A Greek manuscript dating to the 16th or 17th century listing former monks and benefactors to be included in a priest’s prayers. This and other manuscripts thought to be lost since the Theotokos Eikosiphoinissa Patriarchal and Stavropegial Monastery was looted in 1917 have turned up in a Manhattan auction house. (GOARCH/Dimitrios Panagos via The New York Times)
by Colin Moynihan
NEW YORK, NY.- In 2008, Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan sold three Greek-language manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries to an antiquities dealer who returned them two years later after concluding they might have been looted. The dealer was reimbursed, but the auction house, its officials said, was unable to reach the person who had consigned the items. So, they sat on a shelf for more than a decade, all but lost in the shuffle of daily operations. Three months ago, though, the manuscripts resurfaced when Swann’s chief financial officer went through his office before a renovation. There on a shelf in a long-forgotten plastic bag were the manuscripts, which are believed to have been stolen from a Greek monastery in the midst of World War I. They are thought to have been lost in 1917 when Bulgarian combatants are said to have plundered nearly 900 items from the Theotokos Eikosiphoinissa Patriarchal and Stavropegial Monastery, often called Kosinitza, in northern Greece. The manuscripts w ... More
A page from a ledger book of some 1,800 silhouette portraits made by the 19th-century traveling artist William Bache. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has digitized the portraits and made them available online. (MarkGulezian/National Portrait Gallery, partial gift of Sarah Bache Bloise via The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- More than two decades ago, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., acquired a 19th-century album filled with nearly 2,000 silhouette portraits, including those of two former presidents. Before displaying the cut-paper portraits, made by a traveling artist named William Bache, the museum needed to create a new, sturdier binding for the book. That is when curators spotted an unusual red residue on the pages, and decided to test the book to make sure it was safe to handle. They found that each of the album’s fragile pages was laced with arsenic. The album sat in a box until earlier this year, when curators used a grant from the Getty Foundation to digitize it. The museum put the collection online in March, allowing anyone to virtually thumb through the ... More
Installation view,Kelly Akashi, Infinite Body, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2023. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.
NEW YORK, NY.-Tanya Bonakdar Gallery opened Kelly Akashi: Infinite Body, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view in New York since April 27, and show it through June 10th, 2023. Exploring the biological memory of the body through the language of geology, Infinite Body presents materially diverse translations of the artist’s personal and shared experiences along a broader temporal landscape. Throughout the exhibition, cast representations of the artist’s body are broken into pieces, mended together, and merged with other representations of natural bodies on large rammed earth platforms. The fragmented body becomes a poetic experiment encapsulating the impermanence of life while also reflecting the romance and history of material processes. The body as a vessel of consciousness is conceptually connected to altar-like calcite forms and personal objects presented throughout the exhibition. ... More
“Mustang,” a 32-foot-tall sculpture by the artist Luis Jimenez that is also known as Blucifer, stands outside Denver International Airport in Denver on Feb. 23, 2023. Some people wonder if it is actually the pale horse of the apocalypse (the one ridden by Death). (Benjamin Rasmussen/The New York Times)
DENVER, CO.- Equine art lives in many airports: Seattle and San Francisco have bronze horses shaped like driftwood; Central Illinois has wire horses suspended from the ceiling; Tucson, Arizona, has a winged horse; and Barcelona, Spain has a burly horse. None of them have a horse like Blucifer. Rearing 32 feet high in a median outside Denver International Airport, the cobalt-colored, demon-eyed, vein-streaked steed has terrified travelers and mobilized conspiracy theorists since it arrived 15 years ago. First, though, it killed its creator. Artist Luis Jimenez designed the statue, officially known as “Mustang,” to make reference to Mexican murals and the energy of the Southwest, with glowing red eyes meant as an homage to his father’s neon workshop. The horse came to stand for something darker ... More
An undated photo provided by Cheyenne Julien, Chapter NY, and Museum of the City of New York of Julien’s painting “Salsa Sundays at Orchard Beach”, 2023. (Cheyenne Julien, Chapter NY, and Museum of the City of New York via The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- You know that life in the Big Apple has changed in the last 100 years. But when was the last time you stopped to think about just how much? Or in some cases, just how little? A new exhibition celebrating the centennial of the Museum of the City of New York will remind you. Take for example, the commuter, Speedy, portrayed by Harold Lloyd in the 1928 silent film of the same name, and Michael Richards’ Kramer of the long-running television series “Seinfeld.” Both confront the decades-old problem of finding a satisfactory seat on a subway train, as clips of the actors’ work show. Or consider the costumes worn by the cast in the television series “Pose,” about the city’s underground ball culture, as well as the robe and gloves worn by Robert De Niro, who starred in the film “Raging Bull,” which depicted the boxer Jake LaMotta. These characters from different eras are in their own ways synonymous with the city. And the oldest object in the exhibi ... More
Jeffrey Meris’s “The Block is Hot: The Resurrection” (2023). The work is on exhibit at “Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation,” at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. (Jeffrey Meris via The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- Any major milestone offers the opportunity for much-needed historical reflection, if not reconsideration. And this year, the 160th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation arrives at a particularly thought-provoking moment for a nation still grappling with the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow and decades of entrenched inequality. Into this dynamic and racially charged atmosphere comes “Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation,” which is on display at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. “Emancipation” has its genesis in an intriguing premise: What if an iconic artwork — in this case, sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward’s “The Freedman” from 1863 — is so historically fraught that it requires an entirely new cultural and aesthetic interpretation for the current era? Initially modeled in plaster and later cast in bronze, “The Freedman” portrays a formerly enslaved man clad in ... More
