“[The exhibition] brought in 1,071,840 visitors over the four months it was on view. This figure easily smashed its previous attendance record of 540,000 visitors, which was held by a 2018 Eugène Delacroix retrospective.” – ARTnews
Author: Matthew Westphal
Langston Hughes, Spanish Civil War Correspondent
“The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper sent him abroad to write ‘trench-coat prose’ about black Americans volunteering in the International Brigades. … Hughes’s 22 articles covered an angle no one else in the world was focused on as companies such as the Abraham Lincoln and Washington Brigades were not only integrated but featured Negro commanders leading white troops.” – Literary Hub
Merce in Three Dimensions
Alla Kovgan’s new film Cunningham not only shoots its dancers in three dimensions, but collages historic, two-dimensional black-and-white images in smaller sizes on the screen, often overlaid with print. This practice allows us to choose (or stumble upon) those visions most meaningful to us, or to accept multiplicity and not worry about what we didn’t see. – Deborah Jowitt
Furtwängler in Wartime
Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned Wilhelm Furtwängler’s wartime broadcasts with the Berlin Philharmonic. They should. – Joseph Horowitz
She was just a Miller’s daughter: ENO revives a middle-period Verdi
The English National Opera is having a tough old time, but the company is still capable of both daring and successful ventures, such as the new Luisa Miller, a Verdi rarity last staged in London in 1858. – Paul Levy
When Filmmakers Make Films In Languages They Don’t Speak Well
“It is a truth universally acknowledged in world cinema that a celebrated auteur, making their first film outside their native tongue, must be preparing a dud.” But is it actually true? Well, there are a few success stories such as Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth and Alps in Greek, then The Lobster and Oscar-winner The Favourite in English), but only a few. – The Guardian
Which Language Is Most Difficult To Lipread?
“This last question, though seemingly simple, resists every attempt to answer it. Every theory runs into brick walls of evidence, the research is limited, and even the basic understanding of what lipreading is, how effective it is, and how it works is laden with conflicting points of view.” – Atlas Obscura
Even Great Journalism Isn’t Enough To Fully Understand #MeToo. We Need Fiction.
“It’s a truism to say our society doesn’t do well when faced with competing stories about what happened; that’s what ‘he said/she said’ has become a shorthand for. … To overcome that reflex, … we need to practice on something with lower stakes than the literal lives of accusers and accused. We need Me Too fiction and metatexts that help us understand this problem outside of a news cycle. And recently, we’ve been getting them.” – Slate
It’s Time To Retire ‘West Side Story’ And Its Stereotypes, Argues Puerto Rican Critic
Carina del Valle Schorske: “If this musical is still our narrative ghetto, then the least we can do is make noise about what it feels like to live in it. In 2020, it feels exhausting.” – The New York Times
Silent-Film Superstar ‘Baby Peggy’, Diana Serra Cary, Dead At 101
“Born Peggy-Jean Montgomery, she became one of the country’s youngest self-made millionaires by age 4, then suffered a devastating reversal of fortune and fame in her adolescence. In adulthood, she rebounded with a new name, Diana Serra Cary, and became a respected author of books on Hollywood film history. In her autumnal years, at screenings of her few extant films, she found herself embraced as a movie pioneer.” – The Washington Post