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Gabriel Madan opens exhibition "Severance" at Fran&ccedilois Ghebaly
LOS ANGELES.- By some lights, the best pages of Marcel Prousts serpentine seven-volume meditation on memory, love, lust, art and other things are the very first, when the protagonist reminisces about Combray, the fictional French seaside town of his youth, revisits his evenings at home, his pining for his mothers kiss, the drama of being shattered every time said kiss doesnt come. These delicious and confused gusts of memory offer up an amuse-bouche for the sensual adventures to come. Place and childhood function in equally powerful ways in Severance, Gabriel Madans new suite of paintings on view starting today at Fran&ccedilois Ghebaly. The Cuban-American Miami of the artists youth, and by extension, its seaside, are his omphalos, his own Combray, suggestive settings which inflect and inform his adamantly affecting art ... More

Henry Grossman, photographer of celebrities and Beatles, dies at 86
NEW YORK, NY.- Henry Grossman, a photographer who was best known for his formal portraits of celebrities and other public figures but who also, less famously, immortalized the Beatles on film in thousands of unscripted antics while juggling a side career as a Metropolitan Opera tenor and a Broadway bit player died on Nov. 27 in Englewood, New Jersey. He was 86. His son, David, said he died in a hospital several months after sustaining injuries in a fall. Grossman produced paradigmatic portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Martha Graham, Leontyne Price, Leonard Bernstein and Nelson Mandela. He photographed new Metropolitan Opera productions for Time magazine and was the official photographer for many Broadway shows. His portraits of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson ... More

When the writing demands talent and discretion, call the ghostwriter
NEW YORK, NY.- The cover of Prince Harrys new memoir has a simple design: a close-up of his familiar face, looking calm and resolute behind a ginger beard. His name is at the top of the frame, and the title, Spare, is at the bottom. What the cover does not include is the name of the books ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer. Perhaps the most exalted practitioner of a little-understood craft, Moehringer aims, ultimately, to disappear. Ghostwriters channel someone elses voice often, someone elses very recognizable voice and construct with it a book that has shape and texture, narrative arc and memorable characters, all without leaving fingerprints. Doing it well requires a tremendous amount of technical skill and an ego that is, at a minimum, flexible. If Im a great collaborative writer, I am a vessel, said Michelle Burford ... More

Within himself, an African photographer finds multitudes
NEW YORK, NY.- In the aftermath of the civil war in Nigeria that devastated his Igbo community, Samuel Fosso was sent in 1972 to live with an uncle who was a shoemaker in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. Dissatisfied with cobbling, Fosso apprenticed with an Igbo photographer down the street. Three years after his arrival, he opened his own portrait studio. He was 13. At the end of the workday, he would finish off a roll of black-and-white film with self-portraits for his grandmother back home, to demonstrate that despite having been a sickly child, he was in robust health. Showing off in front of the painted backdrops he used for his clients, he would put on a tank top and briefs, oversized sunglasses, a jiujitsu costume or fashionably fringed white pants adopting the attire and attitudes of African and African American pop stars ... More

British comedy 'Peter Pan Goes Wrong' plans spring Broadway bow
NEW YORK, NY.- Six years ago, Mischief Theatre arrived on Broadway from Britain with The Play That Goes Wrong, a madcap comedy about a hapless amateur theater company attempting to stage a whodunit. That farce was a success, with outlandish physical comedy that led to a Tony Award for best set. A national tour was also successful, and a production has since been running off-Broadway. Now, Mischief is planning a return to Broadway with Peter Pan Goes Wrong, a sort of sequel in which the same theater company attempts to stage J.M. Barries beloved play about a boy who doesnt grow up. Peter Pan Goes Wrong is scheduled to start performances March 17 and to open April 19 at Broadways Ethel Barrymore Theater. The play is planning a limited run of 16.5 weeks (the unorthodox run length reflects the companys off-kilter brand) ... More

Exhibition brings together an impressive corpus of Lebbeus Woods' drawings
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Friedman Benda is presenting Lebbeus Woods, Ecologies, 1984-1990. Curated by Jennifer Olshin, the exhibition brings together an impressive corpus of Woods drawings, focusing on three building projects created between 1984-1990. Together, these drawings represent a cache of ideas so radical and prescient that even today, works that are over 30 years old, offer students, architects, and thinkers all over the world, a never-ending springboard for architectural imagination. Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012) was one of the most pre-eminent visionary architects of the late 20th / early 21st centuries. A theorist, educator, poet, master draftsman, and architect, it is his extraordinary drawings that are fundamental to his sweeping and radical vision of what architecture could be. Central to that vision was an indomitable ... More

Revisiting a composer's psychedelic Lewis Carroll music
NEW YORK, NY.- Lewis Carrolls influence is all over contemporary culture. Theres the surreal image of going through the looking glass; the look of a Tim Burton movie, including his version of Alice in Wonderland; the skewed angles of Tom Pettys video for Dont Come Around Here No More; the use of a word like galumphing. And, as a new album from New Yorks Albany Symphony demonstrates, there are the Carroll-inspired musical works of composer David Del Tredici, some of which have been captured on two world premiere recordings from the ensemble, led by David Allen Miller. These long-awaited performances of Pop-Pourri (from 1968, and revised in 1973) and Adventures Underground (written in 1971 and revised in 1977) are a booming, psychedelic marvel. In the initial seconds of the first movement of Pop-Pourri, ... More

First CGC-graded video games hit the block in Heritage's January event
DALLAS, TX.- How do you figure the value of a vintage home video game? Given the category's meteoric rise in collectability, it's a serious question for collectors and consigners alike. Children of the 80s and 90s, now grown up and leaning into nostalgia, are at the leading edge of a collectibles market that includes video games, comic books and trading cards, and they rely on certification and grading services to set that universal measure of quality. The service CGC (Certified Guaranty Company), long dominant in comics and more recently trading cards, announced last year that it would launch a video-game division. Video-game collectors and sellers (who also often trade in comics and cards) duly rejoiced. Up until now this burgeoning category was led only by grading services Wata and VGA. Already the leader in the video game market ... More

For critics and fans, nearly 29 years of 'Stomp' memories
NEW YORK, NY.- Stomp, the long-running off-Broadway show, will close in New York on Sunday after nearly 29 years onstage. We asked our critics and New York Times readers to share what the show has meant to them. Below are edited and condensed selections of their responses. Our first sons first show was Stomp, but when he showed up to see it on Labor Day weekend of 1994, management tried to turn him away. Perhaps thats because he was 6 months old. Stomp, an usher explained, less to the child than to his father, was a very loud, in-your-face experience, inappropriate for an infant in a BabyBjÃ¶rn and Crayola-colored shoes. Nevertheless, father and son were grudgingly seated, in one seat. I was not there, but I can report with some confidence, based on family lore and my subsequent experience of their theater habits ... More