Two thousand exhibitors set up shop for Salone del Mobile, Milan’s furniture fair to the stars

By Elena Clavarino

If you’re in design, there is no more momentous an occasion than the Salone del Mobile, that rendez-vous in Milan, the furniture world’s who’s who. If this were fine arts, Salone would be Art Basel, Frieze, and TEFAF rolled into one. After its 2020 cancellation, and last year’s toned-down Supersalone in September, this June’s 60th edition will run full steam. The Italian L’Officiel compared it to “a pregnancy finally coming to term.”

For those who aren’t familiar with the format, it’s a week of cocktail parties, installations, gallery openings, and, of course, the fair itself, in which hundreds of multi-million-dollar booths pop up in the city’s Rho Fiera. While the fair is mostly easy to navigate, the READ ON

Forget hot dogs—this Memorial Day, it’s all about the bun, and the many other forms of bread artists from Dalí to Lichtenstein used as motifs in their work

By Colby Mugrabi

As surrealists often do, Salvador Dalí used bread as an object to fetishize. Drawing inspiration from an inkwell modeled after Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus (1857-59), Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) embeds the Angelus scene in a loaf of bread, which acts as a whimsical headpiece on top of a bust of a woman.

Like much of surrealist art, Dalí’s sculpture uses food to place the female subject as an object to be consumed, made even more explicit by the corncobs dangling around her neck and the swarm of ants along her forehead. Dalí’s sculpture adheres to his READ ON

Harry Styles is at the top of his game as musician, actor, and icon. And what’s not to love?

By Will Hodgkinson

Cast your mind back to 2010, when five teenage boys of limited talent but looks and charm in abundance auditioned as solo candidates on The X Factor. Feeling each had something about them, but not enough to make it on their own, Simon Cowell came up with the idea of sticking the lot together and, hey presto, One Direction was born.

When the most successful boy band of the 21st century so far spluttered to an end (or, officially, went on hiatus) in 2016, its members went down various forks in the road. Zayn Malik tried his hand at sleazy R&B, leading to the all too prophetically titled 2021 album READ ON

A major retrospective highlights the many sides of famed photographer William Klein

By James Wolcott

Immediacy is the hopping-off point of William Klein’s photography. His most memorable photographs aren’t images frozen in time but impromptu moments captured at near boil, their bustling activity crowding the frame.

A punk kid points a gun barrel at the camera with one eye cocked like a pint-size desperado. A young woman in a bikini leans forward, flashing a wide smile of happy teeth, while in the background slumps a dapper gentleman in the mild throes of dyspepsia. His group shots often present a thick stew of sullen faces, like a gathering of dark clouds.

Klein’s early reliance on a 35mm camera, high-contrast film, a wide lens, and nimble READ ON

By Carol Woolton

On June 2, 1953, the Queen’s Coronation Day, it poured with rain. Nine young aristocratic girls were chosen to be maids of honor, including the 21-year-old Lady Anne Coke—subsequently Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting and much later the best-selling author Anne Glenconner. She remembers it was dark and cold when they arrived at Westminster Abbey. “Our dresses weren’t lined. There were still rationing and clothing coupons after the war, you see. A tiny thread of blue cotton had been placed on the floor in the abbey, so the Queen knew where to stand,” says Glenconner, recalling the moment, at the back of the abbey, when each maid of honor lifted a portion of the 16-foot velvet Robe of State, and with a quick “Are you ready, girls?” from the future monarch, they were off. “When the procession began, we walked past row upon row of tiaras.” READ ON

Of Simon Russell Beale, London Assurance, and the joys of farce

By Matthew Gurewitsch

If you worship youth and beauty, in particular your own, time is not your friend. Such is the predicament of the widowed London fop Sir Harcourt Courtly, who plans to restore his shaky fortunes by marrying an orphaned country heiress the same age as his wild-oats-sowing Oxbridge-drop-out son. Watch the plates spin in the live video of Nicholas Hytner’s revival of London Assurance, filmed in 2010 at the National Theatre, London.

