A Pasolini series at MoMA provides occasion to revisit the principled, prolific filmmaker:
The Museum of Modern Art is showing a series of Pier Paolo Pasolini's films over the coming weeks, a great change to revisit the complex director's oeuvre.
Bio: Marion Lignana Rosenberg is a writer, critic, and translator based in New York.
A writer in many genres, a visual artist, and a public intellectual, Pasolini sparked controversy throughout his life. In 1942, he published a collection of poems in Friulian dialect: a political act, since the suppression of regional dialects was a cornerstone of Mussolini’s cultural policy. Pasolini believed that dialects could offer a “carnal approach” to the worlds of peasants and slum-dwellers, whom he saw as less corrupted by capitalism’s mercenary concerns. More
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on December 13th, 2012 11:00amThe Morgan show epitomizes the artistic movement known as mannerism, of which Rosso is a celebrated practitioner. Derived from the Italian word maniera or “style,” mannerism burst forth in Florence and Rome in the early 1500s. Encompassing some 30 cannily selected objects in a single gallery, Fantasy and Invention exemplifies mannerism’s hermetic quality and its delight in erudition and exquisite detail. More
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on November 27th, 2012 10:40amThis month New Yorkers will have the relatively rare chance to see and hear all the Mozart-Da Ponte operas in quick succession. The Metroplitan Opera’s revival of Le nozze di Figaro plays through Saturday (when the luminous Hei-Kyung Hong will sing the role of Countess Almaviva), and Don Giovanni will join the repertory on Nov. 28. The Met and the Juilliard School also present a joint production of Così fan tutte that opens tonight at Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater and will be repeated on Nov. 17 and 19. Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, conducts, Stephen Wadsworth directs, and the cast features a remarkable ensemble of rising stars from the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and Juilliard’s Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts. More
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on November 14th, 2012 2:30pmBoth shows merit repeated visits. Many of the 58 drawings at the Frick are on view in New York for the first time, and none of the 100 works at the Morgan has been shown in the United States before. Drawn from two of the world’s great collections, London’s Courtauld Gallery and Munich’s Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, the exhibitions are awe inspiring. Both encompass works by the Italian and Northern European Old Masters (including Mantegna, Dürer, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt). In addition, The Frick show gives prominence to English and French artists from the 18th and 19th centuries, while the Morgan exhibit highlights exuberant drawings in the Bavarian Rococo style along with works from the late 20th century. More
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on October 12th, 2012 5:05pmWhile the visuals at Tuesday’s Otello premiere were satisfying, musical matters were less so. At the interval, a Met spokesman announced that Johan Botha was suffering from allergies and asked for understanding. The tenor sang the strenuous title role beautifully at the house in 2008, but last night struggled with its highest reaches, rarely spinning a smooth legato line and seeming preoccupied more with his own vocal survival than with the Moor’s tribulations. More
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on October 10th, 2012 2:55pmIn the Western tradition, artists and philosophers long affirmed that nature “sheweth [the] handywork” of a mighty and providential demiurge—and that in imitating nature, practitioners of the various arts partook to some degree of the Maker’s creative mastery. For Cage, though, nature’s method of working was “purposeless play.” Shaped by his studies of Buddhism, Indian philosophy, and the I-Ching (the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes”) in the 1940s and 1950s, Cage incorporated aleatoric or “chance-controlled” elements into his ground-breaking work in all media, including the watercolors, prints, drawings, and scores on display at the National Academy. More
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on September 17th, 2012 4:10pmThe Murder of Crows, the breathtaking 30-minute mixed-media soundscape by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller now receiving its U.S. premiere at the Park Avenue Armory, compels listeners to grapple with the disquieting mystery of voices and sounds without causes. Created for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, and on view at the Armory through September 9, Murder is a kind of auditory film without external imagery or action. More
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on August 7th, 2012 12:46pmThe darkness of Hart’s lyric for “This Funny World” (“If you’re beaten, conceal it,/ There’s no pity for you”) so unnerved Belle Baker, who was to give its first performance in the show Betsy, that she commissioned a more upbeat number from Irving Berlin and sang that instead. Hart’s songs could be tender (“My Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t It Romantic?”), topical (“Zip!”), or meta (“Johnny One Note”), but it is their sadness that sticks in the mind: “Glad to Be Unhappy,” “It Never Entered My Mind.” More
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on July 3rd, 2012 1:53pmVenice, in short, was louche, lax, and diverse: an ideal setting for an explosion of creativity and beauty. A new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, Renaissance Venice: Drawings from the Morgan, explores some of the cultural bounty that the city and Most Serene Republic of Venice gave to the world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. More
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on May 21st, 2012 10:26amOver the next month, New Yorkers will have the chance to become acquainted with a riveting but less familiar body of work that pays homage to Callas and other divas: the cinema of Werner Schroeter (1945–2010). Between May 11 and June 11, the Museum of Modern Art will present the first comprehensive North American retrospective of films by the queer movie, theater, and opera director, encompassing some 40 films and rare early shorts. More
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on May 10th, 2012 2:11pm
