“Local councils have seized on the volunteer idea as an easy answer to budget cuts. Each local authority has struggled to find its own solutions, with local residents doing whatever they can. The commitment of volunteers is wholly admirable, but the result is that as a country, we have been left without a coherent library service and we have seen no real attempt to find out how well community-run libraries work.”
Tag: 10.19.17
Puzzle: A Painting Attributed To Leonardo Gets Science Wrong. Does That Mean It’s Not A Leonardo?
The painting is estimated to fetch $100m (£75m) at auction next month. But “in a forthcoming study, Leonardo da Vinci: the Biography, Walter Isaacson questions why an artistic genius, scientist, inventor, and engineer showed an ‘unusual lapse or unwillingness’ to link art and science in depicting the orb.”
Two Picasso Murals And The Anders Breivik Bombing Make For A Bitter Battle In Oslo
A few hours before right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik shot 69 people dead at a summer camp outside the Norwegian capital in 2011, he left a car bomb in the city’s government district that killed eight and severely damaged two landmark Brutalist buildings which have been empty ever since. Now the Norwegian government plans to tear down and replace one of those buildings and relocate its two murals, created by Pablo Picasso with Carl Nesjar. “Opponents of the decision see it as an affront to Norwegian and global artistic heritage, and a capitulation to Mr. Breivik.” Says one official, “We don’t want the ministry to tear down the building when the terrorist didn’t manage to do that.”
Danielle Darrieux, Great Beauty Of French Postwar Cinema, Dead At 100
“[Her] poise, languid glamour and fine singing voice catapulted her to stardom as a teenager in the early 1930s and kept her there for decades, whether in melodramas, frisky comedies or light musicals. … If her pre-war movies emphasized her sparkle and charm, the postwar years elicited some of her most riveting dramatic performances. Much of her critical legacy rests on three celebrated films she made with director Max Ophuls: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952) and The Earrings of Madame de … (1953).