Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Inside Views: The ‘Louvre Museum’ Masterpieces Undergo Renovation

After months of closure since the beginning of the health crisis and only a reopening for a few short months between two confinements last summer, the #Louvre​ lost 72% of attendance by 2020. But despite the absence of visitors, the heart of the #museum​ has not completely stopped beating. The Louvre is even taking advantage of this period to carry out #renovations​.

Quotations: ‘Albert Camus, 1913-1960’ (Video)

Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44 in 1957, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel. Camus was born in Algeria to French Pieds Noirs parents. 

Powerful quotations from the great French philosopher Albert Camus. Narrated by Chris Lines. Song: Quiet by Eleven Tales

Video Trailer: ‘Exploring Hemingway’ – A Film By Ken Burns & Lynn Novick (PBS)

Get an inside look at Hemingway and discover why Ken Burns and Lynn Novick chose to explore the complex and iconic writer. Hemingway premieres April 5, 2021 on PBS.

Illustrations: ‘The New Yorker Cover’ (1925-2020)

For The New Yorker’s ninety-sixth anniversary, Sergio García Sánchez draws the magazine’s trademark dandy, Eustace Tilley, masked and with a vaccine dose in hand. We also see scenes of pandemic life, and the contours of a city waiting to reëmerge.

“With masks, social distancing, and vaccines, we’ll slowly recover life in the city,” Sánchez told us. “The chance encounters with people of all cultures; the thrill of eating outside at any hour. The city is a container for so many stories, and soon they’ll be out in the open again.”

This is Sánchez’s début cover, but he isn’t the first to reimagine our mascot. When Rea Irvin, the magazine’s inaugural art editor, drew a Regency dandy for the first issue, in February, 1925, he likely wanted readers to laugh—this self-serious gentleman was a caricature of the dour, bourgeois old guard. A year later, to celebrate The New Yorker still being afloat, Irvin and the magazine’s editor, Harold Ross, decided to republish the cover, establishing an anniversary tradition that endures to this day. Tilley, of course, has changed with the times, and we’ve collected, below, a few of the ways in which artists have remade him.

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Gallery Views: ‘Normandy’ – The Lockdown Paintings Of David Hockney In Paris

While museums in France are shut due to Covid-19 restrictions, private galleries are allowed to remain open and have become a haven for art enthusiasts. British artist David Hockney’s “Ma Normandie” (“My Normandy) show, which opened at a Paris gallery last year, has been the sensation of the season.

David Hockney, OM, CH, RA is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.

Cocktails With A Curator: ‘Piero Della Francesca’

In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon explores Piero della Francesca’s “St. John the Evangelist,” one of the few major works by the Renaissance artist in the United States. This striking panel was originally part of a polyptych commissioned for the high altar of Sant’Agostino in Piero’s hometown of Borgo San Sepolcro. The polyptych was probably dismembered in the mid-16th century, less than one hundred years after it was made, and many fragments are now lost. Enjoy this week’s program with a bourbon-powered Saint cocktail or a refreshing Grapefruit Citrus mocktail.SHOW LESS

International Art: ‘Apollo Magazine’ (February 2021)

FEATURES | Matthew P. Canepa on the art of ancient Iran; Lisa Yuskavage interviewed by Jonathan GriffinRosamund Bartlett on how Russia fell for French impressionism; Will Wiles offers up an elegy for the VHS

REVIEWS | Tim Smith-Laing on drawings of Dante’s Divine ComedyRobert Hanks on an exhibition about touch at the Fitzwilliam; Diana Evans on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain; Kathryn Murphy on the enigmas of Aby Warburg’s image atlas; Isabelle Kent on the life of Goya; Adriano Aymonino on the history of marble; Thomas Marks on the art of TV chefs

PLUS | Nicholas PennyVictoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh on blockbuster shows after CovidBen Street rifles through his postcards of paintings; Andrew Russeth moves to Seoul and heads straight to a museumEdwin Heathcote defends the modern architectural frieze; Robert O’Byrne on the fickleness of taste

Cocktails With A Curator: ‘El Greco’s “Vincenzo Anastagi”‘ (Frick Video)

In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” journey to sixteenth-century Rome with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon as he discusses El Greco’s “Vincenzo Anastagi,” one of three important paintings by the Renaissance artist in the Frick’s collection. Born in Crete, El Greco spent a formative seven years in Rome, where he painted this rare, full-length portrait of a minor aristocrat from Perugia then serving as Sergeant Major of Castel Sant’Angelo. Look closely at this unusual painting while sipping an Ouzo Lemonade, which gets its kick from the anise-flavored spirit popular in the artist’s birthplace.

To view this painting in detail, please visit our website: https://www.frick.org/anastagielgreco