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      in Music

      A Sibling Rivalry Divides Harry Bertoia’s Legacy

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      Celia Bertoia’s father — the famous sculptor and not-so-famous musician Harry Bertoia — had been dead 30 years when she asked a psychic how to handle his legacy.The youngest of three children, she had long seemed to be her father’s favorite: a confidante who, as a child, would cut his hair outdoors on their forest-fronting property among the idyllic valleys of Eastern Pennsylvania. But after his death in 1978, she dodged the family business of welding together mountains of metal into behemoth public-art installations and “sounding sculptures” that made music. She became a real-estate agent in Colorado, then the owner of a Montana service that provided timing for road races.When she entered her 50s, Celia decided it was time to help manage the thousands of pieces her father had left. Her mother, Brigitta Valentiner Bertoia, had died in 2007. The next year, Celia consulted the psychic, who, knowing none of the back story, described “beautiful papers with abstract designs” — which Celia took as a reference to her father’s monotypes — and his lung cancer.Harry Bertoia is buried near the barn that houses his sounding sculptures, and under his biggest gong.Aaron Richter for The New York Times“She said: ‘The world is ready for these now. You should get these out,’” Celia, now 68, recalled in a phone conversation from the Utah office park that houses the Harry Bertoia Foundation, the nonprofit she started in 2013. “She gave me the direction.”Following the psychic’s guidance reignited the childhood rivalry between Celia and her older brother, Val, who had spent much of the previous three decades restoring, appraising and emulating his father’s sculptures in the workshop Harry established in 1952. Accusations of theft, forgery, avarice and betrayal erupted, prompting a bitter three-year lawsuit that led, in 2016, to the division of Bertoia’s most fabled work: a centuries-old stone barn stuffed with nearly 100 of his so-called Sonambients, intricate but austere sculptures he welded from rods of beryllium copper and played like a virtuoso.Many families struggle with issues of inheritance. But during the last decade, the Bertoias have learned how complicated those issues can be when that inheritance is unique.“When I first heard the sculptures, I went, ‘Wow, what is that?’ Their suppleness is so inviting,” said the composer Mark Grey, who captured their sounds with a mobile studio in 2002 to build simulacrums for the Kronos Quartet. “His sculptures leapfrog electronic music technology to create a different window into what we think sound is.”In late 2021, Sotheby’s auctioned 20 of Bertoia’s Sonambients (a rough portmanteau of sound and ambient) for nearly $6 million, prices that were in some cases ten times their estimates. Then Jack White’s Third Man Records reissued the 11 rare LPs Bertoia had recorded in the barn — recursive chimes that linger like church bells, powerful drones that roar like doom metal, tapped gongs that sing like seraphic choirs. The first pressing sold out in days. Last year, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted the first domestic Bertoia retrospective in nearly half a century. There, musicians including Nels Cline and Craig Taborn played the Sonambients in a series of concerts.Those events were all partnerships with the foundation, part of Celia’s efforts to send her father’s work out into the world. Val, though, hopes to bring the world to the work. As children, they fought, and as adults, they have competing visions of their father’s legacy.“Celia and Val have the utmost respect for Harry,” Lesta Bertoia, the oldest sibling, who excused herself from the lawsuit, said in an interview. “But they have never had good communication. Now they can make up one another’s motives.”Val Bertoia with Melissa Strawser, his partner, at the Bertoia barn. Aaron Richter for The New York TimesTHE MORNING AFTER the Sotheby’s auction, 100 miles southwest of Manhattan at the family home in rural Pennsylvania, Val Bertoia bounded around what he called the “Sonambient Barn” with a devilish grin. He swatted and swiped row after row of musical sculptures ­— half of them made by his father, half by his own hand. The place shook with tectonic power, long southerly windows buzzing like beehives. His longtime partner, the artist Melissa Strawser, beamed.The Bertoia family arrived in tiny Bally, Pa., at the dawn of the 1950s. Harry was an accomplished jewelry and furniture designer who had worked with Charles and Ray Eames. He’d taken a job at the modern design bastion Knoll, where he developed the celebrated Diamond chair. Then the sound of a bending wire captured his attention and fired his imagination.An archival photograph of Harry Bertoia with his sculptures, and at left, a mallet used to activate them.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesBertoia’s grave in Pennsylvania.Aaron Richter for The New York TimesDuring his final 20 years, Bertoia developed an army of minimalist sculptures with long rods that waved like fields of grain, producing tidal washes of luminous overtones or pointillist symphonies. He added a second floor to the hay barn, where his desk remains; the rest of the barn functioned as a giant resonant chamber, filled with a rotating cast of 100 sculptures.“Being in the presence of those sounds brought me into a different world,” Celia said. “He would move around the room like a cat. He knew those sculptures better than he knew his family.”Val began working for his father at his sprawling, cluttered shop in the center of Bally in 1971. Their relationship was sometimes strained, but Val said he internalized his father’s methods. “Harry was my idol, my hero, my superman,” he said.After his father’s death, Val tended to the business. He continued making sounding sculptures, incorporating whimsy, a quality he felt his father had shunned, and numbering every piece sequentially. (After 45 years, he is nearing 2,700.) Harry Bertoia acolytes accused Val of being a charlatan who plagiarized, charged for tours and inflated appraisals.