By Mark Rozzo

David Bowie said that the work of Derek Boshier “cascades over the decades and is utterly real and convincing.” At age 83, Boshier is at once a living legend and an unsung hero of postwar British art. READ ON

By Sarah Hyde

The rusticated façade of central Florence’s ritzy Palazzo Strozzi—the location of JR’s latest work, La Ferita (The Wound)—stands in stark contrast to the impoverished streets of the banlieue where the French artist was born. READ ON

Sir David McVicar’s Met Opera staging of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux, starring Sondra Radvanovsky as Britain’s first Queen Elizabeth

By Matthew Gurewitsch

Back in the day, everyone knew that opera was all about voice, voice, voice. But that was then. As Verdi’s enslaved Ethiopian princess Aida in the recent Lotte de Beer production for the Paris Opéra, the Canadian diva Sondra Radvanovsky traipsed around after a smaller-than-life earth-mother mannequin operated by a trio of puppeteers. Thus the doll preempted the diva, reducing her to “just” a voice. The affinity with Japan’s great Bunraku theater lent the show an exotic touch, but honestly… (Officially unavailable in the U.S., the production leads a shadow life on YouTube, and it’s worth seeking out for the phenomenal suite of quick-changing, anachronistic READ ON

Eye on Dance, a weekly interview show that ran from 1981 to 2004, was required watching in the dance world. A special archival episode from 1986 is now available for streaming

By Laura Jacobs

Our first glimpse of Eye on Dance took place on January 1, 1981. It came in under the radar, with far less limelight than the big television broadcasts—“Live From Lincoln Center” and “Dance in America”—events that brought the 1970s dance boom into living rooms around the country. Eye on Dance was grass roots and intimate, inside scuttlebutt and ahead of the curve, historical, radical, and wildly diverse. It was also weekly and live, which meant the enterprise had an anything-can-happen wit and grit.

Celia Ipiotis, its creator, producer, and host, had been an aspiring dancer in her youth, but READ ON

Perhaps none of the arts have suffered from the pandemic more majorly than jazz. Until the post-vaccine Jazz Age arrives, try the next best thing: live recordings

By Evan Eisenberg

For more than a year now, jazz has been in a choke hold. Here and there, now and then, the grip has relaxed, only to tighten again with a vengeance. And while most performing arts have suffered similar constriction, the agony felt by jazz has been particularly acute. Born at the sizzling synapse between improvising musicians and drinkers, dancers, fornicators, jubilant mourners, aficionados—and, of course, other improvising musicians—jazz, hot or cool, still depends on warm bodies not only for its livelihood but for the very breath of life.

Valiantly, resourcefully, clubs and musicians have tried to stay afloat by READ ON

Artcurial Paris’s spring auction focuses on the artists of Congo’s Le Hangar collective, founders of contemporary African art who developed their craft away from Western influence

By Tobias Grey

Danger often lurks in the paintings of Pilipili Mulongoy: a snake about to strike, a leopard primed to pounce. Meanwhile, the creatures’ prey—perhaps some busy butterfly or docile gazelle—are blissfully unaware of what fate holds for them. It is chastening to look at these tableaux, knowing that the 20th-century artist lived through an age of atrocities in Belgian-occupied Congo. The question of whether Pilipili’s works are allegorical cannot be answered by an auction. Nonetheless, Artcurial’s upcoming Paris sale—“The Artists of Le Hangar: The Origins of Contemporary African Art”—is an important one. READ ON

Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek adapt Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, awarded the 1996 Golden Palm in Cannes, for Opera Philadelphia

By Matthew Gurewitsch

Quite an epiphany, the sound of church bells over the empty sea at the close of Breaking the Waves, and after the rough stuff that comes before, you need it. Drawn from the movie that earned Lars von Trier the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1996, the adaptation by Missy Mazzoli (music) and Royce Vavrek (libretto) had critics at Opera Philadelphia’s world premiere in 2016 scrambling for superlatives. Directed in spare yet piercing style by James Darrah, the production is showing now on the company’s streaming channel.

