Category: people

“That battle pitted two of the nation’s most prestigious, and deep-pocketed, archival institutions against each other, in a mini-drama mixing Milleresque high principle with more bare-knuckled competition. And it cracks a window onto the rarefied trade in writers’ papers, and the delicate calibrations of money, emotion and concern for posterity that determine where they ultimately come to rest.”

“Trained in ballet in her native Germany, Ms. von Aroldingen admitted that she had to unlearn much of what she knew when adapting to [New York] City Ballet’s fleet, streamlined style. Yet after Balanchine’s death in 1983, she became an expert stager of his works for other companies in the United States and abroad, and performed a wide Balanchine repertoire herself before she retired from dancing in 1984. She served as a ballet mistress in the company from 2004 to 2016.”

In campaigns as a public figure and in print under the pen name Piloti, he led battles to save historic buildings from the wrecking ball and against postwar architecture and urban planning. He was perhaps best known for championing the preservation of the red telephone booth.

Over the years there were some exhibitions and acquisitions, notably a 140-work retrospective in 1997 of both his commercial and fine art in Basel, Switzerland, where Mr. Bertschmann was born and raised. But these accomplishments never amounted to a self-sustaining fine art career. As he reached his 80s, humility and obscurity started getting old, and costly. Now the Bertschmanns find themselves in a tenuous financial position.

Gilbert Cruz came to the newspaper three years ago as television editor; previously, he worked at Vulture, New York magazine’s culture website, where he worked his way up to editorial director.

“[He] devoted almost all of his 35-year career to his unusual combination of art-making and teaching, and to the group, which exhibited as Tim Rollins + K.O.S.” (It stands for Kids of Survival.) “In a classroom with a barely functioning sink and broken windows boarded up with plywood, Mr. Rollins and his most interested students had begun to function as a workshop when they hit on the idea of using books for both inspiration and material.”

“‘I can’t create the objects I crave to look at,’ he [once] said, ‘so I collect them.’ … His personal collection featured more than 400 drawings, including rare works by Goya, Van Gogh and Andrea Mantegna and price-setting items by Rembrandt and Samuel Palmer. But he insisted that ‘great art collecting need not be based on a great fortune; education, experience and eye are more important.’ He spoke from his own history.”

“His work as an interpreter was so original and so powerful that it has influenced musicians down to our own day: generations of conductors, including those who disagreed and disagree with his interpretations, have been the beneficiaries of his reforms in the opera house and concert hall, and his insistence that the performer’s job is to come as close as possible to revealing the composer’s intentions, rather than to use the music as a vehicle for self-expression, remains a basic principle for many of today’s outstanding performers.”

“In our current era of non-stop technological innovation, fuzzy wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization. Self-help gurus need not be charlatans peddling snake oil. Many are psychologists with impressive academic pedigrees and a commitment to scientific methodologies, or tech entrepreneurs with enviable records of success in life and business. What they’re selling is metrics. It’s no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind. We must now chart our progress, count our steps, log our sleep rhythms, tweak our diets, record our negative thoughts—then analyze the data, recalibrate, and repeat.”