Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Tributes: Legendary Actor Kirk Douglas Dies At 103

Kirk Douglas Dies at 103 on February 5, 2020“It is with tremendous sadness that my brothers and I announce that Kirk Douglas left us today at the age of 103. To the world he was a legend, an actor from the golden age of movies who lived well into his golden years, a humanitarian whose commitment to justice and the causes he believed in set a standard for all of us to aspire to.

But to me and my brothers Joel and Peter he was simply Dad, to Catherine, a wonderful father-in-law, to his grandchildren and great grandchild their loving grandfather, and to his wife Anne, a wonderful husband.

Kirk’s life was well lived, and he leaves a legacy in film that will endure for generations to come, and a history as a renowned philanthropist who worked to aid the public and bring peace to the planet.

Let me end with the words I told him on his last birthday and which will always remain true. Dad- I love you so much and I am so proud to be your son.”

Michael Douglas on Instagram, February 5, 2020

 

Video Profiles: 66-Year Old Author & Director Jan Eliasberg (“Hannah’s War”)

Hannah's War by Jan Eliasberg March 3 2020 releaseA “mesmerizing” re-imagination of the final months of World War II (Kate Quinn, author of The Alice Network), Hannah’s War is an unforgettable love story about an exceptional woman and the dangerous power of her greatest discovery.
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Berlin, 1938.  Groundbreaking physicist Dr. Hannah Weiss is on the verge of the greatest discovery of the 20th century: splitting the atom. She understands that the energy released by her discovery can power entire cities or destroy them. Hannah believes the weapon’s creation will secure an end to future wars, but as a Jewish woman living under the harsh rule of the Third Reich, her research is belittled, overlooked, and eventually stolen by her German colleagues. Faced with an impossible choice, Hannah must decide what she is willing to sacrifice in pursuit of science’s greatest achievement.

New Mexico, 1945. Returning wounded and battered from the liberation of Paris, Major Jack Delaney arrives in the New Mexican desert with a mission: to catch a spy. Someone in the top-secret nuclear lab at Los Alamos has been leaking encoded equations to Hitler’s scientists. Chief among Jack’s suspects is the brilliant and mysterious Hannah Weiss, an exiled physicist lending her talent to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mission. All signs point to Hannah as the traitor, but over three days of interrogation that separate her lies from the truth, Jack will realize they have more in common than either one bargained for.
Hannah’s War is a thrilling wartime story of loyalty, truth, and the unforeseeable fallout of a single choice.

Profiles: How The 1960’s Inspired Painter David Hockney, Now 82 (Video)

David Hockney A Bigger Splash Tate BritainDavid Hockney, (born 9 July 1937) is a British 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.

Hockney has owned a home and studio in Bridlington and London, and two residences in California, where he has lived on and off since 1964: one in the Hollywood Hills, one in Malibu, and an office and archives on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, California. (From Tate Museum Biography)

Painted in Los Angeles in 1966, David Hockney’s ‘The Splash’ is as recognizableThe  as Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’, Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ and Munch’s ‘The Scream’. In this episode of Expert Voices, discover how the liberal lifestyle in Los Angeles inspired one of the most iconic images of the 20th century and hear Hockney himself explain how he immortalised his split-second swimming pool moment on canvas.

Auctions: “Sotheby’s Impressionist, Modern & Surrealist Art Sale” (Video)

We are LIVE from our Impressionist, Modern & Surrealist Art Evening Sale in London. Watch as works by Van Gogh, Duchamp, Pissarro, Signac, Kirchner, Miro, Giacometti, Léger, Chagall and Picabia go under the hammer!

Website:  https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/…

New Exhibitions: “El Greco – Ambition And Defiance” (Art Institute Of Chicago)

March 7 – June 21, 2020

This major exhibition charts the career of the artist known simply as El Greco. Over 57 works from across the world trace not only the development of his distinctive style but also the astounding ambition that drove him to relentlessly pursue success.

 

Portrait of Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino El Greco 1609Born in Crete as Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541–1614), El Greco trained in the traditional manner of Byzantine icon painting. He moved to Venice in 1567 to learn a new artistic approach, absorbing developments in Venetian Renaissance painting through the lens of artists such as Titian and Tintoretto. The works El Greco painted during his time in Venice, however, reveal both his embrace of and struggles to fully adapt to this manner of painting.

Art Institute of Chicago logoFollowing this transformative period, El Greco went to Rome, probably in an attempt to attract patronage within the papal circle. There his acceptance into the elevated circle of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese brought a close association with the painter Giulio Clovio and the erudite historian and collector Fulvio Orsini. El Greco’s portraits, allegories, and religious paintings between 1570 and 1577 reflect these relationships as well as his complicated engagement with Michelangelo and other artistic luminaries of the 16th century.

Website

Exhibitions: 88-Year Old Gerhard Richter “Painting After All” – Landscape As A Site Of Memory (The Met)

Gerhard Richter Painting After All March 2020Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post–Second World War Germany, in both broad and very personal terms.

This handsomely designed book features approximately 100 of his key canvases, from photo paintings created in the early 1960s to portraits and later large-scale abstract series, as well as select works in glass.

