March 11, 2013, 11:58 AM
ARTstor has reached an agreement with Condé Nast to share 25,000 images of cartoons from The New Yorker, highlights from the Condé Nast Archive of Photography, and selections from the Fairchild Photo Service.
The images in these collections will be of great assistance in teaching a myriad of subjects like history, literature, and fashion. The New Yorker’s cartoons are legendary for their incisive wit and for shedding light on the dominant topics of every era, from the Depression to the Internet. The magazine’s cartoonists include renowned figures like, Peter Arno, Roz Chast, Otto Soglow, William Steig, James Thurber, and Gahan Wilson. The Condé Nast Collection, containing images dating back to 1892, represents one of the world’s greatest collections of magazine photography, encompassing fashion, celebrity, and lifestyle photography from publications such as House & Garden, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. The Fairchild Photo Service, comprised of more than three million photos gathered over six decades, is the fashion world’s preeminent image gallery. Read more…
November 28, 2012, 9:48 AM
There is an interesting new exhibit at the always awesome Mingei:
Drawn from the collection of Mingei International Museum and other institutional and private collections, this exhibition draws the eye to the art of music making, sharing the beautiful form and design details of musical instruments, bells, gongs, rattles, whistles and noisemakers from cultures across the world. Visitors moving through the exhibition will also be able to listen to recordings of a number of exotic instruments.
Check it out HERE
July 30, 2012, 9:30 AM
From the Washington Post:
PARIS — France’s Culture Ministry has confirmed that award-winning French filmmaker Chris Marker has died, one day after his 91st birthday. Many critics count Marker, with his experimental documentary style, as among the most influential French filmmakers of the post-war era. His 1962 classic “La Jetee” — a 28-minute post-apocalyptic movie comprised almost entirely of stills — is often ranked among the best time-travel films ever made.
It was the inspiration for Hollywood’s “Twelve Monkeys,” which Marker co-wrote. Cannes Film Festival President Gilles Jacob called Marker an “indefatigable filmmaker,” paying homage to a director who was still active into his 80s.
June 28, 2012, 11:22 AM
From the NYT Online
THE magic of Tanglewood, the summer festival in western Massachusetts, has many parts. There is the music of course, this being the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. There is the beauty of the surroundings, both on the meticulously maintained campus in the quaint town of Lenox and all around in the Berkshire Hills.
There is a spirit that has evolved over three-quarters of a century, stemming from the festival’s founder, Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony from 1924 to 1949; nurtured under music directors like Charles Munch and Erich Leinsdorf, and influential guests like Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss; and now combining the youthful energy of students at the Tanglewood Music Center with a unity of purpose across generations. That spirit splintered briefly some 15 years ago, when Seiji Ozawa, the orchestra’s music director at the time, crossed swords with longtime faculty members, but it seemed to come back stronger than ever under James Levine, the music director from 2004 to 2011.
There is even a tinge of pride — a slight sense of indomitability, perhaps — shared by performers and audiences alike, born of their having repeatedly weathered terrifying flash storms and survived the annual plague of mosquitoes. Mud is part of the creation myth, as witnessed in the photograph of well dressed patrons tiptoeing over the newly soaked grounds at a Wagner concert in 1937 — in the festival’s first season, before the concert shed was built — often printed in the Tanglewood program.
Alas, this disparate yet potent mix of elements cannot be bottled. But happily the music can be, to some extent, and has been, in the form of archival recordings now being made available in quantity.
Read more…
February 1, 2012, 1:21 PM
Via ArtInfo:
Artist Mike Kelley has passed away at his home in Los Angeles, having apparently taken his own life. The tragic news was confirmed to BLOUIN ARTINFO by Helene Winer, of New York’s Metro Pictures gallery, a long-time associate of the artist.
“It is totally shocking that someone would decide to do this, someone who has success and renown and options,” said Winer. “It’s extremely sad.” She added that the artist had been depressed.
Kelley was born in 1954 in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. He became involved in the city’s music scene as a teen, and while a student at the University of Michigan, formed the influential proto-punk band Destroy All Monsters with fellow artists Jim Shaw, Niagara, and Cary Loren (a retrospective devoted to Destroy All Monsters was held at L.A.’s Prism gallery last year). Together, the band hatched a style of performance that skirted the edge of performance art.
