The Lost Generation: Women Ceramicists and the Cuban Avant-Garde examines the participants and artistic output from 1949 to 1959 of the Taller de Santiago de las Vegas, a ceramic workshop on the outskirts of Havana. A decade of artistic experimentation primarily by little-known women ceramicists had deep reverberations both for the acceptance of ceramics as a fine art form in Cuba and for the symbiotic relationship that flourished between the ceramicists and the painters, largely men, who visited the Taller to learn the craft. The painters in turn applied new techniques and methodologies to their two-dimensional production, which is now regarded as synonymous with the Cuban avant-garde (vanguardia).
At the helm of the Taller was a physician, Juan Miguel Rodríguez de la Cruz, who formed and fired the ceramics and hired mainly women, many of whom were trained at the prestigious Academia San Alejandro and other fine arts schools, to decorate the wares. These ceramicists created their own styles, establishing an artistic movement that garnered national and international recognition. Rebeca Robés Massés, Marta Arjona, María Elena Jubrías, Mirta García Buch, Amelia Peláez, and numerous others were key ceramicists at the Taller. They and Rodríguez de la Cruz welcomed the participation of renowned modernist painters and sculptors, including René Portocarrero, Wifredo Lam, Raúl Milián, Wifredo Arcay, Luis Martínez Pedro, Mariano Rodríguez, and Agustín Cárdenas.
The only artist in the exhibit we were familiar with was Wifredo Lam, the Cuban modernist whose paintings – like this untitled 1943 work at MFABoston – we had long admired.
Lam spent only a short time at the Taller, but the exhibit features extensive work from the dozen or so other artists and ceramicists who created there. This video, via History Bites: New England, provides an excellent overview.
While virtually all the objects in the exhibits are striking, the Missus and I were especially drawn to René Portocarrero and his Fractured Fairy Tales-style ceramic tiles.
We also very much liked the work of Amelia Peláez, from paintings such as 1948’s Woman with Fish . . .
to the ceramics she decorated, like her 1951 Water Jug with Abstract Figures (ceramicist Juan Miguel Rodríguez de la Cruz).
There’s an amazing amount of amazing work at the McMullen right now. Well worth a trundle.
To borrow a phrase from former President Barack Obama, the news media is currently getting all wee-weed up about the coming cicada apocalypse this spring.
Here’s how Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs defined the term to NPR’s Robert Siegel at the time (August of 2009, for those of you keeping score at home).
SIEGEL: Gibbs defined getting wee-weed up as when people, and I quote, “get all nervous for no particular reason.” Finally, he came around to this.
Mr. GIBBS: Bed wetting is – would be probably the more consumer-friendly term for…
SIEGEL: For getting all wee-weed up. Thus ending what our correspondent Don Gonyea tells us is one of the strangest exchanges that he has witnessed at the White House in almost a decade.
Except, in the case of the upcoming cicada blitz, the wee-wee part is kind of literal, as Alla Katsnelson reports in the New York Times.
This spring, when the ground temperature hits 64 degrees Fahrenheit, trillions of cicadas will dig their way up from beneath the soil across the Southern and Midwestern United States. In a rare so-called double emergence, two distinct cicada broods — one on a 13-year life cycle and the other on a 17-year one — will take to the trees to sing, eat and mate.
And though we may prefer not to think about it, considering their lodgings in the branches above, the cicadas will also eliminate waste in the form of urine. Despite their size, cicadas have an impressively powerful stream, scientists reported in an article published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the summer of 1970, I muddled through Cincinnati’s cicada invasion, although I did manage to keep the little passers at broom’s length, as detailed in this account of the seven-year stretch I did in the Midwest back then.
In the summer of 1970 Bob Dylan traveled to Princeton University to receive an honorary Doctorate of Music. Once there, he encountered both a) very loud protests, and b) an even louder swarm of 17-year cicadas that drowned out his introduction by a university official.
Subsequently Dylan wrote a song about that experience called Day of the Locusts.
And the locusts sang, well, it give me a chill,
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody.
And the locusts sang with a high whinin’ trill,
Yeah, the locusts sang and they was singing for me . . .