“I realized I could not replace Harry Bertoia,” Val, now 73, said. “I had my own personality and discoveries.”Harry Bertoia’s sounding sculptures are also housed at the foundation that bears his name in St. George, Utah.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesThis loose arrangement seemed to work until Celia launched her foundation. She’d been away from the sculptures for so long that she asked to shadow Val for two weeks, to get reacquainted with their dynamics and his own work. He agreed, then demanded $10,000; he admitted this was to scare her off. When Celia mentioned a few sculptures she’d requested years earlier, Val said they were gone. He’d split the proceeds only with Lesta, the sister who lived nearby. Celia hired a lawyer, battling Val over what belonged where until they settled in 2016.Celia and Lesta received 73 of the remaining 92 Sonambients. Val kept the barn, their childhood home, the workshop, and the other 19 sounding sculptures. Val described the day he spent crating his father’s sculptures as “emotionally swirling, like a hurricane.” For Celia, it was “a knife in the belly.” Lesta watched from the sidelines, telling them they were again behaving like children.A DECADE AGO, Bertoia’s musical legacy found an unexpected champion. John Brien is the owner of Important Records, a Massachusetts-based label that had documented the experimental recesses of international musical scenes for a dozen years, like harsh noise from Japan and New Zealand and graceful drones from England and Australia. He knew of Bertoia’s chairs and even kept a photo of the designer above his desk. He was embarrassed when he stumbled on a link to Bertoia’s music in 2012; how had he missed it?“There was nothing I could compare it to,” Brien said. “I wanted to know as much as I could.”Brien pitched the idea of a box set to the Bertoias, who consented despite the lawsuit. He began visiting the barn, where Harry’s Sony microphones still hung, to collect photos, slides and sketches. Released in 2016, the 11-disc “Sonambient” was the first compilation of Harry’s albums.Brien has since emerged as one of Bertoia’s most steadfast advocates, restoring and converting nearly 200 hours of unheard tape of music made on the sculptures. He has unearthed novel techniques within those recordings, including a primitive form of overdubbing. Brien said he can now identify several sculptures by sound alone.Amid the turmoil, Brien strove to be inclusive. He solicited essays from all three children. The art historian Beverly Twitchell, who organized Bertoia’s first two exhibitions while he was alive and wrote a definitive biography, contributed archival photos and guided Brien beyond the drama. And when the much-larger Third Man suggested partnering on a vinyl edition, defraying the massive cost of pressing such a large set, he agreed.“I wanted to reach a new audience unfamiliar with this music,” said Brien. “This was the way.”Celia Bertoia, the artist’s younger daughter, at the foundation.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesBrien’s work suggests an ideal path forward for the Bertoia family — partnerships, not divisions. But Celia and Val still seem hesitant to share resources, even while mounting exhaustive projects to document their father’s work.“Celia’s goal is to gain money, where I have the goal of gaining people,” Val said. (According to financial records, Celia has not drawn a salary as the foundation’s executive director for several years.) “We have two different directions — the foundation and the ‘Soundation.’ The Soundation is about how people can feel healed.”For five years, and with the help of Sotheby’s, the foundation worked to sell 60 of Celia and Lesta’s 73 Sonambients to a museum willing to build a new barn. Practicalities quashed the plan. Celia is now focused on a catalogue raisonné, a complete accounting of Harry’s work. That’s difficult to accomplish for an artist who never signed his creations, and harder still when a feud makes some of the pieces untouchable.“The catalog will survive far beyond any of the siblings,” she said. “It will ensure Harry’s work will live on.”Bertoia’s works at the foundation in Utah, which operates separately from Val Bertoia’s collection in Pennsylvania.Saeed Rahbaran for The New York TimesVal has filled the half-empty barn with sounding sculptures of his own, opposite his father’s remaining Sonambients. Moving among them, he raved about the possibilities of what he called “the metaverse” — an augmented-reality program that will allow anyone to visit the barn virtually and play. Brien had once floated the idea, but Val and Strawser pursued it when the pandemic shuttered in-person tours.Grey, the composer, has started developing the program. It is not a question of technology, he insisted, but funding. “To see the barn in all its glory — the microphones hanging off rafters, cobwebs all over them — was remarkable, but time moves on,” Grey said. “We have the opportunity to keep this art alive.”When Twitchell, the Bertoia biographer, learned the barn’s contents would be scattered, she was sad. But practical considerations offset her disappointment. The aging barn has no security system or fire sprinklers, little parking or insurance. Even if the instruments are no longer in the same place, she said, they will at least survive.“Harry would like the idea of multiple approaches to his work,” Twitchell said. “No one would say ‘this is the only way to think about this stuff.’” More

