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Very happy and proud to take over for Thomas Hampson to sing Whitman songs by Hindemith at Grafenegg Festival! Thank you Thomas for your warm introduction with the audience, your kind words and your support and friendship for over 20 years! #grafenegg #thomashampson #artsong #hampsongfoundation #baritone (hier: Grafenegg)

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Very happy and proud to take over for Thomas Hampson and sing three Whitman songs by Hindemith at Grafenegg Festival! Thank you Thomas for the warm introduction with the audience, your kind words and your support for over 20 years! #thomashampson #grafenegg #baritone #artsong #hampsongfoundation (hier: Grafenegg)

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busy learning...two different worlds....#verdi #paulhindemith #operleipzig #grafenegg #artsong #opera (hier: Munich, Germany)

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Morning coffe 😁 #edmonton #intelligentsia #downtown #winspearcentre #beethoven9 #sibelius #jetlag (hier: Edmonton, Alberta)

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Recital at Liszt Festival Austria together with Eva Maria Riedl and Eduard Kutrowatz #franzliszt #lisztfestival #liederabend #brahms #korngold #carlloewe #burgenland (hier: Lisztzentrum)

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Finally joining the rehearsals for Elisir d'amore at the great open air festival in St.Margarethen/Austria #openair #elisirdamore #burgenland #donizetti (hier: Steinbruch St. Margarethen)

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Interesting exhibition..... #zakka #isseymiyake #roppongi #21_21designsight (hier: 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT)

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Taking a picture of our fans taking pictures! 😉#tokyo #ueno #uenopark #volksoper (hier: 東京文化会館)

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Over the clouds is under the clouds.... #tokyo #roppongi #moritower (hier: Roppongi Hills 六本木ヒルズ)

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#kennedycenter #washingtondc #promusicahebraica #artsong #zemlinsky #emigreviews (hier: Kennedy Center Opera House)

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2 days to go! Debut at Deutsche Oper Berlin as Wolfram! deutscheoper #berlin #richardwagner #tannhäuser (hier: Deutsche Oper Berlin)

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Gewandhaus tonight! Arias by Mozart and Verdi! #gewandhaus #operleipzig #mozart #lenozzedifigaro #gewandhausorchester #latraviata (hier: Gewandhaus)

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The cover for this week’s issue, “Mirror,” becomes a story of its own in an animated video. The story, narrated by Ira Glass and co-produced by “This American Life,” was illustrated by Chris Ware and John Kuramoto and features music by Nico Muhly. Learn more about how it came to be. 

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Abstract painter Arshile Gorky, born today in 1904, was largely self-taught. The title of this painting, Diary of a Seducer is a phrase that Gorky took from Soren Kierkegaard, the existential philosopher. 

[Arshile Gorky. Diary of a Seducer. 1945]

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Charles Sheeler, View of New York, 1931

From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

To support himself, Sheeler took up photography in 1912. He made images for commercial use, enjoying the financial security provided by producing photographs for magazine publishers and advertising firms. Sheeler also garnered critical acclaim for his photographs as works of art, and he began to experiment with film. At the same time, Sheeler was still struggling to gain respect as a painter. His dealer, aware of the secondary status that photography held with many collectors and critics, recommended that he restrict himself to the brush. With no guarantees of the same kind of success in painting that he had realized with photography, Sheeler embarked on the next phase of his career with ambivalence. View of New York was executed the year that Sheeler made the difficult decision to set aside photography. The painting’s title is ironic, for it does not depict a cityscape at all but shows the interior of the artist’s studio in New York. Through the open window, Sheeler painted a cloudy sky instead of the skyscrapers and crowded streets that had occupied an earlier generation. The balanced, almost geometric structure of the composition and the limited palette of grays, pale blues, and maroon underscore the stillness of the interior, as do the objects pictured: the empty chair, the unlit lamp, and a covered and unused camera. The enigmatic, almost funereal mood of this workspace alludes to Sheeler’s own ambivalence. He called the image “the most severe picture I ever painted,” but it was also one of his most personal.

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Charles Sheeler, Skyscrapers, 1922

From the Phillips Collection:

Skyscrapers, which reflects the 1920s precisionist aesthetic, is one of Sheeler’s most accomplished assimilations of European modernism into his own uniquely American style. Using sharply defined contours, non-atmospheric planes of color, and intense frontal light, Sheeler conveyed the grandeur of monumental buildings grouped together.

For Skyscrapers, Sheeler made and studied both a photograph and a drawing. In comparing the photograph and the drawing with the final work, one can visualize Sheeler’s gradual reduction and simplification of the scene. By cropping the image, he brought the subject closer to the picture plane. In the painting, Sheeler simplified the image by creating planes of solid color for the shapes that are crucial to the overall structure of the composition. The viewer’s eye is directed into the composition by the diagonal recession of strong gray shadows. Intended as a unifying compositional device rather than a disclosure of time of day, these raking shadows converge on the focal point of the painting, the cubic design in the lower center of the picture. The diagonal contours of the shadows disrupt the otherwise predominantly vertical composition.

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Photography is nature seen from the eyes outwards. Painting is nature seen from the eyes inwards.

CHARLES SHEELER (via ronulicny)