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National Portrait Gallery announces shortlist for Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024
LONDON.- Three artists have been shortlisted for the prestigious Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024 (11 July until 27 October 2024), which makes a welcome return to the National Portrait Gallery in 2024. The three shortlisted portraits were selected from 1,647 entries from 62 countries, with 50 selected for final display. Entries were submitted anonymously and judged by a panel, which included the National Portrait Gallery’s Director, Dr Nicholas Cullinan OBE; visual artist, Barbara Walker MBE RA; sociologist and bioethicist, Sir Tom Shakespeare; actor and host of the podcast, Talk Art, Russell Tovey; and the Gallery’s Curator for Contemporary Collections, Tanya Bentley. The three shortlisted portraits are: · Zizi (2023) by Isabella Watling · Jacqueline with Still Life (2020) by Antony Williams · Lying (2020) by Catherine Chambers ... More

Denis Villeneuve answers all your questions about 'Dune: Part Two'
NEW YORK, NY.- This weekend, “Dune: Part Two” muscles back into IMAX theaters with the verve of Timothée Chalamet rodeo-riding a giant sandworm. After nearly two months in theaters, the film is the current champion of this year’s box office race, with a total take of more than $680 million. (It’s also available to rent or buy on some streaming platforms.) The film’s success is thanks in part to audiences that have returned over and over to get lost in the rocky warrens and spiritual reckonings of the planet Arrakis. One admirer reports he’s seen the movie 25 times to date. That there’s so much to explore in “Dune: Part Two” is a credit to its writer and director, Denis Villeneuve, who boldly reshaped Frank Herbert’s complex and cerebral 1965 novel “Dune.” Villeneuve split the book and its themes into two films: “Dune: Part One,” released in 2021, focused ... More

Before she became music's greatest teacher, she wrote an opera
NEW YORK, NY.- In March 1912, famous violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe visited the home of his fellow musician Raoul Pugno in Paris. At the piano, Pugno played and sang through “La Ville Morte,” an opera he was writing with Nadia Boulanger, a mentee-turned-collaborator 35 years his junior. “Of this very private performance,” Ysaÿe wrote to Boulanger later that month, “I keep the most profound and happiest impression.” The opera, he told her, was “so beautiful, so sound, so poignant.” “La Ville Morte” was the most ambitious project of Boulanger’s young composing career. And once it took shape, with a piano-vocal score completed that summer, she wrote under the final measures, “Alleluia!!!!” But one thing after another kept “La Ville Morte” from reaching the stage. In 1914, Pugno, an essential partner in selling it to the public, died. ... More

A Pulitzer-winning composer puts his operatic spin on Edith Wharton
NEW YORK, NY.- Composer and pianist Anthony Davis is known for drawing inspiration from real-world figures in his operas. “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — recently mounted by the Metropolitan Opera — and “The Central Park Five,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, are both grave, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about well-known people. But Davis has also written rollicking adaptations of literary material. Less frequently produced but no less interesting are chamber operas like “Lilith,” a saucy and inventive take on the story of Adam’s first wife that features a divorce court in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, “Lear on the 2nd Floor” is a riff on Shakespeare that brings “King Lear” into contemporary discussions about medicine and Alzheimer’s disease. “The Reef,” Davis’ latest music drama to arrive onstage and his follow-up to “The ... More

Abe Koogler's new play is an ode to intense culinary experiences
NEW YORK, NY.- Abe Koogler didn’t grow up going to many restaurants. He was raised on Vashon Island, Washington — sparse and bucolic with an artsy populace, a few miles southwest of Seattle — in a house without a TV, where meals were mostly eaten at home, his free time spent fashioning handmade puppets onto chopsticks. So when he moved to New York, a city with restaurants on virtually every corner, he found the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s highbrow establishments fascinating. “Living in New York, you walk by all these highly curated, beautiful, warm spaces where people are in the middle of this intense culinary experience,” Koogler said on a rainy afternoon in midtown. “And I like looking at these windows and imagining what it’s like for the people inside. “A lot of it is being fascinated and not knowing why,” he added. Koogler, 39, is known for his darkly comedic play ... More

