Author: Matthew Westphal

Did The Hippies Really Contribute Anything To American Culture? Yeah, Man, They Did

“The 1960s marked a coming together of politics and counterculture, reminiscent of earlier modernist movements like dada and fluxus, though on a much larger scale. The hippies and their offshoot groups, more than any other anti-establishment group at the time, integrated art and life in a way in which the two were indistinguishable – an idea that carries through to contemporary art today.”

New Clues To The Whereabouts Of Frida Kahlo’s Most Famous Lost Painting?

“The hunt for Frida Kahlo’s long-lost painting La Mesa Herida (The Wounded Table, 1940) has been revived in Mexico, where a researcher says he expects to track it down within five years. The work, a holy grail for Kahlo scholars, went missing after the artist donated it to the former Soviet Union. Last seen in an exhibition in Warsaw in 1955, it disappeared on its way to Moscow.”

Andrew Garfield And Stephen Spinella Trade Emails On Playing Prior Walter In ‘Angels In America’

“Andrew Garfield, a Tony Award nominee for playing the defiant Prior Walter in the Broadway revival of Angels in America, was 9 years old in 1993, when Stephen Spinella won the first of his two Tonys in the role. As it happens, Mr. Spinella is again tackling the furious, fantastical poetry of Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour play, this time as the bilious lawyer Roy Cohn at Berkeley Repertory Theater. The New York Times asked the actors, who have never met, to correspond by email during a week’s worth of shows. … Below are edited excerpts from their exchange, which included insights on how to understand the character of Prior, a man with AIDS who accompanies an angel to heaven, and how to maintain the stamina to play him.”

The Yellow In Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ Is Fading To Olive-Brown

“A laborious x-ray scan of the painting’s canvas has discovered that Vincent van Gogh used two different types of a chrome yellow paint, one of which is more liable to degrade under light. The change in the 1889 painting, one of a series of sunflowers by Van Gogh, is so far not visible to the human eye but, over time, the painting is set to lose some of its vibrancy in the pale-yellow background and the sunflowers’ bright yellow petals and stems, where the sensitive pigment was mixed to achieve the right green hue.”

The Lost Dancing Maidens Of Berlin: The Long, Strange Search For A Sculpture Looted In World War II

“Outside of art history circles, [Walter Schott’s] Drei tanzende Mädchen isn’t even particularly well known. But inside them, and especially among restitution experts, the sculpture represents a superlative example of the time, energy, money, doggedness and old-fashioned expertise required to track down a missing piece of art. And it stands as a heart-wrenching test of the limits of legal solutions to crimes in which the burden of restitution isn’t always clear.”

How Europe’s Oldest Language Survived Through The Millennia

“This week on the podcast [The World in Words] we talk about Basque. With more than six dialects, how did Basque develop a language standard? How did this language survive the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco when speaking, writing and reading it were illegal? How has this minority language thrived and even grown in the years since Franco’s dictatorship ended? And what does the future hold?” (audio)

Pompidou Centre’s Brussels Outpost Opens In A Former Garage

“Through last year, the garage was used to service and show cars manufactured by Citroën, who agreed to leave the space as part of a deal brokered with the city of Brussels in 2015 that involved transitioning the garage into an arts institution. … When Kanal is completely renovated it will encompass not only a museum of modern and contemporary art, but also the collections of the local CIVA Foundation, as well as public spaces devoted to culture, education, and leisure.”