(Actually, cicadas aren’t locusts, but why get technical about it when Bob Dylan is involved.)
In Cincinnati, which was another 1970 cicada hot spot, a local historian noted that “you can’t wear sandals outside because they crawl right onto your feet.”
The high whine, the crunching of cicadas underfoot, the constant cries of “God, they’re everywhere!” – that was the soundtrack of my summer of 1970.
Each morning I would sweep the overnight cicada blanket off my car with a broom . . .
As you splendid readers no doubt recall, an annual tradition at the Global Worldwide Headquarters is the Counting of the Photogs in the New York Times “Year in Pictures” special section published at the end of every December (previous photo finishes here).
The Year in Pictures 2023 comes literally wrapped in human tragedy, with this image spanning the front and back covers.
“This woman was going from body to body, searching for her killed siblings. When she found her pregnant sister, she started talking to her and saying, ‘You were scared of giving birth and now you are rested before you had to go through it.’ She was talking to her dead brothers and saying their names and their positive attributes.” —Samar Abu Elouf
The collection features six more examples of Samar Abu Elouf’s chronicle of the Israel-Hamas war, one photo more heart-wrenching than the last.
GAZA CITY, OCT. 12. Wounded children arrived at Al Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, after an airstrike on the Shati refugee camp. Hospitals relied on generators after Israel blocked water, electricity and fuel from entering Gaza.
DEIR AL BALAH, GAZA STRIP, OCT. 22. Khaled Joudeh, 9, mourning over the body of his 8-month-old sister, Misk. He had already said goodbye to his mother, father, older brother and sister, all killed in Israeli airstrikes.
The photo section also includes five pictures taken by Tamir Kalifa, who captured the uncertainty of war . . .
HERZLIYA, ISRAEL, OCT. 14. Friends and relatives of Maya Regev, 21, and her brother Itay Regev, 18, watching a news segment about the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. The siblings, who were later released, had attended the Tribe of Nova festival, where gunmen massacred hundreds of young people and abducted others.
. . . and the finality of gun violence.
UVALDE, TEXAS, APRIL 19. Caitlyne Gonzales, 11, dancing to Taylor Swift songs at the grave of her friend Jackie Cazares, who was one of the 19 students killed last year in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Others with multiple contributions to the year-end review include Amir Hamja . . .
WASHINGTON, NOV. 4. A view on Pennsylvania Avenue as thousands of demonstrators marched in support of Palestinians. Rallies across the country reflected the many groups calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Erin Schaff . . .
CHOCTAW, OKLA., MAY 29. Ann Brown, left, soothed her daughter, Shawn Armstrong, who had recently tried to hang herself after learning that her son, Josh Askins, an addict, had been arrested and charged with murder in the fentanyl death of a friend.
Nanna Heitmann . . .
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, AUG. 29. Hundreds of police officers and National Guard troops surrounded the Porokhovskoye cemetery, where Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary boss, was buried two months after he led a brief mutiny against Russian military leadership.
Tyler Hicks . . .
“I saw what I originally thought was just a uniform that had been discarded on the road, but on closer inspection I realized it was a body. There had been no effort made to move the body. He’d been run over so many times that he became impacted to the point that the body had become part of the road.” —Tyler Hicks
Sergey Ponomarev . . .
DOUAR TNIRT, MOROCCO, SEPT. 11. A man sat in front of his destroyed house in the Atlas Mountains after a 6.8-magnitude earthquake devastated rural towns near the southwestern city of Marrakesh and killed nearly 3,000 people.
. . . and Dave Sanders.
BROOKLYN, JUNE 7. For days, the Brooklyn Bridge, along with much of the Midwest and East Coast, was shrouded in reddish haze from wildfires in Quebec and Ontario. New York experienced its worst air quality on record.
Thankfully, not every image the Times published last year was somber or sobering, as managing editor Mark Lacey notes in the section’s introduction.
[You’ll] find images here — collected by two photo editors, Jeffrey Henson Scales and Tanner Curtis — of war and fashion. A devastating wildfire and a day spent playing in the surf. A plume of smoke from a train accident and an ultrafancy debutante ball. Military standoffs and the tennis champion Coco Gauff, lying on the court after winning the U.S. Open.
