Nobody knows how old the Russian-born photographer Nina Leen was when she died, in 1995. Judging from her obituary, information about Leen is scarce. She lived in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland before moving to the U.S., where she became one of Life magazine’s first female photographers, in the nineteen-forties. She shot countless assignments for the magazine, including more than fifty cover stories, and produced fifteen photo books. Her most well-known subjects were animals (including her dog Lucky), American women and adolescents, and the Irascibles, a group of abstract artists, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
(Episode 8 of the The Story of Painting
Sister Wendy – in front of Monet’s paintings of waterlilies at L’Orangerie
– talking about her experience of the paintings and how Monet painted them)
About Sister Wendy (1930-2018) – nun, art critic and unlikely TV star
“Sister Wendy” as she was universally known – a.k.a. Sister Wendy Beckett, variously described as a broadcaster, art historian, art critic, consecrated virgin and hermit – died yesterday age 88 at her home and sanctuary at the Carmelite Monastery in Quidenham in Norfolk.
Sister Wendy’s lecture on Stanley Spencer, she was great – and funny.
Decades after she helped develop Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, 87-year-old Gladys West has received one of the Air Force space program’s highest distinctions, First Coast News reports.
West was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. earlier this month. The honor was given in recognition of the work she did as one of the agency’s “human computers” in the era predating high-powered data processors. When West joined the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia in 1956, she was one of just four black employees, two of whom were men. One of those men, Ira West, would later become her husband.
Early in her career, West contributed to an astronomical study that proved the regularity of Pluto’s rotation relative to Neptune. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, she programmed a computer to come up with a super-accurate model of the Earth, accounting for variations in the planet’s shape caused by gravitational, tidal, and other forces. This model laid the groundwork for the Global Positioning System (GPS) that’s ubiquitous in the military, smartphones, and cars today.
West retired from the military in 1998, but she hasn’t stopped her pursuit of knowledge. In 2018, she completed her Ph.D. through a remote program with Virginia Tech.
Cuaron: Yes, this film is autobiographical, in the sense that 90% of the scenes come out of my memory. We shot in the places where these scenes took place. I gathered 70% of the furniture in my home … from different family members spread all around Mexico. And then I cast actors that look as much as possible as the original people.
(Last year J. Phoenix won the best actor and Lynne Ramsay won the best scriptwriter award at Cannes)
Guillame Del Toro tweeted.
Lynn Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here. What a great film… Non-fetishized violence, gritty poetry and full of humanity. One of the best directors working -and a fearless actor by her side.
Joaquin Phoenix and Lynne Ramsay follow their instincts to find ‘You Were Never Really Here’
“We filmed this shot of me floating in this pool, and she just got in the pool with me, and just was there with me, right off-camera,” Phoenix explained. “There’s something about Lynne—she feels things very strongly. You’ll hear her breathing and making sounds off-camera because you know that she’s in it. But she got in the pool with me, and that was on the first day of filming! I was like, ‘Ah, I love this woman’ Vanity Fair . .
Rooney Mara played the ex-wife in “Her”. Joaquin P. suggested to Gus Van Sant that she plays the girlfriend of the Portland Cartoonist.
(Portrait of Lautrec on the wall, Gus Van Sant directing Joaquin Phoenix)
After River’s death, Van Sant offered him a meaty role in the black comedy “To Die For,” co-starring Nicole Kidman and Matt Dillon. It was Joaquin’s first role in four years.
Twenty-three years later, Van Sant and Joaquin Phoenix are together again in “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” a film about the late quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan, who lived in Van Sant’s hometown of Portland, Ore.
Robert Morris—the American artist who irreversibly transformed contemporary art as a founding practitioner of Minimalism—has died at age eighty-seven in Kingston, New York, from pneumonia, according to his wife, Lucile Michaels Morris. For over five decades, Morris flouted predictability through his experimentations in sculpture, dance, performances, installations, Land-, and process art.
Simon Grant
In the text ‘Indiana Street’, the wonderful essay on some recollections of your childhood growing up in Kansas, that appears in your most recent collected writings Have I Reasons, you wrote about a moment in the winter of 1935, when you were four years old, putting your fist through a window, and described your reaction as the ‘cardinal moment in my life’. Could you tell us more about this?
Robert Morris
It was a moment of fury and anger relieved by an act of bodily violence. No doubt I have lived a life of art-making by transposing and sublimating a fury that has never abated and rises ever anew: an unending source of energy.
Why Bertolucci’s The Conformist deserves a place in cinema history(the Guardian)
The Italian director’s 1970 expressionist masterpiece offered a blueprint for a new kind of Hollywood film, which is why Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese and co owe him a huge debt
(1900)
(Julian on Bernardo – talking about 1900)
via Bruce Weber
(Malkovich moved to Europe after working with Bertolucci in Sheltering Aky).
Frequently references classic movies
Frequently has nude scenes in his films
Long, complex camera movements.
Often references famous painters or art movements.
Nonlinear timeline.
The young Bertolucci took after his father, a Roman poet and film critic, and became a celebrated published poet by the age of 20. He gave up poetry for the cinema after working as an assistant to Pier Paolo Pasolini on the movie Accattone (1961).
He’s a big fan of Breaking Bad (2008).
[on the end of Breaking Bad (2008)] I’m sad about it. I want more.
Nicolas Roeg was one of the most original film-makers the UK has ever produced.
His early experience as a cinematographer brought a stunning visual quality to his work.
His work sits closer to that of Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Andrea Arnold, Sally Potter, Steve McQueen and other British art house directors, than the storytelling of Lean, Lester, Schlesinger, and other directors he cut his teeth with.
In all of his films Nicolas Roeg shows what happens when characters from different cultures intersect. From Performance (gangster meets rock star) to Walkabout (abandoned white children saved by Aborigine on his walkabout) to The Man Who Fell to Earth (alien crashing on Earth needs to return to his home planet) this intersection forms the core dramatic element of his films.
