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Albrecht Dürer: Drawn to art at an early age
The celebrated Renaissance artist's watercolors, drawings and prints — many
lent by the Albertina Museum in Vienna — are the focus of a new exhibition at
the National Gallery in Washington.
It is rare for a museum to lend the heart of its most prized collection to
another museum, but the Albertina in Vienna has done just that by shipping
almost a hundred watercolors and drawings by Albrecht Dürer to the National
Gallery of Art here for an exhibition. Dürer, a German born in Nuremberg in
1471, is the great master of the Northern European Renaissance, akin to Leonardo
da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo of the Italian Renaissance. Dürer's
greatness, according to Andrew Robison of the National Gallery, curator of the
show, is based on his watercolors, drawings and prints, just as Da Vinci and
Raphael are identified with painting and Michelangelo with sculpture...
LOS ANGELES TIMES
March 31, 2013
My Role In
the Presidential Election of 1960
While reading The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s
formidable biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, I found myself recalling my role
in the election of 1960 when Senator John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President
Richard Nixon for president. I was a junior member of the Washington staff of
the Associated Press then but nevertheless landed some juicy assignments. Since
my role has been ignored by biographers and historians, from Theodore H. White
to Caro, I thought it might be helpful to set down some of the details...
NEWS COMMENTARY
December 22, 2012
A
Hopeful End to a Shameless Campaign
The reelection of President Barack Obama is provoking an avalanche of punditry
that does not need more from me. I just want to note a handful of highlights
that may get lost in the avalanche. Most important, the result averted a
calamitous injustice. If Obama had lost, it would have been a victory for
obstruction, lies, distortion, deceit and racism. A cynical and shameless
campaign, concocted four years ago by Republicans obsessed with dishonoring the
new president, would have succeeded. Supporters of Romney even put forth a
campaign argument that amounted to blackmail: since the stubborn Republican
House of Representatives would never work with Obama, they said, the good of the
nation demanded Romney as president...
NEWS COMMENTARY
November 11, 2012
Read all about it: Newspapers as art in exhibit
The exhibition 'Shock of the News' at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington looks at artists' real and figurative use of newspapers in their
works, including those by Hans Richter, Ellsworth Kelly and Paul Sietsema.
For a hundred years, artists have been using and abusing newspapers as a vital
part of their works. Pungent examples include the Spanish painter Salvador Dali
creating an absurd newspaper about himself, the German-born Swiss artist Dieter
Roth making a sausage, complete with gelatin and spices, out of copies of the
British tabloid Daily Mirror and the American Jim Hodges coating a Jordanian
newspaper entirely in 24 karat gold. Little attention has been paid to this
phenomenon by the world's museums in the past. But these examples and five dozen
others now make up a novel exhibition called "Shock of the News" that opened
recently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and will close Jan. 27. It
goes nowhere else...
LOS ANGELES TIMES
October 16, 2012
Race and the Election
It must have been galling for
the Republicans to see so many blacks voting for their own in the 2008
presidential election. The returns must have struck many Republicans as unfair,
even undemocratic. Nothing else can explain the way the Republicans have allowed
racism to stain their campaign against President Obama for a second term. No one
likes to throw around so nasty an accusation, but I don’t know what else it
is...
NEWS COMMENTARY
September 7, 2012
The
Intellectual Congressman
If American elections made sense, the selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as
the Republican vice presidential candidate would be universally regarded as
about as foolish a move as the selection of Sarah Palin four years ago. By no
stretch of logic can any reasonable analyst justify the choice. Mitt Romney is
so bland and clunky a candidate that for a long while we all have had a tough
time figuring him out. He has been running around crying out that he is a
rip-snorting genuine extreme conservative, but it was hard to take him at his
word. It all sounded like election hooey. After all, he was a somewhat decent
governor of Massachusetts who gave us Romneycare the model for Obamacare. A lot
of people felt that once elected he would revert to his innate blandness. They
also probably felt that his innate blandness might even turn into innate
goodness. The embrace of Ryan changes all that...
NEWS COMMENTARY
August 25, 2012
Soutine and Dr. Maisler
by Stanley Meisler
a fictional
short story based on real
people, not a memoir
Stanley Meisler
is the author of the biography
Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War, the history
United
Nations : A History and the history
When The World Calls:
The Inside Story Of The Peace Corps
And Its First Fifty Years.
Meisler served as a
Los Angeles Times foreign and diplomatic
correspondent for thirty years, assigned to Nairobi, Mexico City, Madrid,
Toronto, Paris, Barcelona, the United Nations and Washington. He still
contributes articles to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday Opinion
and Art sections and writes a News Commentary
for his website,
www.stanleymeisler.com.
For many
years, Meisler has contributed articles to leading American magazines
including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic,
The Nation, the
Reader’s Digest, the Quarterly Journal of Military History, and the
Columbia Journalism Review. While most of these articles focus on foreign
affairs and political issues, Meisler has contributed more than thirty articles on
artists and art history to the Smithsonian
Magazine... |
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