It Was a Great Week for …
… the United States Congress (or, anyway, better than the week Pyotr Kikilyk had—more on him in a moment): Robert Mueller’s testimony was delayed till July 24, freeing up Democrats to bicker among themselves…
The art of French Neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac is in high demand. So much so that, in May of last year, his 1915 depiction of the port of La Rochelle, valued at about $1.7 million, was stolen from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nancy, France. (This spring, it was recovered in Ukraine and returned to the museum.) Signac, born in 1863, is best known for his contributions alongside Georges Seurat to the pointillism movement. Throughout his career, Signac also painted watercolors: Lézardrieux, l’Église, painted in Brittany, circa 1929, is on view at Sotheby’s in advance of its sale in the Impressionist and Modern Art Online auction on July 24.
For drop-dead operatic dazzle on a colossal scale, the Bregenz Festival’s floating stage at the Austrian end of Lake Constance takes a back seat to no showcase on earth, not even the fabled Verona Arena. Conventional scenic design is useless here. The action is far away. Nuance is a lost cause. What’s needed is an extravagant visual metaphor that distills the essence of the classic at hand. Engineered like spaceships, each show takes months to build and runs for two seasons, to almost invariably sold-out houses. The new attraction this year is Rigoletto, Verdi’s twisty tragedy of a court jester’s revenge. —Matthew Gurewitsch
It’s not every fairy-tale illustrator who could pull off collaborations with both Walt Disney and Karl Lagerfeld, but the Danish artist Kay Nielsen (1886–1957) forged a sophisticated aesthetic that embraced the strangeness of these tales while mirroring the latent eroticism that have made them stick for centuries. He was, in a word, catnip to big-time make-believers like Disney and Lagerfeld. READ ON
Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley
Chris Garrett Michael Hainey George Kalogerakis Nathan King
Angela Panichi
John Tornow
Jim Kelly
Laura Jacobs
Ashley Baker
Julia Vitale
Ann Schneider
Bob Mankoff
Beth Kseniak
Elena Clavarino Clementine Ford Alex Oliveira
Isabelle Harvie-Watt
Bridget Arsenault
Adam Nadler
Matt Kapp
H. Scott Jolley
Elinor Schneider
Emily Davis
Anjali Lewis
Marc Leyer
Madeline Spates
Eshaan Jain