New York
Graham Fuller
Thirteen years ago, I visited the magnificent Morgan Library & Museum with the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, whom I was profiling for The New York Times. She was starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, and it made sense for us to view the Morgan’s exhibition of Brontë juvenilia together. Gainsbourg seemed haunted by the show; I know I was. It was the sight of the tiny writing, the tiny gloves (Charlotte Brontë’s), and the locks of thin blondish Brontë hair - close enough to touch - under the glass cabinets. One could feel the siblings’ unquiet slumbers.There’s none of William Blake’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
THE choreographer George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, aged 79, of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare, if nowadays notorious, condition only discovered at his autopsy. What had been recognised long before his death, though, was that this man was one of the very greatest geniuses of the 20th century, a figure to be reckoned alongside Pablo Picasso in art and Igor Stravinsky in music.What he did for ballet was nothing less than complete reinvention, applying his mind energetically for almost 60 years to turning the conventional art he had learned in St Petersburg at the Mariinsky Theatre Read more ...