“Martinez currently heads the museum’s Greek and Roman antiquities department. The 49-year-old, who was handed a three-year term, has been with the Louvre since 2007 and is leading the restoration of the famed headless Greek sculpture, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.”
Tag: 04.04.13
Seven National Ballet Of Cuba Dancers Defect
“The seven young members of the internationally acclaimed National Ballet of Cuba who defected last month after a tour in Mexico came to the United States in search of wider artistic horizons, one of them has declared.”
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 85, Novelist And Screenwriter For Merchant-Ivory
“For years, people who read Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novels assumed she was born in India. … [But she was] a German Jew displaced by war to England, who married an Indian man and settled in his country. She absorbed enough of subcontinental culture to portray it with clarity and comic sensibility in books that earned her comparisons to Jane Austen.”
How Spain’s Artists Are – Or Aren’t – Responding To Economic Crisis
“Despite Spain’s record unemployment and economic recession, ‘most artists have stuck to their line and there’s been no new movement really linked to the crisis,’ said Antonio Sanz, the director of [Madrid gallery] Ivorypress.”
Jane Henson, Co-Creator Of The Muppets, Dead At 78
“As the first partner to the famous Muppeteer, Henson was instrumental in the creation of the earliest characters in the brood of marionette-puppet hybrids. The initial crew of zany foam personalities included Kermit, who made his 1955 debut on the TV show Sam and Friends not as a frog, but as a green-hued lizard made from an old coat belonging to Jim’s mother.”
China Is Becoming More Western (Literally… And Physically)
“For the past few decades, China has been replicating — almost brick-for-brick — many of the West’s iconic architectural gems, including such iconic buildings as the Sydney Opera House, the White House in Washington and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.”
Vladimir Nabokov As Lit Professor
“He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines.”
Religion Without God – A Preview Of Ronald Dworkin’s Final Book
“Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter.”
Israel Ballet’s Founder Fired After 45 Years
“Berta Yampolsky, who founded the Israel Ballet in 1967 and has been its artistic director ever since, told Haaretz she was fired recently by the company’s supervising accountant.”