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      in Theater

      The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks

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      ONE OF THE world’s oldest surviving theatrical arts, Japanese Noh grew out of various forms of popular entertainment at temples, shrines and festivals, including seasonal rites offered by villagers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. During the Muromachi period (1336-1573), those varied productions were codified into an elaborately contrived entertainment for military leaders, some of whom, like the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also acted in Noh. Presented using minimal props on a stage comprising a roof, four pillars and a bridge way, the plays dramatize myths and tales from traditional Japanese literature with monologues, sparse bamboo flute melodies, periodic percussion and tonal chanting. Often, supernatural beings take human form. The pace can be almost hypnotically slow, with the colors and elaborate embroidery of the actors’ costumes indicating their characters’ age and status.But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Noh is the carved masks worn by performers. Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the archetypes for the masks made today, says the historian Eric Rath, who specializes in premodern Japan; many represent different characters, depending on the play. Master mask carvers have long been celebrated for their ability to create a static face that seems to come alive, its expression changing with the angle of the performer’s head and the way the light hits its features. While many Japanese people today have never seen a live Noh performance, the white visage and red lips of a Ko-omote mask (one of a few denoting a young woman) or the bulging golden eyes of the horned Hannya (one of the most famous of the demon masks, representing a wrathful, jealous woman) are both intrinsic to Japan’s visual culture.Nakamura in her Noh-inspired mask “Okina” (2022).Before World War II, only men were allowed to perform Noh professionally; now, some women play leading roles. But until recently, mask making, in which blocks of hinoki cypress carved in high relief are hollowed out, then primed with a white mixture of crushed oyster shells and animal glue — with mineral pigment for lips and cheeks, and gold powder or copper to give the teeth and eyes of masks depicting supernatural beings an otherworldly glow — was a craft largely handed down from father to son.THAT’S CHANGED SOMEWHAT in the years since the Kyoto-based Mitsue Nakamura, 76, started learning the craft in the 1980s. When she began, she knew of only one other woman in the field, but this year, all four of her current apprentices, some of whom study for as long as 10 years, are female. Some adhere to the traditional archetypes and techniques, while others radically reinterpret them.For purists, Nakamura says, a true Noh mask is never entirely decorative: It has to be used onstage, and its maker must hew precisely to a narrow set of centuries-old parameters. Today, Nakamura says, actors prize masks that are antiques or appear to be. Her pieces, each of which takes about a month to complete, often look older than they are thanks to the shadows she smudges into the contours of the face, or a weathering she achieves by scratching the paint with bamboo.Nakamura wearing her mask “Ikkaku Sennin” (2020).In 2018, the Kanagawa-based playwright and screenwriter Lilico Aso, 48, came to see Nakamura’s process firsthand because she was interested in developing a character who was a Noh mask carver; instead, she became a mask carver herself, drawn, she says, to the idea of being “both a craftsman and an artist.” She’s been studying with Nakamura ever since and, last fall, in a show titled “Noh Mask Maker Mitsue Nakamura and Her Four Disciples” at Tokyo’s Tanaka Yaesu gallery, she exhibited a series of four masks called “Time Capsule” inspired by celebrities and fictional characters. Rihanna became an earth goddess with pearlescent blue lips and eye shadow. Ariana Grande morphed into the moon princess Kaguya, who, in an ancient tale, rejects all her mortal suitors and returns to her lunar home; in Aso’s rendering, she has the high, soft eyebrows of a Noh beauty.For some female Noh artisans, subtle changes to traditional forms emerge from a deep personal connection. Keiko Udaka, 43, who also works in Kyoto, grew up steeped in Noh, with a father who was both a performer and a mask maker. She began studying with him when she was a teenager; in 2021, after he died, she took over an unfinished Noh play he was working on, commissioned by a town in Ehime prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. While one of her brothers completed the script, Udaka created a mask for the main character, a folk hero who starved to death while cultivating barley for future generations, imbuing it with the features of their late father. Such homages aren’t an uncommon practice among Noh artisans, and the allure is obvious: As Udaka says, a painstakingly crafted carving is more indelible than a photo. “Memories can be recorded too easily in many places now,” she says, “and they don’t remain in our minds.”Nakamura in her “Ryoshuku no Tsuki” (2022) mask.While Udaka’s departures from tradition are subtle, those of the Tokyo-based Shuko Nakamura (no relation to the Kyoto mask maker), 34, are unignorable. Inspired by Noh history, folklore and her own imagination, she makes masks out of modeling clay and paper rather than wood. One mask depicts an old woman, a crown of blue-black crows circling above her forlorn face, alluding to the ubasute story — which appears in both folk tales and Noh — of an elderly family member abandoned in the forest. With deep smile lines, a long horsehair beard and bushy pompom eyebrows, another mask honors the form of Okina, a spirit who appears as an old man. A gnarled pine tree sprouts from the mask’s head in place of hair; at the roots nestle a pair of turtles. The conifers and reptiles, she says, are references to the characteristic illustrations on the fan Okina holds when he dances.Out of respect for the ancient art, Shuko Nakamura refers to her creations as “creative masks” rather than Noh masks, but the tribute is clear. And even a traditional mask maker like Mitsue Nakamura sees the place for works that expand the boundaries of Noh’s conservative culture. “Of course, the best masks are those used onstage,” she says, “but I think we should also make Noh masks that can stand on their own.”Photo assistants: Megan Collante, Orion Johnson More