The script is the handiwork of Dion (short for Dionysus) Boucicault (1820–90), who was born in Dublin, flourished as an actor-playwright-manager on both sides of the Atlantic, and was laid to rest in Hastings-on-Hudson. His stock in trade was melodrama, including READ ON

On a recent spring day in the Scottish countryside, the newly restored estate of Rory McEwen hosted a tribute to the late, great British artist and folk singer

By James Fox

A few days ago, I boarded a train from London to Berwick-upon-Tweed, to the Scottish Borders. I was carrying a Guild F-212, a 12-string guitar made in the early 60s, about the best you can play. I was heading for a great Palladian house called Marchmont, near Greenlaw in Berwickshire, where a celebration was planned in honor of Rory McEwen, who was born there and who died in 1982, aged 50.

Rory was a rare and extraordinary man, his achievements shadowed by his early death. His friend the American artist Jim Dine said of him, “He was touched by God, not just with the skills as an artist, but by all skills.” READ ON

By David Yaffe

The Smile is not Radiohead, but you could be forgiven if you thought otherwise. Singer Thom Yorke and guitarist-arranger Jonny Greenwood are the essential sound of Radiohead. Yorke and Greenwood collaborated during lockdown, and what started as a splinter project has taken on a life of its own. Their new album, A Light for Attracting Attention, dropped May 13, and having added the drummer Tom Skinner, this trio sounds fully formed. That light may be attracting attention, but be careful. It leads to much numinous darkness, a sonic chiaroscuro. READ ON

A Cubist Hamlet from the Australian composer Brett Dean, with the original Glyndebourne cast

By Matthew Gurewitsch

Operas are written to be lived with. Aficionados know this, which is why they hate to settle for hearing a score of substance just once. These days, Brett Dean’s Hamlet is staking its claim as such a score.

Since its unveiling at Glyndebourne in the summer of 2017, Dean’s version of the Danish tragedy has toured the U.K. and chalked up premieres in Adelaide and Cologne. Next year, it’s Munich’s turn. Through June 9, a transfer of Neil Armstrong’s Glyndebourne production is playing at the Metropolitan Opera, with much of the original cast intact. What better moment to catch up with the live video from Glyndebourne, perhaps even as prep for the June 4 READ ON

By Osman Can Yerebakan

Édouard Louis is prepared to move us off our seats. The 29-year-old French author of piercing autobiographies—The End of Eddy (2014), History of Violence (2016)—makes his American acting debut in the stage adaptation of his 2018 book, Who Killed My Father, later this month at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Louis calls his work “confrontational literature,” and because a book is easy to close and put aside, this literary provocateur is fascinated by the immediacy of theater as well as by its physical reality. READ ON

Forty years after their unofficial split, Abba is attempting a comeback with a live-concert tour featuring avatars of the band’s younger selves

By Dan Cairns

At Abba’s central London HQ, Bjorn Ulvaeus, 77, sits on a sofa, dressed head to alligator-skin, cowboy-booted toe in black. He is a picture of health, wealth and contentment. On the surface. In reality, he says, he wakes regularly in the wee small hours. Why? Oh, just the small matter of the opening of “Abba Voyage,” in two weeks’ time.

It is an immersive, “360-degree concert experience” where the band’s biggest, most popular hits will be staged in a custom-built, 3,000-seat venue at the Olympic Park in London. “Abbatars” — avatars of the band’s younger selves created with George Lucas’s visual effects company — will stand in for the septuagenarian original members and the 100-minute concert is booking until December 4, with multiple shows a week. READ ON

Mean Girls meets the Bard in an encore of Red Bull Theater’s Mac Beth

By Matthew Gurewitsch

A quarter-century ago, the director Joe Calarco adapted Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Off Broadway for a cast of four students crawling the walls of their repressive all-boys Catholic prep school. Billed as Shakespeare’s R&J, the show was somber, by no means camp. There was no cross-dressing. Regional and international revivals continue to this day.

In spring 2019, the Red Bull Theater gave the New York premiere of Erica Schmidt’s Mac Beth, performed by a seven-woman ensemble enacting teenagers in high-school uniforms, and that was a hit, too. Like Calarco’s love story, Schmidt’s thriller presents cannibalized Shakespeare as a full-length play within a READ ON

On the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., the unlikely story of how the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album of all time came to be

By Nathan King

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” —H.L. Mencken

That one can still descend into the great, sloppy trough of tumbleweed pageantry that is Exile on Main St. is miraculous. In fact, that we can, at this knotty moment in history, listen to the music of the men who wrote that album 50 years ago tomorrow—ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones—is nothing short of a miracle.

