Fine Arts News

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Huguette Clark owned several apartments on Fifth Avenue, a mansion in Connecticut and a house in California, but chose to live for two decades in a hospital room. This New York City house, her childhood home, featured five art galleries. (Photo from the book Empty Mansions)

Courtesy of Camera Craft

She had three apartments on New York's Fifth Avenue, all filled with treasures worth millions, not to mention a mansion in Connecticut and a house in California. But the enigmatic heiress Huguette Clark lived her last 20 years in a plainly decorated hospital room — even though she wasn't sick.

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Huguette Clark poses for a photograph in her debutante days. She was 104 when she died in 2011. (Photo from the book Empty Mansions)

It's just one of many curiosities about Clark, the late heiress to the fortune of copper magnate Sen.Andrew Williams Clark. For years, even friends and family thought she was living on Fifth Avenue. Her lavish gifts to her nurse prompted a police investigation. And now, three years after her death at age 104, Clark's artwork and antiques are heading from her abandoned apartments to Christie's auction block.

Empty Homes Full Of Pristine Treasures

At a preview for the auction, being held this month, the room is filled with extraordinary items collected over decades, all in perfect condition. One armchair from the 18th century is so perfectly preserved that the needlepoint colors are still brilliant.

"The decorative arts that you see around the room here have come from the Fifth Avenue apartment where Huguette lived a fair part of her life," says Andrew McVinish, head of Private and Iconic Collections at Christie's.
There are rare books, antiques and paintings. Christie's recently sold a Monet painting of water lilies from the Clark estate for $24 million. At one point, McVinish takes a gold-colored handbag out of a case. The paper stuffing is still in it. "Once again, never been used," he says.

And that's symbolic of one of Clark's eccentricities. She had a mansion in Connecticut that was never occupied. Her New York apartments were kept up, empty, for more than 20 years. Paul Clark Newell, a cousin of Clark's, spoke to her over the phone for nine years while Clark was in the hospital. He, like everyone, assumed she was living on Fifth Avenue.

She always made the calls out so no one would know where she was calling from, Newell says. He and Bill Dedman are co-authors of a book about Clark called Empty Mansions.

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The George I Walnut and Beech Wing Armchair, circa 1725, covered in 18th century gros point and petit point needlework, is one of Huguette Clark's many belongings headed to auction.

Photo courtesy of Christie's Images Ltd. 2014

Dedman notes that if you were in your mid-80s, alone with three apartments filled with paintings worth millions, you might well feel unsafe.

"She had much more society in the hospital than she had at home," he says. "She had people visiting her, she had people to take care of her."

Generosity That Raised Red Flags

Clark gave her nurse $30 million in gifts over time, and put her lawyer and accountant in the will. This raised so many red flags that the Manhattan district attorney's office began to investigate. The assumption was that Clark was yet another example of an elderly, wealthy woman preyed on by lawyers, accountants and caretakers. But the investigation closed with no charges.

Dedman, who first reported the story, says everyone reasonably assumed something was amiss, but that wasn't the case.

"This was an eccentric, capable, lucid, artistic, generous woman who had enjoyed the trappings of wealth," Dedman says. "She's interested in music and painting, and Japanese history, and building little castles, and her doll collection, and being generous to the people she knows, and even to strangers. That was the life that she wanted and that she lived."

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The view from Clark's last regular hospital room at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. (Photo from the book Empty Mansions)

Before Clark's death, the hospital where she had lived for so many years lobbied her for money for a building. In the end she gave the hospital only $1 million. What she did want was to create an art institute in her mansion in Santa Barbara — and that will become a reality.

Meryl Gordon, who wrote about the Astor family scandal in Mrs. Astor Regrets, just wrote a book about Clark, The Phantom of Fifth Avenue. She interviewed Marie Pompei, a nurse who became a friend of Clark's after she no longer worked for her. Pompei saw the heiress about a month before Clark died in 2011.

"And they were singing in the hospital; they were telling jokes," Gordon says. "[Clark] really was all there until she went into a coma and died. She knew what she wanted; she knew what she didn't want, but she also had a sense of humor."

Dedman and Gordon paint a very different portrait of the reclusive heiress in her final years — quite different from the one many people had imagined.



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Scientists and art experts found a hidden painting beneath one of Picasso's first masterpieces, The Blue Room, thanks to advances in infrared technology. Here, associate conservator Patricia Favero of The Phillips Collection points to a detail in the image.

Evan Vucci/AP

A bearded man lurks beneath the surface of a famous Picasso painting. That's the image brought to us by curators who used new technology to find details of a portrait the artist painted over when he created his famous The Blue Room in 1901.

The painting's surface depicts a scene in Pablo Picasso's studio in Paris, with a woman bathing between a window and a table. But a different scene lies underneath, as infrared and other analysis shows a man in a bow tie staring out from the canvas, his head propped on his hand.

The Blue Room is at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Researchers from the museum and other institutions recently showed the AP the newly uncovered details of what lies beneath the painting.

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The Blue Room, one of Pablo Picasso's first masterpieces, sits in a vertical position in front of an infared camera at the Phillips Collection in Washington on Tuesday.

"It's really one of those moments that really makes what you do special," Phillips conservator Patricia Favero tells the AP. "The second reaction was, 'Well, who is it?' We're still working on answering that question."
The likely reason the canvas was reused, curators say, was that Picasso didn't have the money to use a new canvas for each new work early in his career.

The AP says this isn't the first time a different work has been found beneath a Picasso:
"A technical analysis of La Vie at the Cleveland Museum of Art revealed Picasso significantly reworked the painting's composition. And conservators found a portrait of a mustached man beneath Picasso's painting Woman Ironing at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan."

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While cities are still competing for the not yet built Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, parts of the collection are already on display. The "Star Wars Identities" traveling exhibition, currently at the Cite du Cinema in Saint-Denis, France, features 200 objects from George Lucas' collection — including the costumes of Chewbacca, Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa.

A short time ago, in a city not far away, Star Wars creator George Lucas decided to build a museum to house his movie memorabilia and his art collection.

There's just one looming question: Where should it go?

Lucas says he'll spend $300 million of his own money to build the proposed Lucas Cultural Arts Museum and will provide a $400 million endowment after his death. In addition to holding Skywalker artifacts galore, the museum would also host Lucas' private art collection, featuring works by Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth, among others.

But after Lucas' original planned location fell through, it's not clear where the museum will be located. San Francisco and Chicago are both trying to win the right to host the museum, and Los Angeles just entered the fray as well.


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Kandinsky's "Painting no. 201," on the left, was the inspiration for the salad on the right, which was used to test diners' appreciation of the dish.
Museum of Modern Art; Crossmodal Research Laboratory

We eat first with our eyes. When strawberries are perfectly red, they seem to taste sweeter. When chicken is painted blue, it's disturbing. The ancient Romans understood that, and certainly today's top chefs exploit it when they plate their food.

Some plating practices are ethnic, others trendy. A Japanese dish would not appeal if a large chunk of meat was set on top of a heap of starch in the center of the plate, as is common practice with French food. And then there are chef-y flourishes like towering vertical stacks, swirly sauces and the fried sprigs of rosemary sticking out of a sandwich.

So how far should chefs and stylists really go to win over diners? Perhaps even further.
Recently, some experimental psychologists at the University of Oxford decided to see what impact a plate of salad arranged like an abstract painting would have on 60 diners' perception of the food.

One group of diners was offered a salad arranged like Wassily Kandinsky's "Painting number 201." Another group was given a salad featuring broccoli sprouts, Portobello mushroom slices and snow peas lined up in neat rows. The last group was offered a typical pile of salad arranged in the middle of a plate. Each salad had identical ingredients, dressing and condiments.

The Kandinsky salad was rated the best — by an 18 percent margin over the other two presentations. Most importantly for restaurateurs, diners were willing to pay twice as much – both before and after eating it. (See the breakdowns in ratings in this bar graph.)

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The components of the salad used in the Oxford study (left), and the pile of salad given to the third group of participants.
Crossmodal Research Laboratory

Charles Michel, who is the chef in residence at the Oxford Crossmodal Research Lab and the lead author of the study, tells The Salt he chose Kandinsky's work for "the specific association of colors and movement." His chef's mind saw a salad, particularly the mushroom shape in the top left corner, and the experiment took shape.
"It's not so much about food copying a work of art in particular, but rather using artistic inspiration, or simply having an artistic sensitivity when plating food — as most chefs actually do," he says.

The diners were not told that the Kandinsky-esque salad was designed to look like a painting. Still, the study shows that "diners intuitively attribute an artistic value to the food, find it more complex and like it more" when presented this way, the study's authors, Michel and his co-authors write in the paper.

Why the diners thought the painting-like plates were more appealing is trickier to parse out. They may have identified appealing patterns of color and shape, or, the artistic plate may have "implicitly suggested a connotation of higher value (or effort) through the visual display, value that might have helped to deliver a more pleasurable eating experience," the study says.

The "Taste of Kandinsky" study was published this month in the journal Flavour.
"I hope certain cooks can get inspired by this, and openly connect culinary creation to a more artistic act," Michel says.

So all you wanna-be chefs and food stylists, try imitating some art for your next food photo shoot. Tweet us your pictures to @NPRFood. Don't forget to tell us what painting you're modeling and use the hashtag #NPRfineartfood. We'll post a roundup of the best next week.

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To the left is the fiesta huipil of the Chinantla region of northern Oaxaca, while a Carla Fernández-designed rebozo, hand-embroidered by indigenous Otomii artisans with an iguana motif, is modeled on the right. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is exhibiting Fernández's work this summer.

Eunice Adorno/Ramiro Chaves/Courtesy of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

In a small shed in Tenancingo, Mexico, partly open to the sky, about a half-dozen men stand behind huge wooden looms. They pedal side-by-side, their churning feet making a beautiful harmony as they craft handmade rebozos.
Rebozos, long rectangular shawls that came into style in Mexico in the 16th century, and the huipil, a woven and embroidered blouse or dress of pre-Columbian origin, are the main elements of Mexican traditional dress.

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Mexican designer Carla Fernández visits a rebozo workshop in Tenancingo, Mexico. In her work, Fernández uses fabrics made by weavers from across Mexico.

Today rebozos and huipiles bridge the past and future of Mexican garments. They're being reinterpreted by designers like Carla Fernández, who takes these handmade textiles and manipulates them into something contemporary.

The tiny rural workshop in Tenancingo represents one thread of Fernández's elaborate supply chain, one that loops from Mexico's plains and mountains to runways in Tokyo and Amsterdam.

A Few Cuts, Then Transformation

On a visit to the weavers, the designer unfurls a blue-and-white fringed rebozo, intricately loomed into a tight herringbone pattern. It's nearly 8 feet long.

"We just make these cuts, and put these two sleeves," Fernández explains. "And you can use it as a vest, and then you can turn it upside down and you will see it becomes more a blouse or a sweater."

On the body, it's chic, sculptural, edgy — but laid flat, the finished garment keeps its traditional rectangular shape.
Fernández leaves the fringes of the rebozo intact, she says, "so you can actually see that this is all handmade."
In fact, the rebozo is one of the most labor-intensive garments on earth. Before any looming begins, the threads are wrapped with thousands of knots and dyed, then the knots are removed — a process known as ikat.

Mexico's rich, raw fabrics — cotton, shaggy sheep's wool or even rough ixtle from cactus fiber — attracted Fernández as a teenager. Indigenous women in remote villages wore these fabrics themselves — but the ones they sold weren't as elaborate.
"I used to tell them, 'No, I don't want this huipil, I want one like the one you are wearing,' " Fernández says.
Now 41, Fernández travels constantly to collaborate with indigenous weavers throughout Mexico, offering special workshops where weavers can develop new skills or learn to market old ones.

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A weaver crafts a rebozo on a traditional loom in the rebozo workshop of Don Fermín Escobar in Tenancingo, Mexico. At right, a detail from a rebozo.

Protecting A Heritage Of Storytelling And History

Hundreds of miles away from the rebozo workshop, in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Fernández has been invited to the city of Tuxtepec to see if local weavers want to become her suppliers.

The weavers here are women with long braids, wearing bright red huipiles. Some of them speak only a tonal dialect called Chinantec as they demonstrate a backstrap loom, which ties around the waist to a pole.
Their huipiles are woven with symbols, like trees of life or creation myths of light and darkness. Traditionally, indigenous weaving tells a story.

There's so much cultural significance attached to these garments that issues of historic racism and exploitation can't help but come up. Marta Xucunostli, a 34-year-old local activist, says that she was initially skeptical about designers like Fernández coming into indigenous areas like hers to work with weavers.

"At the beginning ... I was like, 'Who is this designer who is coming?' Because as communities we protect ourselves," Xucunostli says. "Like back in the times of the conquerors ... giving a mirror and doing some not-fair trade."
Xucunostli says she Googled Fernández carefully. Her caution comes from centuries of exploitation. Anthropologist Marta Turok, who specializes in Mexican textiles and helped Fernández establish fair-trade practices, can understand.
"To be an Indian is to be at the lowest link in the chain," she says.

'The Next Thing You Know ... Goodbye, Braids'

The role of weaving in communities is changing. When Turok began her research decades ago, nearly all indigenous women wore huipiles.
As more and more children assimilated and went to school, however, plaid skirts and acrylic sweaters became mandatory.
"And the next thing you know ... goodbye, braids," Turok says. "Do you think that young girl is ever going to wear a huipil? Probably not."
Since the Zapatista rebellion in the 1990s, the Mexican government has made some attempts at reform, including recognition of indigenous cultures.
Turok says a critical concern in seeking new markets is whether it compromises the heritage of the artisans.
"Once the designers came in, or the non-profits, or even the government, you created a system of dependency. The artisans became dependent on a third person," Turok says.
"That third person could control the raw material and say, 'Here, I'll give you the raw material and I'll just pay you for your labor,' " she says. "So one of the questions is: Who is in control of the production?"

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Weavers make huipiles, a detail of which can be seen at right. Huipiles have been worn by indigenous women in Mexico and Central America since before the era of Spanish colonialism.

Making Contacts, Placing Orders

Fernández's answer to this question lies farther into the region called Chinantla. The road into the mountains passes cool green groves of vanilla bean orchards and trees laden with mangos.

Fernández is on her way to meet another group of artisans — women she's not yet sure if she'll be able to work with.
"We will try," Fernández says. "This trip is very important to us because we'll have the contacts of the weavers — and then we will get back to the city and reach them through email, through phones, and then we'll know exactly what we can propose."
In the tiny community of San Pedro Ixcatlán, Fernández's car pulls up outside the hilltop home of Rosina Sarmiento, a 65-year-old artisan.

Inside, Sarmiento opens a cabinet overflowing with bright, beautifully embroidered fabrics created in the Mazateca style.
They're covered in birds and flowers. Fernández checks out bedspreads and tablecloths, holding them up against her body.
"The embroidery is so fine that it looks painted," Fernández says. "If you see it from far away, you don't know if it's a print. And then you come very close and then you see that it's amazingly embroidered."
If Sarmiento decides she'd like to work with Fernández, Fernández will pay half up front and half on delivery. Ultimately, one of Sarmiento's hand-embroidered flowers or parrots might end up on shawls, ponchos or dresses in one of Fernández's two Mexico City boutiques.

Old Traditions, New Versatility

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At left, a Quetzalcoatl feathered-serpent fiesta huipil. On the right, Mayan artisans hand-embroidered an armadillo onto this linen dress from Carla Fernández's Mayalands collection. The shape of Fernández's dress is inspired by the traditional huipil.

Fernández is prepared for another question as well: Is this use of indigenous weaving traditional? "What [the weavers] do for the tourists is not traditional, either, you know?" Fernández says. "These are the communities that want to do new designs — those are the ones we work with."