There are three dozen other photojournalists represented in this stunning visual diary of the past year. By all means, go find them.
Well the Missus and I trundled up to the Granite State over the weekend to check out the newly installed exhibits at Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art and say, they were swell.
We started at Fabricating Modernism: Prints from the School of Paris (through January 7), which features artworks that “constitute a small portion of an extensive collection of prints committed to the Currier Museum of Art. Most of these prints are dated from after World War II and created by artists working in the United States and Paris.”
Given the vast breadth of the collection, we have selected objects illustrating the collector’s passion for artists working in his beloved Paris, such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, and Georges Rouault . . .
The School of Paris (French: École de Paris) refers to the French and émigré artists who worked in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. Considered by many as the cultural capital of Europe, Paris was also one of the first global cities.
Its multicultural and polyglot art community included many Americans, like artists Gertrude Stein, Sam Francis, Al Held, and Joan Mitchell, along with writers James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few.
It’s an interesting and varied collection, much of it drawn from the artists’ later years, such as Picasso’s linoleum cut Portrait of Jacqueline Full Face II above from 1962 when he was 81, or Sonia Delaunay’s 1969 color etching and aquatint Untitled when she was 84.
Ditto for Georges Braque’s L”Echo, a 1960 lithograph printed three years before his death at the age of 81.
All in all, a nice addition to the Currier’s already fine collection of over 15,000 objects.
Saya Woolfalk’s (American, b. 1979) commission for the Currier Museum of Art investigates the history of the institution and revisits its iconography and original design.
The mosaics adorning the former main entrance of the Currier (designed by Salvatore Lascari in 1929–1930) constitute the starting point for this new installation by Woolfalk, which reimagines the Western art canon’s singular cultural perspective.
The artwork conceived by the artist for the Currier combines video projections, sculptural forms made of glass, wallpaper, and sound – creating an immersive environment where the viewer is invited to voyage, rest, and meditate as if in a sensorial temple.
In other words, maybe get a buzz on before entering the exhibit. (The Missus and I did not, for those of you keeping score at home.) Anyway, here’s a quick look from the show’s opening reception, compliments of Keith Spiro.
Prior to becoming one of the most prominent artists in East Africa, Sanaa Gateja (Ugandan, b. 1950) studied interior design in Italy and jewelry design at Goldsmiths in London. His intricate works oscillate between abstraction and figuration.
Each composition is a new exploration, a novel exercise in shaping forms or patterns with color and vice versa. Gateja’s art is primarily created using beads made from recycled paper, which he rolls, dyes, and affixes to bark cloth. This signature technique has earned him the nickname “the Bead King” in his home country, and for the last thirty years, he has taught it to local communities and across the entire region.
Sanaa Gateja’s work is both painstaking and lyrical, as this close-up segment of one design nicely illustrates.
The largest current exhibit at the Currier is Toward the New: A Journey into Abstraction (through March 31), which “presents a new collection-based exhibition looking at the long journey toward abstraction that encompasses its many manifestations.”
Many painters celebrated the physical properties of paint for its own sake – its thickness, texture, color – beyond its historic role as a transmitter of visual information, while sculptors used modern materials and industrial processes. Artists featured in this exhibition employed a variety of tools for inspiration, including complex compositional formulas, bold geometric forms, experiments in visual perception and arbitrary color, and the unconscious.
Many of the Currier’s all-time favorites are included in the show, such as Pablo Picasso’s Woman Seated in a Chair (1941), Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square: Early Rising I (1961), Alexander Calder’s Petit Disque Jaune (1967), and Joan Mitchell’s Cous-cous (1961–1962) [above].
Here’s senior curator Kurt Sundstrom in 2020 discussing Picasso’s painting, “Woman Seated in a Chair.”
On our way, out the Missus and I stopped by Currier Created (through January 7), a collection of artworks “featuring the artistic talents of the museum’s staff.”
Representative samples include Michelle Peterson’s acrylic on canvas Screen Time . . .
. . . and Jim Mooney’s linocut print The Outermost House.
The exhibit is a sweet tribute to those who make the Currier well worth a trundle this holiday season.
