Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Billie, Robert, Check's in the Mail, Stop that Check! & Would You Like Lace with That?


ARTS ALMANAC-

April 7, 1915: Billie Holiday, American singer, was born. "Billie Holiday (born Elinore Harris) was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed Lady Day by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday was a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Above all, she was admired all over the world for her deeply personal and intimate approach to singing. Critic John Bush wrote that she "changed the art of American pop vocals forever."


April 7, 1990: "The Perfect Moment", an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, opened at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center; the center and its director were indicted on obscenity charges. In 2000 the subsequent trial was chronicled in the television movie Dirty Pictures.


IN THE NEWS-

- NEW YORK: "Representatives of a lender seized artworks from Berry-Hill Galleries, a well-known American art specialist on Manhattan's Upper East Side, after a judge found the gallery had defaulted on a debt of $9.5 million. As people from the gallery and the bank, American Capital Financial Services, congregated Tuesday on the first floor of the gallery's stately townhouse, handlers carried the artworks, primarily paintings, down the street toward Fifth Avenue, where they deposited them into two large moving trucks." Read the full story

- 10,000 bought fake art for over $20 million : "A woman from La Canada was sentenced to 84 months in federal prison for selling bogus artwork on national television networks in a scheme described by United States District Judge Gary Feess as “audacious.” Kristine Eubanks, 52, together with her husband Gerald Sullivan, ran a company called Fine Art Treasures Gallery that sold bogus artworks both on DirecTV and The Dish Network during the period 2002 – 2006. The art being sold was said to have been found at “estate liquidations” and created by such noteables as Chagall, Picasso and Dali". Read the full story


IN OUR STORE-

“Plain & Fancy. American Women and Their Needlework, 1700-1850”

By Susan B. Swan.
Published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1977.

An extremely important study, illustrated with examples from the collections at Winterthur. " 'Plain & Fancy' traces the social history of women and the evolution of stitchery trends and practices from 1700 to 1850. More than 150 photographs from the renowned collection of the Henry Francis duPont Winterthur Museum illustrate plain and fancy sewing -the simple but essential household work and the elaborate, ornamental examples".

$35.00


No comments: