadow on those around him.
Months after his death, the Vivid festival of light will pay tribute to John Olsen, projecting his art onto the “greatest blank canvas on earth” — the sails of the Sydney Opera House. His children, Tim and Louise Olsen, will be there to marvel at his achievements and celebrate the life that has shaped them.
The New Yorker – June 5, 2023 issue: Masha Titova’s “The Music of Art”. The magazine publishes its first synesthetic, collaborative, and interactive cover. By Françoise Mouly.
The pop singer’s trial for copyright infringement of Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend’s “Let’s Get It On” highlights how hard it is to draw the property lines of pop.
When the critic Joanna Biggs was thirty-two, her mother, still in her fifties, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Everything wobbled,” she recalls. Biggs was married but not sure she wanted to be, suddenly distrustful of the neat, conventional course—marriage, kids, burbs—plotted out since she met her husband, at nineteen. It was as though the disease’s rending of a maternal bond had severed her contract with the prescribed feminine itinerary. Soon enough, she and her husband were seeing other people; then he moved out, and she began making pilgrimages to visit Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.
Monday, May 29, 2023: Monocle’s Istanbul correspondent, Hannah Lucinda Smith, unpacks the hard nationalism dominating Turkish politics as provisional results from the run-off election come in.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has given few indications that he intends to change course at home, where he faces a looming economic crisis, or in foreign policy, where he has vexed Western allies.
The deal to raise the debt ceiling bolsters President Biden’s argument that he is committed to bipartisanship, but it comes at the cost of rankling many in his own party.
The mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh led to arguably the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to protect Jewish institutions in America.
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia looks like a commander in absentia, treating the war in Ukraine as unfortunate but distant. His options have narrowed, but he is still betting on outlasting his foes.
Once a hunting lodge for the Bourbon monarchs, the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples is now home to one of the world’s most significant collections of Italian painting. This exhibition at the Musée Louvre in Paris (7 June–8 January 2024) brings more than 60 masterpieces from the museum to France. Highlights of the paintings on view include Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Young Girl (or Antea) (1524–27) and Guido Reni’s Atalanta and Hippomenes (1620–25).
Wanderlust Travel Videos (May 28, 2023) – The part of our village that most (foreign) tourists will see when they visit us is called: ”Giethoorn village”. This part of our village contains hand-dug canals and all small islands which are inter connected by 176 bridges to the mainland. In fact, on all these islands, there are houses (farmhouses) which are built in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A walking/cycling path named: ‘Binnenpad’ runs right trough this area. Tourist shops and restaurants (which are well represented) are interspersed with typical Dutch houses with thatched roofs.
Kirsten Dirksen Films (May 28, 2023) – Caspar Schols built his first shapeshifting house in his mother’s backyard as her writing cabin that, by sliding a room-on-rails, could convert into a place to sleep under the stars.
He has since perfected his expandable home with 10 prototypes: his most recent model is robust enough to serve as a primary residence and has a bathtub and guest bed hidden in the floor. The house can be opened up – on sunny days, for nature-watching or just to sleep directly under the stars – with just a push.
The entire walls and ceiling of the house move, but anyone can propel this 3,000 kilograms (over 6000 pounds) room-on-rails because Schols created a system that is “super low friction”. To create a well-insulated home that has walls that move, Schols and his team designed the rails with wind labyrinths to trap the air and added brushes to any moving surface to prevent airflow.
DW Documentary (May 28, 2023) – NATO members are viewing Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine with grave concern, especially those on the alliance’s eastern flank. They’re joining forces with German troops right on the Russian border.
Germany is the leading or “framework nation” in what is called the NATO Battle Group Lithuania. With its alliance partners, German forces are serving “on the front line” – right on the Russian border. They’re guarding NATO’s northeast flank against any possible incursion and ensuring the Baltic states are supported during times of crisis and, if necessary, conflict.
In the spring of 2023, Germany’s military is in Rukla and Pabrade, among other places, for maneuvers. There it is practicing with NATO partners from Croatia, the Czechia and the Netherlands to handle a Russian attack on the Baltic states. In full agreement with the NATO motto “train as you fight,” practice and training are closely-oriented to a genuine threat.
The leader of the German contingent, Colonel Wolfgang Schmidt, points out the special historic significance and perceived peril in the Baltic. He says, “From historical experience, of course the perception of possible aggression – be it Russian or Belarusian – is far more intense here than in the Federal Republic of Germany.” He adds that not everyone has grasped the defense of “all that we stand for – modernity, freedom of opinion and speech and everything we describe as Western values begins here.” For a year, Schmidt says, the Ukraine has been fighting far more than their Russian attackers – they’re defending “our freedom,” too. This report follows a major exercise called “Griffin Lightning.” A platoon commander with the Dutch Armed Forces emphasizes the importance of maneuvers and cooperation among the multinational forces.
First Lieutenant Bent S. says, “We’re taking part in different exercises. Last week we were with the Norwegians. In a few weeks, the whole Battle Group will come together and we’ll train again with the Norwegians, Germans, Czechs and Croats. Nobody wants war, but if it really comes to it, we’ll be ready.” This documentary provides an exclusive look at NATO maneuvers in Lithuania, which are unfolding closer than ever before to a genuine military threat.
frevonyc presents ‘Altered Lands’, the first show by British artist Jake Wood-Evans on US soil, an exhibition curated by one of Europe’s most exciting independent galleries, Unit London.
Jake Wood-Evans presents a conscious shift from figure towards landscape. With Altered Lands Wood-Evans explores references from eighteenth and nineteenth-century English artists, examining how these artworks communicate notions of transience, nostalgia, and intangibility through a contemporary lens.
With a focus on John Constable, Benjamin Williams Leader, and the overlooked landscape works of Gainsborough, Wood-Evans continues to unravel the thread that weaves through his entire practice, using the familiar as a tool to uncover something new.
Unit London is one of London’s leading independent, artist-led galleries. It was founded in 2013 by two young British artists, Joe Kennedy, and Jonny Burt. They had a vision of creating a gallery that champions and supports the world’s most gifted emerging artists in a manner that is open, inclusive, and accessible.
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