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      in Music

      36 Hours in Nashville: Things to Do and See

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      1 p.m.
      Stroll the strip, then kick off your shoes
      Roughly a mile south of downtown is the 12South neighborhood, which includes a walkable corridor of shops, restaurants and cafes; it’s an easy excursion to grab a quick gift, a latte or lunch. Plunder the vintage goods at Savant, at the north end of the strip, and then swing by Draper James — the actor Reese Witherspoon’s brick-and-mortar salute to all that is Southern and genteel — which sells clothes, home goods and Ms. Witherspoon’s book club picks. For lunch, grab a few of Bartaco’s light-yet-satisfying roasted-cauliflower tacos ($3.25 each). At the corridor’s south end, White’s Mercantile sells everything from books to organic dog treats to candlewick trimmers. Finally, Sevier Park, next door, is where you can kick off your shoes and lie on the grass, but be wary of cold noses: This park is dog-friendly. More

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      in Movies

      Pieces of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s Life Together Head to Auction

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      More than 300 items that belonged to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward will be sold in June in a series of auctions run by Sotheby’s in New York.Shackles from the film “Cool Hand Luke”; a script from the 1963 comedy “A New Kind of Love”; the wedding dress that Joanne Woodward wore the day she married Paul Newman in 1958.These artifacts, along with some 300 others, tell the story of a union between two of Hollywood’s most enduring film stars that lasted more than a half century. It began in 1953 and lasted until Mr. Newman, a magnetic titan of the screen, died in 2008 at the age of 83. Ms. Woodward, 93, a formidable talent, has kept a private life since she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007.The objects will also take on another kind of value later this year, when they are put up for sale in a series of auctions by Sotheby’s. If previous demand for Mr. Newman’s belongings is any measure, the events are likely to be lucrative: A Rolex he owned sold in 2017 for a record $17.8 million. Three years later, another of Mr. Newman’s watches sold for more than $5.4 million.The auctions, which will take place both online and in person in New York, follow the recent release of “The Last Movie Stars,” a six-part HBO Max documentary series directed by Ethan Hawke and based on audio transcripts of interviews with the couple’s friends, colleagues and family members.Mr. Newman’s posthumous memoir, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” was also published last year.Putting a Price Tag on ArtCard 1 of 6Hot commodities. More

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      in Television

      How Hard Is It to Paint Like Vermeer? TV Contestants Find Out.

