Category: people

The painter’s correspondence with girlfriend Alice Moore, whom he dated as a young 20-something, has recently surfaced, and it changes some of what biographers thought they knew.

His four-volume, 3,600-page biography of Mahler made him the world’s pre-eminent expert on the composer. His collaboration in countless concerts, festivals, exhibitions, and documentaries played a huge part in establishing Mahler’s place in the modern concert repertoire.

The young Yayoi Kusama was plagued with visual hallucinations, mental health problems, and a mother who violently disapproved (literally) of her interest in art. Today, at 87, she’s more productive than ever, even as she continues to live in the psychiatric hospital she checked herself into 40 years ago. Darryl Wee tells us about Kusama’s journey.

“‘I have always wanted to be an entertainer rather than an actor,’ McCowen once wrote, but the truth is he was both: he could immerse himself in a character but also hold an audience spellbound, as in his celebrated one-man performance of St Mark’s Gospel.”

“If [Stéphane] Grappelli was a flashy diamond, Mr. Asmussen was a hidden gem. He found a devoted following of jazz critics and discerning listeners who admired his facility as a multi-instrumentalist (vibraphone, flute and conga), sometime crooner and occasional clown in the mold of a fellow Dane, the pianist and satirist Victor Borge.”

Corey’s dizzying mix of mock-intellectual circumlocutions, earnest political tirades and slapstick one-liners made Corey the king of comedic confusion and earned him the nickname “professor.”

“The profound impact of Anish’s work continues a long history of Jewish contribution to the arts, while his social activism reaffirms the commitment of the Jewish people to humanitarian causes,” the Genesis Prize Foundation’s chairman and cofounder, Stan Polovets, said in a statement.

The Victorians were not, in fact, all that prudish. They had, as Kathryn Hughes explains, other reasons to hide their bodies.

“Having entered the four-year period aged twenty-seven as a promising if uncommercial newcomer backed by obscure experimental presses, he will exit it at thirty transformed into a literary lion and international celebrity.”

Known for “distinctive tone, breathtaking phrasing and delicate shaping of the music,” he spent 17 years as principal clarinetist of the London Symphony and two decades as one of the earliest members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.