April 10, 1963: Firefighters recover a crucifix from Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church. Credit: Detroit News
NEWS
Steve Hindle takes over as research director at the Huntington Library. Pasadena Star- News
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts reports that its exhibit of the touring show “Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musée Picasso, Paris” was a blockbuster, generating record attendance of about 250,000 and $2.4 million in ticket revenue.
Jacqueline Trescott, writing in the Washington Post, says that according to Chmura Economics & Analytics, the show brought $26.6 million to the Richmond area and $30 million to Virginia. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts press release
The show is at the de Young museum in San Francisco through Oct. 9.
The Daily Mirror Recommends
Marney Rich Keenan of the Detroit News has a terrific story about the restoration of a 13-foot crucifix that was salvaged in 1963 after a fire burned Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church.
Keenan says: “Now, 100 years later, the revered Christian symbol and Verbiest family heirloom is once again being rescued. The all-but-forgotten cross — neglected and found on the floor behind an altar at Detroit’s Good Shepherd Church covered by a sheet — will soon be restored to its original beauty. Once refurbished, the crucifix will resume its place of honor for adoration and prayer in a new church home.”
A restoration project at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House Complex includes duplicating the original windows, many of which vanished over the years. Eve Kahn, writing in the New York Times, has the story.
Did the West Make Newspapers, or Did Newspapers Make the West?
On Stanford University’s Rural West Initiative, Krissy Clark and Geoff McGhee write:
“The history of newspapers in the rural West is a history of crisis and triumph in alternation. Failure, and bouncing back from it, have been a tradition. And at a time when there is so much talk about the future of newspapers, this past is worth considering. Ironically, this legacy of turbulence finds rural newspapers relatively unscathed by the calamities currently facing many big city papers. Put another way, there is no crisis in rural Western newspapers; the crisis has always been there. And the papers are stronger for it.”
[Updated at 6:32 a.m.: Archeologists in Israel are exploring the history of the Philistines in the annual digging season . AP]
[General Electric posts its history in photos on Tumblr.]
[48 hours in Bath, England. Reuters]
BOOKS
Writing in the Los Angeles times, Wendy Smith reviews Earl Swift’s “The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.”
Smith says: “Though it gives ample coverage to critics, this is not an anti-highway screed. Swift has a clear-eyed view of the interstate system’s benefits (speed and safety) and drawbacks (homogeneity and ugly off-ramp development).”
Bill Keller reviews John Julius Norwich’s “Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy”in the New York Times.
Keller, The Times’ executive editor, says: “ ‘Absolute Monarchs’ sprawls across Europe and the Levant, over two millenniums, and with an impossibly immense cast: 265 popes (plus various usurpers and antipopes), feral hordes of Vandals, Huns and Visigoths, expansionist emperors, Byzantine intriguers, Borgias and Medicis, heretic zealots, conspiring clerics, bestial inquisitors and more. Norwich manages to organize this crowded stage and produce a rollicking narrative. He keeps things moving at nearly beach-read pace by being selective about where he lingers and by adopting the tone of an enthusiastic tour guide, expert but less than reverent.”
FILM
Stephen Holden reviews Joseph Dorman’s documentary “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness” in the New York Times.
Holden says: “It is a rich, beautifully organized and illustrated modern history of Eastern European Jewry examined through the life and work of the author, born Sholem Rabinovich in Pereyaslav (near Kiev) in 1859.”
JAMESTOWN, N.Y.
Many people still love Lucy, according to Jay Jones, writing in the Los Angeles Times about the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center.
WASHINGTON
The African American Civil War Museum has moved to a 5,000-square-foot former school and plans a reopening celebration starting July 18. Jacqueline Trescott has the story in the Washington Post.
Maurice Barboza and his aunt Lena Ferguson compiled a list of nearly 5,000 black veterans of the Revolutionary War. After letting his project lapse, he is once again trying to get a memorial to early black patriots on the National Mall, according to Derrick Perkins of the Alexandria (Va.) Times. | Washington Post
The National Portrait Gallery is featuring brief lectures once a week highlighting a single portrait. The subjects are July 14, Mamie Eisenhower; July 21, Pedro Martinez, July 28 John Updike. Washington Post
YPSILANTI, MICH.
The Blue Angels will perform at the Thunder Over Michigan Air Show, July 23-24.
LONDON
The National Gallery’s “Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500,” is reviewed by Paul Levy in the Wall Street Journal.
Levy says: If you have a taste for early Italian art—and there are examples in this show ranging from Byzantine through Carlo Crivelli—you will relish an hour spent in this well-installed exhibition of pieces made for churches, now almost entirely in the National Gallery’s own collection.
AND FINALLY
Blue Star Museums are offering free admission to active duty military personnel through Labor Day. Participating museums in California include the Autry National Center, the Hammer Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There’s also a blog.
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