Word: metropolitane
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Like offhand remarks, artists' sketches sometimes have a persisting value of their own. Last week both Chicago's Art Institute and Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum featured big shows of drawings. Together they provided two backstage glimpses at Europe's art history...
Manhattan's Metropolitan featured 70 drawings from the 15th to the 19th Century. Standouts were six casual masterpieces by the 15th-Century Florentines, who drew mostly in sepia and silverpoint (indelible). Trained to make each stroke right the first time, men like Michelangelo, Filippino Lippi and Verrochio looked long and hard before translating their models' flesh into thin lines. Their looser chalk studies, like Michelangelo's Libyan Sibyl, showed the same supreme accuracy...
Rembrandt (1606-69), less interested in objective accuracy and less patient, enclosed the general looks of things with parenthetical stabs of his pen, gave them loose cloaks of broadly brushed shadow. His eight sketches at the Metropolitan (a woman hanging from a gibbet, a burgher sitting on a step, etc.) described not only what he saw but what he felt about...
...sang them and how much he got paid. Says he: "I have done a quarter of a million dollars worth of Tristans since 1930. Also 3,340 English pounds, 3,200 reichsmarks, 332,000 francs, and 4,000 Danish kroner worth." At $1,000 a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House, he has figured that his profits, after taxes, are 14? on the dollar...
...probably the only person who has bothered to count how many words (6,984) there are in the role of Siegfried. This week the Met, which has also been keeping track, more roughly, of Lauritz Melchior, put on a show to mark his 20th anniversary at the Metropolitan. In a special Sunday night performance, Melchior sang the most ambitious program of his career-one act each from three Wagnerian operas. Four sopranos alternated in singing with him. The demonstration proved, to the satisfaction of all present, that Melchior is not only the most durable but also the greatest of Wagnerians...