Tag Archives: Arts & Literature

Profiles: The “Stylish” Legacy Of British Author Hugo Charteris (1922-1970)

From a New Criterion online article:

Hugo Charteris The LifelineAlan Ross, for forty years The London Magazine’s editor, found Charteris “one of the most original, quirky and shrewd explorers of the behaviour of the landed gentry . . . and at a time when prose was plain, his was idiosyncratically stylish.”

When Hugo Charteris’s first novel, the haunting A Share of the World, was published in 1953 to the praise of Rosamond Lehmann (who helped to get it published), Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, and Francis Wyndham (Charteris’s relation and consistent supporter), the author, just turned thirty-one, seemed set for lasting fame. It hasn’t worked that way in the The New Criterion March 2020almost five decades since his death of cancer in 1970, aged only forty-seven.

Nowadays, few people seem to know his name. This is true among not only the ever-growing majority who pay little attention to novels and novelists, but also the enlightened minority who do.

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Artists: Spanish Painter Joan Miró’s “Endlessly Creative” Printmaking

Excerpts from a Christie’s online article (Feb 28, 2020):

Joan Miró Christie's
Joan Miró

Like Pablo Picasso, his compatriot and peer, Miró had an unwavering commitment to printmaking. Also like Picasso, he created more than 2,000 works in the medium. It’s often said that Miró’s fondness for calligraphic lines — such a distinctive feature of his paintings — lent itself naturally to graphic work.

‘In terms of both the quality and quantity of his output, Joan Miró was one of the most important printmakers of the 20th century,’ says Murray Macaulay, Head of Prints at Christie’s in London.

Joan Miró Prints Christie'sThe son of a watchmaker, Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. He moved to Paris in the early 1920s and soon joined the Surrealist movement. He also befriended a host of avant-garde writers, such as Max Jacob, Tristan Tzara, Antonin Artaud, André Breton and Paul Eluard.

The first prints Miró ever made were illustrations for Tzara’s 1930 book of poems, L’arbre des Voyageurs. Literary sources would prove to be a constant inspiration for him, with notable examples including Alfred Jarry’s play, Ubu Roi; Stephen Spender’s poem, Fraternity; and the mystic, medieval text, Canticle of the Sun, by St Francis of Assisi.

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Exhibitions: Press Preview Of “Michelangelo – Mind Of The Master” (The Getty)

A film by Eric Minh Swenson.

Michelangelo was one of the most creative and influential artists in the history of Western art. This exhibition explores the full range of his work as a painter, sculptor, and architect through more than two dozen of his extraordinary drawings, including designs for celebrated projects such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Medici Chapel tombs, and The Last Judgment. These studies and sketches enable us to witness Michelangelo at work, and to experience firsthand his boundless creativity and his pioneering representation of the human form.

This exhibition has been organized by the Teylers Museum, Haarlem in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum and The Cleveland Museum of Art. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

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Tributes: CBS Interview From 1998 With Author Clive Cussler (1931-2020)

Novelist Clive Cussler, the man whose maritime alter-ego, adventurer Dirk Pitt, raised the Titanic and explored countless shipwrecks, has himself located more than 60 sunken ships and submarines. Cussler (who died on February 24, 2020, at age 88) talked to correspondent Anthony Mason in this interview that originally aired on “Sunday Morning” on January 25, 1998, in which he discussed his passion for vintage cars, and for going beneath the ocean’s surface to find the answers to naval history’s perplexing questions.

Surrealism: “Midnight In Paris, 1929″(Dalí Museum)

Excerpts from a Wall Street Journal online review (Feb 25, 2020):

Midnight in Paris Surrealism at the Crossroads 1929 Special Exhibit Dali MuseumMasson, a founding Surrealist, saw the movement as an immersion “into what the German romantics call the night side of things.” However, “towards 1930,” Masson wrote, “a formidable disaster appeared in its midst: the demagogy of the irrational.” “Midnight in Paris” touches on Surrealism’s highs and lows, its darkness, poetry, beauty and banalities, reminding viewers—at the heart of the Dalí Museum, no less—that the movement is much, much more than melting watches.

In 1920s Paris, Surrealist revolution and transgression were in the air, but not everyone agreed on how to make Surrealist works or what they should look like. “Midnight in Paris: Surrealism at the Crossroads, 1929,” an exhibition of 80 paintings, prints, sculptures, drawings, collages, photographs, films and documents at St. Petersburg’s Dalí Museum, proposes to examine Surrealism’s rich visual fabric, conflicts and rivalries during the movement’s heyday in the City of Light. Organized by Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou, and William Jeffett, chief curator of special exhibitions at the Dalí, it focuses on the moment just before Surrealism burst onto and began to dominate the world stage.

