Recent links of note:
“Art Gallery of Ontario plans $60-million expansion, including six-floor tower”
Alex Bozikovic, The Globe and Mail
Toronto’s largest art museum, known for its collections of Canadian, European, and Indigenous art, is reportedly getting fifty-five thousand square feet larger. Since its founding in 1900, the Art Gallery of Ontario has undergone a number of expansions, most recently in 2008, when the Toronto-born Frank Gehry redesigned the main building, adding ninety-seven thousand square feet of exhibition space. The most notable feature of the Gehry addition is the “Galleria Italia”—named for the twenty-six families of Italian descent who sponsored the space—a massive wing shaped like the hull of a ship, with an outer wall constructed from slats of wood and curved glass appended to the front of the museum. The latest project, called “AGO Global Contemporary,” will make room for the more than twenty thousand new pieces acquired over the last five years. According to Alex Bozikovic in The Globe and Mail, there are plans for a six-story tower, which would further dwarf The Grange, the beautiful 1817 Georgian mansion currently sitting beneath a sea of blue titanium (thanks, Gehry) that served as the museum’s first home.
“Ralph Vaughan Williams: modernist master”
Richard Bratby, The Spectator
Richard Bratby has penned a defense of Ralph Vaughan Williams in The Spectator ahead of the English composer’s one-hundred-fiftieth birthday this October. Vaughan Williams, the great-nephew of Charles Darwin, is perhaps best known for his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and The Lark Ascending, both performed regularly in concert halls throughout the world. Why does a composer as popular as Vaughn Williams need defending? Bratby explains that the “outward serenity” of his music makes it an easy target for detractors, such as the composer Elisabeth Lutyens, who famously called him a member of the “cowpat school” who merely writes “folky-wolky melodies on the cor anglais.” Vaughan Williams, who had studied with Bruch in Berlin and Ravel in Paris before embracing film music in his late sixties, earns a different moniker from Bratby: “modernist master of uncompromising originality.”
“A Kinetic Endlessness”
Julian Bell, The New York Review of Books
In this week’s New York Review of Books, the English painter Julian Bell discusses “Poussin and the Dance,” the exhibition that recently closed at the National Gallery in London and will open on February 15 at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition focuses on a few large paintings depicting dancing figures, such as A Bacchanalian Revel Before a Herm (ca. 1632–33), created when Poussin lived in Rome during his thirties and forties before he committed himself to sober religious subjects in his final years. To depict these scenes of revelry, the painter began by creating wax figurines in complicated positions that he would then try to capture on paper and canvas. (Though the wax models do not survive, the curators have included reconstructions.) In this delightful article Bell delves into Poussin’s relationships with Roman patrons and how he learned to capture movement from ancient reliefs.
Podcast:
“Music for a While #58: ‘I hate music?’ ” Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
Dispatch:
“Distant planets,” by Isaac Sligh. On a concert of Britten, Elgar, and Holst by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.