In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, examines the life and work of French painter François Boucher, with a focus on “A Lady on Her Daybed.” Discover why Boucher was said to epitomize the taste of the eighteenth century.
This week’s complementary cocktail has a kick: the potent French 75, named after the powerful French 75mm field gun.
When asked what he did for a living, Peter would usually say he was a designer, or, a typographer. Designing for print – books, exhibition catalogues, magazines, posters – 
took up the most substantial part of his time, at the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s and thereafter as a freelance. He was also an illustrator, a journalist, an author of children’s books, an editor and a publisher. The great range of his professional work, and his encompassing interest in the work of others, made him a collaborator sought out by writers, publishers and artists.
Diana Souhami, who worked with Peter often, wrote in the Guardian after his death: “He had the ability to conceptualise what each publishing project needed and to get it right. He was hugely and diversely productive, but seldom hit a wrong note.”
Discussing his journalism in her appreciation in the London Review, Mary‑Kay Wilmers wrote: “There are people whom getting a grip doesn’t suit, who don’t want to be confined. One can honour the world in depth or across a wide range and there were few aspects of the world that Peter didn’t wish to honour.”
He probably would have been delighted by – and certainly modestly sceptical of – Alan Bennett’s appraisal, in the posthumous publication of a catalogue of his pictures in Artwork, that he was “an heir to Ardizzone, Bawden and Ravilious.”
Peter Campbell was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1937. In 1960 he emigrated to London where he lived for the rest of his life. He died in 2011.
In this episode of “Travels with a Curator,” we visit the world-famous Westminster Abbey in London, with Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Xavier shares connections between Westminster Abbey and the Frick through an examination of the life of General John Burgoyne, a playwright, parliamentarian, and military officer buried in the Abbey’s north cloister. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Burgoyne was acquired by The Frick Collection in 1943.
To see this painting in detail, please visit our website: https://collections.frick.org/objects.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is one of the most admired painters of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Known for his powerful, dramatically lit compositions, Caravaggio depicted violence and the human form with a degree of realism unprecedented at the time. He was among the most famous painters in Rome—but not only because of his skill as an artist.
Caravaggio was also notorious for his wild life and shocking temper. After being sentenced to death for murder, he fled Rome and died in exile at age 38 . Three biographies written in the decades after his death constitute nearly all that is known about the enigmatic artist.
In this episode, Getty curator and expert on Italian painting Davide Gasparatto discusses Caravaggio and the role these early biographies, by Giulio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori, played in defining Caravaggio’s legacy.
Peter Sellers was one of the twentieth century’s most astonishing actors. His meteoric rise to fame – from his beginnings with Spike Milligan on BBC Radio’s The Goon Show in the 1950s to his multiple Oscar nominations and status as Stanley Kubrick’s favourite actor – is equalled only by the endless complexities of his personal life – the multiple marriages, the chronic health problems, the petulant fits of rage, the deep insecurity, the unwise career choices and the long decline in his later years.
This film explores the life of this peerless actor and comedian, featuring interviews with family, friends, colleagues and critics, many of whom have never spoken out before. The film charts Sellers’s formative years backstage as part of his parents’ itinerant music hall revue group, his wartime service in India and Burma and his journey to global superstardom, where tales of his life backstage with the likes of Sophia Loren, Orson Welles and Alec Guinness were often more unbelievable than the roles they were playing out before the cameras. This is the story of the man who could play any role, apart from one – himself.
With contributions from family members, including second wife Britt Ekland and his daughters Sarah and Victoria, as well as former friends and girlfriends such as Sinead Cusack, Nanette Newman and Janette Scott, the film explores the life of Sellers with candour and affection. Colleagues like director Joe McGrath and actor Simon Williams recall tales of Sellers’s extravagant behaviour onset, and famous fans like Michael Palin, Steve Coogan and Hanif Kureishi reveal why they hold Sellers in such high esteem.
This is a film about family and how Sellers’s mercurial temperament has affected the generation that followed. His two surviving children Sarah and Victoria recall the challenges of growing up alongside his tempestuous mood swings, while his grandson Will explores the troubled legacy his grandfather left behind.
The first comprehensive publication exploring the life and art of pioneering American abstract artist Alice Trumbull Mason is perfect for audiences eager to discover unsung yet brilliantly talented women artists.
A groundbreaking artist, Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971) was one of the earliest painters of the twentieth century to embrace abstract painting in America. Mason’s early paintings have been compared to those of Gorky, Kandinsky, and Miró, and in 1936 she became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and one of its leaders in the promotion of abstract work by artists such as Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian, and many others. Mason was a true artist’s artist whose efforts helped lead to the great movements of later twentieth-century art, such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Post-Modernism, and Conceptual Art.
Alice Trumbull Mason features essays that illuminate and contextualize the artist’s multifaceted work and personal life through her paintings, prints, poetry, and letters. The book reveals the full life story of a seminal abstractionist, making a sound argument for adding her to the annals of great twentieth-century artists.
British author, playwright and translator Michael Frayn is best known for his farcical comedy ‘Noises Off’ and ‘Copenhagen’, which details a 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
He is also a translator of Russian and has written several English translations of Chekhov. He spoke to us about his prolific career and his latest book, ‘Magic Mobile’.
With the whole world at the touch of your finger – why ever leave the imaginary realm of your mobile phone? This book of short comedic vignettes might give you a reason ―Magic Mobile is the latest offering of comic genius from Michael Frayn, award-winning author of the plays Noises Off and Copenhagen and novels The Tin Men, Towards the End of the Morning, and Headlong.
A conversation with the acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin that transports us to two of her favorite cities, Venice and Rome, in a celebration of Italy as the country begins to loosen the longest coronavirus-related lockdown in Europe. The episode features evocative readings from her forthcoming book,Two Cities, which captures the meditative yet constantly surprising nature of travel from a deeply personal point of view.
From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces.
Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader.
The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned ekphrasis series, Two Cities creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.
ekphrasis
Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.
Cynthia Zarin
Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Orbit (2017), as well as five books for children and a collection of essays, An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History (2013). Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale University.
From Christie’s online magazine (May 2020):
Rodin travelled to Italy in 1875, a trip described by the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe as, ‘one of the seminal events in modern art’.
Here, in his mid-thirties, he fell under the spell of the Renaissance master, Michelangelo. His monumental, exaggerated nude figures would have a deep and lasting influence on the artist. ‘My liberation from academicism was via Michelangelo,’ Rodin later recalled. ‘He is the bridge by which I passed from one circle to another.’
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is renowned for breathing life into clay, creating naturalistic, often vigorously modelled sculptures which convey intense human emotions: love, ecstasy, agony or grief. Breaking the rules of academic convention and classical idealism, Rodin ushered in a new form of highly expressive sculpture that went on to influence generations of artists that followed.
Read full article at Christie’s