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Exhibitions: Inside Look At “Picasso And Paper”, Royal Academy Of Arts (Video)

Join Curator Ann Dumas for a view inside the ‘Picasso and Paper’ exhibition, which features works spanning the artist’s entire career. Can you guess which work the artist made when he was just nine years old?

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Inteviews: 67-Year Old British Author Hilary Mantel – “Extraordinarily Probable Fiction” (NYT)

Excerpts from a New York Times interview (Feb 24, 2020):

Hilary Mantel by Ellie Smith for the New York Times
“All that time I was listening to the past, and now I’m almost talking for a living,” Mantel said, “and it feels very frivolous and empty compared to the stillness that there used to be in every day.”Credit…Ellie Smith for The New York Times

“Hilary has reset the historical patterns through the way in which she’s reimagined the man,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford theology professor who published a new Cromwell biography in 2018. “It’s fiction which is extraordinarily probable, and it’s remarkably like the Cromwell I’d been excavating myself.”

Hilary Mantel has a recurring anxiety dream that takes place in a library. She finds a book with some scrap of historical information she’s been seeking, but when she tries to read it, the words disintegrate before her eyes.

“And then when you wake up,” she said, “you’ve got the rhythm of a sentence in your head, but you don’t know what the sentence was.”

To an unusual degree for a novelist, Mantel feels bound by facts. That approach has made her latest project — a nearly 1,800-page trilogy about the 16th-century lawyer and fixer Thomas Cromwell — more complicated than anything she’s undertaken in her four decades of writing.

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Motor Racing: “The Art Of Competition – Racing Posters” (RM Sotheby’s)

RM Sotheby's LogoIn motor racing, a win or podium finish is often immortalized with the reward of a trophy but to foster and create the enthusiasm leading up to the race and attract the masses of racing enthusiasts and fans to witness many of the world’s greatest historic motoring races, it was often the beautifully executed imagery that drove people to the tracks. 

Often a work of art in itself, historic motor racing posters manage to capture the very spirit of each race, venue, marques and their respective drivers best. What better way to celebrate heritage of motor racing then through this outstanding offering of nearly 60 original posters and artwork, all offered without reserve.

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New Exhibitions: “Giorgio De Chirico – Metaphysical Painting” At The Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (2020)

The exhibition Giorgio de Chirico. Metaphysical painting retraces the career and the artistic and philosophic influences of the artist Giorgio de Chirico from Munich to Turin, then to Paris where he discovered the artistic avant-garde of his era, and lastly Ferrare. The connections between the painter – discovered by Apollinaire and Giorgio de Chirico Il Ritornante 1917-1918subsequently backed by the art dealer Paul Guillaume – and the Parisian cultural and literary circles will be highlighted as never before.

Born in Greece and trained in the fount of classical culture and late German Romanticism, de Chirico developed the foundations of a new artistic exploration alongside his younger brother Alberto Savinio. A student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as of 1908, he discovered the thinking of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as well as the works of Böcklin and Klinger. After travelling to Milan then Florence, it was in France, and more specifically Paris, as of autumn 1911, that he established his unique visual vocabulary through contact with the modernist artistic revolutions. He was quickly noticed by numerous artistic celebrities of the time, among whom Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Raynal, André Salmon, André Breton, Paul Éluard and Jean Paulhan were the first to take an interest in and promote his work.

Musée de l'Orangerie logoThe exhibition thus comes into its own at the Musée de l’Orangerie alongside the figure of Paul Guillaume, the first art dealer to work with Giorgio de Chirico. On his return to Italy in 1915, he and his brother Savinio were sent to Ferrare for military reasons, where he continued his artistic research. This period (June 1915-December 1918) provided an opportunity for painters Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi to get to know the two brothers, thus resulting in the creation of what was later to be known as the “metaphysical movement” which brings the exhibition to a close.

Exhibition organised by the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg

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Art Videos: “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Century Of American Art” (Sotheby’s)

Sotheby's AuctionsIn the final years of Georgia O’Keeffe’s nearly century-long life, she employed and befriended the young sculptor Juan Hamilton. The two would become inseparable, and upon her death in 1986, Hamilton inherited fine art and personal affects from the artist’s estate, including rarely seen pieces from the estate of O’Keeffe’s late husband, Joseph Stieglitz.

This March, Sotheby’s is honored to present these works in Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Juan Hamilton: Passage, a dedicated auction in New York on 5 March 2020. In this episode of Expert Voices, Head of American Art Kayla Carlsen explores the stories behind this remarkable collection while highlighting exceptional works, including O’Keeffe’s Nature Forms – Gaspé, Stieglitz’s Hand and Wheel and Hamilton’s Untitled (Red Form).

(New York | 5 March 2020)