After graduating college in 1976, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the California Institute of the Arts, studying alongside teachers like John Baldessari and Laurie Anderson. Music continued to be a constant passion: he formed another band, “Poetics,” with fellow CalArts students John Miller and Tony Oursler.
January 31, 2012, 9:46 AM
One of the greatest ethnomusicologists ever is getting a wider audience.
From the NYT Online:
A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.
On Tuesday, to commemorate what would have been Lomax’s 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox label is releasing “The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center,” a digital download sampler of 16 field recordings from different locales and stages of Lomax’s career.
MORE
January 11, 2012, 3:18 PM
Look here for a list of the best art apps for teachers!
January 3, 2012, 9:50 AM
From the Washington Post Online
Eva Zeisel, who designed and produced stylish but simple lines of tableware that were credited with bringing a sense of serenity to American dinnertime, died Dec. 30 at her home in New City, N.Y.
Mrs. Zeisel was 105 and had come to America just before World War II, after a harrowing series of adventures in the turbulent Europe of the 1930s.
Her daughter, Jean Richards, confirmed the death but said she did not know the medical cause.
Mrs. Zeisel was widely regarded as a master of modern design. Her salt and pepper shakers, creamers and ladles are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet she resisted being characterized as an artist. “Art has more ego to it than what I do,” she once told the New Yorker.
What Mrs. Zeisel did was create everyday objects that fundamentally changed the look of American kitchens and dining rooms.
She brought “a trained designer’s eye and touch to the kind of inexpensive daily goods that were available to everyone,” said Karen Kettering, vice president for Russian art at Sotheby’s and a former curator at the Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens in the District, which featured a retrospective of Mrs. Zeisel’s work in 2005.
Mrs. Zeisel received artistic training in her native Hungary in the years after World War I. She moved to the Soviet Union, where she worked in a factory and, after building a reputation as a talented ceramicist, landed a job as art director of the state-run porcelain and glass industries.
While in that position, Mrs. Zeisel was falsely accused of conspiring to assassinate Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Read more…
July 7, 2011, 12:17 PM
From NYT online
Robert Sklar, a film scholar whose 1975 book “Movie-Made America” was one of the first histories to place Hollywood films in a social and political context, finding them a key to understanding how modern American values and beliefs have been shaped, died on Saturday in Barcelona. He was 74.
The cause was a brain injury sustained in a bicycle accident, his son Leonard said.
Mr. Sklar, who was a professor of cinema studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for more than 30 years, came to film in the 1960s, when he was asked to serve as a faculty adviser to the Cinema Guild, the student film society at the University of Michigan, where he taught in the American culture program.
He found the proposal enticing. After publishing a cultural study of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he had begun focusing on Hollywood film as a lens for analyzing American society in the 1920s and 1930s.
When he could not find a satisfactory history of American film, he decided to fill the gap himself and wrote “Movie-Made America: A History of American Movies.” It immediately became a standard work on the subject and has never been out of print. In 1994 it was reissued in a revised and expanded version.
Read more…
May 27, 2011, 8:46 AM
Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist and onetime romantic partner of Max Ernst whose paintings depicted women and half-human beasts floating in a dreamscape of images drawn from myth, folklore, religious ritual and the occult, died on Wednesday in Mexico City, where she lived. She was 94.
“The Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self-Portrait),” oil on canvas, 1939, Ms. Carrington’s first major Surrealist work. The painting is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A sculpture from a recent exhibition of Leonora Carrigton’s work at the Estación Indianilla Cultural Center in Mexico City.
The cause was pneumonia, Wendi Norris, the co-owner of Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern gallery in San Francisco, said.
Ms. Carrington, one of the last living links to the world of André Breton, Man Ray and Miró, was an art student when she encountered Ernst’s work for the first time at the International Surrealism Exhibition in London in 1936. A year later she met him at a party.
The two fell in love and ran off to Paris, where Ernst, more than 25 years her senior, left his wife and introduced Ms. Carrington to the Surrealist circle. “From Max I had my education,” she told The Guardian of London in 2007. “I learned about art and literature. He taught me everything.”
She became acquainted with the likes of Picasso, Dalí and Tanguy. With her striking looks and adventurous spirit, she seemed like the ideal muse, but the role did not suit. Miró once handed her a few coins and told her to run out and buy him a pack of cigarettes. “I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself,” she told The Guardian. “I wasn’t daunted by any of them.”
Read more…
