Paul McCartney's Tribute to John Lennon (SNL, December 11, 2010)

When Overlooked Art Turns Celebrity

New York Times
December 13, 2010

The painting was beautiful, just not admired. Then suddenly, after more than four centuries, it was. It acquired a pedigree. The art hadn’t changed, but its stature had.

And there it was the other day, propped on an easel in the Prado’s sunny, pristine conservation studio here, like a patient on the table in an operating theater. The most remarkable old master picture to have turned up in a long time revealed its every blemish and bruise, but also its virtues.

In September the Prado made news. It announced that this painting, “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day,” a panoramic canvas showing a mountain of revelers drinking the first wine of the season, and a few of them suffering its consequences, was by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Only 40-odd paintings by this 16th-century Flemish Renaissance master survive. This one, from around 1565, came from a private seller, whose ancient family, unaware and clearly unconcerned, had kept it for eons in the proverbial dark corridor, in Córdoba, where it accumulated dirt. Then the Prado conservators took a look. What seemed to be the artist’s signature turned up beneath layers of grime and varnish.

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A detail of the painting, showing a peasant celebrating during a festival for the first wine of the season.

Vintage Photos from Robert McCabe's Trips to Greece in the 1950s

Rhodes 1954. This marble Aphrodite, in the museum in Rhodes, was found in the sea.

Huffington Post
December 12, 2010

Legendary photographer Robert A. McCabe has compiled what are, in essence, stunning photographic journals of Cuba and Antarctica, among other places.

McCabe also traveled as a Princeton undergraduate to Greece in June 1954, witnessing firsthand soaring unemployment (at the time of his visit, unemployment was hovering around 30%) and poor wages (those who did work were making a little less than a dollar a day). McCabe recalls in his introduction to his book, Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land, 1954-1965, how unspoiled the landscape of Greece felt before all the tourists and development starting happening, which has forever changed the landscape in Athens.

He traveled extensively through the Aegean after that, from 1954-1965, to document fully the experiences, people and places there (he was, in particular, interested in Greece's iconic architecture).

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Sounion 1955. At the temple of Poseidon.

Epeiros 1961. Young friends.

Athens 1955. The Agora and the Acropolis from Observatory Road.

Athens 1955. Acropolis. The Propylaia from the Parthenon.

Athens 1955. The Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion.

Serifos 1963. A church in Chora.

The Aegean 1954. On the bow of a caique.

Mykonos 1955. At a baptismal festival.

John Lennon (1940-1980)