The soprano Ying Fang, who stars as Zerlina in a new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” in New York, April 18, 2023. Three artists preparing a new production of the classic at the Metropolitan Opera discuss what makes it so difficult yet satisfying. (Vincent Tullo/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- There are operas that are challenging for their sheer technical demands — the density of Berg’s “Lulu” or the heroic immensity of Wagner epics. And then there are those that seem simple but are actually some of the most difficult. In that second category fall Mozart’s three collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte — “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così Fan Tutte” — works of slippery psychology, frank humanity and, crucially, crystalline construction that punishes any mistake onstage or in the orchestra pit. Particularly tough to stage is “Don Giovanni,” which returns to the Metropolitan Opera in a new production May 5, with Peter Mattei in the title role. Its score runs nearly three hours with major events at the beginning and end — Giovanni murders the father of a woman he nearly rapes, then later is dragged to hell — but little in between other than characters repeating mistakes, as ... More
Jamel Shabazz, Strictly Old School (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan), 1980/1990. Courtesy of the artist.
PLEASANTVILLE, NY.- The Gordon Parks Foundation is now presenting Albums, an exhibition of photography by Jamel Shabazz, a Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize recipient, which opened on April 27th at the foundation’s gallery. The gallery is located at 48 Wheeler Ave in Pleasantville, NY. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Shabazz obtained his first camera in the mid-1970s and immediately began making portraits in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and The Bronx. His camera was also at his side while he worked as an officer at Rikers Island in the 1980s, where he made portraits of inmates that he later shared with their friends and family. Shabazz took his rolls of color film to be processed at a one-hour photo shop in Chinatown that provided two copies of each print. Shabazz typically shared one with his sitters, and the second he organized into changing, thematic albums that function as portfolios to be shared with future sitters. ... More
NEW YORK, NY.- Freedom ripples as an undercurrent through the works of British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien. For four decades, he has produced boundary-stretching works addressing racism, homophobia, migration and colonialism, from experimental documentaries to lavish multiscreen installations; in all of them an activist spirit is counterbalanced with opulent imagery and sound. Some critics have found Julien’s films too beautiful for the fraught subjects they treat, and like the work of many of his Black peers in Britain who came to prominence in the 1980s, his aesthetic innovations were long overlooked by the art establishment here, which preferred to view his work through a reductive lens of identity. Now, a major exhibition at Tate Britain, in London, is the culmination of a trajectory that began on the margins, with films for television and cinema, and evolved into something more elaborate that belongs ... More
LONDON.- Karin Hindsbo, the director of Norway’s recently opened National Museum, on Friday was named the new director of Tate Modern in London, one of the world’s most popular museums. Hindsbo, a Danish-born art historian, will take on the role in September, succeeding Frances Morris, who has led Tate Modern since 2016. In October, Morris announced she was leaving to focus on curatorial projects and to work on addressing the art world’s climate impacts. In a news release, Hindsbo, 49, said she was “beyond excited” to make the move, adding that “some of my greatest experiences encountering art” occurred at the museum, housed in a former power station on the bank of the River Thames. The directorship of Tate Modern is one of the European art world’s highest-profile roles, with the museum expected to regularly stage blockbuster exhibitions of contemporary and modern art. Under Morris’ leadership, it has hosted ... More
ROME.- In First Person Plural is an exhibition conceived as a film set, in which the artworks act as characters capable of activating different stories within the same scenario. A space composed of a complex ensemble of elements—artworks, music, artefacts, masks, reflective surfaces, performers—transporting the viewer into an alternate dimension through their association. In First Person Plural is the first group show to be presented in the SOLO/MULTI section of MACRO’s programme and aims to explore another facet of the exhibition as medium with an experimental approach. The exhibition is designed to be a synesthetic and disorientating experience, which takes form through the works of the artists from diverse generations and backgrounds, evading thematic and temporal classifications but destabilizing the boundaries and definitions of the human, non-human and post-human. It is a space in which our notions of reality and fiction ... More
Fake books doubling as storage containers at the home of Anna Shiwlall, the owner of 27 Diamonds Interior Design in Anaheim, Calif., April 23, 2023. Already the norm for film sets and commercial spaces, fake books are becoming common fixtures in homes, but if you see one, you might never know. (Beth Coller/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- If it looks like a book, feels like a book and stacks like a book, there’s still a good chance it may not be a book. Fake books come in several different forms: once-real books that are hollowed out, fabric backdrops with images of books printed on them, empty boxlike objects with faux titles and authors or sometimes just a facade of spines along a bookshelf. Already the norm for film sets and commercial spaces, fake books are becoming popular fixtures in homes. While some people are going all in and covering entire walls in fake books, others are aghast at the thought that someone would think to decorate with a book that isn’t real. “I will never use fake books,” said Jeanie Engelbach, an interior ... More
Candice Lin. Photo: Georgia Arnold.