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      Amateur and professional artists are competing to recreate some of the old master’s lost works in a Dutch reality show that coincides with a blockbuster Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam.Here’s the assignment: Recreate a painting that doesn’t exist, based only on a description jotted down centuries ago. And also: Make it look like a Vermeer.That’s the starting bell for a Dutch reality TV show, in which two professional painters and dozens of amateur artists compete to reinvent the lost works of the 17th-century master. The results are judged by Vermeer experts from the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, and from the Mauritshuis, a collection of old masters in The Hague.The show, “The New Vermeer” (“De Nieuwe Vermeer”), which began on Feb. 12, is timed to coincide with a blockbuster exhibition of the painter’s work at the Rijksmuseum, featuring the largest collection of his works ever shown. But the hourlong TV show is aimed, in part, at viewers who might not feel comfortable walking into a museum.The mash-up of highbrow culture and mass entertainment has been an instant sensation in the Netherlands, with 1.3 million viewers (in a country of 17 million) tuning in for the first episode. The six-episode series ends March 19.Two contestants, Maudy Alferink and Nard Kwast, center, conferring with Abbie Vandivere, right, a conservator from the Mauritshuis museum who is another of the TV show’s judges.Omroep MAX“This program scores better than most of the other programs we broadcast — documentaries and drama series included,” said Jan Slagter, chief executive of Omroep MAX, which broadcasts the series. “What’s important is that it’s about art and culture, but that it’s made in a very accessible way,” he noted.The success of “The New Vermeer” reflects surging interest in the artist during the Rijksmuseum run, said Pieter Roelofs, the exhibition’s curator and one of the TV show’s judges. “The idea that people from all around the globe are arriving for this exhibition makes the Dutch understand that this is really something special,” Roelofs added. Vermeer “is beloved, and now people want to know more.”The museum sold out the more than 450,000 tickets for the Vermeer show in less than four days — a response that Roelofs compared to a pop concert or sporting event.Roelofs said that the museum was working on finding ways to release more tickets, either by extending opening hours or by allowing more visitors through the doors for each time slot. Additional tickets will be released on March 6, and they’re likely to be snatched up quickly.The Rijksmuseum sold out the more than 450,000 tickets for its Vermeer show in less than four days.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThose lucky enough to get in will see 28 Vermeer paintings, about three-quarters of the 35 or so works that still exist. It is known that Vermeer painted at least six more paintings, which have subsequently been lost. Some of them haven’t been seen since the 17th century, and one was stolen from a museum decades ago and never recovered.The premise of “The New Vermeer” is for contemporary artists to bring those works back to life.There are two categories of artists who compete. For each episode, producers have chosen two professional painters, who go head-to-head to create a painting that looks like something Vermeer might have painted. They were given four months to complete the task, with guidance from art experts and curators who provided them with tips and clues about Vermeer’s painting techniques, materials, and the props he used.Each episode also features four amateur artists who create modern interpretations of the missing work, competing in what they call the “free category.” They can work in any style they wish, and the resulting images are judged on how well they reflect the spirit of Vermeer’s work.Two artworks — one from each category — are selected as winners in each episode. The judges are Roelofs, from the Rijksmuseum, and Abbie Vandivere, a Mauritshuis paintings conservator who has spent years studying that museum’s most famous item, “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”The show’s experts give contestants tips and clues about Vermeer’s painting techniques, materials, and the props he used.Mark de Blok/MAXWe know about five of the missing Vermeer works only because they were described in inventories or auction records from around the time of the artist’s death, in 1675, Vandivere said.Two famous urban scenes painted by Vermeer still exist, for example: “View of Delft” and “The Little Street,” both currently on display in Amsterdam. But a 17th-century auction catalog notes that he painted a third, described only as “a view of some houses in Delft.” In Episode 2, the contestants attempted to recreate this work, which they referred to as “The Second Little Street.”Another Vermeer painting, “The Concert,” hung in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until 1990, when it was stolen in one of the world’s largest unsolved art heists. It has never been recovered. In Episode 4, artists will try to recreate that work based on photographs.Slagter, the broadcasting executive, said that focusing on Vermeer’s missing paintings allowed viewers to engage their imaginations. “Everyone who watches the show, young and old, can use their own fantasy to imagine a painting that doesn’t exist,” he said.Part of the fun of the show is cheering on the amateurs, who hail from across the Netherlands and work in different styles, using stained glass, printmaking and even Lego. To recreate the Vermeer street scene, one artist used small pieces of driftwood; another arranged knickknacks and childhood toys into a three-dimensional assemblage.The weekly live TV broadcasts are supplemented with a podcast, an online gallery of all the works featured on the show and an invitation to viewers to send in their own contemporary interpretations of Vermeer, which are shared on the show’s website.The six winning amateur artworks from each episode will be displayed at the Museum Prinsenhof, which is housed in a former church in Delft, Vermeer’s hometown. The winning paintings created by the professional artists will be exhibited at the Mauritshuis.Nard Kwast, a painter from the central Dutch city of Apeldoorn, won the professional category in the first episode with an oil painting of a domestic scene that Roelof said reminded him of Vermeer’s famous “The Milkmaid.”“What’s really Vermeer-like in this picture is the light, and you’ve done that so beautifully,” Vandivere commented when judging the work.Nard Kwast’s reimagining of a lost Vermeer painting that won him the professional category in Episode 1.DeNieuweVermeer.nlIn an interview, Kwast said that he had been fascinated with 17th-century painting techniques since the age of 8. He now works as a painter who produces pieces in the style of the 17th-century masters, creating replicas of paintings by Rembrandt and Ferdinand Bol, for example, on commission for private clients.Kwast said that he couldn’t really imagine a higher honor than to see his contemporary painting hang alongside the old masters.“It wasn’t my neighbor who was saying my work was good — it was experts from the Rijksmuseum and Mauritshuis,” he said. And to have his work compared to Vermeer’s? “This is the biggest compliment you can possibly get,” he said. More

