Category: AJBlogs

He was a renowned expert on American Impressionism and 19th-century American still-life painting as well as author of more than 20 books on American art, notably his three-volume Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting 1710-1920. – Lee Rosenbaum

When I visited dish-besotted Bill Stern in his apartment in Los Angeles, we would make tea for breakfast in a gray pot designed in the 1960s by Edith Heath. At some aha moment, Bill decided to found The Museum of California Design. He died a week after our last breakfast. – Jeff Weinstein

Any sustainable and resilient plan for returning to live performance will have to be highly adaptable, nimble, responsive, and risk-tolerant. The trick will be to find loosely-coupled approaches to what has become tightly-coupled work. – Andrew Taylor

Do you consider your organization’s deepest responsibility to be to art or to people? I don’t mean what is your mission. Rather, in extreme instances, what is most important? If many in your community are hurting is your focus on art? – Doug Borwick

Considering his long, illustrious career as an art scholar and museum director, not to mention his generosity in sharing his deep insights with others (including me), I’m puzzled as to why there’s been so little mention of his death last week. – Lee Rosenbaum

How often can you say that the Metropolitan Opera rocks? That happens in much of this new recording, taken from live performances of the Met’s hit production. But the price of capturing that live energy was surprisingly high. – David Patrick Stearns

Pina Bausch’s work has been a delight and compulsion throughout my theatregoing lifetime. I’ve seen every piece I can, several of them more than once. And it turns out I’ve written quite a bit about her work, so have collected some of it here. – David Jays

Of course, I had to grow, pluck my own and juice them. I even bit one on the vine like an animal — I am an animal — and sucked and chewed, thinking of another writer who acted on the same impulse before I was born, though with a different lure. – Jeff Weinstein

As a generation of jazz elders leaves our world — some hastened by the pandemic — their faces as photographed by Sánta István Csaba become even more luminous, haunting, iconic. – Howard Mandel