Increasingly, younger indigenous women wielding cell phones and business cards seem happy to have their handiwork on the world stage.

"They know how to do backstrap loom. Who in the world, like young people, know[s] how to do backstrap loom? Very few," Fernández says. "But it's something that makes you very unique, like those things that your grandparents taught you. I think the new generations are pretty into it."

Milagros Ortega, 27, is part of the next generation, and a full-time weaver. A backstrap loom of red thread is strung across the patio at her home in San Lucas Ojitlán. She and her fellow weavers won't hesitate to try new things for Fernández, she says, but she won't stop weaving huipiles for herself.

"We would never let anything change this," she says, "because these are our roots." Their roots, their history and their heritage.
You can see Fernández's designs, featuring the work of weavers from across Mexico, at an exhibit this summer at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The show is called "Carla Fernández: The Barefoot Designer," and Fernández herself will give a workshop in August.

Cecilia Gomez Diaz, a young weaver from Chiapas, will also be teaching at the museum this summer.
"When I weave, I think how each person represents, to me, a human in the universe," Diaz says. "There are as many humans as threads — there is no end."


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Frido Kahlo self-portrait Roots and Just Eat Life's rendition of the painting submitted through Twitter.

Just Eat Life/Twitter

We love to have fun with food, and as you may recall, we recently told you about a scientific experiment showing that people who ate a salad arranged like a Kandinsky painting said it tasted better and was worth more money than a typical pile of greens.
The experiment inspired us to challenge you to tweet pictures of your food as fine art. And boy, you delivered.

Once we saw @JustEatLife's attempt at Frida Kahlo's self-portrait Roots with salmon, purple majesty mashed potatoes and nori standing in for the famous hair and brow, we started getting really hungry.

"We initially dove in with artistic determination, however, staring at salmon Frida gave us a huge laugh in the end. She was tasty!" says the Just Eat Life crew, who live in New York and host a cooking show on YouTube.

We were also inspired by the vertical veggie composition sent in by Jacqueline Langholtz (@ArgosIsland) of Charlottesville, Va. Langholtz tells us her boyfriend, Michael DeMonaco, was making a salad for dinner when she told him about our #NPRfineartfood challenge. Since DeMonaco is currently working on a home remodel inspired by D.C.-born artist Gene Davis, who was known for his colorful vertical stripe canvases, he took his Swiss chard, carrots and cucumbers in that direction.

And it turns out Kandinsky's Painting No. 201 — the one used by the British psychologists at the University of Oxford — isn't the only work by the painter that's sent people off to the kitchen. Milwaukee Art Museum's chef du cuisine created an entire menu of Kandinsky-inspired dishes for the museum's cafe patrons, including a Bauhaus brat burger; shchi, a Russian cabbage soup; and cookies with psychedelic swirls.

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Gene Davis' Apricot Ripple; ArgosIsland's untitled photo submitted via Twitter.

And finally, our own Beth Novey (@BethNovey), a producer on NPR's arts, culture and books desk, sent us two fabulous entries.
Her sculpture, Blackberry Square, recalls Russian painter Kazimir Malevich's avant garde 1915 piece Black Suprematic Square.

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Kazimir Malevich's Black Suprematic Square; NPR's Beth Novey's Blackberry Square.

And, we couldn't resist the patriotic fruit kebabs Novey made for the Fourth of July. Naturally, they look like Georgia-born abstract expressionist Jasper Johns' Flag from 1954.

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Jasper Johns' painting Flag; Beth Novey with her inspired fruit kebabs.

"This was so much fun," Novey tells The Salt. But she has one regret. "I'm only sad I didn't have a chance to re-create some Giuseppe Arcimboldo works because that would have been so meta!"

Thanks to everyone for playing with your food!

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Mark Rothko's 1962 Panel Four (Harvard Mural) was one of five murals the artist did for Harvard University in the early 1960s.

Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum
Paintings by postwar abstract artist Mark Rothko are highly coveted — in May one of his works sold at auction in London for $50 million. But oddly enough, Harvard University has had a handful of Rothkos — faded by sunlight and splattered with food and drink — in storage. Now, new technology has led to a potentially controversial restoration.

Retired Harvard curator and conservator Marjorie Cohn was an apprentice at the Harvard Art Museums around the time Rothko was commissioned to create wall-sized paintings for a new space at the university's Holyoke Center. When the painter arrived with his finished, rolled-up canvases in 1963, Cohn remembers the entire conservation department showed up to stretch the huge plum and crimson-colored paintings onto wooden frames.

“ My boss was on the telephone all the time ... about making sure those curtains were kept closed. But of course they weren't. It had the best view in Cambridge. Everybody went there for parties. They could care less about Rothko murals. They were there for a party, and they opened the curtain to look at the view, and you really can't blame them.

- Marjorie Cohn, retired Harvard curator and conservator

"The atmosphere then was so positive," she recalls. "He had nothing but praise for our efforts in getting things ready for him, and we of course were just thrilled to be working with such a famous artist."
Rothko took no money for the five paintings, but he did demand that they always be hung as a group in a penthouse dining room, with the drapes drawn.
"My boss was on the telephone all the time ... about making sure those curtains were kept closed," Cohn says. "But of course they weren't. It had the best view in Cambridge. Everybody went there for parties. They could care less about Rothko murals. They were there for a party, and they opened the curtain to look at the view, and you really can't blame them."

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Panel Five of Rothko's Harvard Murals hangs in Holyoke Center in January 1968.

Rothko died in 1970. His Harvard paintings eventually became so damaged by sunlight — and splattered with cocktails and food — that the university took them down in 1979 and put them in storage. They've been displayed just twice in the U.S. since then. Some at Harvard blamed the artist for insisting they be hung in a busy dining room. His son, Christopher, says the family was furious.

"We were upset that they had so thoroughly misunderstood my father's intentions and thought that he didn't even care about his own work," he says. "Nothing could have been further from the truth."
But now the Rothko family has partnered with the Harvard Art Museums to revive the five legendary works. The process began with a sixth painting created at the same time that went home with Rothko in the '60s. It stayed rolled up, safe from booze and light damage. With access to that, the conservators had a benchmark for the original colors. But they couldn't duplicate them, says conservator Jens Stenger, who collaborated on the restoration.

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Panel One (Harvard Mural Triptych), 1962, egg tempera and distemper on canvas.

"Rothko made his own paint," Stenger says. "He used animal glue, and he heated it up and poured in dry pigment. He also used whole egg as a binding medium to disperse the pigment."
In fact Rothko kept his recipe so secret he didn't even tell his assistants. Stenger says the concoction actually penetrated the canvas. "It's like a stain. If you would start in-painting this you would completely remove the artist's hand; you would remove the brushwork."

"In-painting" is one of the traditional methods of restoring artworks: Conservators repaint over damaged areas, matching as best they can. Since that wasn't possible with the Rothkos, they had to come up with a different approach.

"What we're doing is using light as a retouching tool," says Narayan Khandekar, senior conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums. "In the same way that when you restore a painting, traditionally you use paint to restore the lost colors. In this case we're using light to fill in those missing areas."

Each of Rothko's faded murals is illuminated by a projector suspended from the ceiling. It took years for the team to develop this new technique, and they're still tweaking it with help from the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture group and Swiss researchers. The projectors and their software shine light on the canvases in incremental degrees, correcting where needed, says Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, who directs Harvard's Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art.

"This system enables us to color correct, pixel by pixel, specific areas, without flooding the entire painting with a colored light," Mancusi-Ungaro explains. "But it also enables us to do it without physically touching the painting."
“ I got the goose bumps! ... Because it's just projecting a transparent light on there, you still have the feel of the canvas. For me that's what makes it still feel so believable. Because, you know, my father's brush strokes are still there.

- Christopher Rothko, on seeing his father's painting restored

Mancusi-Ungaro restored faded paintings the old-fashioned way at Rothko Chapel in Houston. She expects skeptics to chime in when the Harvard murals are unveiled officially in the fall. Art critics are not allowed to see them until then — but the museum has heard from perhaps the toughest reviewer: Rothko's son, Christopher, saw his father's murals after their illuminated restoration.

"I got the goose bumps!" Rothko says. "I was really struck right away not so much by the color but by the way they still felt like paintings. Because it's just projecting a transparent light on there, you still have the feel of the canvas. For me that's what makes it still feel so believable. Because, you know, my father's brush strokes are still there."
And the Bloody Marys and hors d'oeuvres are gone.

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Albert Paley's iron and steel gates, archways and free-standing sculptures are eye-catching landmarks. His 2010 steel work Evanesce stands in Monterrey, Mexico. "American Metal: The Art of Albert Paley" is on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art until September.

Agencia para la Planeacióndel Desarrollo Urbano de Nuevo León/Courtesy Paley Studios
Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1940s, Albert Paley played with blocks and Legos. And he loved wandering the streets, scavenging bottle caps, matchbook covers, cigar bands and "picking up pebbles that I thought were interesting," he recalls.

Now 70, the American sculptor has moved from pebbles to monumental gates. His iron and steel works adorn Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chattanooga, Tenn., and Rochester, N.Y. His gates, archways and free-standing sculptures are eye-catching landmarks.

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Paley's 1983 Architectural Screen is made of steel and brass.

Courtesy Paley Studios

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In 1972, Paley won a competition to design the gates for the bookstore at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery.

"They really are an announcement, a signifier, they are a work of art," says Eric Turner, curator of "American Metal: The Art of Albert Paley," on view at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. "... He transforms something from a merely utilitarian function into something much, much more."
In 1972, Paley beat out 30 entries and won a competition to design gates — when they're fancy they're called "portals" — for the bookstore at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery. Made of brass, steel, bronze and copper, they're very art nouveau — they swirl and flow like shiny, sinuous vines.
A critic once described art nouveau as "vermicelli in delirium," but that was in the 1890s. When Paley began as a jeweler in the 1960s, there was an art nouveau revival underway.

"The discipline of the goldsmith I found was very intriguing," he says. "The sense of quality, the sense of refinement, as far as developing the object. But also conceptually, what does the jewelry do to the individual? How does it manifest their ego or their presence? This is the type of work that I was doing at that time."


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Deaccessioning — the permanent removal of an object from a museum's collection — has been a big issue in Detroit. When the city declared bankruptcy, it had to put all of its assets on the table. Turns out, the most valuable asset was the art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Sometimes museums get in trouble. Deep trouble. Not because they damage art, or let it get stolen ... but because they sell it. The Delaware Art Museum is the latest target of the art world's ire — for selling one painting from its collection to try and tackle a debt, and for revelations in the past few days that two more paintings are up for sale.

The controversy relates to a serious museum practice with an unfriendly name: "deaccessioning," or the permanent removal of an object from the collection. There are rules around when and how deaccessioning can take place. Break those rules and there are some unpleasant consequences.

Trustees at the Delaware Art Museum are trying to pay off a $19.8 million debt for a building expansion and replenish its endowment. So, in June, they decided to deaccession a painting in their collection by selling it at auction. That's a big no-no, according to the Association of Art Museum Directors, an umbrella organization of more than 200 members that came up with the guidelines.

“ Works of art shouldn't be considered liquid assets to be converted into cash. They're records of human creativity that are held in the public trust.

- Susan Taylor, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors

According to Susan Taylor, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the AAMD's current president, "The proceeds from the sale or funds from the deaccession can only be used to buy other works of art." The AAMD has sanctioned the Delaware Art Museum. Among other punitive measures, the AAMD has called for other museums to discontinue working with the Delaware museum.

"The principle for us is that works of art shouldn't be considered liquid assets to be converted into cash," says Taylor. "They're records of human creativity that are held in the public trust."

The Delaware Art Museum declined to be interviewed for this story. In a Q&A on their website, trustees say they've tried for five years to find ways to pay off the debt, including cuts to museum staff and refinancing. They now plan to sell two more works — a painting by Winslow Homer and a sculpture by Alexander Calder.

To be clear, deaccessioning is not forbidden. According to the guidelines, art can be sold if, for example, it's of poor quality or it turns out to be fake. But the restrictions don't make a lot of sense to some art professionals, especially that the money must be used to acquire more art.

"Maybe the museum doesn't need any more art," says Marion Maneker who publishes The Art Market Monitor. Maneker says the AAMD's guidelines are reasonable under normal circumstances, but not if a museum is in dire straits.
“ An art museum has to have the ability to breathe and circulate like any other organic body.

- Marion Maneker, publisher of The Art Market Monitor

"Once you've decided to sell a work of art, what you end up with is money. And money is fungible. And saying that that money has to be cordoned off and only used for art doesn't address the realities of running any sort of museum. An art museum has to have the ability to breathe and circulate like any other organic body," Maneker says.

Deaccessioning has been a huge issue in Detroit. When the city declared bankruptcy, it had to put all of its assets on the table. Detroit's most valuable asset? The art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. But Detroit's attorney general said the art cannot be sold because it's a public trust.

Graham Beal, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, says museums need to think very carefully about the future before even considering a sale.

"During the Depression, when the DIA almost closed, there is no talk of selling art whatsoever," Beal says. "If they had, they would have sold their new Van Gogh, the first Van Gogh to enter a U.S. museum or the same with our great Matisse. We wouldn't have them now."

To visitors to the museums and galleries on the National Mall, the logic around the rules of deaccessioning doesn't make a lot of sense. One visitor, Jim Pohlmann of Alexandria, Va., says not every museum is located in an area with deep pockets.

"I think you have to do what you have to do," says Pohlmann. "And that might be to sell a couple of pieces of art. Not necessarily the ones that you have that are meant to draw people in. Those are sacred. You keep those. But I mean they all have stuff laying around in their basement that they only bring out periodically. Dump those."



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The titles of James Ostrer's photographs are inspired by the European Union's codes for food additives, known as E numbers. Instead of just E numbers, Ostrer uses EF numbers, for "emotional fossil." This one is called EF 124.

James Ostrer

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Ostrer modeled some of the masks himself. He got his friends and family to help him out with the rest.

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To make these masks, the artist often used colored cream cheese as a base, and layered other foods on top.

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A robot, controlled from afar, moves in for a closer look.
Alexey Moskvin/Tate Britain

There are four robots roaming around the Tate Britain museum in London. Since Wednesday night, they've been roving the halls after hours, streaming video to the world as part of the After Dark project.

As the robots move through the museum, their little lights illuminate hundreds of statues and paintings — works of historic and contemporary British art — spread over roughly 20 rooms.

If it's not cool enough to have robots making their way around a museum in the dark, there's another cool factor: Regular people all around the world are controlling their movements from their computers.

"[The robots] have controls navigating around the gallery. They can go forward, left, right, tilt the head up and down, look around," says David Di Duca, one of the project designers. He's with a digital design studio called The Workers. They received the Tate Britain's IK Prize, which awards a group that uses digital technology to bring the museum's collections to a wider audience.

"When someone's controlling the robot, they're effectively curating the feed or the experience for a much wider audience."

That means anyone, anywhere, with access to the Internet can be a curator. Every night since Wednesday, people have been able to visit the site and fill out a simple form for a chance to take the robots for a spin. What's more, the event also offers a chance to reach people who may never visit the museum. People from all over the world can log on for the robots and stay to explore 500 years of British art.
[embedded content]

Art experts and gallery guides are working in shifts to provide commentary throughout the night.
One potential challenge, though: When you are sending robots into galleries at night and letting people remotely take the reigns, how do you make sure the precious artworks don't get ruined? Di Duca says there are a lot of precautions in place.

