"The oil on canvas painting, named after the dog, a griffon called Minnay, is one of a series of eight dog paintings Manet produced between 1875-1883. The animal belonged to Marguerite, whose father was Gauthier Lathuille, the owner of a cabaret and later restaurant that featured in other Manet paintings." - The Guardian
"The new on-demand streaming service, dubbed SFSymphony+, is scheduled to launch on Feb. 4 with a chamber program curated by Salonen as part of the orchestra's SoundBox series. … Membership is priced at $120 for the entire season, or $15 for individual episodes. Some of the programming … will also be offered for free." This is planned as a...
"President Joe Biden on Wednesday issued an executive order to dissolve the 1776 Commission, a panel stood up by President Donald Trump … as an apparent counter to The New York Times' 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project aimed at teaching American students about slavery that Trump, speaking last fall, had called 'toxic propaganda.'" - CNN
"In another blow to Art Basel and its owner, MCH Group, the art fair's organizers have postponed its flagship edition in Switzerland for the second year straight due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Basel fair, which usually takes place in June, is now scheduled for September 23 through 26." - Artnet
"With the Cannes Lions still on track to run June 21-25, it’s feasible that the Cannes Film Festival could be assembled in time to roll out in early July. One industry insider says it would take only a few days or roughly a week to set up the film festival." - Variety
"There have been a lot of bad things happening this year, obviously. But the good thing about being a critic during this pandemic is that it forces us to be flexible in a way that a lot of critics may have been resistant to. I think it’s really essential that we don’t lock critics in this very strict, old-fashioned...
As more and more of the internet is consolidated, discredited, and co-opted by capital, Wikipedia begins to look like a vestige of a bygone era. With its volunteer-run editing process and its open-source ethos, the site may be the one success of an early-internet ethos (crowdsourced, democratized information-sharing, with little centralized control) that otherwise has come to look like...
“The paper trail for these art plunderers, as for most second-rank figures in Nazi Germany, largely dried up after their interrogations and de-Nazifications in the late 1940s,” Jonathan Petropoulos writes. “The oral history offered by Bruno Lohse and other old Nazis provided one of the few ways to reconstruct the postwar experiences of this cohort.” - The New York...
“These once-dead buildings are now living spaces where people work, eat and carry out their lives,” says Luis Martín Bogdanovich, the general manager of Prolima, the municipality’s program to recuperate the historic center. The impact of Arte Express on the center of Lima “extends far beyond the restored physical structures to the whole dynamic of the city center itself,”...
The new Barbie, whose face is “sculpted to Dr Angelou’s likeness” and who is wearing a head-wrap, jewellery and floral print dress on its “curvy body”, joins Rosa Parks and Florence Nightingale in the “Inspiring Women” series of Barbie dolls. - The Guardian
If maps are representations of a larger reality, then jigsaws are maps too. Indeed, they began life this way, as ‘dissected maps’. Invented by the British cartographer John Spilsbury in the 1760s, the earliest puzzles were designed to make geography lessons more fun for schoolchildren and, no doubt, inculcate them early into the cult of empire. - Psyche
"Set in fin de siècle Paris but supercharged by 75 pop songs, it opened to a rave from The New York Times ('This one's for the hedonists,' exulted Ben Brantley), and it was regularly selling out all 1,302 seats, even during a holiday season when it cost $799 to watch from a cafe table encircled by cancan dancers." Then...
This is the greatest modern artistic nation in Europe. Art history tends to get it all wrong, exaggerating the glamour of French art, just as it does with American art. And in Britain, laughably, we even try to kid ourselves that Henry Moore and John Piper are modernist greats. The reality is that nowhere else has produced as much...
As director of the Toldeo Museum of Art, he organized a pathbreaking (and record-breaking) El Greco exhibition. As president of the Rhode Island School of Design, he built a new museum and quadrupled the endowment. And when a member of the Qatari royal family was determined to turn Doha into an international art destination, she hired him to direct...
