With her husband Eugene, co-founder of Texas Instruments, and for decades after his death, she gave millions to educational, civic, and cultural groups, including virtually every major visual and performing arts institution in Dallas. As recently as last year, she endowed a biennial $150,000 prize for achievement in the arts.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Collector Sues Sotheby’s For Selling, And Undervaluing, A Basquiat His Late Wife Owned
“The art masterpiece in question – Flesh and Spirit, a 12-by-12-foot painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat – is just days away from the auction block. It is a prized asset of the estate of [Hubert] Neumann’s wife, Dolores Ormandy Neumann, who died in September 2016, and its potential sale shines a spotlight on what appears to be a nasty family dispute.”
There Will Be No Nobel Prize For Literature In 2018
“The Swedish Academy … announc[ed] Friday that the prize will not be handed out this year, on the grounds that the academy is in no shape to pick a winner after a string of sex abuse allegations and financial crimes scandals … and it was decided that two winners will be announced in 2019, with one recipient recognized for this year’s eligibility period.”
Alice Provensen, Award-Winning Illustrator Of Children’s Books, Dead At 99
“Mrs. Provensen, who also wrote several picture books, worked for 40 years alongside her husband, Martin Provensen, illustrating such works as The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown, The Fuzzy Duckling, Katie the Kitten and adaptations of classic literature. … They evoked the world of post-Impressionist Paris in their Caldecott Medal-winning 1983 book The Glorious Flight, about the first airplane journey over the English Channel, by French pilot Louis Blériot in 1909.”
Is The Pompidou Centre Becoming Another Guggenheim, Franchising Itself Hither And Yon?
“With outposts and partnerships either launched or pending in Metz, Málaga, Brussels, the Gulf, Shanghai and possibly Latin America, … the Pompidou’s president, Serge Lasvignes, is boldly steering it into a number of new ventures, which he believes will deepen the Parisian museum’s relationship with artistic centres it might otherwise be unable to reach.”
In British Movie Theatres, Polish Immigrants Are Now A Major Demographic
“Like Bollywood, Polish cinema has flourished” – with some titles even making the weekly top 10 at the box office – “in UK multiplexes rather than arthouses, without any help from the British media. It is only partly true to say that the mainstream press has ignored these releases; what’s more significant is that its attention and approval were never sought in the first place. With Polish now the second most commonly spoken language in England, English-speaking viewers are not part of this particular success story.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.03.18
Off the pedestal
Here’s a phrase from the biography of Beth Bahia Cohen, a violinist who plays our kind of classical music, but who also plays just about every violin-like instrument found anywhere in the world. … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2018-05-03
May 3 Birthdays
This is the birthday of two men who had significant effects on jazz and popular music. Bing Crosby was born on May 3, 1903 in Spokane, Washington, John Lewis seventeen years later … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-05-03
Jayne Mansfield – Hollywood Starlet, Polyglot Intellectual, Or Practicing Satanist? (Or All Three?)
“Some of the best known lurid ‘facts’ about Jayne Mansfield, the American film star of the ’50s and ’60s, are based on rumour. So the directors of a new documentary about her short and scandalous life faced a difficult task. Was Mansfield, one of the first actresses to be marketed as a ‘blonde bombshell’, also a violin-playing intellectual with superb comic timing who spoke five languages? Or was the star who came to be known as the ‘working man’s Marilyn Monroe’ actually a devil worshipper who was decapitated in a car crash as the result of a curse?”
‘Ink-Stained Pixels’: The (Surprisingly Long) History Of E-Books Before Kindle
“The truth is that it took a long time for e-books to ‘arrive’; Amazon was far from first. There, admittedly, was a comfort level that had to be worked out with the electronic book, which gave Amazon the perfect opportunity to swoop in. Tonight’s Tedium talks about the evolution of electronic books before the Kindle. I’d tell you to turn the page, but we’re not really working with paper here, are we?”
Art Museums Are Becoming Addicted To Blockbuster Shows: Felix Salmon
“Major event” exhibitions like the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrors show and the traveling David Bowie Is show “achieve two important goals for any museum: They increase attendance, and they increase revenue. But … blockbusters effectively ratchet up expectations everywhere, to the point at which lower-budget affairs can no longer capture the public imagination. That’s bad for most museums, and it’s bad for the public, too, which will increasingly subsist on the cultural equivalent of junk food.”