"The robots are designed with a wide lower base, and the outside edge of that is a kill switch, which takes out the power to the robots. Some artworks are directly on the floor, [so there's something for the robots to hit] in that worst-case scenario."

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There are also humans behind the scenes if something goes wrong. Ross Cairns, one of the founders of The Workers, is also working on the project.

"We have a sort of HQ in the dungeons of the Tate where we're just making sure everything's running well, while upstairs in the gallery the robots are roaming free."

Di Duca says that generally things have been running smoothly. Some of the best moments are when two of the robots actually meet each other in the gallery.

"They sort of look at each other," he says. "And you have no idea who the two people controlling them are, and they're never gonna meet each other, but they're, for some split moment, staring at each other with these funny robot faces in a gallery in London."

If you want to see artwork, Di Duca still thinks the best way is to actually go to a museum. They're not trying to replace that experience.

"It's meant to be something else — some experience on its own right which allows you to see things in a way which hasn't been seen before."

There's still time. You can watch the live feed and maybe even get lucky enough to take control. You can still get involved here. The last tour will go until 3 a.m. GMT Monday.



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Researchers asked 4-year-olds to draw a child. Here's a sample of their artwork. Twins Early Development Study/King's College in London hide caption

At age 4, many young children are just beginning to explore their artistic style.

The kid I used to babysit in high school preferred self-portraits, undoubtedly inspired by the later works of Joan Miro. My cousin, a prolific young artist, worked almost exclusively on still lifes of 18-wheelers.

These early works may be good for more than decorating your refrigerator and cubicle, researchers say. There appears to be an association, though a modest one, between how a child draws at 4 and her thinking skills at 14, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science.

The findings don't mean parents should worry if their little ones aren't producing masterpieces early on. But the study suggests intellectual and artistic skills may be related to each other in a way that reveals something about the influence of our genes.

Researchers from King's College London enlisted 7,700 pairs of 4-year-old identical and fraternal twins in England to draw pictures of a child. The researchers scored each drawing on a scale of 0 to 12, based on how many body parts were included. All the kids also took verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests at 4 and 14.

Kids with higher drawing scores tended to do better on the intelligence tests, though the two were only moderately linked. And that was expected, says Rosalind Arden a cognitive geneticist who led the study while at the King's College Institute of Psychiatry. The drawing test researchers used was first developed in the 1920s to measure children's cognition. And studies have shown the test to be useful, but not always accurate.

In a surprise to the researchers, the drawings and the test results from identical twins (who share all their genes) were more similar to one another than those from fraternal twins (who share only half their genes). "We had thought any siblings who were raised in the same home would be quite similar," Arden tells Shots. The findings add to the growing body of evidence that suggests genes can play a role in both artistic and cognitive ability, she says.

This doesn't mean that a child's genetic predisposition necessarily hurts his or her chances of succeeding in artistic and intellectual endeavors, Arden says. As previous studies have shown, countless factors affect a person's abilities — and genes are only one of them.

How would Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have done on the drawing test when they were kids? Arden says she and her colleagues are trying to figure out whether judging the children's art in some other way (maybe based on creativity instead of accuracy) would reveal something different about their intelligence.

But we shouldn't assume that these abstract masters couldn't draw realistically, Arden says. Picasso was a prodigy, who could draw everything from birds to busts with amazing accuracy at a young age. In fact, the artist famously said he easily learned to draw like Raphael when he was young, but it took him a lifetime to learn to draw like a child.

The most amazing thing about the drawings collected for this study is that they represent such a range of both ability and style, Arden says. "I had a fantastic time looking through them."

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This installation at the Tower of London will ultimately feature 888,246 ceramic poppies, honoring the soldiers from Britain and the British colonies who died in World War I.

How do you memorialize an event that happened 100 years ago? Almost nobody is alive who witnessed the start of World War I. In England, at the Tower of London, an unusual artistic commemoration is blooming. Its name comes from a poem, written by an anonymous soldier in World War I: "The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red."

The Tower of London was built in the 11th century, and for most of the years since then its moat was full of water. But today, operations manager John Brown looks out and describes the sight: "In effect, a green field surrounding the castle, and within that, we have started to build this huge artistic installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies."

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The ceramic poppies at the Tower of London are handmade; each one is unique.

That's one flower for each soldier from Britain or the British colonies who died in WWI. Each is handmade, and volunteers plant each poppy in the soil by hand.

The red poppy is a symbol of remembrance for a reason: In Western Europe, it is the first wildflower to appear when soil is churned up. So after a war, fields where soldiers fell become vast expanses of crimson blooms.
The ceramic poppies at the Tower of London are not planted in orderly rows. They look like an undulating sea from afar. Up close, each bloom is unique. Droplets cling to them from a recent shower. Against the walls of the tower, they crest like a wave of water — or, given the color, like a wave of blood. They cascade from one of the tower windows to the ground like a waterfall, and a 30-foot curl of red poppies crests over the tower's main entrance.

The concept came from a ceramic artist named Paul Cummings. He decided to make the flowers, but he had no place to put them. "So we said, we have the real estate," explains Brown. A British theatrical designer, Tom Piper, provided the design and interpretation of the idea.

"Every morning when I walk through the site just to make sure everything's ready, you get your own moment of inner peace for yourself," says Jim Duncan. He's one of the Yeoman Warders, the iconic beefeaters who live and work at the tower. For the next three months, he will be overseeing the planting project.

"You get the goose pimples. You get the lump in the throat," he says. "And then you get a great bunch of people that come in, work hard, work together as a team. It was raining this afternoon — nobody left."

The sound of hammering comes from the corner of the moat where rain-soaked volunteers are working in matching red shirts. They pound metal stakes into the ground, then place a red ceramic blossom on top, supporting each one with small rubber plugs.

Lynne England came from the New Forest on England's southern coast to plant poppies with her husband, Arthur, in honor of her great-uncle. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for holding his position while under fire during WWI. "He was shot three times, but he held position. And because of that, he saved a lot of British lives. So we felt we had to come and plant a poppy for him today," she says.

"I'm almost in tears just talking to you now," she says. "Just look at it — every single poppy, every poppy you hold, is somebody's life."

"And the fact that they're all handmade and they're all individual," says her husband, "it's not like you're doing some process and repeating something. Each time feels very, very special."

The first of these flowers was planted Aug. 5, the first full day of fighting in the war. The last one will be planted on Nov. 11, Armistice Day, when the guns fell silent. They'll come down after that. People can buy them online — thousands have already been sold — and the money will go to veterans' charities.

Even though each blossom represents a British or colonial life lost in the war, a staffer pointed out that more than 100,000 Americans died, too. So as we concluded our interviews, she handed me a red poppy, and I planted it in the soil at the Tower of London.

---

The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

By Anonymous (Unknown Soldier)
The blood swept lands and seas of red,
Where angels dare to tread.
As I put my hand to reach,
As God cried a tear of pain as the angels fell,
Again and again.
As the tears of mine fell to the ground
To sleep with the flowers of red
As any be dead
My children see and work through fields of my
Own with corn and wheat,
Blessed by love so far from pain of my resting
Fields so far from my love.
It be time to put my hand up and end this pain
Of living hell, to see the people around me
Fall someone angel as the mist falls around
And the rain so thick with black thunder I hear
Over the clouds, to sleep forever and kiss
The flower of my people gone before time
To sleep and cry no more
I put my hand up and see the land of red,
This is my time to go over,
I may not come back
So sleep, kiss the boys for me



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Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya is one of the women featured on Jason Porath's blog Rejected Princesses. Oktyabrskaya was the first female tanker to ever win the Hero of the Soviet Union award.

Many of us have come to know the tales of Disney's princesses by heart. But put Snow White, Cinderella, Belle and Ariel aside for a moment and consider these characters: A transgender Native American, a tank commander and a Mexican revolutionary.

Theirs are not the kind of stories you find in a Disney princess flick, but they're in the spotlight on the blog Rejected Princesses. Each week, former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath adds a new illustration and write-up about a woman who is, as the blog says, "too awesome, awful or offbeat for kids' movies."

"I take women, sort of unsung heroines — usually from history, but a lot from mythology and some from literature — who wouldn't necessarily make the cut for mainstream animated princess movies, and give them that style," Porath tells NPR's Arun Rath. "It's sort of an alternate-reality glimpse into, 'What if they got their moment in the sun?' "

One of his favorite examples is the aforementioned Soviet tank commander, Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya. Porath says Oktyabrskaya's husband was killed by the Nazis, so she sold all of her belongings in order to buy a tank and fight. She named the tank "Fighting Girlfriend." The illustration shows her sitting atop her tank, anthropomorphized in Cars-like fashion, amid a battle.

"It's this weird, incongruous mash-up of history as well as these mainstream animated movies," he says.

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Porath drew Elisabeth Bathory washing her hair before a dresser strewn with references to her reputation as a torturer. He also wrote a spirited defense of Bathory's innocence.

But Porath's also includes some non-heroic Rejected Princesses, like Elisabeth Bathory, who he says is possibly the most prolific female serial killer in history. He says he didn't want to only include one type of female character.

"I didn't want it to just be everybody is shiny, happy, kick-butt heroines," he says. "There are people who are heroes, there are people who are villains and there are people who are just weird."

The project started as a bit of a lark, Porath says, and was born out of a lunch conversation he had while working at DreamWorks about unlikely stories to be given the animated princess treatment. The blog and the premise quickly took off, he says.

But Porath says Rejected Princesses isn't meant to bash Disney and the work they do on their mainstream animated princess stories.

"That said, I feel like there is room for people that don't get the spotlight put on them," Porath says. "Maybe they won't make $100 million ... but there should be a place for that."

Porath says there is no shortage of women to feature on the blog, and he still has a list of about 600 ready to go.


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  Zhang Kechun; Under the Abandoned Pier, 2013-2014. Zhang, 34, spent years shooting photos along the Yellow River. The figures are tea sellers.
  
  Zhang Kechun/Courtesy of Three Shadows +3 Gallery
  
  Liu Di/Courtesy of Pekin Fine Arts
  
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These supporters of Scottish independence are saying yes, and separatist groups in other parts of the world hope it will give them a boost as they seek to break away. David Cheskin/AP hide caption

Scotland's referendum on independence Thursday could resonate far beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. There are many places with separatist movements, like the militias in eastern Ukraine who have been battling the Ukrainian government this year.

Here's a look at some of the other places with separatists who want to break away from their current rulers, from Canada to Spain to Belgium to India.

Quebec

Quebec's separatists have had long and close links to the Scottish National Party, which is spearheading the "yes" campaign. The Parti Quebecois is hoping that a "yes" vote or even a narrow defeat in Scotland could rejuvenate its own attempts to break away from Canada.

The French-speaking province has held two referendums on independence, one in 1980 and the other in 1995. In the more recent vote, the side that supported staying with Canada barely held on. Since then, support for independence has fallen dramatically, according to polls.

Still, Daniel Turp, a Quebec nationalist politician, is in Edinburgh this week to witness Thursday's vote, and he says the events in Scotland are reminiscent of how the 1995 vote in Quebec played out.
"The end of the Scottish campaign is absolutely déjà vu," he told The Telegraph.

He says he has advised Scottish pro-independence leaders to beware of last-minute promises from the pro-union side.
"I said that if they did well, there would be all sorts of late promises of more autonomy and more devolution," he said. "And look what's happening now. Ottawa did the same with us. But these promises are hollow. If Scotland votes no, they will be quickly forgotten."

Andre Lecours, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa, tells The Associated Press that the "yes" campaigns in Scotland and Quebec have similarities as well as major differences.
"There are lots of similarities, first in that the Yes campaign has been positive, with the same message, that 'we're good enough and big enough, and we can do it,' " he told the AP. "And a bit like the PQ, the Yes Scotland campaign has energized Scottish society and reached people that typically aren't involved in the political process."

The AP adds: "On the other hand, he said the Scots have avoided an often-cited pitfall of the Quebec separatist movement — a lack of clarity about what exactly would happen in the event of a referendum victory."

Flanders

The Flemish-speaking region of Belgium has in recent years uneasily coexisted with the French-speaking south of the country.

The New Flemish Alliance, or N-VA, emerged as the single-biggest party in elections in May, and is likely to be at the head of any national government. Flemish nationalist sentiments are strong, and political scientist Dave Sinardet tells Agence France-Presse that a good performance by the "yes" vote in Scotland "could inspire the base of the N-VA."
Still, as De Morgen, a Flemish daily, notes, "There is little appetite for the economic uncertainties of a separatist adventure" in Flanders.

Here's more from AFP on what's a more likely future for the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium:

"For Flemish nationalists, a more realistic perspective that Belgium becomes a confederation where Flanders would enjoy almost complete autonomy without breaking up the country.
"If they prove that once in government they are efficient managers, N-VA strategists believe they could emerge strengthened from elections in 2019 and make a big push then for a confederation."

Catalonia

Polls show more than half the people in Catalonia support independence from Spain, and the region's lawmakers are hoping to put that backing to a referendum on Nov. 9.

The Washington Post reports:

"Catalonia has long been one of Spain's main industrial engines, representing one-fifth of the whole country's economy, and its politicians believe its future would be rosier if it was free of the wider dysfunctions of the Spanish economy. Madrid, though, has been far less accommodating of Catalan aspirations than the British government under Prime Minister David Cameron has been of Scotland's move toward independence."

The government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has said he will block a vote, and indeed the country's constitutional court is likely to stop any referendum, which needs government approval. Rajoy has also said an independent Scotland will have to negotiate entry into the EU and NATO, an apparent signal that independent-minded regions should not expect an easy path to international organizations.

Albert Royo-Mariné, secretary general of the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia, tells USA Today that Spain should learn from "the way Britain managed to find a way to give the people of Scotland a vote that mirrors their political will."
"Scotland has been given the opportunity to choose what they want to be, and Spain needs to be inspired by this precedent. This is the way to solve political conflicts," Royo-Mariné said. "Spain is a young democracy, and it cannot afford to block a peaceful movement such as this. That would be dangerous for Spain."

Kashmir

Kashmir, the region claimed by both India and Pakistan, has been the scene of a pro-independence movement for decades. As NPR's Julie McCarthy recently noted, a heavy Indian army presence has kept a lid on rebellion.
As the BBC notes, several thousand Kashmiris who live in Scotland will vote in Thursday's referendum.
"That vote will determine whether a region with a distinct identity can successfully secede from a much larger nation," the BBC says — a sentence that can have a parallel in Kashmir as well as Scotland.

Kashmiris were promised a referendum — but only a choice between India and Pakistan and not independence — soon after the king in Muslim-majority Kashmir joined India in 1947. But that vote never took place. India maintains that conditions aren't right for one, and so chances of a vote are slim to none. The BBC adds:

"If there was a referendum in Kashmir, what would the outcome be?
"Nobody knows.
"Twenty-five years of separatist insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir, and the Indian response to it, have claimed tens of thousands of lives. They have also created a climate where people are often reluctant to say what they really feel."

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These pastel boxes originally owned by Mary Cassatt were acquired recently by the National Gallery of Art.

Imagine if you could see the pen Beethoven used to write his Symphony No. 5. Or the chisel Michelangelo used to sculpt his David. Art lovers find endless fascination in the materials of artists — a pen, a brush, even a rag can become sacred objects, humanizing a work of art.

And now, at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, visitors can see some of the materials that impressionist Mary Cassatt once used — three well-loved, large wooden boxes of pastels from distinguished Paris art supply stores. Each box is filled with stubby pieces of pastels, some worn down to half an inch, others almost untouched.

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Six years before Cassatt died she gave these boxes of chalk pastels to Electra Webb Bostwick, the 10-year-old granddaughter of her New York friend and patron Louisine Havemeyer.

