At a Louisiana art opening, I saw a hopeful answer to the headlines
Thanks to “Winter,” a book by Val McDermid that I wrote about last week, I learned about a tradition in McDermid’s native Scotland that helps locals avoid the winter blues.
Every January, the National Gallery of Scotland brings out 38 brilliant watercolors by William Turner for everyone to see. Henry Vaughan, a wealthy patron who donated the pictures long ago, made the January show a condition of his bequest. He thought showing the masterpieces in weak winter light would be the best way to preserve them. Vaughan’s idea had another pleasing result.
During Scotland’s gray winters, Turner’s vivid images give visitors to Edinburgh’s premier art venue a redeeming splash of color. McDermid’s story about Vaughan and those Turner watercolors really resonated with me because every winter I find myself especially drawn to the dazzling palettes in art museums, too. My birthday falls in January, when the holidays are gone and the weeks can fall prey to post-Yuletide blahs. For the past few years now, I’ve answered that challenge by giving myself the gift of an art museum visit. Previous itineraries have included the Dallas Museum of Art, home to a stellar Van Gogh exhibition in 2022, and the LSU Museum of Art, which staged an exhibit of American Impressionist paintings last winter
This year my wife and I flipped the script a bit by visiting an art show to celebrate Valentine’s Day rather than my birthday The LSU Museum of Art obliged with an evening of Champagne, desserts and fellowship to open its new exhibit of Marc Chagall lithographs, which runs through May 24.
Chagall’s lyrical sense of humor and vivid embrace of color make his pictures blaze like a festive hearth, and opening night visitors to the exhibit almost seemed to warm their hands around his masterworks.
“I need this now,” the museum’s executive director, Mark Tullos, said of the exhibit
“This puts me at peace. I’m glad you’re here to enjoy this with us.”
Chagall, who died at 97 in 1985, lived in several places throughout his life, but his most formative years were in France. In a nod to Chagall’s artistic roots, Rudolphe Sambou, consul general of France in New Orleans, was on hand to offer remarks, too.
“Culture is not an ornament for prosperous times,” Sambou told listeners. To the contrary, Sambou pointed out, it’s a sustaining part of our shared humanity. I thought about Sambou’s words as patrons sipped bubbly from plastic cups and milled around the lithographs, which were mostly conceived to explore romantic love. In a season of grim headlines, it was comforting to see so many people gathered at an event that joyously celebrated matters of the heart. For Chagall, who had suffered in life but answered its pain with beautiful images of soaring spirituality art wasn’t merely an escape. It was a way to summon the best in us, something we all need now more than ever Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.
Louisiana actor was in a Super Bowl commercial. No one at theparty noticed.
BY JAN RISHER Staff writer
When Elliot Hamilton’s face appeared in a Super Bowl commercial last month, no one at the Midtown Manhattan party where he was watching the game noticed. They were talking about Bad Bunny’s halftime show Hamilton, 31, had known the advertisement would air during the game, but he had no idea
when. By the fourth quarter, he was starting to suspect that something had gone wrong. “Was I lied to?” he wondered. When the advertisement came on, it was the culmination of years of auditioning and nearmisses — his first commercial to air nationally But around him, the conversation continued uninterrupted.
“I said, ‘Who was that guy?’ to my friends, but they were still talking about Bad Bunny,” Hamilton said.
Within seconds, though, his phone began lighting up. Texts poured in from Louisiana — from high school friends in Lafayette, from Loyola classmates all over, from his family who had been sworn to secrecy At 31, the Lafayette native had just made his national advertising debut on the biggest television night of the year
Two weeks later, not much had changed.
BY RACHEL MIPRO Contributing writer