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      in Music

      V&A Museum To Open David Bowie Archive

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      The London museum will house more than 80,000 items from the star’s music career at a new David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts. It will open in 2025.Over a 55-year career, David Bowie redefined the essence of cool by embracing an outsider status. Now, Ziggy Stardust and all of the musician’s other personas will have a permanent home.The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will house more than 80,000 items from Bowie’s career at a new David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts, the museum announced on Thursday. The center, which will be at a new outpost of the museum called the V&A East Storehouse at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in the Stratford section of London, will open in 2025.“With David’s life’s work becoming part of the U.K.’s national collections, he takes his rightful place amongst many other cultural icons and artistic geniuses,” Bowie’s estate said in a statement. “David’s work can be shared with the public in ways that haven’t been possible before, and we’re so pleased to be working closely with the V&A to continue to commemorate David’s enduring cultural influence.”Bowie died in 2016, two days after his 69th birthday.In a statement, the museum said that the acquisition and the creation of the center had been made possible by a combined donation of 10 million pounds (about $12 million) from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group, adding that the donation would support “the ongoing conservation, research and study of the archive.” Warner Music bought Bowie’s entire songwriting catalog last year.Beyond 70,000 images of Bowie taken by the likes of Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton, the collection includes letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, other photography, film, music videos, set designs, instruments, album artwork, awards, and of course, fashion.Many of those will be familiar to fans: Bowie’s ensembles worn as his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust; Kansai Yamamoto’s costumes for the “Aladdin Sane” tour in 1973; the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and the British designer Alexander McQueen for the 1997 “Earthling” album cover.Handwritten lyrics for songs like “Fame,” Heroes” and “Ashes to Ashes” will also be on display, including examples of Bowie’s cut-up technique. The artist looked to William S. Burroughs, the postmodern author, as inspiration to cut up written text and rearrange it into lyrics.Cut-up lyrics for “Blackout” from “Heroes,” recorded in 1977 by David Bowie.The David Bowie ArchiveIn 1997, Bowie told The Times that he worked with that method “about 40 percent of the time,” which, in that year, meant using a Macintosh computer.“I feed into it the fodder, and it spews out reams of paper with these arbitrary combinations of words and phrases,” he said.Bowie’s personal writing and “intimate notebooks from every year of Bowie’s life and career” and “unrealized projects” will also be on display, many of which have never been made available to the public, the museum said.The permanent collection comes 10 years after the museum created “David Bowie Is,” a vast survey that traced the beginnings of David Jones, a saxophone and blues player growing up in London, as he became David Bowie, a transcendent figure in music, art and fashion. The traveling exhibit made its final stop in 2018 in New York, the city Bowie called home at the end of his life.“I believe everyone will agree with me when I say that when I look back at the last 60 years of post-Beatles music, that if only one artist could be in the V&A it should be David Bowie,” Nile Rodgers, a longtime collaborator, said in a statement. “He didn’t just make art. He was art!” More

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      in Music

      The Raincoats’ Gina Birch Goes Solo (and Still Makes the Floor Rattle)