"I'm delighted," says curator Kim Jones. "It's the kind of thing that really entrances people."

One gallery visitor bends over to inspect the chalks — and gasps when she realizes what she's looking at: "It's just fascinating. It's a piece of history," she says.

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In her 1878-1879 work, At the Theater, Cassatt incorporates metallic paint with gouache and pastel.

To think that Cassatt held them, and used them — it offers a rare glimpse into the process behind the masterpieces.
Jones says the National Gallery will be doing examinations of the pastels in the near future — testing to see what they're made of, which pigments were used, how the soft pigment powder was stabilized, how the pastels were fixed to drawing paper so they wouldn't smudge (these days, some artists use hair spray as a fixative).

In her last decades, Cassatt was using pastels more than oil paints. Her luminous colors were vibrant — beautiful fuchsias and teals. In 1920 — six years before she died — Cassatt gave these boxes of chalk pastels to the 10-year-old granddaughter of her New York friend and patron Louisine Havemeyer. Years later, that granddaughter, Electra Webb Bostwick , admitted she didn't know just how special the gift was.

"Not realizing the value of the pastels I wasted lots of them on playing and swapping them with my friends," she recalled.
Now they belong to the National Gallery's collection of artists' materials — paints, brushes and other artifacts, useful to scholars and other artists who study them for inspiration and edification. They'll be on view until Oct. 5.




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Plaster casts taken from soldiers' mutilated faces (top row), new sculpted faces (bottom row), and final masks (on the table) sit in the studio of Anna Coleman Ladd in 1918.

Sometimes art can change how people see the world. But Anna Coleman Ladd made art that changed how the world saw people.

It was World War I, and soldiers were coming home from the battlefield with devastating injuries. Those who survived were often left with disfigured faces.

"The part of the soldier's body that was most vulnerable was his face, because if he looked up over a trench, that was the part that was going to be hit," says David Lubin, a professor of art at Wake Forest University.

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Ladd's papers include these photos of a World War I veteran with and without his mask, circa 1920.

As director of the Red Cross mask-making studio in Paris, Ladd worked with mutilés de la face, men who had taken shrapnel, bullets and flamethrowers to the face. Ladd studied dozens of those disfigured faces, then sculpted masks made to resemble the soldiers' former selves.

The Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art has just posted a collection of Ladd's papers online — photos, letters, diaries and other texts documenting her work. Lubin, who researched the sculptor for an upcoming book, tells NPR's Rachel Martin that part of the artist's process was to discover the man behind the injury.

"She wanted to make the Studio for Portrait Masks, as it was called, a really warm and inviting place, where men could come in and feel happy and relaxed," Lubin explains.

It started in 1917, when Ladd, who was then a sculptor and socialite living in Boston, read about the work of a sculptor who ran what was called the "Tin Noses Shop," a mask-making studio for disfigured British soldiers. Inspired, Ladd set up her own studio in Paris and set to work sculpting new faces for those who had lost a piece of theirs in trench warfare. For many, the studio was a safe haven.

"These men couldn't be seen on the street," says Lubin. "They'd gone through multiple operations, and they were seen as so hideous people would sometimes pass out from seeing them."

Ladd started by getting to know the men: their quirks, daily habits, what their siblings looked like, the limited facial expressions they were still capable of. Then, she would choose an expression. For some, that expression would be the only one they could wear.

She'd make a plaster mold of her subject's face, fill in the missing parts, and then galvanize the result in copper. After repeated fittings and adjustments, which might take several weeks, Ladd would position the mask on his face and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCSzrUnie2E a paintbrush.

"She would try to paint a pigment that would be like the color of that man's skin," says Lubin. "She would always take a tone that was halfway between what it would appear to be on a cloudy day and what it would appear to be on a sunny day."

In about a year and a half, Ladd and her colleagues sculpted almost 100 masks, each one a labor-intensive feat.
"She was very proud of the fact that men who had thought they were going to have to live lives as recluses were able to go back into society," says Lubin. "I have my doubts. I really don't think it was as easy [for the men] as she portrays."

Lubin says when the war ended, the Red Cross couldn't fund the studio anymore, so the studios closed. Ladd returned to Boston, where she resumed sculpting portrait busts and art for fountains.

"I would have to say," says Lubin, "that the art that she made before and after the war nowhere comes near the sort of importance and gravity of what she did during the war."



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Geoffrey Holder and his son, Leo.

Shortly after the death of dancer, choreographer, actor, painter and director Geoffrey Holder, his son, Leo, composed and shared this letter about the end of his father's life.

This Is A True Story
Geoffrey Holder 1930-2014
October 5th
A little more than a week after developing pneumonia, Geoffrey Holder made a decision. He was calling the shots as always. He was done. Two attempts at removing the breathing tube didn't show promising results. In his truest moment of clarity since being rolled into ICU, he said he was good. Mouthing the words "No, I am not afraid" without a trace of negativity, sadness or bitterness, he sincerely was good with it. He had lived the fullest life he could possibly live, a 70+ year career in multiple art forms, and was still creating. Still painting, a bag of gold (of course) fabric and embellishments in his room for a new dress for my mother, sculptures made out of rope, baseball caps and wire hangers. New ideas every second, always restlessly chasing his too-fertile mind.

A week of breathing tubes and restrained hands had forced him to communicate with only cryptic clues which I was fortunate enough to be able to decipher at best 40 percent of the time. The fact that we all struggled to understand him enraged him to the point that he could sometimes pull tantrums taking up to four people to restrain him from pulling out the wires. He was headstrong (understatement), but he was also physically strong. Iron hand grip that no illness could weaken. Nine days of mouthing words that, because of the tubes, produced no sound, forcing him to use his eyes to try to accentuate the point he was trying to make.

But this didn't mean he wasn't still Geoffrey Holder. This didn't mean an end to taking over. Holding court as he always did. Directing and ordering people around. Choreographing. Getting his way. We still understood that part, and the sight of his closest friends and extended family brought out the best in him. Broad smiles in spite of the tubes, nodding approval of anything that met his standard (which was very high), and exuding pride and joy in all those in whom he saw a spark of magic and encouraged to blossom. The week saw a parade of friends from all over the world checking in to see him, hold his hand, rub his head, and give him the latest gossip. But he was still trying to tell me something, and although I was still the best at deciphering what he was saying, I still wasn't getting it.

Saturday night I had a breakthrough. After a good day for him, including a visit by the Rev. Dr. Forbes, Senior Minister Emeritus of Riverside Church, who offered prayer and described Geoffrey's choreography as prayer itself, which made him beam, I brought in some music. Bill Evans with Symphony Orchestra, one of his all-time favorites. He had once choreographed a piece to one of the cuts on the album ... a throwaway ballet to fill out the program, but the music inspired him. From his bed, he started to at first sway with the music, then the arms went up, and Geoffrey started to dance again. In his bed. Purest of spirits. Still Geoffrey Holder. Then he summoned me to take his hands, and this most unique dancer/choreographer pulled himself up from his bed as if to reach the sky. It was then I broke the code: He was telling me he was going to dance his way out. Still a Geoffrey Holder production.

If it had been up to him, this evening's solo would have been it. The higher he pulled himself up, the higher he wanted to fly. I had to let him down. Not yet. There are friends and family coming in from out of town. He resignedly shrugged his shoulders, closed his eyes and went to sleep. I got it. Really. I got it. I walked out of the hospital elated. Ate a full meal for the first time in days, slept like a baby after. The next day would be his last. I was not sad. It wasn't stressful for me to deal with him in this state. It was an honor and a privilege to tend to anything he needed. This impromptu dance was his dress rehearsal.

Next morning, I show up early. Possible second thoughts? Should we wait? What if he changes his mind? Did he understand what we were talking about here? Thoroughly. Mind as clear as crystal. "You still game for our dance tonight?" A nod, a smile, and a wink, with tubes still down his throat. We're still on. But he still wants to do it NOW. NOT later. He's cranky. Sulks a while. Sleeps a while. Eventually snaps out of it.

From noon on, a caravan of friends and family from all over the globe comes through the ICU wing. Ages 1 to 80. Young designers and artists he nurtured and who inspired him. Younger dancers he encouraged to always play to the rear balcony with majesty. The now "elder statesmen" dancers on whom he built some of his signature ballets. His rat pack of buddies. Wayward saints he would offer food, drink, a shoulder to cry on, a couch to sleep it off, and lifetime's worth of deep conversation and thought. Closest and oldest friends. Family.

They know they are here to say goodbye. He knows they are here to say goodbye. He greets them beaming with joy to see them. By this time I'm reading his lips better and am able to translate for him as much as I can. The last of them leave. It's time for his one true love to have her time with him. His muse. Her champion. This is their time. 59 years distilled into 5 minutes of the gentlest looks and words as she caresses his noble brow one last time. She puts a note she wrote to him in is hand. She leaves.

Everyone is gone except me. My moment. I will be with him as he goes.
One more time: "You good?" Nod & faint smile. "You ready?" He is. I have asked the doctors to not start the morphine drip right away, because I want him to have his solo on his own time. Knowing him, he might stop breathing right after his finale. For dramatic effect. He's still Geoffrey Holder.

They remove the tube that has imprisoned him for the past nine days and robbed this great communicator of the ability to speak. I remove the mittens that prevent his hands from moving freely.

I start the music, take his hands and start leading him, swaying them back and forth. And he lets go of me. He's gonna wing it as he was prone to do when he was younger. Breathing on his own for the last time, Geoffrey Holder, eyes closed, performs his last solo to Bill Evans playing Fauré's Pavane. From his deathbed. The arms take flight, his beautiful hands articulate through the air, with grace. I whisper "shoulders" and they go into an undulating shimmy, rolling like waves. His Geoffrey Holder head gently rocks back and forth as he stretches out his right arm to deliver his trademark finger gesture, which once meant "you can't afford this" and now is a subtle manifestation of pure human spirit and infinite wisdom. His musical timing still impeccable, bouncing off the notes, as if playing his own duet with Evan's piano. Come the finale, he doesn't lift himself off the bed as he planned; instead, one last gentle rock of the torso, crosses his arms and turns his head to the side in a pose worthy of Pavlova. All with a faint, gentile smile.

The orchestra finishes when he does. I lose it.

They administer the morphine drip and put an oxygen mask over his face. And I watch him begin taking his last breaths.
I put on some different music. I sit and watch him sleep, and breathe ... 20 minutes later, he's still breathing, albeit with this gurgling sound you can hear through the mask. Another several minutes go by, he's still breathing. Weakly, but still breathing ... then his right hand starts to move. It looks like he's using my mother's note like a pencil, scratching the surface of the bed as if he's drawing. This stops a few minutes later, then the left hand begins tapping. Through the oxygen mask, the gurgling starts creating its own rhythm. Not sure of what I'm hearing, I look up to see his mouth moving. I get closer to listen: " ... two, three ... two, three ... " He's counting! It gets stronger, and at its loudest sounds like the deep purr of a lion, then he says, "Arms, two, three ... Turn, two, three ... Swing, two, three ... Down two, three ... "
I call my mother at home, where she was having a reception in his honor. She picks up. There are friends and family telling Geoffrey stories simultaneously laughing and crying in the background. "Hi, Honey, are you all right?"

"Yes, actually ... he hasn't stopped breathing yet." I tell her about his solo, which brings her to a smile and a lightening of mood. I continue:
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure, Honey. What?"
"Who the hell did you marry?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're not gonna believe this. He's got a morphine drip, going on over half an hour, an oxygen mask on, his eyes closed, AND HE'S CHOREOGRAPHING!"
This brings her to her first laugh of the day. She now knows we will be all right.

He continues on like this for quite a while, and a doctor comes in to take some meter readings of the machines. I ask the doctor if this is normal. As she begins to explain to me about the process, his closed eyes burst open, focused straight on us like lasers, and he roars with all his might: "SHUT UUUUUUUUUUUUUP!!! YOU'RE BREAKING MY CONCENTRATION!!!!!!!"
We freeze with our mouths open. He stares us down. Long and hard.

Then he closes his eyes again, "Arms, two, three ... Turn, two, three ... Swing, two, three ... Down, two, three ... "
He continued counting 'til it faded out, leaving only the sound of faint breathing, slowing down to his very last breath at 9:25 p.m.
Still Geoffrey Holder.
The most incredible night of my life.
Thank you for indulging me.
Love & best,
L


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To see the National Portrait Gallery's Out of Many, One in its entirety, visitors must take to the air above the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Tami Heilemann/Department of the Interior

Last month on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., trucks pulled up bearing thousands of tons of dark topsoil and sand. Volunteers arrived with shovels and rakes. Following an artist's instructions and guided by satellite coordinates, they laid out a design across 6 acres to create a work commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.

Now, standing at the perimeter of the portrait, it looks like a field under construction. The only clue that something more complex is going on is that the soil is laid out in carefully contoured lines — so when it's viewed from way up on high, you see the image of a face.

A tourist visiting from Ohio walks by. Jim Mahoney hasn't heard about the piece, and would never have guessed it was a face by looking at it from ground level.

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At the ground level, it's hard to tell this field of dirt, sand and gravel has been carefully arranged to form a giant face. Oliver Dearden/NPR

"The easy answer would be, 'Well, that doesn't make sense,'" he says, but "I guess I'm a little more open minded to think symbolism really matters. It's not what it is, it's what it means."

Eva Folkert of Michigan was excited to actually walk on the sand after seeing large-scale images of the piece. "You create art yourself in your mind as you try to put these singular pieces together to make one whole thing," she says. "And maybe that's part of the concept too, right?"

Out Of Many, One is the name of the piece. Although the artist behind the work, Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada, has done similar projects in Europe, this is his first in the United States.

Rodríguez-Gerada moved to the U.S. from Cuba at the age of 4, and was raised in New Jersey. He grew up in with an ethnically diverse group of friends, which he says has had a lasting impact on him. He wanted the portrait to represent America, so the face on the Mall blends photos he took of young men from many racial backgrounds.
After a few early trips to the site, Rodríguez-Gerada realized the National Mall is on a flight path. A happy coincidence, that's part of what makes the piece so unique — it can be appreciated from so many vantage points.

"It's designed to be viewed here, now, walking through it, from the Monument, from the planes flying out of National," Rodríguez-Gerada says.

If you're not in a plane, the one reliable way to see this portrait in its entirety is from the top of the Washington Monument.

Up on the observation deck, people look out over the city in all four directions.

Many are surprised to find an enormous face peering back at them, where normally there is only grass.

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Guided by artist instructions and satellite coordinates, workers mapped out patterns in the soil not far from the Washington Monument.

It's now been a little more than a week since the the portrait made its debut. Despite several good rains, the edges of the face have stood up to the elements — with a little help from volunteers who come by to rake the sand back into place.

But the work, by design, will disappear. At the end of this month, it will be plowed under and reseeded with grass, preserved only in photographs and memories.

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Edgar Degas' Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is on display at the National Gallery of Art until Jan. 11. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon/ Courtesy of the National Gallery

A century-old teenager is the focus of a musical and an art exhibit in Washington right now. The National Gallery of Art is showing Edgar Degas' statue Little Dancer Aged Fourteen in conjunction with the Kennedy Center's Oct. 25 opening of Little Dancer, a new show inspired by the sculpture.

Ballet students Brittany Yevoli and Ava Durant, both 14, see themselves in Degas' statue. Looking at her, they stand as she does — fourth position, weight on the left leg, right leg forward, foot turned out to the right. They recognize her tutu, her shoes and her perfect posture.

"It looks like she's standing in rehearsal," Yevoli says.

They also notice the young girls hands, clasped firmly behind her back. "Maybe showing respect," Durant says, "but also just sort of the way that we're supposed to stand in class."

