Helen Epstein

Visual Arts Review: Get to Know Pissarro’s People at The Clark

June 26, 2011
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Camille Pissarro lived to be 73. As he aged, he looked more and more like the prototype of a Sephardic Jew. Anti-Semitic rioting accompanied the Dreyfus Affair; the painter found it prudent to stay inside his hotel room in Paris.

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Theater Review: Very Fond Memories of Water

June 19, 2011
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This is a highly satisfying evening of light theater that provokes its audience to bursts of recognition, laughter and sorrow in quick succession.

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Book Review: One Hundred Names for Love

June 18, 2011
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ONE HUNDRED NAMES FOR LOVE is an intermittently engaging and very useful book for millions of partners, parents, children, friends and caretakers of stroke victims as well as anyone else interested in the workings of the mind.

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Book Review: An Intriguing but Annoying House of Exile

May 27, 2011
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Ambitious, by turns captivating and exasperating, this sprawling book is like an enormous photomontage—that popular German art form of the 1920s—made up of textual mosaics from newspaper articles, diary entries, letters, novels, or, on occasion, FBI files.

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Visual Arts News: Gloucester Writer’s Center Celebrates Birthday

May 15, 2011
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Updated Local artist, curator and arts educator Susan Erony, whose text piece on silk “To Gloucester with Love” is a setting of a Charles Olson poem, gave a model of an arts center talk on the evolution of text as visual art.

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Theater Review: A Superb “Educating Rita”

March 21, 2011
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Willy Russell’s play is a keeper. It’s tightly-crafted, emotionally generous, and—most of all—FUN! It provides one hell of a dramatic vehicle for a director attuned to the comedy of “higher” education. Educating Rita by Willy Russell. Staged by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theater, Boston, MA, through April 10. By Helen Epstein…

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Culture Vulture: Reflections on the Jewish Film Festival

March 7, 2011
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Running through March 14, the Jewish Film Festival is a thinking person’s cinema experience with provocative introductions and post-film Q and As.

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Culture Vulture in New York: Three Museums, Three Ways to Reject the Past

March 3, 2011
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The snow is gone, daffodils are coming up in Central Park, and there are terrific shows in all of the major New York museums. The three I saw—at the Guggenheim, the Neue Galerie, and the Whitney —all draw on the early part of the twentieth century when artists in Europe and the United States were…

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Music Commentary: What Are the BSO Trustees Thinking?

February 24, 2011
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I’ve been going to BSO Open Rehearsal for some 50 years at Tanglewood and can’t remember ever having as alienating an experience as I and over one thousand other attendees had Wednesday night at Symphony Hall.

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Opera Review: “Nixon in China” at The Shalin Liu Performance Center

February 14, 2011
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Although its interior says 21st century, the Shalin Liu Performance Center has a homespun, American 19th-century facade that made me think of Mark Twain and the provincial opera houses of the California Gold Rush. Care was taken to reference the original Haskins Building that once housed a clothing store called Madras and the local yacht…

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