MILAN.- Since 14 April and continuing to 18 June 2023 at the GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, the winner of the 6th edition of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize, Candice Lin (Concord, MA, 1979) is presenting the installation Personal Protective Demon, curated by Federico Giani, curator of the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. The sculptress was awarded by the Prize Selection Committee – composed of Sebastiano Barassi, Anna Maria Montaldo, Pavel Pyś, Christian Rattemeyer, Lorenzo Respi and Andrea Viliani – and thanks to the collaboration of the Area Musei d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of the Municipality of Milan, which shares the aims of the Prize, presents a new installation specially conceived for the space of Ignazio Gardella’s stairway, the monumental connecting point between the first and second floors of the Gallery of Modern Art, in dialogue with the artefacts of non- European orig ... More
Quote A world at peace produces realistic art. Paul Klee
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Putting the brutality of a prize fight on the Met Opera stage NEW YORK, NY.- Emile Griffith fought Benny Paret on March 24, 1962, in a highly anticipated welterweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden. In the 12th round, Griffith knocked Paret into the ropes and pounded him with more than a dozen unanswered blows. As The New York Times put it the next day, “The only reason Paret still was on his feet was that Griffith’s pile-driving fists were keeping him there, pinned against the post.” Paret never regained consciousness and died 10 days later. The fight and its terrible aftermath were high drama. One might even call the story operatic. There has been little overlap between the high drama of sports and the high drama of opera, beyond the bullfighting in “Carmen” or perhaps that odd singing competition in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg ... More
Josh Kline's survival art for 21st-century America NEW YORK, NY.- Since 2011, with his breakout show at the downtown gallery 47 Canal, Josh Kline has been an artist of American extremes. He promised a new art made with new technologies, from 3D printing to deepfake software, but his view of the 2010s was hardly rosy. In sarcastic spoofs of celebrity interviews and fashion campaigns, Kline lambasted the era of social media as an eddy of corporate pseudo-individuality. Soon after, his view turned from disapproving to downright apocalyptic — in sculptures and installations of Teletubbies dressed in riot gear, of human heads and hands bundled into shopping carts, of Manhattan half-drowned by rising seas. Now, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century,” a wide and antagonistic retrospective of t ... More
6 British castles where you can stay like royalty on a commoner's budget LONDON.- When King Charles III is crowned on May 6, the world will witness, for the first time since his mother’s coronation in 1953, a ceremony that packs more than 1,000 years of British pomp and pageantry into a single day. But for some people, one day might not be enough. Britain teems with castles that offer travelers a chance to walk the same halls and sleep in the same quarters as monarchs of days gone by. Those who revel in the grand spectacle unfolding in Westminster Abbey may also want to soak in the noble lore in the old stone walls of some of those castles. “The sheer drama of the past thousand years of royal history in Great Britain is like a long-running soap opera,” said Tracy Borman, a London-based royal historian and the author of “Crown & Sceptre,” a history of the British monarchy ... More
Gost Books to release 'Water' by Ian Berry, with an essay by Kathie Webber LONDON.- Over the course of 15 years, Magnum photojournalist Ian Berry travelled the globe to document the inextricable links between landscape, life and water. This new book presented by Gost brings together a selection of the resulting images which collectively tell the story of man’s complex relationship with water—at a time when climate change demonstrates just how precariously water and life are intertwined. ‘I have gradually become aware through the years of my gathering images that something extraordinary was happening to our world—this year has shown above all others that the planet is struggling. There is too much water in some places, too little in others. Ice is melting at an unprecedented pace and it’s so very easy to dismiss what is happening when we see it briefly on TV and then it’s gone. ... More
