Category: people

“[He was] a fervent supporter of experimental choreographers as a dance critic for The New York Times and the author of critical biographies of George Balanchine and Martha Graham … [as well as] managing editor of the quarterly Ballet Review from 1969 to 1995.” – The New York Times

“Mr. Clements wrote more than 80 children’s books, including the text of picture books about a pampered Egyptian cat, an unbecoming fish, a Christmas in which Mrs. Claus stands in for Santa and a young girl who can’t stop using compound words such as nitwit, higgledy-piggledy and itty-bitty. That rib-tickling book was appropriately called Double Trouble in Walla Walla (1997).” – The Washington Post

“For most of his career, he was known as an accompanist, outdated nomenclature that cannot begin to describe his musical sensitivity to the needs of a singer. … His association with singers Elly Ameling, Jessye Norman, José van Dam, Teresa Berganza, Mady Mesplé, and above all, baritone Gérard Souzay, with whom he concertized for over three decades, literally defines the history of European art song performance in the second half of the twentieth century.” – WFMT (Chicago)

Steve Lazarides has now self-published a book of his photographs from the time he travelled the world tasked with making sure Banksy didn’t get arrested or duffed up and didn’t run out of spray paint. “I had the time of my life,” he says as he sits on the roof of his London office, talking about the man he calls Matey Boy. “We were lawless and did just what we wanted. Matey Boy had a political agenda that you can see very clearly in everything he does, but I just had a fucking blast.” – The Guardian

When I started writing criticism, in 1965, in almost pristine ignorance, I discovered that I was the world’s leading expert in one thing: my experience. Most of what I know in a scholarly way about art I learned on deadlines, to sound as if I knew what I was talking about—as, little by little, I did. Educating yourself in public is painful, but the lessons stick. – The New Yorker

Karina became a star of French New Wave films as a teenager starring in Jean Luc Godard’s The Little Soldier and went on to star in more of Godard’s movies (and to marry him). She was a Renaissance woman who also directed films, had a singing career, and wrote four novels. – The New York Times

Timberg was a beloved and ferocious reader, writer, and arts lover. He was a Los Angeles Times reporter for years “before writing Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, a 2015 book that examined how digital technology and economic polarization were damaging American cultural life. The book was energized by the author’s deep, broad enthusiasm for the arts, from the poetry of W.H. Auden to vintage guitars, but its roots were in Timberg’s own career reversals.” – Los Angeles Times

Sifton was also an author, including of a memoir that cemented her father, Reinhold Niebuhr, as the author of the Serenity Prayer. The authors she edited – burnished, as The NYT puts it – included “Isaiah Berlin, Don DeLillo, Ann Douglas, Susan Eisenhower, Carlos Fuentes, Philip Gourevitch, Michael Ignatieff, Stanley Karnow, Stephen Kinzer, J.R. MacArthur, Robert MacNeil, Peter Matthiessen, Jules Witcover and Victor S. Navasky.” – The New York Times

He memorably portrayed blue-collar heavies and hotheads in films such as “The Godfather: Part II,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and “Do the Right Thing,” and played against type as a middle-aged mama’s boy in “Moonstruck.” – Washington Post