“Ms. Bouglione, known as Madame Rosa, was one of the last links to an era in which clowns, acrobats, lion tamers, trapeze artists, jugglers and other circus performers were a source of international renown and national pride … Their audiences regularly numbered into the thousands and included entertainers such as Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman and Josephine Baker, who gave Ms. Bouglione costume suggestions, as well as French politicians including Vincent Auriol and Georges Pompidou.”
Category: people
Jane Fortune, Who Rescued The Works Of Renaissance Florence’s Female Artists, Dead At 76
“She founded a nonprofit foundation called Advancing Women Artists to find and salvage art created by women between the 16th and 20th centuries. Her resurrection of these works, many of them Renaissance treasures lost to history and secreted in Tuscan churches and attics for centuries, earned her, in the Italian press, the nickname ‘Indiana Jane.'”
China’s Most Famous Actress, Missing For Months, Confesses To Tax Fraud
Last month, Fan Bingbing, who had not been seen or heard from since early July, was getting public denunciations from government-related bodies and seemed on the way to being made a non-person, old-time-Communist-style. Authorities have now declared Fan and her companies liable for a total of up to $129 million in back taxes and fines, and she has posted a public apology and acceptance of punishment on social media.
Gallerist Phyllis Kind, Who Created A Market For ‘Outsider’ Artists, Dead At 85
“What started as a print shop devoted to Old Masters quickly became, under Phyllis’s leadership …, a hotbed for vanguard art in [Chicago], promoting artists — grouped together under the names the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists — who were mining comic books, Pop art, and Surrealism to make graphically punchy, bawdy, psychedelic, and psychologically charged pictures.”
‘She Changed My Life. Twice.” — Jerry Saltz Pays Tribute To Phyllis Kind
“[She was] possessor of one of the sharpest bullshit detectors I’ve ever experienced.” Saltz recounts two occasions from his ne’er-do-well younger days in which Kind got him to straighten up and fly right. (And it kinda worked, for a while.)
What One Speaker Learned While Doing A TED Talk
“Having done the talk I have learned that this is the alchemy of art. Ted Talks are art masquerading as information. I was struggling to express something, not yet a fully formed articulation in my head, but I stuttered it out anyway. Then scientists and other fine humans heard it and spoke it back to me from their experience in a way that has helped me understand my life better.”
Charles Aznavour, Master Of The Chanson, And Also Composer And Film Star, Has Died At 94
It’s nearly impossible to sum up the life of a man who toured as an international musician for almost 80 years, but here’s just a bit. “His accomplishments were prodigious: He wrote, by his own estimate, more than 1,000 songs, for himself and for others, and sang them in French, Armenian, English, German, Italian, Spanish and Yiddish. He sold well over 100 million records in his lifetime. He appeared in more than 60 films, beginning with bit parts as a child.”
Otis Rush, Blues Singer And Lead Guitarist, Has Died At 83
Rush was “a richly emotive singer and a guitarist of great skill and imagination, … in the vanguard of a small circle of late-1950s innovators, including Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, whose music, steeped in R&B, heralded a new era for Chicago blues.”
The Deep Anxiety Of Being Claire Foy
The Emmy-winning actor, who plays Queen Elizabeth on the Netflix series The Crown, says her anxiety “started as a form of self-protection. ‘It was a tool to survive, definitely. To try to hold on to everything. To try to feel safe.'”
Joe Masteroff, Playwright Of ‘Cabaret,’ Has Died At 98
Masteroff, who adapted Cabaret from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the stage adaptation of that book, hit a timely nerve (not that performances have ever stopped at colleges, high schools, and community theatres – or even on Broadway, where it was revived in 2014). “Cabaret, produced and directed by the Broadway legend Harold Prince, pushed boundaries with provocative depictions of homosexuality, bisexuality, ménages à trois and abortion” – and the growing Nazi threat.