Well the Missus and I trundled over to The Fens the other day to catch Mondrian: Foundations at the Museum of Fine Arts (through April 28) and say, it was swell.
In the years around 1900, before Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) created some of the most recognizable abstract canvases of the last century, he turned his eye to the characteristic sights of the Dutch landscape: canals, windmills, fields, flowers, and trees. Mondrian’s earlier and lesser-known works reveal a restless and experimental artist who constantly reinvented himself, absorbing new influences and moving away from conventions of representation.
“Mondrian: Foundations” presents 28 paintings and works on paper, primarily from Mondrian’s early career, that trace the artist’s explorations as he progressed from realistic traditions to experimental abstractions . . . [The] early works show many affinities with his later abstractions: a strength of intuition and precision, an emphasis on the structure of natural forms, and innate feeling for rhythm and dynamism. Visitors can trace Mondrian’s journey toward abstraction and consider this icon of 20th-century modernism through a new lens.
According to a press release that appeared in some local newspapers (like The Boston Sun) but, oddly, not on the MFA’s Press page, “[a] majority of the works in Mondrian: Foundations are drawn from a gift to the MFA from Maria and Conrad Janis by and through the Janis Living Trust,”
In addition to 34 paintings, drawings and watercolors by Mondrian—24 of which are on view in the exhibition—the gift included more than 200 works that significantly reshape the Museum’s holdings of early and mid-20th century art from Europe and the U.S. Highlights include a group of five sculptures by Jean Arp that enable the MFA to show the full chronological range of his work; works on paper by Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and Franz Kline; the Museum’s first work by Anna Mary Moses (“Grandma Moses”); and a group of seven works by the self-taught artist Morris Hirshfield.
Let’s hope we see most of those works on display sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, here’s some of what appears in the Mondrian exhibit.
Post Mill at Heeswijk, Side View, 1904
Bend in the Gein with Row of Ten or Eleven Poplars, about 1905–06
Study of a Dahlia (Sketchbook Sheet 1), 1908
Apple Tree, about 1912
It wasn’t much of a leap from that last charcoal drawing to the Mondrian we’ve all come to know and, in some cases, wear.
As we moved through the exhibit, the Missus noticed how Mondrian signed his early work.
Mondrian has experimented with his name almost as much as his artistic style. Like his forms, Mondrian reduced his name from Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan to Mondrian, distancing himself from his Dutch roots. Although still occasionally referred to as “Mondriaan,” the artist officially dropped the second “a” from his name in 1911, rendering it a very appropriate anagram; “I Paint Modern.”
Piet Mondrian most certainly did. And the MFA exhibit is well worth a trundle to see how it all started.
Ever since sports gambling became legal in 2018 (SCOTUS: You bet!), the hardworking staff has laid plenty of 8 to 5 that the sports book-industrial complex would go sideways in no time flat.
Cue Jared Diamond’s piece in today’s Wall Street Journal under the headline, “A Reporter’s Tweet Moved NBA Draft Odds. He Also Works for a Gambling Company.”
The story revolves around this pre-draft tweet from Shams Charania, “a reporter for the sports journalism website the Athletic [owned by the New York Times] who is known as one of the industry’s premier news-breakers about the NBA.”
Drive Timesniks nuts graf:
Charania has a commercial partnership agreement with FanDuel, a prominent online sportsbook that allows customers to wager on the sport Charania covers for the Athletic. Though Charania isn’t a FanDuel employee, he regularly appears on FanDuel’s TV channel and is compensated by the company. The banner atop Charania’s Twitter profile features the Athletic logo, sandwiched between the logos of FanDuel and Stadium, the sports television network he also works for.
Despite disclaimers all around, Diamond adds, “the episode served as a stark example of the thorny situations that will no doubt continue to arise as sports leagues, sports media and sports gambling enterprises become increasingly intertwined. ”
Our kissin’ cousin (Frog Division) Dr. Ads has been on this like Brown on Williamson, dubbing the sports book/sports league/sports media hookup the Axis of Wheedle.
Here’s just FanDuel’s list of besties.
