Category: people

“[He was] revered in Chicago – and around the world – not only as a colossal piano virtuoso but as a symbol of Chicago jazz. … [He] summoned immense masses of sound at the piano without succumbing to a percussive clatter. Add to this the extraordinary velocity he could achieve, as well as the melodic and harmonic ingenuity of his improvisations, and you had a pianist held in awe by colleagues and students alike.”

By profession an attorney and real estate developer, he was a co-founder of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and led the effort to move the Goodman Theatre into a building of its own, anchoring a “theatre row” in the North Loop.

“The ‘lingering influence’ of fake news ‘is dependent on an individual’s level of cognitive ability,’ psychologists Jonas De Keersmaecker and Arne Roets of Ghent University write in the journal Intelligence. They report people with greater cognitive skills can and do make corrections when new, better information supersedes a mistaken early report. Those whose reasoning, understanding, and problem-solving abilities are less advanced have trouble making that switch.”

The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.” When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress. In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.

John G. Briggs Jr. was a respected classical music critic and cultural reporter for the Times. But he had a second professional life that he hid from his bosses in New York. Writing under a pseudonym for a prominent South Carolina newspaper, the Times journalist delivered fire-breathing, race-baiting and occasionally anti-Semitic screeds attacking the “liberal” press and its alleged communist ties.

“Hailed as ‘the Bergman of the boards’ and ‘the Fellini of the foam,’ Mr. Brown brought next to no professional training but an abundance of passion to his art form, which he used to popularize surfing far beyond the coastlines of California.”

“[He] participated in the swirl of movements and self-proclaimed groups, some armed with manifestoes, that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1950s and ’60s. … Many of these artists emphasized everyday materials and processes; most rejected the expression of subjectivity and emotion that prevailed in the gestural abstract painting and figurative sculpture that immediately followed World War II.”

Mr. Martins has long been known to have intimate relationships with dancers, as well as a quick, volcanic temper. That he was able to act so freely, his critics say, points to dysfunctional power relationships between Mr. Martins and his employees, and between him and City Ballet’s management, which at times seems to have looked the other way.

“When he was young, Lear was employed as an ornithological illustrator, and he spent years learning to draw birds, favoring live models in an era when most worked from taxidermy. Before he turned 20, he’d published Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, a critical success, and the first monograph produced in England to focus on a single family of birds.”

Seidemann was taking photos of his friends, and that led, and his skill, led to his fame. “The graphics of the era were framed by the photos Bob took. … He gave a regal purity to hippies like the Grateful Dead. He made it look natural. They weren’t posing.”