Little Dancer is charming, even entrancing, yet the French had a less flattering nickname for the Paris Opera Ballet corps. "They called the students rats," curator Alison Luchs says. "They were little; they were thin; they scampered; they came in from the streets."

Luchs sees determination in the young ballerina's face — one writer called her "Miss Bossy Pants" — but conservator Shelley Sturman sees a bit of mystery. "Her eyes are half closed, her head is tilted," Sturman says. "She's ready to rise above that rat of the opera mystique."

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Degas used a real bodice, tutu, ribbon and even real hair in his sculpture.

Degas' Disappearing Muse

Degas made many sculptures, but Little Dancer is the only one he ever exhibited, and he worked on it for years. He made dozens of drawings before he began to sculpt with clay and beeswax, shaping and re-shaping this National Gallery original. X-rays show he stabilized the 39-inch figure with lead pipe wrapped in rope, and used wire for her arms.

"And to make them stiffer and firmer, he actually put in old paint brushes," Sturman says. To tilt her head, he put a spring coil — maybe from a chair or mattress — inside her neck. And then, he dressed her. It was totally unconventional: He gave her a real cotton bodice, waxed so it looks bronzy; a real tutu; a real silk ribbon tied around a braid made of real, blond human hair; and real linen slippers – pink and also waxed.

How did critics react in 1881? "A lot of them thought it was awful," Sturman says. "They were stunned by the realism. They were used to seeing sculptures of women in marble and bronze."

They were also used to seeing goddesses, not a flat-chested, skinny, coltish adolescent like Marie Van Goethem, the ballerina who posed for the sculpture.

"[Her name is] written on a Degas drawing," Sturman says. "[Her] parents came from Belgium. The father was a tailor; the mother was a laundress."

Marie started modeling for Degas around 1878. Curator Allison Luchs says her dance career ended four years later. "She was dismissed from the ballet. The implication is that she was missing rehearsals or getting something wrong. And she disappears. We don't know what became of her."

The new musical Little Dancer imagines Marie's life.

A Talented Street Urchin

Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the book and lyrics for the musical, says she got the idea for Little Dancer when she saw a bronze replica of the statue at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. Curious about the story behind it, Ahrens did some research on Degas and Marie.

"I began to see a story emerging about an artist who was beginning to go blind, who was frightened that he was losing his power to paint," she says. "And into his life, somehow, walks a little girl who inspires him, in some way, because she is such an urchin, such a spirit and a stubborn soul, and he begins to sketch her and suddenly decides that he wants to sculpt."

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Tony Award-winning actor Boyd Gaines plays Edgar Degas opposite the New York City Ballet's Tiler Peck, as Marie Van Goethem, during a Manhattan rehearsal. Paul Kolnik/Courtesy of the Kennedy Center

Ahrens and her collaborator, composer Stephen Flaherty, have created a musical that's both historically informed and highly speculative. In a Manhattan rehearsal studio, many of Degas' most famous paintings and sketches are taped to the wall — ballerinas slumping in exhaustion, rich men in black hats checking out the girls, absinthe drinkers. Director and choreographer Susan Stroman has put them all onstage, but says the heart of Little Dancer is the story of a prickly artist finding his equally prickly young muse in one of those ballet rats.

"You want to believe that she had language," Stroman says, "and she, you know, was like an Artful Dodger almost. And so that's what we have created, in essence."

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Peck says she sees her character, the young Marie Van Goethem, as a survivor. Matthew Karas/Courtesy of the Kennedy Center

New York City Ballet star Tiler Peck plays young Marie as a street urchin — a very talented street urchin, but one who has no qualms picking people's pockets, including Monsieur Degas', to get money for pointe shoes.

"What I see her as is just like a survivor," Peck says. "She does anything to make her ends meet. You know, there's no hope for her at home. She goes home and her mom's drunk all the time, her mom's asking her for her money. And I feel like the ballet is the one sort of happy hope that she has in her life."

She's caught between many things, says composer Stephen Flaherty. "She's not a child; she's not an adult. She's sort of in between, in the cracks, and that's one of the things we really wanted to capture." It's that "in between-ness" that attracts Degas.

While the musical comes up with the reason Marie is dismissed from the Paris Opera, it doesn't exactly say what happened to her afterwards. There's a dream ballet which offers a variety of possible paths, and the character of older Marie quite literally haunts the show.

"By having an adult Marie and a young Marie, we're saying that she survived," director Susan Stroman says. "And that's a good thing. And that's what we would hope for.



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Tourists take photos and listen to an audio tour in front of El Greco's 'The Disrobing of Christ' inside Toledo's cathedral. Lauren Frayer for NPR

At a small exhibit at the Historical Museum of Crete, a visiting artist gazes at an early religious painting by El Greco.
"The Baptism of Christ" is a vividly colored, two-dimensional, egg tempera-on-panel work from the second half of the 16th century. But it already showed hints of the style that would later make him one of the Western world's most famous painters.

Sophia Vorontzova, a Russian artist now living in Germany, calls it his "signature in art."

"These longer forms, the colors, and for that time, for his time, I think it is very extraordinary," she says, pointing around the two-room exhibit. "You feel like El Greco was so interested in [telling a] story no one else saw."
The painter had mixed fortunes in life, but his works are being celebrated this year in Crete and in Spain on the 400th anniversary of his death.

El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete in 1541, and information about his early life is sketchy at best. What is known is based on a few documents and three Byzantine icons he painted, says Nicos Hadjinicolaou, an art historian and professor emeritus at the University of Crete who has written several books and studies on El Greco.

Hadjinicolaou says the evidence shows Theotokopoulos was already an established icon painter in his early 20s.

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The Baptism of Christ by Domenikos Theotokopoulos, commonly known as El Greco is displayed at Christies auctioneers in London in 2004.

"We know that in 1563, he was a master, he had the title of a master, which means that he had a workshop, which means he had people working for him," he says.

Hadjinicolaou says there's also evidence that Theotokopoulos was married and perhaps even had children.

But because so little can be verified about the artist's life on Crete, the Greeks have gotten a little creative with it. The 2007 film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm063wrb9m8, for instance, depicts him as a melodramatic young genius from a politically rebellious family who dance like warriors at funerals. (More galling for El Greco aficionados is the film's claim that he was persecuted during the Spanish Inquisition, something that never happened.)

Claims to El Greco

In northern Crete, a village of orange farmers called Fodele claims it is the painter's birthplace, even though a court document shows that he stated he was born in the city of Candia (modern-day Iraklion) about 17 miles away.
Village president Yiannis Fakoukais says Spanish academics declared Fodele as the painter's birthplace a century ago. Fakoukakis says Theotokopoulos even has descendants in Fodele.

"This is what generations of people here have lived and died knowing," he says. "People talk about us, books are written about us, and why should some document erase that?"

Each year, Fodele attracts busloads of tourists who visit a small museum that villagers claim is the painter's childhood home. The humble stone house, restored with money from the Greek government, is decorated with copies of his works and yellowed newspaper clippings of villagers declaring their relation to him.

The village also has a cafe called Domenicos and a taverna called El Greco. Even Maria Thanasa's olive-oil products shop profits from the association.

"Of course Domenikos Theotokopoulos helps us economically," she says. "Because we have tourists. And the restaurants work, the cafes work, even the women who make macrame work."

Hadjinicolaou, the art historian, says the fuss is more about Greek identity than El Greco himself.

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Cafe Domenico in Fodele, Greece, which claims to be El Greco's hometown, though documents suggest he was born in another town nearby.

"Partly the interest is founded in Greek nationalism," he says. "Because this fellow came from here, because he is Greek, there is an additional kind of pride which has nothing to do with recognition of his art."

El Greco Leaves Home

Theotokopoulos left Crete sometime around 1567, departing for Italy, where he spent the next decade experimenting with his artistic style. He then moved to Spain, where he made his home.

"During his lifetime he was called either Domeniko Greco — Greco is Italian, Domeniko Spanish — in official documents in contracts, or, occasionally, Domeniko Theotokopouli, Griego," Hatzinikolaou says. "Then everyone got to know him as El Greco."

Greeks recognize the artist is famous for the work he did in Spain, not Greece. But Hatzinikolaou says they revel in the fact that he never lost his roots.

He always signed his paintings Domenikos Theotokopoulous, "down to the very end, with Greek characters."
Though his works were signed in Greek, El Greco painted them in the Spanish Renaissance style he helped invent.
El Greco's adopted Spanish hometown, Toledo, has held several exhibitions of his work this year. His works have been transported from museums all over the world, coming together in Toledo en masse for the first time since the artist's death.

A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ7B4D2LQP4 greets arrivals at the town's train station. But in the city center, many draw a blank at the name Domenikos Theotokopoulos.

"No idea! Who is that?" says Spanish tourist Angela Fernandez, visiting Toledo from nearby Madrid.
But American tourist Ann Thompson perks up when asked if she knows who Domenikos Theotokopoulos is.
"I do! It's El Greco!" she says. "And I know because my family is from Crete."

Squabbles with Spain's King

El Greco came to Spain to become rich and famous, says his biographer Fernando Marías, author of El Greco: Life and Work and El Greco of Toledo.

"He was very ambitious," says Marías, who also curated one of this year's exhibitions in Toledo. "He tried to raise his status. He thought Spain was a country or a land where his skills would be appreciated, and that he was going to make a much better living."

El Greco's first commission in Spain was an altarpiece for King Philip II, "The Disrobing of Christ," which the king wanted to hang in a monastery north of Madrid, in El Escorial. But El Greco was a perfectionist. He complained about the paint colors he was given, and his fee. Was the king impressed?

"No!" says Marías. "He didn't like it. The relation with El Greco was hard, to say it in a word. The king was angry. Because we know that he had to write a letter, 'Well, there is this Greek who is complaining!' So let's just say it was not the best way to address the king."

King Philip II held a grudge. He never hung El Greco's "The Disrobing of Christ" in his El Escorial monastery. Instead, it now hangs in Toledo's Cathedral.

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View of medieval bridge in Toledo, Spain, where El Greco once lived and painted.

El Greco Arrives in Toledo — and Falls in Love

Out of favor with Spain's royals in Madrid, El Greco moved 40 miles south to Toledo. It had the country's biggest cathedral, and a demand for religious art. It's here that El Greco developed his signature style: eerie, elongated figures of saints, in lurid colors, against stormy Toledo skies.

It was in Toledo that El Greco also found love — perhaps for a second time. He had a relationship with a woman identified in some court documents as Jeronima de las Cuevas, but he never married her. Urban legend in Toledo says Jeronima was a prostitute, or a nun — and thus El Greco couldn't marry her. But Marías, his biographer, says it's more likely because he was already married in Greece.

"He was trying not to rouse suspicion. That's probably the reason he didn't marry the mother of his son," Marías says. "He probably was married in Crete. If he had married for a second time in Spain, he could have been labeled a bigamist and persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition."

El Greco had a son with Jeronima. At age 8, the boy, named Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos, went to work in his father's workshop. He had some of El Greco's talent for painting, but was a better architect. He helped design some municipal buildings in Toledo, and the cathedral's cupola — which still stand today.

Always an Outsider

The Catholic Church didn't know what to make of El Greco. He was a foreigner, and not a Catholic. He'd fallen out with the king. But nobles bought his work.

El Greco got rich, and then overspent, says Inma Sanchez, an art historian and tour guide in Toledo.
"He was trying to live as a nobleman, at a moment that being a nobleman meant to dress with very expensive clothes, to rent some rooms in a palace," Sanchez says. "So he was living a life that was over his possibilities."

El Greco died in Toledo loaded with debts. He was always an outsider. He never learned Spanish. Sanchez gazes at his grave inside a medieval convent in Toledo, still run by nuns.

"Can you see that little coffin in there?" she says. "Well, this is all we have. And of course the dust inside. That's all."

Almost Forgotten

El Greco was almost forgotten until a little more than 100 years ago, when painters like Cezanne, Picasso and Jackson Pollack rediscovered him. They spotted something very modern in his work, some 300 years before Abstract Expressionism. Now El Greco has become one of the West's most popular painters.

If the artist only knew, Sanchez says.

"I always wonder, I ask myself, can you imagine if I could whisper in the ear of El Greco — '400 years later, we're going to do a monographic exhibition just to remember you, in this place, with paintings from all around the world,'" Sanchez says. "He succeeded! He got what he was really looking for — the fame, and to be remembered."



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Edgar Degas' 1875 painting Au Café Concert: La Chanson du Chien is part of billionaire Jerry Perenchio's collection being donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

In a gift the Los Angeles County Museum of Art says is the largest in its history, billionaire Jerry Perenchio is donating art worth an estimated $500 million to the museum.

From member station KPCC in Los Angeles:

"The collection — at least 47 pieces with an estimated value of $500 million — includes work by such European masters as Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso and others."

The paintings and other works collected by Perenchio, 83, won't go into the museum's permanent collection until after his death.

"He has offered to us to show some of the highlights very soon," Museum CEO and Director Michael Govan tells KPCC. "In fact, in a matter of months, so you'll get a taste of that."

The donation also includes a requirement that the museum follow through on plans to rebuild its campus.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the public donation is a divergence for Perenchio, who has largely avoided the spotlight.

"In this case, I've decided that it's worth a temporary step into the spotlight and to encourage other collectors to give to LACMA and support the fundraising," Perenchio tells the newspaper.

A former talent agent and TV executive, Perenchio scored a billion-dollar payday in 2007 when he sold his part of Univision, the Spanish-language network he helped buy in 1992.

Longtime sports fans might also recall that Perenchio was the promoter who put together a famous 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, billed as the "Battle of the Sexes."


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Andy Warhol's Triple Elvis [Ferus Type] is set to be auctioned at Christie's, and expectations are high — but Warhol's estate won't see any of the money. Christie's Images LTD. 2014

It's fall auction season in New York, and two Andy Warhol silkscreens are on the block at Christie's. One is of Elvis Presley — it's called Triple Elvis; the other is Four Marlons — as in Marlon Brando. In the late 1970s, a German casino bought both works for $185,000. This time around, they're expected to fetch more than $100 million. Andy Warhol's estate won't see any of that money: Unlike musicians or novelists, visual artists don't earn future royalties. But that may be about to change.

In 1973, a team of documentary filmmakers was following art maven Robert Scull for a movie called America's Pop Collector. Years before, he'd bought a painting from the artist Robert Rauschenberg for $900, and it was being auctioned at Christies for $85,000 — a windfall for the collector, not the artist. The film crew captured a legendary moment when Scull greeted the artist Robert Rauschenberg — who scolded Scull for profiting off of his artwork.

Scull argued back that the sale benefited the artist, if not directly, because his work would rise in price. Rauschenberg didn't see it that way. He spent years lobbying Congress to get royalties for artists when their works are sold down the line.

The idea didn't get any traction then, but now there's a bill in Congress, called A.R.T. — American Royalties Too — which would mandate that 5% of every auction sale go to the artists or their descendants, with a cap of $700,000. The sponsor is New York congressman Jerry Nadler, who says says the Copyright Office used to be the biggest obstacle. "Back in 1992, the Copyright Office looked into this whole matter and came out against it."

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Warhol's Four Marlons is expected to sell for around $60 million — a German casino bought it (along with the Elvises above) for $185,000 in the 1970s. Christie's Images LTD.

But then Australia and the U.K. passed similar laws in favor of artists, which got the attention of the Copyright Office again. "Earlier this year, having taken a fresh look at it and looking at what other countries have done, and how it's worked out, they said this would be advantageous in the United State," Nadler says. And he adds, the bill may escape partisan gridlock. "Intellectual property is a very unusual area in Congress. You as a general rule, you can not predict where someone is going to be on an issue like this or on music licensing by knowing that he's a Democrat or Republican."

