Tag: 02.21.20

The Forger As Artist – A Superfan’s Show Of Work By Elmyr de Hory

In the 1950s and ’60s, Elmyr de Hory is believed to have forged over a thousand works by major artists. Many have been removed from museums. Others, some experts say, have not. Mark Forgy has spent years dedicated to the memory of de Hory. He has written a book, gives talks and contributes to exhibitions on forgery. It is his calling, he says, and has all led to his newest endeavor: putting on an exhibition of de Hory’s original work. No forgeries. Just de Hory in his own voice. – The New York Times

At The Shanghai Ballet Company, Dancers Are Practicing In Masks

The dancers, including lead dancer Wu Husheng, aren’t finding it easy to train and rehearse with masks on. “Wu, 33, says he can normally train for an hour at a time, but he feels breathless in just 20 minutes with the mask on.” The dancers have seen more than 30 of their performances, especially abroad, canceled, and some dancers can’t get out of quarantines to return to Shanghai. – Reuters

Berlin Film Festival’s Gender Parity Scorecard Is Mostly Good, But Not All Good

The good: Leadership. “Its festival directorships were shared equally between men and women, and … its executive board was similarly balanced.”
The less good: Director numbers. “The majority of films shown at the competition were still made by male directors. At this year’s festival, 37.9% of films were directed by women, and six of the 18 films in competition were directed by women, which is down from seven last year.” – The Guardian (UK)

France Can’t See What’s Erotic About Two Women Falling For Each Other

This is the weirdest possible sentence to write, but director Céline Sciamma says that Portrait of a Lady on Fire isn’t considered erotic in, of all places, France. What? WHAT? Quoi?? Sciamma: “It’s a very bourgeois industry. There’s resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. ‘A film can be feminist?’ They don’t know this concept. They don’t read the book. They don’t even know about the fact that ‘male gaze’ exists. You can tell it’s a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy.” – The Guardian (UK)

The Scottish Artist Who Brought Oz To Life

Sound stages of the 1930s and 1940s needed lots of stage sets, and at MGM, George Gibson was the man in charge. “The backdrops he created appeared in films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), An American in Paris (1951) and Brigadoon (1954). His backdrops were as large as 60ft x 150ft (18m by 45m) and so realistic that the audience often did not realise the setting was a soundstage.” – BBC

We Lost A Lyric Poet When We Lost Amelia Earhart

But no one really knew it because her husband kept it one of her carefully guarded secrets. Now, “searching the archives for Amelia Earhart’s lost poems is a study in fragments—every tucked-away line on the back of a receipt hidden in a notebook an invitation to speculate on her thoughts. Even when her widower published pieces of her verse in his memoir, he had an independent source verify the authenticity of one of them, unsure if the private voice on the page was indeed hers.” – LitHub