Reinbert de Leeuw and Erik Satie

Reinbert de Leeuw - Erik Satie/ Gnossiennes 1-6 (live @TivoliVredenburg Utrecht) 

vrije geluiden VPRO television

 

In the 1960s, pianist and composer Reinbert de Leeuw stood up for the then almost forgotten French composer Erik Satie. A man who composed completely against the spirit of the times around the turn of the last century. Satie wrote short, stripped-down music. In the hands of Reinbert de Leeuw, every change of pace and turn in Satie's work became unprecedentedly expressive. 

Maestro Reinbert de Leeuw performs Gnossiennes 1-6 composed by Erik Satie. Reinbert de Leeuw has a fascination for the French excentric composer Erik Satie. In the '60s and 70's Reinbert de Leeuw's recordings of Satie's music were immensely popular. Thirty years later Reinbert de Leeuw is still fascinated by Satie's music and performs all six Gnossiennes with new tempi. broadcast may 13th 2018 10.30 a.m. (GMT +1) This video was recorded in TivoliVredenburg for VPRO Vrije Geluiden: music program made by the Dutch public broadcast organization VPRO.

Link VPRO vrije geluiden

Aleksandra today 99

 

A woman of thousands! Strong and through a lot in her life. My mother, she turned 99 today. Do you readers of this post want to know more about my mother? Go to the bookstore and buy the book written by Lisa Weeda named Aleksandra. Lisa Weeda travels to Luhansk on behalf of her ninety-four-year-old grandmother Aleksandra, in search of the grave of her uncle Kolya, who has disappeared since 2015. Lisa manages to brave the border post of the war zone and in her flight she tumbles back in time. She ends up in the palace of the Soviets, where her great-grandfather Nikolaj has been waiting for Aleksandra since his own death in 1953. After Aleksandra's deportation to Germany in 1942, he never saw her again. Together with Nikolaj, Lisa wanders through the palace, this limbo where Kolja is also hiding, and brings the history of her Don Cossack family to life.

Link Lisa Weeda 

Link Dolf Pauw

Russians performed by Sting

2005 A&M Records

Now during the war in Ukraine, this clip of Sting is going on today again!

LINK youtube

Mauritshuis

In 1631, John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, a cousin of stadtholder Frederick Henry, bought a plot bordering the Binnenhof and the adjacent Hofvijver pond in The Hague, at that time the political centre of the Dutch Republic. On the plot, the Mauritshuis was built as a home between 1636 and 1641, during John Maurice's governorship of Dutch Brazil. The Dutch Classicist building was designed by the Dutch architects Jacob van Campen and Pieter Post. The two-storey building is strictly symmetrical and contained four apartments and a great hall. Each apartment was designed with an antechamber, a chamber, a cabinet, and a cloakroom. Originally, the building had a cupola, which was destroyed in a fire in 1704. After the death of Prince John Maurice in 1679, the house was owned by the Maes family, who leased the house to the Dutch government. In 1704, most of the interior of the Mauritshuis was destroyed by fire. The building was restored between 1708 and 1718. In 1774, an art gallery open to the public was formed in what is now the Prince William V Gallery. That collection was seized by the French in 1795 and only partially recovered in 1808. The small gallery space soon proved to be too small, however, and in 1820, the Mauritshuis was bought by the Dutch state for the purpose of housing the Royal Cabinet of Paintings. In 1822, the Mauritshuis was opened to the public and housed the Royal Cabinet of Paintings and the Royal Cabinet of Rarities. In 1875, the entire museum became available for paintings. Link mauritshuis.nl

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (born 1940) is a Native American visual artist and curator. She is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and is also of Métis and Shoshone descent. She is also an art educator, art advocate, and political activist. She has been prolific in her long career, and her work draws from a Native worldview and comments on American Indian identity, histories of oppression, and environmental issues. In the mid-1970s, Smith gained prominence as a painter and printmaker, and later she advanced her style and technique with collage, drawing, and mixed media. Her works have been widely exhibited and many are in the permanent collections of prominent art museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her work has also been collected by New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe) and Albuquerque Museum, both located in a landscape that has continually served as one of her greatest sources of inspiration. In 2020 the National Gallery of Art announced it had bought her painting I See Red: Target (1992), which thus became the first painting on canvas by a Native American artist in the gallery. 

Smith actively supports the Native arts community by organizing exhibitions and project collaborations, and she has also participated in national commissions for public works. She lives in Corrales, New Mexico, near the Rio Grande, with her family.

Link jaunequick-to-seesmith.com 

Josef Sudek

During a legendary career that spanned almost six decades, Czech photographer Josef Sudek, the ‘poet of Prague,’ developed a craftsmanship and technical virtuosity that was unparalleled among his contemporaries. Early in his career, though the prevailing art movements of the 1920s and ’30s included cubism, surrealism, and the Czech avant-garde, Sudek sought his own approach characterized by a striking mastery of light. Working in Prague all his life, Sudek devoted himself to creating poetic still life images taken from his studio. His magical orchestration of rich, dark tones and the ethereal luminescence of his highlights render Sudek’s world in a spiritual and dream-like tone, where light is substance. The difficulties in Sudek’s life, the loss of his right arm during World War I and the hardships suffered during the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Prague, color his evocative and emotional work. Despite his handicap, he used large view cameras, including a 12 x 20 panoramic format that he wielded both horizontally and vertically, photographing without the help of an assistant. He compiled seven books of Prague photographs, working in the streets until old age and his physical limitations made it too difficult to haul his cameras around. LINK icp.org

Prof. Panayot Panayotov PANETO

Professor Panayotov's work covers many disciplines. During every visit to his studio, he showed me a lot of work. I took pictures at his request. In memory of his incredible versatility, I have made a selection of these beautiful works of art.

Link blog Panayot Panayotov PANETO

Terry Kurgan

Everyone is Present

Terry Kurgan is an artist and writer based in Johannesburg. Her artistic interest is in photography, and her focus-across a broad range of media-is on the volatile and complex relationship between photography and fiction. Kurgan received her BAFA from the California School of Arts in San Francisco, her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and her MA in Creative Writing from Wits University in Johannesburg. She has exhibited and published widely-in South Africa and internationally-and over the years, received numerous prestigious Fine Art awards. Kurgan has more recently turned to creative non-fiction to uncover a haunting family history, passed down through two generations, inflecting her own experience of the world. Her book, “Everyone is Present” was shortlisted for the Photo Arles Book Prize (France), was selected as a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards (USA), and won what is considered to be South Africa’s premier non-fiction literary prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.

LINK review by Andrew van der Vlies