Christie's and Sotheby's would not agree to an interview. They're lobbying to kill the bill. That upsets artist Frank Stella, whose work has been auctioned for millions. "When the auction houses are against the resale right, there's a kind of not very nice preemptive stance saying that the artist doesn't count, only the collector and the auction house," he says. "I think it's not right."

But some artists are against the bill. Loren Munk says it would give money to a top echelon of artists that are already very successful, or dead. He also worries the law could discourage collectors from investing in mid-level artists. "Artists are like whores," he says, "and a lot of them are like old, old whores on the street" who would be worried about scaring away potential clients.

"I know that it doesn't take much for people to decide that something is just a little bit too much trouble to have to deal with — or if they're going to have to deal with that kind of problem, better to go with something safe."

Another concern is that royalties could drive collectors away from auction houses, towards galleries and private sales, which are exempt in the bill. University of Ohio law professor Guy Rub says at least auctions are public. "The information is public – so one of the problems with the art market is there's a lot of secrecy there. And that's not good to any market, it's not horrible but it's not good," he says.

The A.R.T. Act may get tucked into a bill that deals with larger copyright issues — but by some accounts, it does appear to have a slim chance of passing.


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Pedestrians pass the display windows at Bonhams New York auction house. The Mexican government accuses Bonhams of auctioning off artifacts that were stolen from Mexico, and says others that were offered as ancient were modern fakes.

Bonhams Auction House sold more than 100 pre-Hispanic artifacts Wednesday in New York City, including several Aztec and Mayan warrior statues. The Mexican government claims that at least half of the pieces are fake, and the rest are stolen. In a Spanish-language statement translated by NPR, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said:

"Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History condemns the auction by Bonhams in New York of pre-Columbian, Mexican artifacts. The auction took place without regard to legal and ethical norms. The sale not only violated Mexican laws but the Treaty of Cooperation Between the United States of America and the United Mexican States Providing For The Recovery and Return of Stolen Archaeological, Historical and Cultural Properties that was signed on July 17, 1970."

The institute says it made Bonhams aware of the "violation" through Mexico's Consulate General in New York. The institute says its experts went to New York to examine the artifacts, and they found that several showed evidence of modern manufacturing.

NPR's Carrie Kahn told our Newscast Unit on Tuesday that a spokeswoman for Bonhams said the auction house's specialists researched the artifacts thoroughly and stood by their assessment. The Associated Press reports:

"A Bonhams spokeswoman also said, "We work closely with Interpol, government authorities, the Art Loss Register as well as institutions and academics with expertise in this area to ensure that provenance is correct and that we have complied with applicable legal requirements, which is exceptionally important to our business."

But Wednesday, a Bonhams spokeswoman said the auction house is evaluating "new information" about the items.
Mark Van Stone, a Mayan art expert at Southwestern College, told NPR that the legal threshold for auctioning questionable items in the U.S. is rather low. "If you can smuggle an item into the United States, there's no law against buying and selling it," says Van Stone. "Even if it was illegally obtained and illegally smuggled. Once it's past customs, there's no law against buying and selling it."

Van Stone also raised some questions about the Mexican government's claims. "I've looked at the catalog, and I would not say half the material in that catalog is fake. I would say, at most, 5 or 10 percent."

But Van Stone also notes that a lot of art auctioned in the U.S. has questionable origins. "Generally if you buy something that you don't know the provenience of before, say, 1980, there's a good chance you're buying something that was smuggled into the United States. A lot of collections have things that came in dubiously."

The highest-valued piece at the Bonhams' auction went for $68,750.


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Peter Milton often includes famous artists in his work. In this etching and engraving, called Train From Munich, the doorman is modeled after Marcel Duchamp.

In 1962, Pop Art was taking off in a frenzy of color: Andy Warhol debuted the Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's soup can silkscreens that would revolutionize the art world, and Roy Lichtenstein was at work on his giant paintings in the mode of comic strips. That same year, artist Peter Milton, then 32, went to get his eyes tested.

At the time, Milton was teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and he'd had a show of some of his paintings. "It got reviewed and someone referred to how warm and sort of pinky the landscapes were," he says, "and I was horrified."

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Peter Milton was a painter when he was diagnosed with colorblindness.

Pink was not what Milton thought he'd been laying down on the canvas. So he made an appointment at Johns Hopkins University. "It was a brutal test because what they do is they give you 25 — I think that's the number — 25 discs."
Each disc was a different color of the spectrum, from red to violet, and Milton had to put them in order. So he did, and he thought it was fine — until the lab technician started correcting his work.

"She started moving all the pieces around and substituting, putting some farther down the scale and others up," he says. "It was a massive redoing."

The diagnosis: red-green colorblindness, or deuteranopia. That was on top of the nearsightedness that Milton had known about since he was a kid.

"Peter Milton does not have total colorblindness, but it's fairly severe," says Michael Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University and co-author of The Artist's Eyes: Vision and the History of Art. "We see color because we have three types of cone cells, or receptors, in the retina, one of which is mainly blue sensitive, one is red sensitive and one is green sensitive. Some people are born with abnormal red or green sensors. If they're somewhat abnormal, a person doesn't quite discriminate colors on the red-green end of the spectrum as well, but they may see them if they're bright."

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For Milton, greens look more like a neutral gray with some yellow, and the color maroon looks like mud.

The Elegance Of Black And White

Colorblindness isn't that uncommon — about 1 in 10 men has some form of it — but Milton was a painter. He studied art at Yale under Josef Albers, who wrote the book on color. Literally. It's called Interaction of Color.

"I was told at one point ... that he thought very highly of my work," Milton says. "And this is very bizarre because I'm the colorblind person, he's the color guru."

Milton wasn't going to abandon art, but he did feel he had to abandon color. And so he embraced black and white. In 1969, he and his family moved to a big yellow house in Francestown, N.H., and in the four decades since, Milton has been making extraordinarily intricate black and white prints. You almost need a magnifying glass to take them in: ballerinas, dogs, children and men on bicycles float in and out of ornate train stations and cafes. They're visual puzzles in which past and present seem to merge, but looking closely won't yield an answer. Milton says it's all about invoking a sense of mystery and a mood.

Take the engraving called Mary's Turn. It was inspired by a 1908 photograph by artist Gertrude Kasebier which shows a woman lining up a billiard shot. In Milton's version, the woman is the painter Mary Cassatt, and the billiard balls are floating in the air.

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Milton's Mary's Turn also features Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas paintings hanging on the wall.

"She's playing this magical game and characters from her paintings have all assembled and come and watched her play the game," he says. The painter Edgar Degas, who had a fraught relationship with Cassatt, is also looking on with a puzzled expression. The whole thing has a sort of graininess to it, almost like an old black and white photograph.

"It's really an examination ... of not having color anymore," Milton says, "of using tonal and texture as your medium. Black and white is almost more elegant; maybe it's fully more elegant than color, unless color is used ... with great elegance in itself."

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Milton's The Ministry (Second State) was inspired by the story of Marcel Proust and James Joyce sharing a Paris taxi in 1922.

'I Don't Miss Color'

Of course, Milton isn't the first artist to have worked through eye problems. The two subjects of Mary's Turn, Degas and Cassatt, also had compromised vision.

"Degas probably had a congenital retinal problem," says Stanford's Michael Marmor, "and he had progressive visual loss spanning about 40 years. Mary Cassatt had a different problem: She developed cataracts fairly late in her life."

Claude Monet also had cataracts, eventually losing his ability to tell colors apart. And the 19th-century artist Charles Meryon, who was famous for his etchings of Paris, was colorblind. You might have heard the theory that Vincent van Gogh was colorblind — that one's actually not true.

"He used vibrant greens in many paintings," Marmor says, "and green is a dangerous color for a colorblind person because it lies right between yellow and blue, and to their perception it actually greys out — it loses color."

Marmor says that, like Milton, most artists who found out they were colorblind just switched to printmaking or sculpture. And Milton says his diagnosis kind of took a weight off his shoulders: "I don't miss color. It helps to have a disability — I use that word; it's a strong word — but it helps it have a disability because when you can do anything, which of all the things you can do are you gonna choose? So something has to help you make the choice."

Or, as Degas put it, "I am convinced that these differences in vision are of no importance. One sees as one wishes to see. It's false, and it is that falsity that constitutes art."



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Anselm Kiefer's Sprache der Vogel belongs to one of Miami's best-known private collections.

Miami has a lot going for it. But as a young city, the one thing it doesn't have is a great, publicly owned art collection. (Though it recently built a $220 million art museum to house one.) What Miami does have is some great private collections of contemporary art that are open to the public. Those private collections helped attract Art Basel, a yearly event that turns Miami into a giant art fair. Every December, Art Basel draws top galleries, top buyers and tens of thousands of visitors.

One of the private collections that helped draw Art Basel is the Margulies Collection. Housed in a large warehouse, it was started by developer Martin Margulies 30 years ago and includes sculptures that are figuratively and literally monumental. Sprache der Vogel, a piece by sculptor Anselm Kiefer, sits just inside the warehouse entrance. It shows two bird wings sprouting from a stack of ancient books. The wings span 17 feet and the work weighs 3 tons.

Nearby, there are other large pieces by Willem de Kooning, Joan Miro and George Segal. The Segal is a well-known sculpture from the 1960s called Subway. Curator Katherine Hinds explains the Margulies Collection's curatorial philosophy: "It's not important to have a George Segal," she says. "But it is important to have the right George Segal for this collection." She calls it "connoisseurship" — finding significant works of art to build a collection around.

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George Segal's Subway was thoughtfully acquired by the Margulies Collection, which aims to build its collection around significant works of art.

The man behind this collection, Martin Margulies, doesn't like to give his age, but he's at a point where the parties and nightlife associated with Miami Beach and Art Basel hold little appeal. At his desk, with Hinds at his side, he goes through a stack of invitations.

"Dancing until early morning?" he reads quizzically.
"You have to go to that," Hinds says, pointing to another Art Basel party invitation, to which Margulies answers, "Maybe."
Depending on whom you talk to, Miami is home to between five and 10 major private art collections. Just about all are focused on contemporary art, and for good reason. "You're not gonna see someone getting first-grade work of [Claude] Monet or [Edouard] Manet or [Pablo] Picasso or constructivist kind of work," Margulies says. "It's a young city and contemporary is the only area ... they can reach for."

Just blocks away, another private collection is housed in another warehouse — one that used to serve as a confiscation center for the Drug Enforcement Agency. It's called the Rubell Family Collection and it was founded by Donald and Mera Rubell. They started buying art as a young married couple in New York in the 1960s. Fifty years later, they're celebrating their golden wedding anniversary with new works and an exhibition of their favorites.

While showing visitors through the exhibition, Mera steps into a room with paintings by artists who helped define the New York art scene in the 1980s. "You've got Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring and George Condo," she says. Mera knew some of those artists personally: She remembers climbing through George Condo's fire escape in 1984 because he hadn't paid his rent and the landlord had locked him out.

Don says it was the quality of the art they were collecting that pushed them to acquire a large space where they could make it available to the public. "The artists always gave us their best pieces, or at least allowed us to buy some of their best pieces," he says. "And it did not seem right that they should go into storage."

The Rubells were instrumental in luring Art Basel to Miami Beach 12 years ago, and Miami's interest in contemporary art has been growing ever since. Art galleries and artist studios led to the gentrification of some formerly gritty neighborhoods, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami — led by private collectors Irma and Norman Braman — recently announced plans to build a new museum and sculpture garden.

"The region ... has gone art crazy," Mera says. "And of course when you see all the condos that are being built, it doesn't hurt that people have a lot of wall space. And why not decorate my home with something original and something special?"

The connection between art and real estate is hardly new, but Miami has embraced it. Art dealer Gary Nader has announced plans for a new museum of Latin American art in downtown Miami showcasing works from his private collection. Nader says the museum will be part of a larger development that will include — and here's the Miami touch — two residential condominium towers.

"It's the only way I can build it," Nader explains. "And what is interesting is that these two towers are going to be built specifically for collectors." Ceilings will be 12 feet high to accommodate large art works and there will be an outdoor sculpture park.



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Her watercolor paintings (mostly portraits) tell stories of Americans whose work and traditions are fading into the past, but not before she documents their existence in artworks that could strongly stand on their own even without the meanings behind them. The ideal composition, color, and balance are there without question, but so are the individuals–the subjects, if you will. Look at them and you’ll see culture; look closely and you may see yourself or someone you know.

http://youtu.be/v48XIBZEUnA

I recently asked Whyte, “when someone comes to you and wants to learn how to paint, what’s the first thing you tell him/her?” She was kind enough to share some valuable tips.

“When beginning artists come to me and tell me that they want to learn to paint, I tell them the very first thing they must do is learn how to draw. Drawing is absolutely essential to becoming a successful artist. (Agree with this? Tweet it!) So draw as much as you can, especially from life! Take a small sketchbook with you everywhere, and sketch everyday observations–your family, the dogs running at the park, the people in the waiting area at the dentist’s office, or the clutter on your kitchen table. Your sketchbook will become your daily journal, and bring you up the learning curve to becoming an artist faster than any other means. Drawing from life will hone your eye for proportion, perspective, composition, shape, line and value, and give you a greater understanding how form is described by light.”
Great advice! Whyte added that she tells her students that they need three things to become accomplished artists:
1. Something to say
2. The ability to say it
3. The courage to do it
I couldn’t agree more. If you’re inspired by Whyte’s paintings, learn how to paint from her with this special offer:Watercolor Portraits of the South with Mary Whyte is included in North Light Shop’s 50% off sale (scroll down for an extra 10% off coupon, plus free shipping details). As a special bonus, watch the above video coverage on Whyte and her story-filled portrait paintings. It’s from one of my favorite TV shows, CBS Sunday Morning.

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An anamorphic installation portrait of Malian actor Sotigui Kouyate by French artist Bernard Pras.

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Fooling the eye – with trick-niques like anamorphic sculpture, trompe l'oeil paintings and other optical illusions – is a centuries old artistic pursuit.

From the ancient frescoes of Pompeii through Rene Magritte, M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali, certain visual experimenters have wrangled with reality in a special way.

Such tricks are also up-to-the-minute contemporary. Take a look at this video of a clever 2013 anamorphic installation — by French artist Bernard Pras. It morphs from a portrait of a man to a mundane pile of objects — depending on how you look at it.

If you find the work of Bernard Pras fascinating, you can see more video explications of his installation portraits on the Internet, including French football star Zinedine Zidane and Malian actor Vincent Noel

Or at a convenience store...

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A 7-Eleven in 2008.

Tricking the viewer – like a magician or a three-card monte dealer – can cut two-ways. If the viewer "gets it", then there is a connection; but if the viewer "doesn't get it", the experience can be unsatisfactory. Like for those who can never see the image in a Magic Eye creation.

The Eye Of The Beholder

So why does an artist like to fiddle with a viewer's perception?

Trompe l'oeil "is virtuosic," explains Lois Parkinson Zamora, author of The Inordinate Eye, "so perhaps virtuosi enjoy being virtuosic. They may also enjoy pushing the medium to its extreme ... questioning the nature not only of realistic representation but also of reality itself."

In trompe l'oeil, says Lois, who also teaches comparative cultural studies at the University of Houston, "metaphysics accompanies technique in a very particular fashion ... form and content merge, that is, the realistic status — the reality — of the painting is the subject of the painting."

