MetaFilter posts tagged with centenary

Otherworldly

CheeseDigestsAll — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:56:56 -0800

One hundred years ago today (12/16/08), Maria de los Remedios Varo Uranga, (aka Remedios Varo) was born the Catalan region of north-east Spain. She attended the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, where she was a classmate of Dali, Buñuel, and Lorca. She joined the Surrealist movement in France, but WWII forced her into exile in Mexico where she fully developed her artistic style. Mostly unknown in the US (eclipsed to some degree by the more flamboyance of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera) she was a huge success in Mexico. Her paintings combine the surrealist love of the mystical and unconscious with a delicate sense of the mechanical. A new book has been issued to celebrate her centenary, but in the past decade her work has been a much in the courts as in the museums. The dispute centers on who owns 39 paintings first lent and then given to Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art in 1999 by Walter Gruen, an Austrian and also a World War II refugee and concentration camp survivor who was Varo's supporter, lover, and common-law husband the last 11 years of her life. Varo's niece Beatriz Varo Jimenez of Valencia, Spain, has contended in a Mexico City family court that she is Varo's rightful heir and that Gruen had no right to give the works to the museum. The niece initially won control, but the Attorney General's office nullified the claim in 2006. proclaiming her work a national treasure so the works can not leave Mexico, though the case remains unresolved with respect to actual ownership. Gruen died on October 31 of this year. A exhibition that included these works opened in February at El Museo de Arte Moderno de Ciudad de México (MAM).

Brand, James Brand.

crossoverman — Mon, 26 May 2008 05:12:22 -0800

Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care sees the return of the literary James Bond to the 1960s. Published on May 28th in celebration of creator Ian Fleming's Centenary, the 007 brand name will also be back on the big screen in November - with Daniel Craig's second outing as the British Secret Service Agent in Quantum of Solace. As part of the Fleming Centenary celebrations, there is also a Radio adaptation of Doctor No, an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, a set of James Bond stamps from the Royal Mail and the re-release of Fleming's most famous non-Bond work, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The character of James Bond can also be seen in the Young Bond series of books by Charlie Higson - the fifth and final book of the first series - By Royal Command, due out in September. A graphic novel adaptation of the first Young Bond novel, Silver Fin, will also be released in 2008. And if you ever wondered about M's secretary's life (!), the Moneypenny Diaries trilogy will also be completed this year.

His gift survived it all

Vidiot — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:57:03 -0800

Today is the centenary of W.H. Auden, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Why not commemorate it by attending one of the many events honoring the man and marking the day? Auden wrote about anything and everything; his poems addressed such topics as the advent of World War II ("September 1, 1939", which gained new resonance after 9/11), grief ("Funeral Blues", used to great effect in Four Weddings and a Funeral), physics ("After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics"), commencement addresses ("Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times") unrequited love ("The More Loving One"), and the way life goes on ("Musée des Beaux Arts"). [more inside]