The Doc’s diagnosis: “Multiply that by umpteen sports books, and you have the future: Games = Gambling. And then, all bets on the integrity of sports are off.”
Well the Missus and I trundled over to The Fens yesterday to catch Making Past Present: Cy Twombly (through May 7) at the Museum of Fine Arts and say, it was swell except for the parts that were head-scratching.
More on that later. Here’s how the MFA’s overview of the exhibit begins
Unique among his peers at the vanguard of postwar American art, Cy Twombly (1928–2011) sought inspiration from ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian cultures. Throughout his career, he created thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and prints inspired by the cultures of the past he encountered through his travels, reading, and collecting. Twombly wanted to demonstrate that “Modern Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition, and continuity. For myself,” he wrote, “the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary).”
Work by Twombly appears alongside ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near Eastern art from the MFA’s collection, as well as objects from Twombly’s personal collection of antiquities, which are on public display for the first time.
While major American artists were moving toward Abstract Expressionism, Twombly moved to Italy, married up, and immersed himself in antiquities. In 1952, erstwhile fling Robert Rauschenberg took this picture of Twombly standing next to the massive hand of Emperor Constantine in Rome’s Capitoline Museums.
Twombly, who specialized in cryptography during a stint in the Army, adopted a “characteristic, often illegible handwriting that appears throughout [his] paintings, drawings, and sculptures,” echoing ancient inscriptions in stone.
As time went on, a good deal of Twombly’s scrawlings became more legible, although arguably less interesting.
As the exhibit progresses, Twombly’s scrawlings seem to grow more self-referential and self-indulgent, but maybe that’s just me.
(To be fair graf goes here)
To be fair, you’re well advised to seek a second opinion in Boston Globe art critic Murray Whyte’s smart review of the exhibit, which has – to put it mildly – a different perspective on some of the works.
In “Apollo,” 1975, which appears midway through the 150-work exhibition, he scrawls the sun god’s name on the canvas in a rich cobalt hue. It dissembles in a cascade of words etched in pencil that include a string of the God’s aliases, like “Phoebus.” Less clear are random words like “mouse” and “grasshopper,” chaotically dashed off in a corner of the frame. Twombly didn’t aim to be knowable; his works are often opaque and spontaneous-seeming, deliberately rich with beauty and mystery. To me, they often feel like painterly embodiments of the vagaries of lost history, buried too deep for collective memory to access.
(To be sure graf goes here)
To be sure, Whyte has some reservations of his own: “The exhibition, and indeed, Twombly’s entire oeuvre, is chock-a-block with indulgent paeans to ancient poetry and myth, and his fervent desire for connection to art and history. This can get a little eye-rolly, but the extravagant beauty of his wildly expressive mark-making balances things out; you can be deeply with the work, while dipping lightly into the backstory.”
‘Someone had to move first’: MFA plans sale of NFTs based on fragile French pastels
The museum hopes to fund conservation efforts with the proceeds, but uncertainty in the crypto market raises questions.
How much would you pay for a rarely seen artwork by French Impressionist Claude Monet?
The Museum of Fine Arts aims to find out — sort of — when it dips its toe in the choppy waters of cryptocurrency next month, selling a collection of non-fungible tokens based on pastels from its collection by Monet, Edgar Degas, and other Impressionist luminaries.
The sale, which is being orchestrated by the French startup LaCollection, positions the MFA as one of the first encyclopedic museums in the United States to embrace the novel technology — which links digital artworks to online ownership certificates stored on the blockchain.
Free Degas NFTs or not, the jury is decidedly out on whether vapor-art has been croaked by the crypto crash, as a simple Google search will reveal.
It is, shall we say, a (Bit)coin flip. But the Irish in us leans toward Terry Sullivan’s analysis last November at Yahoo.
In mid-October, Bloomberg published a massive 40,000-word story in Businessweek, written by finance writer, Matt Levine, who attempted to demystify and explain cryptocurrency as well as NFTs. But one might say that both crypto and NFTs got quite a harsh critique in Levine’s story: For example, in the middle of the article, Levine refers to an Esquire article, which discusses how some in crypto are trying to reimagine books as investment opportunities! Levine’s take is this? “The bad way to put this is that every web3 project is simultaneously a Ponzi.”