Explaining pictures at an exhibition in Houston, Lois wrote that the artistic devices of spatial illusion were honed by European artists during the 17th century, in the era known as the Baroque period. The desire to deceive the eye, she observed, "was in response to cultural anxieties occasioned by revolutionary scientific discoveries, revolutionary religious upheaval, also by the new taste for virtuosic visual display."

She continued, "The authority of perception was being undermined, and Baroque artists responded accordingly—and often fantastically—with structures intended to deceive the eye."

As evidence, Lois points me to a well-known 1874 work of trompe l'oeil by Pere Borrell del Caso. The original is in the Colección Banco de España, Madrid. "Maybe the title of the painting," she suggests, in a questioning way, "has something to do with the allure of trompe l'oeil?"

It's called "Escaping Criticism".

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Escaping Criticism by Pere Borrel (1874). Collection Bank of Spain hide caption

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A still from the art film #Blackmendream. The film features nine men, turned away from the camera and talking about their hopes and fears.

Nine men sit turned away from the camera; their faces are never shown. Many are shirtless or naked. They answer questions like: When did you become a black man? Do you cry? How were you raised to deal with your emotions?
This video is the latest piece by Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary artist Shikeith Cathey.

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His work centers around the social, cultural and political misconceptions about black men in America, and the new film explores the emotional experience of black men, born out of those misconceptions.

The men seem both vulnerable and powerful as they thoughtfully respond to these basic, but piercing, questions. To the viewer, there's a feeling that you're eavesdropping on a therapy session.

"That's the response that I would get after wrapping the interview," Shikeith, who goes by his first name, tells NPR's Arun Rath. "The participants, the men, they would say, 'I haven't been able to express like this in so long and it feels like a weight was lifted off of my shoulder.' "

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Shikeith Cathey, 25, works in many platforms — photography, sculpture, installations and video art.
He says most of the interview subjects were strangers, but it wasn't hard to get them to participate.
"Honestly, I just asked — and that was the point. These questions, as simple as they are ... they aren't discussed. I couldn't remember a time when someone asked me, 'How do you feel?' " he says.
"I think it's just assumed that I'm angry as a black man. It's assumed that I don't possess these feelings that are part of my humanity."

Shikeith does all of his work in black and white and says the aesthetic composition of this piece — the nudity, the fact that we never see the faces of the subjects — is all symbolic.

"I wanted to expose what it was like to be dressed in assumptions, before even opening your mouth to say hello."
He adds, "My work is a reflection of that internal battle all black men have to face when you're not necessarily seeing things in black and white, but rather in gray."

This project has gained a lot of attention, as it adds to conversations about race and police use of deadly force. But Shikeith says that the timing is mere coincidence.

"I don't look at what's happening now as situational," he says. "It's not trendy; it's not something that just began. It's something that has been ongoing in this country for a very long time."

“ I don't look at what's happening now as situational. It's not trendy; it's not something that just began. It's something that has been ongoing in this country for a very long time.

- Shikeith

The inspiration for #Blackmendream actually came two years ago, Shikeith says: "I posted a status on Facebook that said, 'What do black men run from?' "

He was expecting answers that revolved around misconceptions of black manhood. But instead, he got a lot of negative stereotypes — mostly from primarily African-American men and women.

"They were writing, 'Black men run from the police, black men run from love, black men run from child support.' "
Disappointed, he set out to create a project that would change that conversation and showcase an emotional side of black masculinity.

He got a grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation Advancing Black Arts initiative. Going forward, he hopes the film and the hashtag will add to a more complex discourse around black manhood.
"We can be different. We can be ourselves. We can respect individuality within our own community. And as we project that, I think the community at large will understand more what it exactly is to be a black man. Overall there'll be a healing."
Watch the film.



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Timothy Spall finds beauty in the unlikeliest places as painter J.M.W. Turner.

If you picture landscape painting as a delicate, ethereal, pristine process involving an easel on a hillside and a sunset, Mr. Turner will be an eye-opener.

Tim Spall grunts and snorts his way through the film as J.M.W. Turner in ways that will forever link phlegm and art in the minds of viewers. He spits on his canvases, stabs at them with brushes, smears them with rags, blows powdered pigment at them. His method looks less like painting, than like an attack on the canvas — but lordy, the results: Mists and fogs surrounding shipwrecks, steam locomotives belching fire, everything bathed in the most astonishing light.

Spall may make a grotesque of Turner — piggish, rutting, whoring — but he finds such incandescence in the world around him. And director Mike Leigh lets you see that incandescence as Turner saw it: Everywhere. In sunsets, of course, but also in a woman's corpse washed up on a riverbank, or in the rashes that bloom on the neck of a gargoyle-like housekeeper. You start to see doors and windows in the film as frames around kinetic images that Leigh's put inside them — ships drifting by, hillsides topped by ochre clouds.

Turner, meanwhile, is distracted by beauty elsewhere — there's a landlady who rents him a room by the sea, and who comes to care for him without knowing he's one of England's most celebrated artists. She is a respite for him. A respite from the fist fights of the exhibition hall, from the preening of critics, from family crises, and from his own excesses. At one point, he nearly dies after lashing himself to a ship's mast during a snowstorm so he can really see the light.

But what he sees, say, on a rowing excursion with fellow artists, as a decommissioned three-mast battleship is tugged into harbor to be turned into tables and chairs? The others see the sunset, the ship's masts and the end of an era. Turner sees the steam-driven tugboat and new beginnings.

Turner's painting of the scene, The Fighting Temeraire will, in fact, become his masterpiece. As Mr. Turner is Mike Leigh's — a growling, snuffling, earthy work of art, every frame worthy of framing.



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Sandro Botticelli's Madonna and Child, painted in 1480, shows a reflective Mary in deep blue.

Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan/National Museum of Women in the Arts

This Christmas, images of the Virgin Mary created over five centuries, glow on the walls of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Mary's role as Woman, Mother and Idea is portrayed by Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Rembrandt as well as other major and lesser known artists from the 1400s through 1900s.

"I think of Mary as being brave and strong," says chief curator Kathryn Wat. "I think sometimes people see meekness and humility. I see that, too, but under-girding all of that I see strength."

Monsignor Timothy Verdon, Canon of the Florence Cathedral, is guest curator of the exhibition. "Mary is one of the main themes in Western art for more than 1,000 years," Verdon explains. "Not only are there more images of her than of anyone else – including her son – her son is often part of the image but the interest of the image is normally more focused on Mary, who is the adult, than on the Christ child."

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Curator Timothy Verdon says "Mary is unexpectedly fashionable," in Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child, painted in the 1460s. Provincia di Firenze, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence/National Museum of Women in the Arts

In the 1460s, Fra Filippo Lippi of Florence saw the Madonna as regal and queenly — a kind of Byzantine empress. "Mary is unexpectedly fashionable," Verdon describes, "in a splendid crimson underdress and a rich mantel and — my goodness — pearls adorning the hem of her diaphanous veil — a kind of very delicate fabric [that] was immediately recognized at the period as a luxury fabric."

Her filigreed halo is made of gold and her face is serene. But there's a sadness there — a premonition that the big-bellied baby she hugs will meet suffering and death.

"This — and other similar works in which we feel that aura of sadness — were made in an age when one of the most common facts in society was infant mortality," Verdon says. "So for people to see the Madonna and the child veiled with this premonition of suffering really fit into a very important part of their lives."

Sandro Botticelli's Madonna, from 1480, is also reflective — and exquisite, in her deep blue robe and delicate golden halo. A century later, in 1570, Federico Barocci's Mary is very human. She's picnicking on the flight into Egypt. Her head is bare (she's put her straw hat on the ground), she's barefoot, and as her baby reaches happily for some cherries Joseph offers, Mary is catching stream water into a silver bowl.

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Federico Barocci's 1570 Rest on the Flight into Egypt shows Mary catching water in a silver bowl as Joseph offers cherries to Jesus.

"This becomes a wonderful symbol of what womanhood, and especially motherhood is — it's a source of life for the families," Verdon says. "It's a wonderfully simple, charming, [but]at the same time, deep picture."

Another bare-headed Mary, chalked in red by Michelangelo around 1525, shows her as powerful. "Not only is her head uncovered, her arms are uncovered and it looks as if she spends all her time at the gym," Verdon says.

She has muscles — which Verdon says symbolized the strength of human desire for God. Each work in this "Picturing Mary" exhibition is layered with meaning. A bowl of fruit symbolizes fecundity. A closed book moves god's word to her womb. A thorn bracelet foreshadows Jesus' agony on the cross.

In the 17th century, Artemisia Gentileschi broke from traditions that kept women painting still lifes and portraits, to show a theological topic in a way no man had done — Mary nursing her child.

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Female artists portrayed Mary in a very different light — above, Artemisia Gentileschi's 1609 oil on canvas, Madonna and Child.

"The idea here is that it's quite forthright," says Wat. "She's revealed her breast, the baby's getting ready to nurse. .... It's very frank and this is not the way male artists typically treated the subject. They were a little more roundabout and things were sort of more unnatural-looking or shaded somehow with fabric or the position was a little different. This is just all right there."

Gentileschi's Mary is monumental — she fills the canvas. An earthy, natural woman, she holds her breast to her eager child with no trace of false modesty or shame.

Society — and the church — wanted different Marys as the centuries passed and artists reflected those shifts. By 1884, Nicolò Barabino designs a mural with the basic Marian elements: blue robe, halo, book of god's words. But her face is veiled, and there's no baby. Here she's become an abstract idea, rather than a specific mother or queen or virgin — this is a work about faith.

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Nicolò Barabino's 1884 mural Faith with Representations of the Arts shows a more abstract understanding of Mary.

"So faith suddenly is impersonated by Mary," Verdon says. "Mary becomes the most emblematic figure of what it means to be a believer." He believes this shift in emphasis is the 1880s version of keeping up with the times. "The world had already become much less Christian than it had [been] in earlier periods," he explains. "The church, knowing that, looks for a neutral and almost philosophical language in which to re-propose some of the traditional beliefs. Since everyone would agree that faith — which may not be necessarily religious faith, it could be political faith, it could be a faith in ethical principles — that faith was a good thing."

Faith, belief, worship, holiness, Mother of God, the Blessed Mother means many different things to Christians around the globe.

Standing amid the 60 artworks — many of them masterpieces — I ask curator Timothy Verdon who Mary is to him. He answers: "She's my mother."



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In that they may have life (1964), Corita Kent turned images from a Wonder Bread wrapper into a meditation on poverty and hunger that includes quotes from a Hazard, Ky., miner's wife and Mohandas Gandhi.

Corita Kent's silkscreens were once compared to Andy Warhol's; her banners and posters were featured at civil rights and anti-war rallies in the 1960s and '70s; she made the covers of Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post; and she even created a popular postage stamp. Yet today, Kent seems to have fallen through the cracks of art history.

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Sister Corita Kent stands in front of her work, including for eleanor, at Immaculate Heart College in 1964. Coutesy the Corita Art Center, Los Angeles

An exhibition that began at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art and opens later this month at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh aims to change that. Ian Berry co-curated "Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent," a retrospective of Kent's 30-year career, and has a good idea of why her artistic reputation has taken a hit. He says, "An 'artist' was from New York. They were a man; they were an epic, abstract painter. And she wore a habit — she just didn't look like what the, sort of, movie version of an artist looked like."

Sister Corita Kent headed the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Graphic designer and art historian Lorraine Wild says Sister Corita, as she was known, had already been experimenting with the silkscreen printing process when she saw a now legendary 1962 exhibition of Warhol's work.

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Kent's for eleanor (1964) plays off General Mills' slogan.

"What she got from Warhol, clearly, was that there was this powerful imagery in pop culture that came out of advertising," Wild says. "And that if you just looked at it from a slightly different angle, you could read all these other things into it, and it already had a kind of power because the audience was familiar with it."

One slogan she appropriated was General Mills' "The Big G stands for Goodness," which referred to the capital G the company used for its logo. "And she turns that into 'G,' 'God;' 'goodness,' 'spiritual goodness,'" Wild says.
Kent also freely juxtaposed advertising logos with Bible verses and quotes from Gertrude Stein and e.e. cummings. In her hands, images from a Wonder Bread wrapper turned into a meditation on poverty and hunger.

According to Doris Donnelly, who taught in the religious education department at Immaculate Heart College while Kent was there, the artist was also tuned into the Top 40. "This is the early '60s. In general, nuns wouldn't know the Beatles," Donnelly says. "She knew the Beatles. She understood the lyrics of the Beatles." In fact, Kent quoted the Beatles' "Things We Said Today" in a 1965 piece called look, which appropriates the logo from Look magazine followed by the words "Love is here to stay. And that's enough."

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Kent not only knew about the Beatles, she also understood their lyrics, which she used in 1965's look.

Her work was also inspired by the Second Vatican Council — or Vatican II, as it was popularly known — which led to major reforms in the church ranging from conducting services in English instead of Latin, to allowing nuns to wear secular clothes. The nuns at Immaculate Heart quickly embraced those reforms, to the displeasure of the local archbishop.

"Cardinal McIntyre," Donnelly says. "He thought they were going too far, too fast." According to Donnelly, mounting pressure from the cardinal finally prompted Kent to make a hard choice. "I was in my office and one of my colleagues came in and she sat down and she said, 'Corita's leaving.' It was a total surprise and it was a sad day."

Kent left the college and its convent in 1968, but she never left the church. She moved to Boston to continue her art work. A poster from the following year features news photos from the Vietnam War accompanied by a Walt Whitman poem that includes the line: "Agonies are one of my changes of garments." According to curator Ian Berry, Kent's themes started getting darker for several reasons.

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Kent created her "love" stamp for the U.S. Postal Service in 1985.

"She was struggling with disease toward the end of her life," he says. "She fought cancer three times and she was struggling with what that was doing. And she was struggling with what was going on in the world, and that comes out in the artwork, for sure."

Still, in 1985 she created a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service based on one of her favorite themes: love. Over 700 million were sold. She succumbed to cancer the following year.

Alexandra Carrera, director of Los Angeles' Corita Art Center, a repository for Kent's work, argues that Kent had a lasting influence on pop art. She also says Kent's legacy is far different from that of East Coast peers like Andy Warhol.

"She was directing people," Carrera says. "And rather than just standing back and being like, 'This is what's going wrong, and I'm just showing you guys because I'm so cool and I'm not going to be part of it,' she was really asking people to engage. And I think that that is a more popular message today than it was 20 or 30 years ago."




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Afghan war rugs featuring U.S. drones is a recent trend in the market, says collector Kevin Sudeith.
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Some rugs feature various weapons of war, including guns and tanks.
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This war rug features the infamous AK-47 rifle, a weapon that has become synonymous with many armed conflicts.
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Afghanistan has suffered through long decades of war; conflict with the Soviet Union, civil war and 13 years of a U.S.-led NATO combat mission. Among the political, economic and cultural impacts of this violence, there's an artistic transformation: the history of violence is reflected in the country's ancient art of rug making.

Kevin Sudeith, a collector, tells NPR's Arun Rath that he has long been impressed by the craftsmanship of Afghan rugs.
"The thing that awed me about the war rugs ... is the combination of a very ancient tradition and ancient designs and patterns that are tied to specific towns and regions of Afghanistan ... coupled with the most contemporary subject matter," Sudeith says. "And the war rugs document that unselfconsciously, succinctly and beautifully."

During the 1990s, after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Sudeith began to notice images of Soviet weapons mixed in with the geometric patterns on the rugs.

"The first rug that I bought was a red rug that had four Kalashnikovs on it, on the sides, and then a mix of tanks and helicopters in the middle," he says.

Before long, Sudeith wasn't just collecting the rugs; he started selling them to other collectors, who were also fascinated by the living history reflected in them.

