Woman Who Botched Spanish Fresco, Now Famous, Sells Her Own Art

“Fame has come late to Cecilia Gímenez, an 80-year-old Spanish painter whose disastrous attempt at restoring a 19th-century Ecce Homo on the walls of her local church spread her name around the globe over the summer. … Now [she] has appeared as an artist in her own right, with one of her pictures currently for sale on eBay. (The bidding has now passed €610.)

Charles Rosen, Pianist, Polymath And Author, Dead At 85

“As a renowned writer and lecturer on music who was also a concert pianist of no small reputation, Mr. Rosen was among the last exemplars of a figure more typically associated with the 19th century: the international scholar-musician. If as a writer he was known for aqueous lucidity and the vast, ecumenical sweep of his inquiry, then as a pianist he tended to rate a similar description.”

Eugene Ionesco, Children’s Author

“In the late 1960s, … the Romanian-French absurdist playwright, published a series of ‘silly stories,’ in his words, that he’d written for his young daughter decades before. … When they were published, Maurice Sendak called them ‘among the most imaginative picture books of the last decade’.” Children are, after all, a natural audience for absurdism.