Philharmonic opens inquiry after misconduct allegations are revived
NEW YORK, NY.- The New York Philharmonic, which has been facing an uproar since a recent magazine article detailed allegations of misconduct against two players it tried and failed to fire in 2018, said Thursday that it was commissioning an outside investigation into its culture. Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s president and CEO, said in a letter to musicians, staff members and board members that the organization had hired an outside lawyer, Katya Jestin, a managing partner of the law firm Jenner & Block, to “launch an independent investigation into the culture of the New York Philharmonic in recent years.” “I am empowering Katya to look at everything and to leave no stone unturned, including any new allegations as they are reported,” Ginstling wrote. The decision came after a report last week in New York magazine detailed accusations ... More

Tennis & sports posters at Swann May 9
NEW YORK, NY.- Swann Galleries’ Thursday, May 9 poster auction offers the world’s most preeminent private tennis and sport collection. With more than 100 scarce and desirable tennis posters coming to auction, this will be the largest collection of tennis posters ever to hit the market, in addition to other sporting images. This singular collection, spanning the 1890s through the 1950s, is the result of a family passion for tennis, fitness and art. The Schwartz family used posters to decorate their well-known clubs, resulting in an assemblage of rare and exciting images from all over the world. Tennis poster enthusiasts will delight in seeing favorites, but they will have the unparalleled opportunity to view and acquire images that don’t appear in the pages of the prominent books written about tennis posters. Rarities include over half a dozen Wimbledon posters ... More

From Dürer to Katz, over 500 years of artistry in Freeman's / Hindman's upcoming fine art sales
CHICAGO, IL.- On April 24 and 25, Freeman’s | Hindman brings a robust selection of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and prints and multiples to market. Representing some of the most esteemed and coveted names in art history—from Pablo Picasso and Roy Lichtenstein to Louise Nevelson and Alex Katz—the Post War and Contemporary Art and Prints and Multiples auctions offer something for every collector. Leading the April 24 Post War and Contemporary Art sale are two mesmerizing Alex Katz paintings from The Private Collection of Debra and Harry Seigle, Chicago, Illinois. Alex Katz’s Ariel (lot 13; estimate: $300,000 – 500,000) is a quietly moody portrait of one of Katz’s frequent muses. Katz’s deceptively simple and flat canvases defy two-dimensionality; their emotional depth has made him one of the most widely exhibited ... More

Works by Edgar Payne, Phil Dike, and Grandma Moses highlight Moran's California and American Fine Art sale
LOS ANGELES, CA.- John Moran Auctioneers will present their bi-annual California and American Fine Art auction on Tuesday, May 7th, 2024 at 12:pm PDT. This sale will feature 140 hand-picked works by noted California & American artists, including: Alson Clark, Edgar Payne, Franz A. Bischoff, Maurice Braun, Elmer Wachtel, Hanson Puthuff, Armin Hansen, Angel Espoy, Charles Rollo Peters, Mischa Askenazy, Jessie Arms Botke, Phil Dike, Emile Gruppe, Arthur C. Goodwin, Edward Potthast, a handful of mid-late 19th century oils by William Keith, Thomas Hill, and John Ross Key and Herzog, Edith White, Samuel Kilburn will be featured. Contemporary California & American artists include selections by Charles ... More

St. Vincent dives headfirst into the darkness
NEW YORK, NY.- On a recent Tuesday night in a dressing room of the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, Annie Clark, the 41-year-old musician who records as St. Vincent, thumbed through a shelf of secondhand records and sipped a glass of pink Champagne. Clark, invited to DJ the venue’s grand reopening party, was the room’s first inhabitant since a major renovation restored the former movie palace; a pristine, new-car smell lingered. Holding court among a few members of her team and her 23-year-old sister, Clark was an attentive host in this antiseptic space, ready with a witty remark (the carefully curated LPs were probably “someone’s deceased grandma’s record collection”) or a topped-off beverage. She wore a cream-colored silk blouse, black kitten-heeled shoes and a gauzy black bow tied artfully around her neck. Even in a moment of relative repose, Clark possessed a feline hyper-awareness of her surroundings. Dave Grohl, who plays drums on two tracks off St. Vincent’s blistering new album “All Born Scre ... More