'Harmony,' a Manilow musical set under Nazis, is Broadway-bound NEW YORK, NY.- “Harmony,” a musical about a German singing group upended by the rise of Nazism, will finally open on Broadway this fall with songs by Barry Manilow and his longtime collaborator, Bruce Sussman. The show, which Manilow and Sussman have been developing for more than 25 years, tells the true story of a sextet that ran afoul of the Nazi regime because the group featured both Jewish and non-Jewish members. The ensemble was called the Comedian Harmonists. “They represent everything I love — they’re a combination of The Manhattan Transfer and the Marx Brothers, with complicated harmonies — and funny as hell,” said Manilow, who wrote the show’s music. “When we dug into it, it just killed me: Why don’t we know about them?” Sussman, who wrote the book a ... More
Inside New York's 'most bizarre' secret penthouse NEW YORK, NY.- On a recent Wednesday afternoon, as the sun turned the stained-glass skylight of a midtown penthouse into a dazzling display of jewel tones, prosecco was poured into flutes. A saxophonist and a violinist who had met moments earlier decided to play a Charlie Parker tune together. When they finished, a small, international and impeccably dressed crowd cheered. In another part of the room, a hat designer was showing off his one-of-a-kind creations, involving emeralds, snakeskin and feathers from Peru. Nearby, a pink-haired painter from Cyprus was explaining her most recent work, hung on the wall behind her. For the past year and a half, Luxuny — the atelier occupying this penthouse high above Bryant Park — has been the setting for various live performances, trunk shows and chef tastings. Pa ... More
Nearing 100, he finally speaks of his world war NEW YORK, NY.- The nightmare shook the old man, who was now in his late 90s. He dreamed of falling from the sky. He awoke feeling helpless and afraid. John Wenzel, a veteran, automotive executive, father and grandfather, had recently moved into a senior living apartment in Brooklyn Heights, the Watermark on Clark Street, a new, frills-and-all building with a Manhattan skyline view. He would soon turn 99 and become the oldest resident there. Since his wife, Alice, died more than 10 years earlier, he had settled into a quiet rhythm, alone with his jazz records and his painting. And suddenly, out of nowhere, these nightmares. He feared he had suffered a seizure, but his vital signs were normal. His adult daughters, Emily and Abby, were also worried. Their father had always been so steady and predictable and w ... More
Buffalo remakes its museum in its own image BUFFALO, NY.- After three and a half years and $230 million, a transformed museum here is about to open amid hopes that it will meet the expectations of a population far different from the one that greeted the original more than 160 years ago. Founded in 1862 by artists and so-called “Buffalo boosters,” the institution known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery has been renamed the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and expanded and renovated by Shohei Shigematsu of the architectural firm OMA. It plans to welcome the public beginning June 12. Since receiving its first painting in 1863, a landscape by Hudson River painter Albert Bierstadt donated by the artist, the institution has been early to acquire works by Henry Moore, Joan Miró, Mark Rothko, Frida Kahlo, Willem de Kooning, Marisol, Andy Warhol and Mar ... More
London's other royals, the 'Pearlies,' keep alive Cockney customs LONDON.- The kings and queens of London’s lesser-known royal family gathered outside a church in Covent Garden on a recent Sunday afternoon dressed in their sparkly finery. But their jewels of choice were not diamonds or rubies. They were buttons made of mother-of-pearl that covered their jet-black suits and hats in intricate patterns, sewn by hand into elaborate designs that glitter in the sunlight. These are the Pearly Kings and Queens of London — keepers of a tradition that began in the Victorian era, was passed down through generations of families and became a symbol of the city’s working-class, Cockney culture. They see themselves as custodians of a waning way of life, which they carry on by singing Cockney songs, sharing Cockney stories and, crucially, collecting money for good causes. M ... More
A photographer whose subject is everyday life BETHLEHEM, PA.- To hear photographer Judith Joy Ross tell it, her life and career are riddled with nonstarters. Her stint in graduate school? “Complete failure,” she said. Her teaching career? “Utter failure.” In her photography archive on the second floor of her yellow house here, there is a box marked “downers,” containing what she considers bad prints of good images. Ross, who has been taking pictures for nearly 60 years, has never been much of a self-promoter. “I have a problem with authority figures,” she said on a gray day in February. Despite all that, Ross, 76, is the subject of a large retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with about 200 of her photographs on ... More
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