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Kevin Sudeith, shown at a 2005 exhibit in Davidson, N.C., collects, shows and sells Afghan war rugs.

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Artist Jesse Howard filled his 20-acre property with hand-painted signs.

By all accounts, self-taught artist Jesse Howard was cantankerous. In middle of the last century, it wasn't unusual to see hand-painted signs on country roads advertising a traveling fair or a farm sale. But Howard's signs offered Bible verses. They proclaimed his anger at his neighbors and the government, and his disappointments with the world around him. "Every word I'm saying's the truth," the artist said of his work. "Every word."

Howard's work hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore. Now, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis has opened the first comprehensive survey of his work.

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Jesse Howard, Untitled (If You Want to See a Gang of Hoodlum Police), 1961.


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Diego Rivera recreated his Rockefeller Center mural for Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes. Man, Controller of the Universe shows a worker at the crossroads of industry, science and the competing political ideologies of the time — capitalism and communism.

It's been called one of the great rivalries of the art world — a clash between egos, riches and ideologies. In the spring of 1932, capitalist (and prolific collector of Mexican art) Nelson Rockefeller hired Mexican painter and staunch socialist Diego Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of the newly erected Rockefeller Center in New York City. Sketches were drawn and approved, but when reporters leaked that Rivera had added an image of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, a battle began.

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Diego Rivera, seen here in 1933, works on a panel of his mural in the lobby of Rockefeller Center.

In the end, the painting was destroyed, ideological differences hardened and the two families lived with a legacy of animosity. But now the daughters of the two men have teamed up to leave the past behind and preserve not only their fathers' legacies, but the art they both loved. Guadalupe Rivera Marin, 90, and Ann Rockefeller, 80, aim to raise $3 million each to build individual galleries in their fathers' names at the Mexican Museum, set to break ground at a new and bigger site this year in San Francisco.
In the dining room of her Mexico City home, Rivera Marin recounts meeting Ann Rockefeller in the 1980s. She says the two took an immediate liking to each other. They had much in common — after all, they were both daughters of famous fathers. During that meeting, Ann Rockefeller told Rivera Marin that as a young girl she didn't want the family name — she wanted to make it on her own.

"In that sense," Rivera Marin says, "I was exactly, more or less, the same, you know? I never [wanted] to be the daughter of Diego Rivera, and I always [wanted] to be myself and to have my own life."

Rockefeller says she never harbored ill feelings toward Rivera Marin. "Between us there were no wounds."
Andrew Kluger, chairman of the museum's board, calls the collaboration a "peace-making motion." "They just decided, 'Let's put it aside,'" he says. "'That's the old men; this is us.'"

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Nelson Rockefeller examines a painting at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1939. Rockefeller was 23 when he hired Diego Rivera to paint a mural in the newly built Rockefeller Center.

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Frida Kahlo's passion for food was evident in her many still lifes of fruit, like this painting entitled "The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened." She was also known for her raucous dinner parties in Mexico City.

The life of Frida Kahlo seems tailor-made for an opera: pain, love, art, travel and revolution. So the Michigan Opera Theater's decision to mount a production of the opera Frida, opening Mar. 7 in Detroit — where the iconic painter lived with her husband, Diego Rivera, for nearly a year, and where she survived a miscarriage that marked a turning point in her art — isn't so surprising.
But here's something that is: The opera is celebrating not only Kahlo's art and life, but her recipes and cooking, too.

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Frida Kahlo's 1940 painting entitled "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird."

Kahlo's passion for food was evident in her many lush, still lifes of fruit. But she was also known for her raucous dinner parties in Mexico City, replete with pulque, mescal, mole and tamales.

Kahlo served dishes she had mostly learned from Rivera's previous (second) wife, Guadalupe Marin. The meals were so central to the household that Kahlo's step-daughter, Guadalupe Rivera, published a book in 1994 with Clarkson Potter of family recipes called Frida's Fiestas. The book uses the meals to frame a memoir of time she spent living with Kahlo and Rivera as a college student.

And that was enough to spark an idea at the opera: Why not celebrate the production — and Kahlo — with Detroit's best Mexican chefs preparing special menus of the artist's most beloved dishes?

"We're really trying to tell the whole story of Frida," said Michael Yashinsky, who directs community engagement for the Michigan Opera Theater. "Part of that is seeing this portrait of her life in this opera, part of it is seeing the art she created at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and part of it is experiencing her through her food."

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Detroit's top Mexican chefs are preparing dishes like these stuffed peppers, called chiles en nogadas, on their special menus in honor of Frida Kahlo.

The opera partnered with three leading chefs in the city's Mexican enclave, Mexicantown, where Kahlo is rumored to have done her grocery shopping. The neighborhood first began attracting Mexican migrants working in Michigan agriculture around 1900. By the time Kahlo and Diego were in Detroit in 1932, the neighborhood housed groceries and shops stocked with dried chiles, fresh tortillas and piloncillo sugar. Today, Mexicantown draws artists as well as immigrants, and is home to supermarket taquerias and taco trucks as well as kitchens run by classically trained chefs.

One of those chefs is Israel Rocha of La Terraza, famous for its shellfish dishes. Drawing largely on Marin-Rivera's book, Rocha will focus in his special Frida opera menu on seafood and a rich posole stew with hominy and dried chiles.

Luis Garza of El Asador and Norberto Garita of El Barzón, the other two chefs involved with the Frida opera project, will meanwhile be serving moles: pork in yellow mole; mole negro Oaxaqueño, a chile and chocolate-based sauce traditionally served with turkey; and mole poblano, a reputed favorite of Diego Rivera. Other dishes will include an oyster soup served at Kahlo and Rivera's wedding; red snapper veracruzana with olives and capers; and chiles en nogadas stuffed with cheese or picadillo, a ground meat, nut and fruit filling.

Garza says his hope is that these dishes will help patrons become more familiar with the breadth and sophistication of Mexican cuisine. "Sometimes people come in [to my restaurant] and say, 'Can I have chimichangas?'" he says, pausing. "And I say, 'No.' I want to bring something different, besides rice and beans and tacos."

Garita shares that hope, but also sees a parallel between his work and that of the woman he is celebrating. "Going into the kitchen is something that you have to forget anything else; you just have to focus on your food. You have to love it," he says. "You have to have the passion, because this is an art, too."

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Dave Holmes is the host of Ovation's American Canvas.

When we get to talking about HBO and Sling, about cord-cutting and the future of television, we tend to focus on the advantages of being able to pick out only the core channels you watch most; the ones you know you love. Now and then, though, I'm glad for the vast array of channels that are trying different things with different people, serving audiences smaller than the ones for football and Cutthroat Kitchen.

Ovation, for instance, makes arts programming — actual arts programming, the way Bravo originally did and the way PBS always has. Their latest show, American Canvas, features writer Dave Holmes doing quick hits at a variety of arts and culture locations in a given city. In the premiere, airing Wednesday night at 10:00 PM Eastern, he's in San Francisco for the hour.
What they're trying to do, I think, is take a format that's been used a lot — in food shows especially — and adapt it to arts. And despite the fact that Holmes has a great background in writing about pop culture (his series on hit lists of the past, which once lived at Vulture under the title "Somewhere In Time" and now lives at Esquire is a gem), they're taking a pretty artsy view of what it means to talk about art.

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Bandaloop dancers in San Francisco.

The episode opens with a visit to something I freely admit I didn't know existed: the Ai Weiwei exhibition spread across the grounds of Alcatraz. A park ranger shows Holmes around, and then he wanders through the art installations giving some background and also just ... looking at art. He visits a crab business on Fisherman's Wharf, a dance troupe called Bandaloop that performs on the sides of buildings (it's very cool), some food purveyors and a green tea place in Chinatown, several places important to the history of the Beats, the Conservatory of Flowers, the studio of a visual artist, and a sidewalk setup where he chats with a local author about the history of gay culture and the connection it bears to the Beats.

My favorite, though, is the Musee Mechanique, a collection of coin-operated amusements of all kinds (games, but also other weird displays) run by a guy named Dan, who gets around on roller skates.

They're using a broad definition of arts and culture: food, architecture, dance, visual arts, fiction, social movements, botany — and it's built for the rhythms of basic cable shows, in that it doesn't just sit with one thing for 15 minutes, then have a commercial, then sit with another thing for 15 minutes. You don't have a real shot at experiencing these things fully in this format anyway, so it's probably a good call to skip around so that if you're not into flowers (or dance or how they make fortune cookies), something else comes along pretty quickly.

Outside of PBS, which has certainly valiantly continued to do arts programming of many kinds, finding television shows that would open with a guy basically saying, "Let's take a fun trip, and let's start at this politically motivated art installation because it's cool and interesting" is pretty tough. The format feels familiar, but the efforts to connect elements to each other and the frankness with which the sociology is approached (there are conversations both about the racism that affected Chinese residents of San Francisco and about the secrecy that caused the city's gay culture to initially thrive underground) are refreshing.

American Canvas is a three-part series, scheduled to also visit Austin and Miami. It's not world-changing, but it's a solid effort to put a sense of place around a genuinely varied collection of cultural snapshots. There's certainly validity in the complaints that people are paying for a lot more television than they're using, but I do worry that an a la carte model might cost us fun little shows like this that will perhaps never be hits, but will offer a particular audience something it finds hard to get elsewhere.
Also known as "Dave Holmes, No Relation."

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A detail from the north wall of Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry murals shows workers on the automobile assembly line. After Detroit declared bankruptcy, the murals were at risk of being sold.

This weekend, visitors to the Detroit Institute of Arts buzzed with excitement over a new exhibit — it was a big moment for the once-troubled museum. The DIA spent much of the last two years under threat as its owner, the city of Detroit, looked for ways to emerge from bankruptcy.

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A new exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts displays nearly 70 works by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Finally, in November, a "grand bargain" was struck. Foundations, private donors and the state of Michigan together raised more than $800 million to help rescue public employee pensions. In return, ownership of the DIA was transferred to a trust — thereby securing its future.
The exhibit, "Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit," has special significance to the city — at its heart are Rivera's Detroit Industry murals, painted on the walls of the DIA. Grand in scope and scale, they celebrate Detroit's auto factories, and depict a kind of worker's utopia — men of all races side by side on an assembly line. Commissioned by Henry Ford's son Edsel, the murals offer incredible detail. One engineer at the time said the artist coherently fit 2 miles of assembly line onto two walls.

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The Assembly of an Automobile, by Diego Rivera, 1932, charcoal on paper.

But the grand murals stand in stark contrast to Kahlo's paintings, which are small and intensely personal. As the museum says in the exhibit description, Rivera romanticized Detroit; Kahlo rejected it.

Museum director Graham Beal tells NPR's Don Gonyea that the exhibit has taken on a deeper meaning for the museum and for the city as a whole.
"Until recently when you looked at the Rivera murals ... you saw a Detroit of the past," he says. "Sort of somehow that it was elegiac. But things have shifted so much in the past few months ... Now you can see the murals as something that is now looking to the future as well as looking to the past, and that all of the old engineering, all the know-how, all the entrepreneurial spirit is somehow in effect again."

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Interview Highlights

On the time Rivera and Kahlo spent in Detroit

Rivera was invited here as one of the world's most famous artists to paint some murals in the really relatively new cultural palace of the Detroit Institute of Arts. And with him came his new wife. They had been married for two years. She was completely unknown. So you have this artist come here who sees the [Ford River Rouge] plant and the other auto plants, and he just falls in love with them and he loves all of this engineering and all this technology even though he's a Mexican communist who's not supposed to relate to anything so obviously capitalist. ...

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Frida Kahlo painted Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States in 1932.

And then you have with him diminutive figure, completely unknown, unformed, in a way, as an artist who loathed the U.S., didn't like Detroit at all, came and went as much as she could, going backwards and forwards to New York, and tragically having to go back to Mexico when her mother died.

So Rivera was here most of the time working on this enormous project, and Frida was here as an unformed artist. She went through the tragic loss of a pregnancy. ... It was through this ghastly experience that you see the emergence of Frida as a signature artist. You see her grasping the fact that she is going to be her own subject matter, something in fact that Rivera urged her to do as well. And so almost like out of a chrysalis, the recognizable Frida Kahlo arrives because of the pain and everything she went through in Detroit.

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In Kahlo's painting The Henry Ford Hospital, she depicts her traumatic loss of a pregnancy.

On the Kahlo works on view in the exhibition

Way in the center of the exhibition is the small painting The Henry Ford Hospital where she rather gruesomely shows the fact that she lost a fetus and she shows herself lying in this bed in a very desolate urban landscape with the Henry Ford Company, the Rouge Plant in the background. She basically puts herself in pain in the middle of an unpleasant landscape, and she writes along the bottom of the bed "Henry Ford Hospital," which somehow links her accident with the Ford company.

On how Rivera's murals were a backdrop during the fight to save the museum during the city's bankruptcy — and what it means to hold this exhibition now

It was an accident of timing really. We didn't know about the bankruptcy when we started working on this exhibition in earnest, and we certainly didn't know how long it was going to last. But it really does seem appropriate. It does seem like a very effective exclamation mark. The DIA once again symbolizes the energy and creativity of Detroit. And that can be seen in the murals, which, you know — let's face it — were never going to leave that building whatever happened.

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The south wall of Rivera's Detroit Industry mural in the Detroit Institute of Arts.


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Decades ago, the Washington, D.C. artist who goes by Mingering Mike channeled his musical aspirations into a series of meticulously hand-painted LP covers for albums that didn't exist. This piece from 1972 is called Joseph War & Friend, 'As High As The Sky' (mixed media on paperboard).

Smithsonian American Art Museum
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"I'm Superman" b/w "Blind in One Eye," 1975 (mixed media on paperboard).

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has just added a handful of soul records to its collection — or at least that's what you might think when you first see the work of Mingering Mike. A self-taught artist, he grew up in a tough part of Washington, D.C., just a few miles from the museum, though his family didn't spend much time there. Now, his work is in the museum permanently.

Mike's work might never have been seen by anyone if it weren't for Dori Hadar, an obsessive record collector. One morning in 2003, Hadar showed up early at a flea market in Washington, DC and started to dig through crates of used LPs.

"I came upon this one crate that contained albums like I had never seen before," Hadar says. "There were approximately 40 LPs that had hand-painted covers and handwritten liner notes and lyrics. And they were all made by someone named Mingering Mike."

At a glance, the albums look like other soul records of the 1960s and '70s — except they're obviously drawn by hand in colored pen and pencil. They feature a young black man with an afro and sideburns, sometimes alone, sometimes with other musicians and dancers. The titles seem to trace the arc of a real career: Grooving with Mike, Boogie Down at the White House, and The Mingering Mike Show: Live from the Howard Theater. Hadar reached into the sleeves to check the condition of the records inside.

"They weren't in very good condition at all, because they were made out of cardboard. And someone had painted them with shiny black paint so that they looked real," Hadar says.

Hadar didn't know why anyone would go to these lengths to create an imaginary music career, but he wanted to find out. It happens that Hadar is a private investigator by trade, and a couple of weeks later, he and a friend were knocking on a door in southeast D.C.

"The door sorta cracked open, and this guy peered out at us. We said, 'Mingering Mike?' And he didn't say anything," Hadar says. "We told him, 'We found some of your things at the flea market.' And he said, 'My babies?'"

Mike was glad to know his albums were safe — but initially, he was not happy to see Hadar at his front door.
"Coming in the ghetto and saying, 'I have your stuff' — what would you think?" Mike says.

Mike still doesn't want to use his real name. At first he didn't want anyone to see the album covers he made either.
"I thought a lot of it, but it was just something private I did," he says. "That's the only way I could say things at the time, 'cause I was an introvert.'"

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