Recording Pioneer

Just 23 years old when she recruited the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a recording contract in 1950, Wilma Cozart Fine went on to create hundreds of orchestral albums that set the standard for classical-music recording for decades.

Mrs. Fine, who died Sept. 21 at the age of 82, led Mercury Records' classical-music recording business in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when senior female executives in the industry were rare. She initiated and produced the label's "Living Presence" series that ultimately grew to a catalog of more than 400 classical recordings.

Despite more than half a century of technical innovation since Mrs. Fine's first recordings, her work is still considered exceptional for the clarity and realism of its sound.

The Mercury catalog included contemporary composers as well as music of the Civil War, made with period instruments and re-enacted battle sounds recorded at Gettysburg.

Seeing O’Keeffe

Piñon and Chimney Rock
















Other O’Keeffe inspirations, as shown by Pat Carlton.

Las Meninas

A picture of an artist's studio is an invitation to enter his private realm, to ponder his perception of the creative process and to marvel at the extent to which art, at its most profound, can transcend the limits of its historic moment and constructed space. Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656)—marked by a massive scale, unremitting technical virtuosity and centuries of critical analysis—is a tour-de-force studio painting and one against which legions of later artists, including Goya and Picasso, have measured themselves. Countless writers have debated the work's seductive visual riddles: its transparent naturalism yet strangely inaccessible subject, its striking combination of a captured moment and staged studio portrait, its meticulously wrought but, in the end, ambiguous perspective. Perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the Golden Age of Spanish art, it has been heralded as a summation of the painter's illustrious career and enduring quest for nobility in an age and culture that did not sufficiently esteem its native artists. In the waning decades of the Hapsburg empire in Spain, Velázquez's "Las Meninas" also offered a telling glimpse of the world of the aging Philip IV, where artifice and illusion often masked, to dazzling effect, an increasingly dismal reality.





Velázquez's first biographer, Palomino, identified the painting's cast of characters, all of them part of the royal household. At center stands the exquisite Infanta Margarita, whose radiant innocence is captured in sheer, scintillating strokes and framed by the solicitous handmaidens (or meninas) who attend her. To the right appear two dwarfs who served, in keeping with court custom, as playmates to the princess; one of them, Nicolasito, teases a sleepy mastiff. Just behind, a lady-in-waiting to the queen chats with an unnamed gentleman, while beyond and silhouetted in a luminous doorway, the queen's chamberlain pauses to look back. And poised at left before his easel, with palette lowered and paintbrush frozen in midair, the artist himself gazes intently out, most likely at Philip IV and his wife, Marianna of Austria, whose likenesses are captured in a shimmering, distant looking glass. It is here that the painter's paradoxes begin.

In the far back, above La Infanta's head, is the mirrored image of the royals.

Unchained Melody

Oh, my love
my darling
I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time
and time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much
are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
Godspeed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow to the sea,
to the sea
to the open arms of the sea
lonely rivers sigh 'wait for me, wait for me'
I'll be coming home wait for me

Oh, my love
my darling
I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time
and time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much
are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
Godspeed your love to me

Kandinsky

Sketch for "Composition II." 1909-1910

View Slideshow




Beginning in 1929, Solomon R. Guggenheim, advised by his friend Hilla Rebay, the notoriously difficult painter, collector and connoisseur of modernist art, bought more than 150 works by Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), along with many by other similarly high-minded artists. In 1939, Guggenheim put his collection on display at his Museum of Non-Objective Painting—the direct ancestor of the present Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum on Fifth Avenue that bears his name. Rebay was the first director. "Uncle Solomon's garage," as his niece, the vanguard enthusiast Peggy Guggenheim, called the museum's first incarnation, included permanent galleries devoted to Kandinsky, a reflection of Guggenheim and Rebay's enthusiasm for the rigorous nonrepresentational approach the painter developed in his quest for what he called, in his writings, "the spiritual in art." Now, the Guggenheim returns to its original mission with a comprehensive retrospective, "Kandinsky," opening Friday and on view through Jan. 13. It's the first major exhibition devoted to the Russian-born artist and theorist—possibly the very first abstract painter—since the Guggenheim's three-part survey more than a quarter century ago.

That exhibition is surveyed in the book Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. (1983). Vivian Endicott Barnett. New York : Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum : Abbeville Press. One of the paintings accompanying the article in today's print Wall Street Journal, and part of the online slideshow is Black Lines (Schwarze Linien). December 1913. Oil on canvas. 51 x 51 5/8 in. The painting is also the cover of the forementioned book.

Another painting in both locales is Succession. April 1935. Oil on canvas. 81 x 100 cm.

The forementioned book is one of several that HWPL has; it also owns video about him, and 26 slides of some of his artworks.













The New York Times also has a review of the art exhibit, and accompanying art work.

Surrealist biomorphism: “Capricious Forms” (1937), a work from Kandinsky’s Paris period, is part of a retrospective at the Guggenheim.











Picture With a Circle" (1911)


Audio Slide Show Color, Movement, Transformation

Concert by the Sea

Joyful Noise Amid the Greenery

www.verdisquarefestival.com

The Other Frank Sinatra

For years, I have been careful to follow the advice Duke Ellington gave me when I was in my early twenties: "Do not categorize music or ­musicians—like 'Dixieland' or 'modern.' Listen, open yourself, to each musician." I failed to heed Duke's counsel with regard to Frank Sinatra Jr.

Duke is reputed to have also said "There are two types of music: good music, and everything else."