“Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, a renowned and popular botanical artist whose subjects ranged from the flowers found in Shakespeare to the weeds found in New York City, died Thursday in Boulder, Colo.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Copy Cops Quash Digital Freedom, Creativity
“The 40th annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week was packed, as usual, with cool new technology. New devices included ultra-thin/ultrawide TV displays, networked entertainment systems and innumerable gadgets that bring music, movies and television to our hands and homes in new ways. But many of these new products limit our freedom to use and share the music, movies and other content they are intended for. It wasn’t always like this.”
Emory Gets Ted Hughes’ Letters To Mistress
“Love letters written by Sylvia Plath’s husband to his mistress have been acquired by Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. Despite writing to Assia Wevill to ‘please burn all my letters,’ the collection includes more than 60 letters from British poet laureate Ted Hughes to Wevill and six from her to him – as well as a number of notes, sketches, fragmentary diary entries and a few photographs of Wevill.”
The Night The Bell Tolled For West End ‘Producers’
“Last Saturday saw the 920th and final performance of The Producers in London’s West End. We know all about first nights at the theatre, because they naturally get all the attention – the all-important early reviews, the news of the breakthrough performance, the will-it-won’t-it-float moment – but what are last nights like?”
Still Anarchic, ‘Les Demoiselles’ Turns 100
Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is a century old. “It’s not just 100 years in the life of a painting, but 100 years of modernism. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the rift, the break that divides past and future. Culturally, the 20th century began in 1907. Consider the dates of other works of high modernism. In music, Schoenberg’s Erwartung was composed in 1909 and Stravinsky began The Rite of Spring in 1910. James Joyce didn’t get started on Ulysses until 1914, by which time Picasso was into the final stages of cubism.”
An Unexpected $1 Million For Baltimore Shakespeare
“At a time when the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival was feeling the pinch of rising costs, the small, 13-year-old professional theater received a surprise, anonymous $1 million gift to create an endowment fund. … The festival was considering producing only two shows,” rather than its usual four per year, “when the $1 million gift came in. Instead, the theater, which has a $600,000 budget, now has a firm financial base.”
Letting a 5,000-Year-Old (Restored) Ruin Look Its Age
“The last and largest of [ancient Egypt’s] cult centers — the only major one still standing in clearly recognizable form — was erected for King Khasekhemwy, who ruled in the second dynasty around 2780 B.C… Now, in an ambitious effort to preserve this ruin, archaeologists, engineers and teams of artisans and laborers are shoring up the walls and gates of Shunet el-Zebib, ravaged by time and the elements and in danger of imminent collapse.”
Value Added, Subtracted In Met’s ‘Puritani’ Simulcast
David Patrick Stearns weighs in on “Bellini’s less watchable, theatrically antiquated I Puritani,” the Metropolitan Opera’s second simulcast offering. “A lesson lies in some of those 3-D movies from the 1950s: Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is basically a stage play on film. That isn’t a problem with a 3-D print that puts you in the same room as the actors, but in a conventional print it’s as static as I Puritani. In present form, simulcasts are just a better variation on what came before. It’s still a relay medium.”
A Movie Theatre With (Egad!) Only One Screen
“Today, single-screen theaters are no longer endangered – they’re practically extinct, maybe 150 nationwide, a handful in this area. Some fill niche markets, showing art films or classics. Others have found new life as anchors for business districts, a means for generating excitement and driving foot traffic.” A new life is the hope for the 94-year-old Hiway Theatre of Jenkintown, Pa., about to reopen after a $1.6 million renovation.
Americans In A Rush To Sell Art For Big £££
“For the last century, art collections have generally flowed from culturerich Europe to cash-rich America. Now, there are signs of them going the other way. Works from three major American collections of Impressionist and modern art will go on the block next month at Sotheby’s in London — a result, art world insiders said, of the increasingly worldwide art market and also the rise of the pound relative to the dollar.”