The 200+ pieces of the Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection – including works by Kandinsky, Nolde and Kirchner, among others – have been acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond through a gift-purchase agreement.
Author: Matthew Westphal
A SoCal Theatre Festival, Felled By The Recession, Is Resurrected In A New Location
“The four-day California International Theatre Festival will run Aug. 20-23 at various locations throughout the city of Calabasas. The festival is being organized by actress Linda Purl, who last year directed the Rubicon International Theatre Festival in Ventura. When financial cutbacks forced the cancellation of the Ventura festival for 2009, Purl approached the city of Calabasas, which agreed to partly fund the new festival.”
Richard Rogers’s British Museum Extension Thrown Out By Local Council
The planning committee of the Borough of Camden’s governing council has rejected, by a five-to-four vote, the Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners scheme for a £130 million, five-story modernist glass extension to the British Museum. “The rejection came despite the plans enjoying the support of English Heritage and being recommended for approval by Camden’s own planning officers.”
Did Freud Like Coney Island? Did Coney Island Like Freud?
“In September 1909, during his only trip to America, Sigmund Freud visited Coney Island” and “probably found it a little seedy.” {He did call America a “great mistake.”) Was the feeling mutual? Now an exhibition at the Coney Island Museum, “[c]reated by the media artist Zoe Beloff, … fills a room with drawings, photographs, artifacts and short films purportedly made by members of a previously unknown group of vocational Freudians founded, Ms. Beloff said, by a man named Albert Grass in the 1920s.”
Do We Need A National Black Arts Festival?
“It seems ludicrous to bring up Monet’s race, doesn’t it? Because it doesn’t really matter what his skin color was back in 1908, when, in 2009, we’re standing in front of a 42-foot canvas admiring those lilac and green brushstrokes.” So, asks Kristi York Wooten, “in the age of Obama, … do we need a National Black Arts Festival? Yes or no? If you’re wondering, my answer is ‘Yes’ (make that, ‘Hell, yes!’).”
Live Streaming, Video Screen Close-Ups, Post-Performance DVDs: Cleveland Int’l Piano Competition Goes High-Tech
Among “the many new bells and whistles in store for the 2009 contest,” which begins this week, are live video of the first two rounds via clevelandpiano.org, “CDs and DVDs available immediately after each performance,” audio of each concert via Instant Encore, and close-up video of each competitor on a screen above the stage
Best-Selling Novelist E. Lynn Harris, 54, Dies During Book Tour
“[He] clearly tapped a rich vein of reader interest with his racy and sometimes graphic tales of affluent, ambitious, powerful black men – athletes, businessmen, lawyers and the like – who nonetheless struggled with their attraction to both men and women. His books married the superficial glamour of jet-setting potboilers with an emotional candor that shed light on a segment of society that had received little attention: black men on the down low.”
Orange County Classical Orgs Hang On Through Recession
Following the November shutdown of Opera Pacific, the ‘other major classical music organizations in the area – including the Philharmonic Society, the Pacific Symphony, the Pacific Chorale and the Orange County Performing Arts Center, all non-profits – watched the wreckage burn and braced for the worst. … [Yet as] these groups end their most trying fiscal year ever, they remain standing and, if not quite without injury, ready for the next round.”
Bauhaus Returns To Berlin In Biggest-Ever Retrospective
“Once celebrated as Europe’s leading art and design school, by early 1933 the Bauhaus was reduced to camping in a hastily converted telephone factory on the outskirts of Berlin and subsisting on handouts from its director, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Denouncing it as ‘un-German,’ the newly elected Nazi government forced the school to close.” Now a major exhibition on the school has opened – next door to the old Gestapo headquarters.
Artist-Management Showdown Over Future Of Milwaukee’s Skylight
“Management of the Skylight Opera Theatre” – controversial managing (and now artistic) director Eric Dillner and a brand-new interim board chairman – “met with dissident artists Friday morning to open another chapter in the controversy that began with the firing of artistic director William Theisen on June 16.” None of the artists, including a number of company stars, “showed any inclination to return to the fold as long as Dillner is in place.”