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      At 67, a member of one of post-punk’s most influential bands is releasing “I Play My Bass Loud” and reflecting on decades of work pushing boundaries.In 1978, shortly after Gina Birch first moved to London to attend the Hornsey College of Art, she often found herself wanting to scream.In her more provincial Nottingham hometown, she had always been confident, but London made her feel naïve and lonely. Then 22, Birch lived in a squat without hot water, where the dirty dishes piled perpetually in the sink. Art was her salvation.She had just begun writing off-kilter songs with her classmate Ana da Silva, in their newly formed and soon to be influential post-punk band the Raincoats. The filmmaker Derek Jarman had recently screened his hallucinatory Super 8 shorts at Hornsey, and Birch was inspired. So one day she stepped in front of her camera, framed her own face in a tight close-up, and for the entire three-minute duration of a Super 8 cartridge, she simply screamed.More than four decades later, that sound is still echoing. The short will appear as part of the upcoming exhibit “Women in Revolt!” at the Tate Britain later this year. A riotous painting based off one of its stills, which she titled “Loneliness,” hung in London’s Gallery 46 as a part of her inaugural solo show as a painter in October 2022. Now, it is also the cover art of her spirited LP “I Play My Bass Loud” — her debut solo album, which she is releasing this Friday at age 67.“I feel very amazed and grateful for it,” Birch said of her late-career burst of creativity, speaking on a video call from her home in North London, where she lives with her husband, Mike Holdsworth, who works in the music industry. (Their two daughters were away at college.) “But a lot of the time I’ve been building toward this, because I’ve just been doing. I’m a doer.”Seated at her kitchen table in a goldenrod blouse and Kelly green sweater, Birch dotted her conversation with goofy wit, an irrepressible grin and the occasional “blimey!” Her strawberry-blonde hair formed an unruly halo around her face.“Once Gina gets into her stride, there’s no stopping her,” said the producer Martin Glover, known as Youth, a founding member of Killing Joke who worked on “I Play My Bass Loud.” Youth has collaborated with an impressive array of British artists throughout his career — including Paul McCartney, with whom he formed the duo the Fireman in 1993 — and considers Birch “up there with the best.” In a video call from his home in Andalusia, Spain, he praised her “open-wound honesty and complete fearlessness in expressing herself, and her failings of herself. I’ve rarely seen that so close up before.”The bass “provides different functions in different music, and as you get more into it, you realize its strengths and its gorgeousness,” Birch said.Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesLast year Birch illustrated a book of the singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten’s lyrics; the two met through Holdsworth in 2011, and Van Etten called her “so inspiring” in an email, adding that she admires Birch’s inclination “to not do what’s easy or expected” and “to let us continue to watch her learn as a part of her art.”Birch sings, writes and plays bass like someone who cannot help but be herself, and her distinct, sometimes contradictory personality oozes out of every track. She’s silly but also dead serious; she can be self-deprecating in one breath and thrillingly self-assured the next. Her solo songs likewise represent a tonal and thematic hodgepodge. “Digging Down” is a dub-inspired screed against — among other urban disruptions — construction noise. “I Am Rage” is an ode to female anger sung in a lilting, ironic whisper. The abstract “And Then It Happened” and the bouncy single “Wish I Was You” represent two completely different sonic approaches to one of the album’s central concerns: the hard-won and sometimes ecstatic self-acceptance that comes with age.Still, Birch and her bandmates in the Raincoats always had a certain unassuming chutzpah, even when they were just starting out. “There’d been articles going, ‘The Raincoats say they rehearse,’” she said. “But we did rehearse! We just didn’t rehearse in the way that people thought rehearsal should be. We weren’t sergeant majors playing to a metronome. We were feeling our way through in an organic way, and embracing the mistakes as we went along.”The Raincoats telegraphed an infectious, do-it-yourself ethos. “What we wore was odd,” Birch said, recalling their “messy hair and our inside-out clothes and our spots with stripes.” She continued, “What we sounded like was difficult. We were not pandering to a common taste. We were trying to do our own thing. But we had a hard-core fan base who got us.”Though the group was most active from the late 1970s to its first breakup in the mid-1980s, that fan base has grown exponentially over time. Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney and Angel Olsen have all cited them as formative influences.The Raincoats’ most famous fan, though, was also one of the most vehement: Kurt Cobain, who included a rapturous ode to the Raincoats and their self-titled debut album in the liner notes to the 1992 Nirvana album “Incesticide.” (A letter and a signed copy of the record that da Silva mailed him after they met in London, Cobain wrote, “was one of the few really important things that I’ve been blessed with since becoming an untouchable boy genius.”) Cobain’s adulation helped get the band’s first three albums back in print, but his sudden death thwarted a plan for the Raincoats to open for Nirvana on tour.Birch sings, writes and plays bass like someone who cannot help but be herself, and her distinct, sometimes contradictory personality oozes out of every track. Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesBirch never met Cobain, but she has felt his presence guiding the Raincoats’ legacy. As she put it, with a wry tenderness, “I do feel like he’s watching us from the big attic in the sky.”Despite the earnestness of Cobain’s fandom, the Raincoats’ essence resists being defined in relation to a famous male frontman. They were at their core communal, anti-hierarchical and matter-of-factly feminist, tacitly encouraging other women who felt like they didn’t belong in the macho British punk scene. “I think quite a lot of women start there, feeling a little unsure of themselves or whatever,” Birch said. “And then as they find their feet, they realize they can make the floor rattle.”When Birch first picked up the bass, it was a practical decision: “It was one of those things where it seemed that the drum kit was too big, the guitar was too hard and I didn’t want to be the main singer,” she said with a laugh.She soon found it was a more powerful and versatile instrument than she’d ever realized. “If you’re listening to a lot of rock records, the bass isn’t something that is foregrounded, necessarily,” she said. “And yet in reggae and jazz, it’s the spine of the music. It provides different functions in different music, and as you get more into it, you realize its strengths and its gorgeousness.”As its title suggests, “I Play My Bass Loud” is a celebration of an often underappreciated instrument. Birch has an especially melodic way of playing, and her slinky, fluid grooves seem to relish their role in the spotlight. But she’s happy to share that spotlight, too: The title track features five female bassists, including Jane Crockford from the British post-punk group the Mo-dettes and Emily Elhaj, who plays in Angel Olsen’s band.“Feminist Song,” one of the album’s most striking tracks, is a poetic and anthemic statement of self that Birch has been playing live for at least a decade. Its chorus finds Birch honoring the plurality of her identity, her refusal to be boxed in: “I’m a fighter, I’m a believer,” she sings defiantly, “I’m a mother, I’m a cleaner, I’m an artist and I’m yours.”That sense of multiplicity extends to her other artistic expressions, too. Her paintings have an almost musical quality about them, in the way that they experiment with extremes of dissonance and harmony. “What I like about painting is you can make your own world,” Birch said. “You can make anything any size you want, any color, any depth. The world that you create is a world that you want to create.”In her recent return to painting — another medium in which she first dabbled in art school — Birch has once again come full circle, standing face-to-face with that 20-something version of herself. Her solo album is a celebration of that, too.“I suppose it is about growing into yourself,” she said, “or growing into the person you want to become or have become. If you can grow into a person that you like or are happy with, that’s pretty great. And I feel I’ve done quite well at that.” More