In roles created on film by Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård, READ ON

By Thomas Beller

Ricky Powell was always hanging out with a camera around his neck, part of the greater metropolitan Beastie Boys world. He took pictures, but he did so without assuming any professional airs about it, or even expressing any sense of artistic ambition around photography. His obvious progenitors were Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom I had seen move through crowded nightclubs (Area, Danceteria, the Michael Todd Room of the Palladium, the World) with a little camera clutched in their hands like a shield. They took snapshots in the spirit of someone collecting material for a private scrapbook READ ON

By Julia Vitale

Starry Night. Sunflowers. Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. The paintings of Vincent van Gogh—from the most beloved to the lesser known—are mostly held in museums around the world. There are very few exceptions, and one of them is Scène de Rue à Montmartre, currently on display in Paris ahead of its sale at Sotheby’s later this month. READ ON

Live from Florence, pianist Hershey Felder’s musical ode to Puccini

By Matthew Gurewitsch

And now for something completely different. Streaming live from Florence, Italy, on March 14, Puccini is the latest in a series of musical portraits by the pianist-playwright-actor Hershey Felder. Over two decades and counting, Felder has stepped out as Ludwig van Beethoven, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Claude Debussy, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Leonard Bernstein, not to mention Sholem Aleichem (Before Fiddler). Many of his piano-accompanied impersonations have made their way to video in a style that evokes costume-heavy early seasons of “Masterpiece Theatre.”

Some well-placed critics have looked down their noses at these efforts. “Mr. READ ON

A 21st-century mind living in the 20th century, Niki de Saint Phalle rejected artistic and social norms. Her sculptures go on display at MoMA PS1 this week

By Patricia Zohn

It’s 1962 in Malibu, and Niki de Saint Phalle, 31, a former Vogue model, wears a white jumpsuit as she aims her .22-caliber rifle at a large plaster assemblage made of the detritus of everyday life, which she has created with the help of the sculptor Jean Tinguely, her Swiss lover and collaborator. Attached to the structure’s white surface are balloons impregnated with colored paints; they explode as she hits them, paint dribbling randomly down. Jane Fonda and artist Edward Kienholz are among the luminaries present to see this Tir (shooting), a proto-performative exploration of creativity and rage.

Though Saint Phalle is best known for her READ ON

Selections from New York fixture Adrian Dannatt’s collection, including pieces by Nan Goldin and Duncan Hannah, are on display at Miguel Abreu Gallery

By Michael Hainey

For decades, Adrian Dannatt has been one of those wonderful Zelig-like figures on New York’s arts and literary scene. Seeming to know everyone and to also know about everything, he’s a witty, wise gent from another, better time, as well as an artist from a different era—specifically, the wide open 80s. Until you happen to bump into him in a bar and have your socks charmed off of you, there’s no better way to spend an hour right now than to see “Doomed and Famous: Selections from the Adrian Dannatt Collection,” at Miguel Abreu Gallery. It’s not just the READ ON

A new performance of von Weber’s Freischütz by Dmitri Tcherniakov, streaming from the Bavarian State Opera in Munich

By Matthew Gurewitsch

With Der Freischütz (The Marksman), Carl Maria von Weber laid the cornerstone of German romantic opera. In the Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new take, foresters and huntsmen from medieval Bohemia foregather in the sky lounge of a multinational headquartered in a city very much like Frankfurt, trading black magic for sinister mind games.

As the CEO’s daughter Agathe, the poised South African soprano Golda Schultz transcends the cognitive dissonance, bringing innocence and truth to life in angelic, shimmering phrases. She’s a star of the first magnitude, and we’re sure to be hearing lots more from her in seasons to come. READ ON

This month, a design exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and a lamp show in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, explore the poetics of light

By Laura Jacobs

The first time I was beguiled by a lamp came courtesy of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. The movie was Charade (1963), and the lamp was an Art Nouveau number placed next to the phone in Hepburn’s hotel room. It is simple and elegant, dark bronze and opaque glass. The stem of the lamp divides at the top like a Y and then each branch curves symmetrically downward into two elongated and glowing shades, making an M.

In Charade, Hepburn is a woman webbed between battling men. The lamp in her room is as slim and graceful as she is, female and rather fallopian. Well, Art Nouveau READ ON

Coinciding with the publication of the unredacted Chips Channon diaries, London’s Heywood Hill Bookshop hosts the volume’s editor, Simon Heffer, in conversation with British MP Michael Gove

By Bridget Arsenault

“Some of the catty remarks (which fascinate) MUST be cut.” These were the express wishes of Lady Honor Guinness, the then ex-wife of Sir Chips Channon, who never allowed the editor of his diaries to see the original manuscripts. But even after careful censorship by Guinness as well as from Peter Coates, Channon’s friend, lover, and literary executor, the gossipy diaries, which took aim at British high society and its royal family, caused a stir when they were published in 1967. This week, Channon, who died in 1958, is in the papers again, owing to the publication of the first in three volumes of those same diaries. This time, though, they are unredacted. READ ON