Gerhard Richter Paintings Facebook

Metropolitan Museum Of ArtNew essays by eminent scholars address a variety of themes: Sheena Wagstaff evaluates the conceptual import of the artist’s technique; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discusses the poignant Birkenau paintings (2014); Peter Geimer explores the artist’s enduring interest in photographic imagery; Briony Fer looks at Richter’s family pictures against traditional painting genres and conventions; Brinda Kumar investigates the artist’s engagement with landscape as a site of memory; André Rottmann considers the impact of randomization and chance on Richter’s abstract works; and Hal Foster examines the glass and mirror works. As this book demonstrates, Richter’s rich and varied oeuvre is a testament to the continued relevance of painting in contemporary art.

Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden on 9th February 1932, the first child of Horst and Hildegard Richter. A daughter, Gisela, followed four years later. They were in many respects an average middle-class family: Horst worked as a teacher at a secondary school in Dresden and Hildegard was a bookseller who liked to play the piano.1 In an interview with Robert Storr, Richter described his early family life as “simple, orderly, structured – mother playing the piano and father earning money.”2

In 1935, Horst accepted a teaching position at a school in Reichenau, a town which today is known as Bogatynia in Poland, at the time located in the German province Saxony. Settling in Reichenau was a drastic change for the family, which was accustomed to the vivid cultural life of the larger Dresden.3 Yet, it was also a move which would keep the family largely safe from the coming war. In the late 1930s Horst was conscripted into the German army, captured by Allied forces and detained as a prisoner of war until Germany’s defeat. In 1946, he was released and returned to his family, who had again relocated, this time to Waltersdorf, a village on the Czech border.

Video Interviews: 55-Year Old Actor Mike Wolfe Of “American Pickers” (CBS)

An archaeologist of antiques, Mike Wolfe has taken viewers on a nationwide scavenger hunt for historic finds via his History Channel series, “American Pickers.”

But he’s not just about buying up the past; he’s also helping preserve it, by restoring old Main Street buildings in Le Claire, Iowa, and elsewhere. Lee Cowan talked with Wolfe about his passion for relics of history.

 

Podcasts: Playwright David Rabe Reads Philip Roth (New Yorker)

New Yorker FictionDavid Rabe joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Other Side of the Street,” by John Updike, which appeared in a 1991 issue of the magazine. 

Playwright David Rabe
Playwright David Rabe

Rabe, a fiction writer, playwright, and screenwriter, is the author of more than a dozen plays, including the Tony Award-winning “Sticks and Bones,” “In the Boom Boom Room,” and “Hurlyburly.” He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theatre Award as a Master American Dramatist in 2014. His novels include “Recital of the Dog” and “Girl by the Road at Night.” 

Website

 

Photographers: 60-Year Old Hélène Binet’s “Architectural Pathos”

“Hélène Binet has emerged as one of the leading architectural photographers in the world. Every time Hélène Binet takes a photograph, she exposes architecture’s achievements, strength, pathos and fragility.” 

Hélène Binet Swiss-French Photographer 1959 - Present

Hélène Binet was born in 1959 in Sorengo and is of both Swiss and French background. She currently lives in London with her husband Raoul Bunschoten and their two children, Izaak and Saskia. She studied photography at the Instituto Europeo di Design in Rome, where she grew up, and soon developed an interest in architetural photography.

Hélène Binet Swiss-French Photographer 1959 - Present
Hélène Binet

Over a period of twenty-five years Hélène Binet has photographed both contemporary and historical architecture. Her list of clients include architects Raoul Bunschoten, Caruso St John, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Studio Mumbai, Peter Zumthor and many others. While following the work of contemporary architects – often from construction through completion – Hélène Binet has also photographed the works of past architects as Alvar Aalto, Geoffrey Bawa, Le Corbusier, Sverre Fehn, John Hejduk, Sigurd Lewerentz, Andrea Palladio and Dimitris Pikionis. More recently, Hélène Binet has started to direct her attention to landscape photography, wherein she transposes key concerns of her architectural photography. Hélène Binet’s work has been published in a wide range of books, and is shown in both national and international exhibitions.

Hélène Binet is an advocate of analogue photography and therefore she exclusively works with film.

Website

New Art Books: “Dalí – The Paintings” (March 2020)

Dalí. The Paintings by Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret Taschen March 2020The study is divided into two parts: the first examines Dalí’s beginnings as an unknown artist. We witness how the young Dalí deployed all the isms―Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, Fauvism, Purism and Futurism―with playful mastery, and how he would borrow from prevailing trends before ridiculing and abandoning them. The second part unveils the conclusions of Dalí’s lifelong inquiries, as well as the great legacy he left in works such as Tuna Fishing (1966/67) or Hallucinogenic Toreador (1970). It includes previously unpublished homages to Velázquez or Michelangelo, painted to the same end as the variations on past masters done by his contemporary, Picasso.

At the age of six, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) wanted to be a cook. At the age of seven, he wanted to be Napoleon. “Since then,” he later said, “my ambition has steadily grown, and my megalomania with it. Now I want only to be Salvador Dalí, I have no greater wish.” Throughout his life, Dalí was out to become Dalí: that is, one of the most significant artists and eccentrics of the 20th century.

Dalí

 

This weighty volume is the most complete study of Dalí’s painted works ever published. After years of research, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret located painted works by the master that had been inaccessible for years―so many, in fact, that almost half the featured illustrations appear in public for the first time in this book.

More than a catalogue raisonné, this book contextualizes Dalí’s oeuvre and its meanings by examining contemporary documents, from writings and drawings to material from other facets of his work, including ballet, cinema, fashion, advertising, and objets d’art. Without these crutches to support analysis, the paintings would simply be a series of many images.

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