“The painter, known for his wry, carefully composed investigations into the nature of art making — say, analyzing every shade of paint used in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, then rendering those shades in abstraction — was also profoundly dedicated to his students as a professor of painting and drawing at UCLA, where he taught for more than three decades.” – Los Angeles Times
Author: Matthew Westphal
New York City Told Its Museums To Get More Diverse Or Lose Funding. Here Are What Museums Are Doing And How The City Will Enforce The Mandate.
“Directions on how institutions should incorporate these objectives were left intentionally vague. Rather than issuing blanket checklists, the city wanted individual institutions to formulate plans that made sense for their respective audiences and agendas.” Reporters Taylor Dafoe and Brian Boucher talk to leaders at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Queens Museum, and Brooklyn Children’s Museum about how they’re responding to the city’s directive. – Artnet
James Levine And Metropolitan Opera Settle Their Lawsuits Against Each Other
“The settlement brought the court battle to a close just as it threatened to air more dirty laundry about both Mr. Levine … and the Met” — which would be why settlement terms weren’t disclosed and neither side will comment. Even so, Michael Cooper’s story has a few eyebrow-raising details as well as a good summary of the progress of the ugly suit-countersuit. – The New York Times
Nine Unpublished Stories By Proust Will Finally See Print (And Why Weren’t They Published Before?)
“The pieces were originally composed by Proust in his early 20s for inclusion in his first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days), a collection of poems and short stories first published in 1896. But for some reason, Proust decided to cut these nine works from the book.” (He may have decided that their subject matter was too scandalous.) – Smithsonian Magazine
First Great Cellist Of Period-Instrument Revival, Anner Bylsma, Dead At 85
He began his career on conventional instruments and spent six years as the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s principal cellist before becoming one of the key artists of the European period-instrument movement in the 1970s and onward. Among his dozens of recordings as soloist and chamber musician, he’s most admired for two recordings of Bach’s Cello Suites, each considered revelatory in its time. – The Strad
Medieval Vagina Monologues: A 700-Year-Old Poem About A Talking Vulva
Der Rosendorn (The Rose Thorn), about a young woman’s argument with her own vagina about which of them men care more about, had been thought to date from the early 16th century. But a strip of parchment found in the library of an Austrian monastery indicates that the bawdy verse story was written ca. 1300 (if not earlier). – The Guardian
Anthologizing Abraham
When I watch a dance that I’ve also seen a few years earlier, I perceive it differently. Has it changed? Maybe. Have I changed? Of course. I’ve viewed and written about all but one of the Kyle Abraham works works performed this past week at Jacob’s Pillow, and things catch my attention that evaded it before. (And here’s another question: do I only remember what I wrote about and forget what I didn’t mention earlier?) – Deborah Jowitt
Turns Out The First Sonnet Cycle Ever Published In English Was By A Woman
Most textbooks have said that the first English sonnet sequence was Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591). Yet three decades earlier, Anne Vaughan Lock’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, a 26-stanza paraphrase of Psalm 51, was published as an appendix in a 1560 volume of Lock’s own translations of a set of Jean Calvin’s sermons. – The New Yorker
How Comedians At The Edinburgh Fringe Are, Or Aren’t, Dealing With Boris And Brexit
“Even leftwing performers in Edinburgh seem unsure what the best response to current affairs should be. Some feel that making Brexit party leader Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory MP, and Boris Johnson into figures of fun has backfired. … Other young performers at the festival have deliberately made the choice to ‘stay silly’, in spite of their political feelings.” – The Observer (UK)
You Probably Haven’t Heard *Of* This Tune, But You’ve Almost Certainly Heard It. Is It History’s Most Enduring Melody?
“La Folia” seems to have appeared first as a folk-dance tune in late medieval Portugal. Over the next century, it spread to Spain and Italy and composers started adapting it; in the 17th and 18th centuries, “La Folia” and variations on it were all over the place (even colonial Latin America). Today some of those old pieces are being heard in concert again, while the melody turns up in pop songs and The Addams Family‘s theme, often without contemporary musicians knowing where it came from. – BBC