Today’s edition features Harvard professor Steven Pinker. As an experimental psychologist, Steven has written extensively about violence – and for his choice from the gallery’s collection he has selected two of Pablo Picasso’s most gruesome depictions of man’s inhumanity, Charnel House and Guernica, now housed in Madrid.
Radio 3 presents a radiophonic art exhibition, as 30 of the world’s most creative minds choose a favourite work from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ep5 Pinker and Picasso.
“The Way I See It” is a co-production of the BBC and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Masterpieces of Painting surveys more than one hundred of the most exquisite and significant paintings displayed in the museum’s famed, daylight-suffused galleries. Vibrant full-color illustrations and engaging descriptions of these masterworks reveal their fascinating histories and cultural, social, and religious meanings. Sure to enchant and edify all art lovers, this book is a spellbinding tour through the history of Western painting.
Rooted in a passion for the Italian Renaissance as well as Dutch and Flemish Baroque works, the original collection of J. Paul Getty (1892–1976) has been transformed over four decades to include seminal pieces by celebrated masters such as Masaccio, Titian, Parmigianino, Cranach, El Greco, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Canaletto, Fragonard, Turner, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Ensor.
Born in Bologna in 1552, Lavinia Fontana is often considered to be the first professional woman painter; she was the first to be accepted into the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and supported her family throughout her life by gaining prestigious commissions for portraits in the city. This self-portrait has been interpreted as a wedding painting; it was completed in the year of Fontana’s marriage to Giovan Paolo Zappi, a fellow artist who became her agent and manager.
Sofonisba Anguissola was born into an aristocratic family from Cremona in around 1532; she travelled to Rome as a young woman, where her talent was recognised by Michelangelo, and in 1559 became lady-in-waiting to Elisabeth de Valois, Queen of Spain (and a keen amateur painter). She became a court painter to Philip II, and remained at court for some 15 years – at least until her marriage to a Sicilian nobleman after Elisabeth’s death in 1568, for which Philip II provided the dowry. Here she portrays Anna of Austria, who became Queen of Spain after Philip remarried in 1570.
Part of the Prado’s bicentenary celebrations, this exhibition looks at two of the most significant women artists of the Renaissance. Though born into very different social classes, both Lavinia Fontana and Sofonisba Anguissola rose to heights of prestige that had not previously been scaled by women painters – Fontana at the Vatican, and Anguissola at the Spanish court.
Warhol, with obvious self-deprecation, described his philosophy as spanning from A to B. As this exhibition decidedly proves, his thinking and artistic production ranged well beyond that, but his true genius lies in his ability to identify cultural patterns and to use repetition, distortion, and recycled images in a way that challenges our faith in images and questions the meaning of our cultural icons.
The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I examines the profound significance of European armor at the dawn of the Renaissance, through the lens of Emperor Maximilian I’s (1459–1519) remarkable life. On view only at The Met, The Last Knight coincides with the five-hundredth anniversary of Maximilian’s death, and is the most ambitious North American loan exhibition of European arms and armor in decades. Including 180 objects selected from some thirty public and private collections in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, The Last Knight will explore how Maximilian’s unparalleled passion for the trappings and ideals of knighthood served his boundless worldly ambitions, imaginative stratagems, and resolute efforts to forge a lasting personal and family legacy.
I became engrossed in Mitchell’s drawings while browsing the book—they’re vivid, intimate—but her handwritten lyrics and poems are just as revelatory. It’s hard not to think about art-making of any kind as an alchemical process, in which feelings and experiences go in and something else comes out. Whatever happens in between is mysterious, if not sublime: suddenly, an ordinary sensation is made beautiful. Our most profound writers do this work with ease, or at least appear to. Mitchell’s lyrics are never overworked or self-conscious, and she manages to be precise in her descriptions while remaining ambiguous about what’s right and what’s wrong; in her songs, the cures and the diseases are sometimes indistinguishable. 
Joni Mitchell, in the foreword to “
Not until July 16 did Edison feel that he had a device worth patenting. The application he signed that day specified multiple timpani that “reproduced” vocal inflections and a sibilant-sensitive diaphragm. But a laboratory visitor (spying for Bell) found the instrument more powerful than clear, with the word schism sounding more like kim.
Fradon’s elaborate drawings were generous masterpieces of compressed fun. One carefully detailed illustration, published in 1987, depicts a chauffeured convertible making its way up a manicured, tree-lined drive, toward an extravagant hilltop mansion. The self-satisfied owner, seated in the rear seat, says to his companion, “It’s my one indulgence.”
A Booklover’s Guide to New York, by Cleo Le-Tan, with drawings by Pierre Le-Tan (Rizzoli)
Boomers Daily 