Arts Archives - Page 6 of 8 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Hath Not a Jew

Of Shakespeare’s major comedies, The Merchant of Venice is my least favorite because it’s the least funny. In a post-Holocaust world it’s difficult to stage the play’s anti-semitic jokes, and directors often make the understandable choice to shift the tone contour of the play toward the political and tragic. At first glance, a recent production …

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Arts

The Art of Lazar Ran

by Jennifer Faines

From origins at the Vitebsk Fine Arts School in Belarus (founded by Mark Chagall in 1918), to safe-keeping in an Ohio home for decades, the art of Lazar Ran and his contemporaries has taken a circuitous path to appear on the walls of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. The collection conveys a lesser-known story of …

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Arts

Seeing the World Through Music

by Stuart Sheppard

Nietzsche famously castigated Euripides for killing the tradition of the chorus in Greek tragedy, because the audience no longer had music to inform its comprehension. He even felt that Euripides caused the death of tragedy itself by trying to make it too Socratic, too rational. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” might …

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Arts

Exploring the Work of Damianos and Mulcahy at the Westmoreland

by Vicky A Clark

To paraphrase a new friend, director general of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts Jamal Shah: in celebrating life, art follows the inquisitive human mind in its desire to delve deeper as it challenges the established reality and surprises us with new realities. It challenges us to deepen our quest to explore the overwhelming …

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Arts

Quantum’s Surreal “The River” Transfixes

by Stuart Sheppard

In Richard Brautigan’s classic surrealist novel, Trout Fishing In America, the narrator visits a store selling trout streams by the foot. They are stacked in piles like pieces of lumber, each length corresponding to a different price. In Jez Butterworth’s 2012 play The River, produced by Quantum Theatre, it’s as if they picked out a …

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Arts

A Long Romance

by Margaret J. Krauss

At first, the performance was delayed because ballerina Carlotta Grisi was recovering from an injury. Then the conductor was battling a tumor. And then safety concerns slowed the set construction. But finally, on June 28, 1841—a Monday night—“Giselle” premiered at the Paris Opéra. After its Paris premiere, the two-act Romantic ballet entered almost immediately into …

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Arts

Hidden from History

by Vicky A Clark

The life of Esther Phillips (1902– 83) would have languished in obscurity, at most a footnote in history, were it not for the dedication of a few friends and supporters. Her story, which intersects with ideas about women, class and mental health in the 20th century, is all too familiar. An obstinate, free-spirited woman, she …

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Arts

Strutting its stuff

by Matthew John Milligan

Unbalanced. Uncomfortable. Unnecessary. For a somewhat misinformed 30-year-old male, these descriptors came to mind when considering the high-heeled shoe. So when I sat down to write about a wildly popular exhibition coming to Pittsburgh this summer featuring these shoes in their historical context, you might understand my uncertainty. After all, my own “heel” collection is …

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Arts

The new Westmoreland

by Graham Shearing

Early in October, looking out over the view of Greensburg from the newly reconfigured Westmoreland Museum of American Art, someone remarked that a building’s foundations had been discovered recently in the old parking garage, which is being turned into a garden. In England, such work recently turned up the body of King Richard III, slain …

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Arts

The New Sound

by Douglas Heuck

Steve Hackman, 35, is an emerging phenomenon in the world of music, fusing classical and popular pieces. Hackman is creating and conducting his hybrid concerts with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Jan. 27 and March 9. A native of suburban Chicago, he has an undergraduate degree in piano performance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and …

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Arts

Changing times at Frick?

by Graham Shearing

The Frick Art and Historical Center is the creature of Miss Frick (Helen Clay Frick was always called that), the daughter of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and it sprang into existence after the reclusive 96-year-old grand dame died at Clayton, her childhood home in Pittsburgh’s Point Breeze in 1984. Since 1970, there had been an …

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Arts

The business of art

by Valentine J. Brkich

It seems as if it should be relatively simple. If you’re an artist, you spend time in your studio, blending inspiration and long hours to create compelling works. When you have a reasonable body of work and the confidence to show it, you contact an art gallery, and voilà—your art hangs on the wall where …

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Arts

Arts Aligned

by Ben Schmitt

They’re situated on either side of Forbes Avenue in Oakland, almost appreciatively staring at each other in a figurative manner: A world-class university and a world-class art collection. On a daily basis, backpack-sporting college students and briefcase-toting college professors weave in and out of these historic institutions, along with the general public. But not until …

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Arts

An outside view

by Graham Shearing

“Embedded” is a strange word, which we have come to recognize nowadays as the term used for journalists and photographers permitted to report in war zones under military protection and some limitation. That was the experience of British photographer Mark Neville working in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan in 2011 as an official war artist, …

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Arts

Richard Mellon Scaife

by Graham Shearing

When Dick Scaife died last summer, there surfaced a rash of brief memoirs of a man most often described as “reclusive,” and, more ambivalently, “mercurial.” Before then, he had been shielded from close scrutiny by the code of Omertà, a protective silence, at least by his friends and close associates. This frustrated those less friendly …

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Arts

Robert Qualters: When Retrospection Gets Personal

by Graham Shearing

As we get older, as age begins to play tricks with our memories, as our surroundings change and the immediately familiar becomes obliterated, we come to rely on simple strategies like keeping a photograph album or simply hanging on to significant things. Many artists make memory their stock-in-trade, not simply as documentation, but rather by …

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Arts

A lens on life

by Graham Shearing

1. An old woman is seated in an upright armchair in a sparely furnished room. 2. A slightly younger man in a suit approaches from a room beyond. He is not perfectly in focus. She does not appear to be aware of him. 3. The man seems to pause and fixes his attention on the …

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Arts

New and newer

by Graham Shearing

The founding director of the Andy Warhol Museum, Mark Francis, recounts this story: A few weeks before the museum opened, Francis had taken the distinguished curator, Walter Hopps, on an advance tour of the completed building. (Hopps was instrumental in putting on Warhol’s first Pop Art show, in June 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in …

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Arts

The Carnegie International: 2013

by Graham Shearing

Let me say at the beginning that I adore the current Carnegie International, curated by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski. It has made me change my mind about a number of things I have held dear in the past. And, to me at least, it is already old hat, because for nearly two …

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Arts

The Formidable Frick

by Christine O'Toole

One hundred and twenty five years ago, the eastern side of Pittsburgh’s East End—its grand villas powered by electricity and surrounded by gleaming motorcars—was arguably the richest and most tech-savvy neighborhood in the country. Within a half-mile stretch between Point Breeze and Wilkinsburg dwelt a dazzle of shrewd self-made millionaires: Henry Heinz, the Carnegie brothers, …

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Arts

A purposeful re-hang

by Graham Shearing

A useful trick for carnegie museum of Art visitors is to read the label on the wall beside the art. In the lower corner is the accession number, for example, 96.1, which indicates the year in which the work was acquired, 1896, followed by the order in which the work was entered into the museum’s …

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Arts

The Arts Engine

by Christine O'Toole

On a cold spring night in April, arts traffic streamed along Penn Avenue in several frenetic directions. Downtown, patrons for the PSO’s performance of Bach’s beloved Brandenburg Concertos poured out of restaurants toward Heinz Hall, dodging ticket-holders for the sold-out “Book of Mormon” at the Benedum Center. Four miles miles east, the cheap end of …

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