Levine also questions the thin connection between the code you’re investing in on the blockchain when you buy an NFT and the actual piece of art. He writes, “but what does it mean to say that the NFT is a piece of digital art? The art does not live on the blockchain…. If you buy an NFT, what you own is a notation on the blockchain that says you own a pointer to some web server.” It’s like paying a museum for a Cezanne, and they only give you the page from the museum catalog…or better yet, they’ve only sent you the museum wall label!
Beyond the financials, though, there’s also the fallout for the prestige of fine art, as Bendor Grosvenor noted in his Diary of an art historian blog last year (via The Art Newspaper).
The British Museum demeans itself by selling its works as NFTs—and will probably live to regret it
In giving cultural validity to meaningless reproductions of Turner and Hokusai pieces, The British Museum blurs the lines between real and fake at its peril
According to an early biographer, J.M.W. Turner viewed publishers who sold his prints as greedy middle men, “huxters of art”. We can easily imagine what he’d make of museums selling his work as NFTs, as the British Museum will this month through the website La Collection. Twenty watercolours will be sold, with prices for the “rarest” starting at €4,999 ($5,660). The iniative follows on from the sale of 200 Hokusai works from the museum’s collection as NFTs last year.
That sum gets you a jpeg with no rights, physical or intellectual, on the original image. What you’re really buying is the sequence of code entered onto the blockchain, which is unique and thus tradable. If enough people believe the line of code is worth something then you can sell your Turner jpeg for a profit. Think of it as the emperor’s new code.
We’re guessing the MFA doesn’t care a whit about all that. But maybe MFA members should.
For the past decade, the hardworking staff has been the Shutterbug Boswell of New York Times photographers, annually tallying who shot what in the paper’s Year in Pictures Special Section.
This year’s section is especially fraught, given the violence and wanton destruction that characterized 2022, as Times editor Dana Jennings addresses in his introduction to the website version of The Year in Pictures 2022.
As I immersed myself in these dozens of photos from the past year, I kept thinking about what happened to my Aunt Shirley and her family more than 30 years ago. I was a senior in college when she and three of her children were murdered by an arsonist who set fire to their tenement in Haverhill, Mass. What I recall most intensely from that dark week is one of Shirley’s younger sisters seething in front of the television cameras from Boston, keening with tears of rage and grief, craving revenge.
Over and over, as I looked at these photographs, I saw the same fury and misery that had stricken Aunt Shirley’s sister, her feral lust to get even.
I saw it in Aleppo and Nairobi, in Boston and Tehran. I saw it after typhoons and tornadoes, in refugee camps and in the rubble of collapsed buildings. But I learned as I looked that it’s better to see the living shackled to the rack of their unspeakable emotions than to watch those who are entombed in blank stoicism.
Also, these photos make the reader more human amid the infinite bombast of our electronic infotainment. The mind-numbing media avalanche threatens to make war, terrorism and catastrophe banal, to turn the maimed and the dead into mere meat, as abstract as Lady Gaga’s gown of raw beef. What many of the pictures here do, though, is turn the shallow creeks of the general into the profound deeps of the particular — shocking us awake.
Let’s start this year’s tally with a shoutout to Daniel Berehulak, whose devastating photo of “twisted metal and other debris [that] lined a village road after a column of destroyed Russian military vehicles was cleared away” provided the section’s double-truck wrapper.
Berehulak was one of several Times photographers who scored a Year in Pictures hat trick. Another was the stalwart Lynsey Addario, who captured more heart-rending tragedy in Ukraine with this photo of “a mother and her two children [who] lay dead as Ukranian soldiers tried in vain to save a man.”
Finbarr O’Reilly contributed this touching photograph of “Hlib Kihitov mourning his twin brother, Ehor Kihitov, who was killed along with nearly two dozen other soldiers in an artillery strike in Popasna in the eastern Luhansk region.”
