Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Los Angeles Views: Getty Center & Museum Reopens

Welcome back to the Getty Center. There’s something for everyone! Come enjoy art, modern design, unique gardens, and spectacular city views.

The Getty Center, in Los Angeles, California, is a campus of the Getty Museum and other programs of the Getty Trust. The $1.3 billion Center opened to the public on December 16, 1997 and is well known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles. 

Shakespeare: ‘Hamnet’ Author Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” one of last year’s most widely acclaimed novels, imagines the life of William Shakespeare, his wife, Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, and the couple’s son Hamnet, who died at 11 years old in 1596.

On this week’s podcast, O’Farrell says she always planned for the novel to have the ensemble cast it does, but that her deepest inspiration was to capture a sense of the young boy at its center.

“The engine behind the book for me was always the fact that I think Hamnet has been overlooked and underwritten by history,” she says. “I think he’s been consigned to a literary footnote. And I believe, quite strongly, that without him — without his tragically short life — we wouldn’t have the play ‘Hamlet.’ We probably wouldn’t have ‘Twelfth Night.’ As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”

Artwork: ‘Flowers In A Terracotta Vase’ By Jan Van Huysum (1682-1749)

Lucy Chiswell, the Dorset Curatorial Fellow, explores Van Huysum’s ‘Flowers in a Terracotta Vase’ in ten minutes.

Jan van Huysum, also spelled Huijsum (15 April 1682 – 8 February 1749), was a Dutch painter.

Museum Tours: The Louvre Reopens To Visitors (Video)

Date of Video: May 19, 2021

The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum, is the world’s largest art museum and a historic monument in Paris, France, and is best known for being the home of the Mona Lisa. A central landmark of the city, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city’s 1st arrondissement.

Poems: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” As Drawn By Sergio Garcia Sanchez

Sergio García Sánchez is a cartoonist, illustrator and professor at the University of Granada, as well as co-author of the graphic novel “Lost in NYC: A Subway Adventure.”

Visualizing Robert Frost’s Seminal Poem
The illustrator Sergio Garcia Sanchez embarks on the road not taken.

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Artworks: Andy Warhol’s ‘Marilyn Monroe’ Of 1962

Andy Warhol created his first painting of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, in the wake of the American movie star’s sudden death at the age of 36. Tragedy, and its portrayal in modern mass media, fascinated Warhol; at the time of Monroe’s death, the artist was enmeshed in his Death and Disaster series, an exploration of gruesome images found in newspapers and magazines. Monroe’s death pushed the narrative of tragedy and celebrity one step further, and in it Warhol found inspiration for arguably the most important suite in his oeuvre. Dating from 1967, Marilyn Monroe is a complete portfolio of ten screen prints, each produced in a different combination of intense, flat colors. This portfolio, which comes from the estate of Barbara Spiegel Linhart, who purchased the works from David Whitney in 1969, is the best possible example of this important set of screenprints, and is a highlight of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale this May.

Art: ‘Jeune Fille en Bleu’ By Amedeo Modigliani (1919)

Painted in 1919 after the artist fled Paris for the south of France, ‘Jeune Fille en Bleu’ is one of the finest works from the penultimate year of Amedeo Modigliani’s life. In this episode of Expert Voices, Sotheby’s Senior Specialist Simon Stock explains how the search for new subjects in this new location saw Modigliani depicting informal models found in local bars and shops. This portrait captures the serenity of the young girl sitter and we see all the recognisable traits of Modigliani’s late work: the simplified human form, the elongated neck and the vacant eyes.

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian Jewish painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by a surreal elongation of faces, necks, and figures that were not received well during his lifetime, but later became much sought-after.

Exhibit View: ‘Mesopotamia – Civilization Begins’, The Getty Villa, Los Angeles

Mesopotamia—the land “between the rivers” in modern-day Iraq—was home to the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Among their many achievements are the creation of the earliest known script (cuneiform), the formation of the first cities, the development of advanced astronomical and mathematical knowledge, and spectacular artistic and literary accomplishments. The exhibition covers three millennia, from the first cities in about 3200 BC to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Babylon in 331 BC.

Exhibition organized by the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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INTERNATIONAL ART: ‘APOLLO MAGAZINE – MAY 2021’

INSIDE THE ISSUE
 
FEATURES | Michael Rakowitz interviewed by Daniel TrillingJon Day on smell and the visual arts; Susan Moore catches up with art collector and former Louvre director Pierre Rosenberg; Oliver Cox on country-house exhibitions in museums; Debika Ray assesses Narendra Modi’s architectural shake-up of New Delhi
REVIEWS | Kitty Hauser on new Australian art in Sydney; Matt Stromberg evaluates LACMA’s experimental rehang; Tom Fleming on the life of John Craxton; Clare Bucknell on a study of women’s self-portraits; Glenn Adamson on a history of Western ceramics; Mark Francis on Richard Hamilton, Pop pioneer
 
MARKET | Stephen OngpinThomas Dane and François Chantala consider the future of London’s galleries and fairs; and the latest art market columns from Susan MooreEmma Crichton-Miller and Samuel Reilly
 
PLUS | Xavier F. Salomon finds a lost Valadier masterpiece in Nicaragua; Isabella Smith visits imperial China through her TV screen; Samuel Reilly on Joan Eardley in GlasgowCharles Holland on the post-war buildings of Raymond Erith; Thomas Marks on Daniel Spoerri’s tableaux of tables; and Robert O’Byrne picks over Apollo’s wartime diet

Great Movie Themes: ‘How The West Was Won’ (1962)

How the West Was Won is a 1962 American  epic  Western  adventure film directed by Henry Hathaway (who directs three out of the five chapters involving the same family), John Ford, and George Marshall, produced by Bernard Smith, written by James R. Webb, and narrated by Spencer Tracy. Originally filmed in true three-lens Cinerama with the according three-panel panorama projected onto an enormous curved screen, the film stars an ensemble cast consisting of (in alphabetical order) Carroll BakerLee J. CobbHenry FondaCarolyn JonesKarl MaldenGregory PeckGeorge PeppardRobert PrestonDebbie ReynoldsJames StewartEli WallachJohn Wayne, and Richard Widmark. The supporting cast features Brigid BazlenWalter BrennanDavid BrianKen CurtisAndy DevineJack LambertRaymond Massey as Abraham LincolnAgnes MooreheadHarry Morgan as Ulysses S. GrantThelma RitterMickey ShaughnessyHarry Dean StantonRuss Tamblyn and Lee Van Cleef.

How the West Was Won is widely considered one of Hollywood‘s greatest epics.[1] The film received widespread critical acclaim and was a box office success, grossing $50 million on a budget of $15 million.[2] At the 36th Academy Awards, it earned eight nominations, including Best Picture, and won three, for Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the ScreenBest Sound, and Best Film Editing. In 1997, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.