Category: people

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.

“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.”

“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?”

“A little more than a year ago, New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova announced that she was diving into the world of professional poker as a new player, all for the purpose of writing a book about her experiences. [Now] the actual writing of the book is on hold because Konnikova, under the guidance of pro Erik Seidel, got too good at poker. In January, Konnikova won $86,400 by beating a 240-person field at the PCA National; in her first tournament after deciding to drop blogs for cards, she won $57,000.”

The museum advertised for a successor with “a highly developed EQ”, and Hollein seems to fit the bill. In San Francisco, as in Frankfurt, he is credited with energising curators, pushing the Fine Arts Museums to organise exhibitions in-house. Despite recently staging shows of paintings by Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel himself, he says: “I see myself as an artistic director, not as a curator.”

“On a personal note, I would like to announce my upcoming retirement as classical music critic of the Chicago Tribune. When I step down July 1, I will have held this position at the paper for nearly 41 years, a record for Chicago (and perhaps U.S.) musical journalism insofar as I have been able to determine. It’s been a great ride, but the time has come to move off into other ventures and give somebody else a shot at one of the best jobs in journalism.”

Intoning lines from a piece called “The Gold Diggers’ Song (We’re in the Money)” was probably not the best way to assuage concerns that shareholders might be making hay on the back of higher prices and job cuts. The song was first written for a 1933 film, but is perhaps most famously used in the musical “42nd Street.”

Horne carries her 84 years the way others carry 60. Her mind is sharp, likewise her memory, and her speaking voice retains its unmistakable metal. Dwelling on the past is not her style. “I don’t listen to myself,” she says. “I don’t watch myself.” Yet in anticipation of the move to the West Coast, she has been forced to contemplate her archive of private recordings.

“His long career at The Chronicle began when he was hired in May 1992 as a temporary copy editor in the section he would go on to oversee, Datebook. Wiegand distinguished himself as someone with empirical knowledge about every art form, high and low, from opera to ballet to country music to the latest trends in pop culture. Over the past several years, he had added his own voice to the paper’s roster of critics, providing incisive, award-winning television reviews.”

“During [his] tenure as art director, Playboy won hundreds of awards for illustration and graphic design and influenced the visual appearance of scores of other magazines and newspapers. … In addition to designing the look of the magazine” – including the bunny logo, one of the most recognized corporate logos on earth – “Mr. Paul hired artists to create original paintings and illustrations. He commissioned work from Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, LeRoy Neiman, James Rosenquist and Shel Silverstein, telling them their work should reflect the spirit of the article and should stand alone, without need of a caption.”