Category: people

IM Birtwhistle was more than your average gallery owner and art aficionado. A prominent part of British cultural life for decades, Birtwhistle was a well-known lyric poet, owner of any number of well-regarded art galleries, and a tireless champion of up-and-coming young artists. She died this week at the age of 88.

“During a restless career of more than 45 years, the American artist Alex Toth, who has died aged 77, drew comics in almost every genre – from war and western to horror and romance – and illustrated stories of Superman, Batman, Zorro, Green Lantern, the Flash and the X-Men… A man of strong convictions, he was impatient with pedestrian scripts, meddling editors, shortsighted publishers and his own shortcomings. Yet he remained passionate about improving his craft and his chosen media, animation and, above all, comics.”

Last week Olga Borodina was to have made her debut at the Vienna State Opera. “Instead, just as the performance was about to begin, a State Opera representative gave a statement from chief executive Ioan Holender that ‘an atmosphere has developed which required the Staatsoper to distance itself from this commitment [to Borodina],’ that Agnes Baltsa was replacing Borodina at short notice despite an injured leg, and that the company would not be working with Borodina in the future.”

“In January, Nick Flynn was caught on camera as he fell down a staircase at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, smashing three 17th-century vases worth an estimated £500,000. He blamed an untied shoelace, but the authorities weren’t so sure. Then on Tuesday, police said they would not press charges.” Still, it’s been a six-month ordeal…

The FBI investigated Miller from almost the time of his first production. “A 34-page FBI report, compiled in 1951, states Miller was ‘under Communist party discipline’ in the 1930s and was a member of the party in the 1940s. The FBI was relying on information from informants. Miller, who died last year at age 89, was a longtime liberal who opposed the Vietnam War, opposed nuclear weapons and supported civil rights.”

“Barbara Epstein was not only one of the founders of The New York Review and co-editor for forty-three years, she was a guiding spirit of the paper. She brought to bear on all the work of the Review a superb intelligence, an exquisite sense of language, and a strong moral and political concern to expose and remedy injustice.

“It is 18 years since he attracted attention as the Goldsmith’s student who curated Freeze – a show of work by his mates that demonstrated the entrepreneurial spirit of a bunch of artists who refused to hang around waiting to be discovered. These days he employs 65 people, including a full-time business manager, Frank Dunphy, who has become famous in his own right. When Hirst speaks, in his curlicued, erratic, scuttling sentences, he nearly always says ‘we’, not ‘I’.”

Robert Hecht is on trial in Italy for antiquities looting. “In some ways Mr. Hecht’s recent four-day Roman sojourn reflected the yin and yang of his persona. There is the refined connoisseur of antiquities, fond of good living, the occasional game of backgammon and traveling throughout Europe; and there is the wily dealer, whom the Italians accuse of conspiring to plunder the nation’s buried treasures at huge personal profit.”

Composer Gyorgi Ligeti, who died last week at 83, “could be mistaken for one of many atonal modernists, whose presence in traumatized post-World War II culture is explained by a global need to put emotions on hold. Ligeti no doubt used modernist musical systems popular among the cerebral musical inventors of the 1960s and ’70s. But his Holocaust experience shows his modernist stance to be anything but a means of emotional insulation. Quite the opposite… While other composers wrote music of disillusionment, Ligeti’s seemed to arrive from a time when illusions weren’t reasonable expectations.”

More than three decades after A Prairie Home Companion first hit the air, host/writer/self-appointed Midwestern everyman Garrison Keillor has become one of the most beloved and reviled figures in American culture. “Keillor is the shock jock of wholesomeness… The mere sound of [his] voice—a breathy baritone that seems precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers—is enough to set off warfare between the generations.”