Aside from being the rock ’n’ roll album, it’s the rock ’n’ roll album as: a child of divorce; READ ON

Meet the British playwright who has turned modern-day American politics into a Shakespearean comedy

By John Lahr

In Mike Bartlett’s latest Shakespearean pastiche, The 47th (at London’s Old Vic Theatre), the British playwright gooses the House of Trump in iambic pentameter—in the sly, gleeful way he did with the House of Windsor in his successful King Charles III. But, here, in Bertie Carvel’s barnstorming embodiment of Trump, the audience is not only faced with an astonishing replica of his big-bellied barbarity, but with the equally unsettling prospect of his second run for the Oval Office in 2024.

It’s hard to imagine a better setup than Trump as the equivalent of Elizabethan terror and elation—at once READ ON

Today’s rose fanatics—and there are a lot of them—join a fan club that stretches from Sappho to Shakespeare to Empress Joséphine

By Daisy Allsup

“I’m not a collector. I’m an addict!” says Sam McKnight, the hairstylist to Princess Di and Kate Moss who swapped his scissors for pruning shears during the U.K.’s first lockdown.

Years ago, McKnight would take a deck chair and a book into The Regent’s Park on summer evenings. It was there that he discovered the Queen Mary’s Rose Gardens and imagined planting his own. Today, he has nearly 100 varieties growing behind his North London house, of which his favorite is the fittingly named Generous Gardener, a climber of the palest pink. “I need a bigger garden,” he says. “I am at peak rose!” READ ON

Ron Carter, the most recorded bassist in history, turns 85 at Carnegie Hall

By David Yaffe

In music, time is all, and it is the bass player’s job to keep it. Time is the heartbeat, the metronome, the pulse. In the hands of a virtuoso, it is also lyrical and hypnotic, and if it’s jazz, it swings. According to Guinness World Records, Ron Carter is the world’s most recorded bass player, anchoring jazz masterpieces with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Eric Dolphy, and Herbie Hancock, among scores of others, and supporting Roberta Flack, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, and A Tribe Called Quest—on nearly 3,000 albums. And he’s still in the clubs, six nights a week, tall and powerful, graceful and elegant, walking that bass anywhere it could possibly go. READ ON

Boston Baroque makes a stellar case for Handel’s rarity Amadigi di Gaula

By Matthew Gurewitsch

Circe, Alcina, Armida … The witch who commands the elements yet cannot bind the man she loves has gone by many names. In Amadigi di Gaula, an earlyish opera from George Frideric Handel’s three-decade London period, she returns as Melissa, working her wiles on the eponymous wandering knight. His heart, though, is set on Oriana, a princess Melissa has locked away, Rapunzel-style, in a tower. Rounding out the cast, there’s Amadigi’s buddy Dardano, Amadigi’s secret rival for Oriana. Now sit back and watch Handel turn the kaleidoscope from heartbreak to fury in arias and a duet or two of surpassing beauty, all orchestrated with imagination nothing short of sublime. READ ON

By Neal Goren

The name Barbara Hannigan is not yet mainstream, but those who love music discuss her artistry in worshipful tones, often with the word “genius” affixed. Hailing from Nova Scotia, now living on the northwest coast of France in a town aptly named Finistère (literally, end of the earth), the willowy blonde beauty is not only one of our great sopranos; she is also a conductor of the first rank. Hannigan’s specialty is contemporary music, and next weekend, in Munich, audiences will have the opportunity to experience her derring-do when she both performs and conducts one of the 20th century’s most emotionally naked and musically challenging operas: Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), composed to a libretto by Jean Cocteau and premiered in 1959. READ ON

By Jensen Davis

Remember the opening of The Sound of Music? That idyllic Austrian meadow, Alps in the background, in which Julie Andrews twirls? “The hills are alive,” she sings. Actually, they weren’t. As with so many of the striking locations in Hollywood movies, from Singin’ in the Rain to Cleopatra, a flat canvas held those hills. For the first museum show dedicated to Hollywood’s backdrops, the Boca Raton Museum of Art has rounded up canvases made between 1938 and 1968—22 in all. They mostly come from movies by MGM, titles such as Marie Antoinette (1938), An American in Paris (1951), and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). The exhibition also features “the grandaddy, the Babe Ruth of all Hollywood backdrops,” as Karen Maness, one of the show’s curators, describes it: Mount Rushmore, where Alfred Hitchcock, in his 1959 thriller, North by Northwest, staged his precarious penultimate scene. READ ON