Jan 20 2025
Long before synthesizers made futuristic sounds routine, Juan García Esquivel was already making orchestras behave as though they had escaped Earth’s gravity. Trumpets exploded from one speaker while voices answered from the other. Piano notes ricocheted across the stereo field. Steel guitar, percussion, whistles, wordless choruses, bells, and unexpected instrumental combinations appeared and disappeared with …
Jan 18 2025
Danny Kaye could turn language into percussion. A list of Russian composers became a showstopper. A nonsensical string of syllables could accelerate until words seemed to lose their meaning entirely. A medieval drinking cup could become the center of one of Hollywood’s most elaborate verbal routines. Then, without changing performers, the same man could sing …
Jan 17 2025
Françoise Hardy seemed almost completely unsuited to becoming a pop star. She disliked crowds, suffered from stage fright, distrusted celebrity, and wrote songs about romantic uncertainty with a seriousness far removed from the exuberant image usually associated with teenage pop. Yet when she appeared on French television in 1962 singing “Tous les garçons et les …
Jan 15 2025
Lee Bontecou made sculptures that seem to stare back. From a wall of patched canvas and welded steel, a black opening pushes toward the viewer. It might be the mouth of a machine, the lens of a camera, the barrel of a weapon, an eye, a wound, a cave, or a hole leading somewhere beyond …
Jan 14 2025
Cecil Beaton could make a room look more glamorous than it really was, turn a movie costume into fashion history, transform a royal portrait into modern mythology, and photograph a bomb-injured child with a directness almost impossible to reconcile with the extravagant society pictures that first made him famous. Few creative careers contain such dramatic …
Jan 08 2025
Some singers become recognizable through the first note they sing. Nora Dean could accomplish it with a cry, a laugh, a stretched syllable, or one of the strange wordless exclamations she scattered through her records. Her voice could sound sweet and playful one moment, mischievous the next, and then suddenly turn raw enough to cut …
Jan 07 2025
Magic hour is not the time to be in a restaurant. -Roloff Beny Roloff Beny photographed the world as though civilization itself were a work of art. A ruined column, a desert wall, a flight of birds, a temple reflected in water, a mountain range disappearing into mist, or a narrow opening between ancient stones …
Jan 04 2025
André Masson wanted to make art before conscious thought had time to interfere. He drew rapidly, allowing the pen to wander across paper until figures unexpectedly emerged from tangles of lines. He poured glue onto canvas, threw sand across the wet surface, brushed away what did not stick, and then followed the accidental forms that …
Dec 18 2024
Few buildings capture the optimism of the Jet Age as perfectly as the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. With enormous white arches sweeping over a circular glass structure, it looks like a flying saucer has landed in the middle of LAX—or perhaps like a spaceport designed for a future that people in 1961 …
Dec 12 2024
Born Yewubdar Gebru on December 12, 1923, Ethiopian pianist, composer, and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is known for her free-spirited piano playing of compositions where notes flit with ease up and down pentatonic (five-note) scales. Her playing is heartfelt and instinctive, skillfully moving around the keyboard without a hitch. The scales heard in much of her music are representative …