As Dana Jennings noted in his introduction, “the year . . . wasn’t all blood and guts, and these photos reflect that, too: ballgames were played, marriages made, Shakespeare performed . . . ”
And Olympic hopes dashed, as Chang W. Lee captured in this photo of Shaun White, “a three-time Olympic gold medalist in snowboarding, after completing his final run on the men’s halfpipe. He missed out on a medal.”
It’s David Guttenfelder, though, who scored the most photos – five, if you’re keeping score at home – in the Times year-end review. His wartime photographs run the gamut from wistful to hopeful.
The former: “Maksim Syroizhko, a Ukrainian soldier with his girlfriend, Yana Matavapaeva. The couple said they had not seen each other since the war began.”
The latter: “Misha, 27, who lost his legs in battle, worked out in a hospital gym as he awaited prosthetic limbs. Fellow patients called him Acrobat.”
The Times Year in Pictures 2022 is a truly amazing assemblage of images capturing a world rich with drama, emotion, and human resilience. It’s also a testament to journalistic vision, skill, and courage, well worth every minute of your attention.
So I was leafing through the New York Times Book Review the other day when I came across this piece about The Dinner Party Writers Dream Of.
This year, our By the Book series of author interviews turned 10 — the feature made its debut in the April 15, 2012, issue, with David Sedaris in the hot seat — so to celebrate, we thought we would throw an end-of-year party. A dinner party, to be precise, since one of our recurring questions almost from the start has been: “You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?”
By design, the answers favor a certain kind of writer (witty, gregarious, charming, engaged) and, also by design, they tend to reveal a fair amount about the hosts: not only their reading habits but their social lives. “I can’t imagine myself hosting a literary dinner party,” Anne Tyler said in 2015. “What on earth would a bunch of writers talk about? I’d rather just curl up with a sandwich and read some favorite book over again on my own.”
We hear you, Anne. Still, plenty of participants have ventured to imagine what a bunch of writers might talk about, and have assembled their dream guest lists for us. Here are the 20 writers invited most often over the years, along with a sampling of quotes explaining their picks. Bon appétit.
Here are the dining companions most in demand among the glitterati over the past decade.
Seriously? Shakespeare, Baldwin, Twain, Morrison, Austen? Dickens? Tolstoy? Proust? Outside of Octavia Butler and Sappho, pretty unimaginative dinner parties, all due respect.
Forty years ago I was creative director at a small Boston ad agency among whose clients was a real estate developer looking to convert the Brook House – a 700-unit gated community on the Boston/Brookline border – from apartments to condominiums.
The developer told me, “Make something that everyone will be talking about.”
So I decided to host a Soirée for the Ages that would appear as an ad campaign in the real estate pages of the Boston Sunday Globe.
RSVPs came in the form of these teaser ads the first week.
The following Sunday, this full-page ad ran in the Globe.
Here’s a slightly more readable version, for those of you keeping score at home.
I’ve never claimed that my little get-together sold a single condo at the Brook House, but a whole bunch of people did talk about it. Maybe because it wasn’t just a bunch of the usual fantasy dinner-party suspects.
The Lost Generation: Women Ceramicists and the Cuban Avant-Garde examines the participants and artistic output from 1949 to 1959 of the Taller de Santiago de las Vegas, a ceramic workshop on the outskirts of Havana. A decade of artistic experimentation primarily by little-known women ceramicists had deep reverberations both for the acceptance of ceramics as a fine art form in Cuba and for the symbiotic relationship that flourished between the ceramicists and the painters, largely men, who visited the Taller to learn the craft. The painters in turn applied new techniques and methodologies to their two-dimensional production, which is now regarded as synonymous with the Cuban avant-garde (vanguardia).
prestigious Academia San Alejandro and other fine arts schools, to decorate the wares. These ceramicists created their own styles, establishing an artistic movement that garnered national and international recognition. Rebeca Robés Massés, Marta Arjona, María Elena Jubrías, Mirta García Buch, Amelia Peláez, and numerous others were key ceramicists at the Taller. They and Rodríguez de la Cruz welcomed the participation of renowned modernist painters and sculptors, including René Portocarrero, Wifredo Lam, Raúl Milián, Wifredo Arcay, Luis Martínez Pedro, Mariano Rodríguez, and Agustín Cárdenas.
Campaign Outsider 