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      Yoko Ono Fans Ring In Her 90th Birthday With a ’60s-Style Happening

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      There was singing, dancing and bell ringing in Central Park for an artist who has lived long past the days when she was often vilified.At 90, Yoko Ono has outlasted her detractors, just as she more or less predicted she would in “Yes, I’m a Witch,” a defiant song she recorded in the 1970s.“I’m not gonna die for you,” Ms. Ono sang. “You might as well face the truth / I’m gonna stick around / For quite a while / Yes, I’m a witch.”To commemorate her 90th birthday on Saturday, more than 50 artists and fans gathered at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park to take part in “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono,” a 1960s-style art happening that doubled as a celebration.Many of those who showed up said they had become aware of Ms. Ono decades ago, around the time when she was newly married to John Lennon and the Beatles were breaking up.“I was a big Beatles fan when I was 10, 11, 12,” said the abstract painter Jean Foos, 69, “and I heard a lot of negative stuff about her. But once I came to New York and heard her music, I loved her.”The artist Jean Foos, right, posed for a photo with a Yoko Ono banner.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesStaring at a black-and-white image of Ms. Ono printed onto a banner that hung from a wire on the bandshell stage, Ms. Foos mentioned “Season of Glass,” the album that Ms. Ono released in 1981, less than six months after Mr. Lennon was murdered.“For years in my studio, I would listen to ‘Season of Glass’ over and over,” Ms. Foos said, “especially while grieving different sad things that happened in my life. I just love her so much.”Carla Saad, a restaurateur who described herself as a “huge Beatles fan,” arrived with her 6-year-old son, Harrison Moscona. “I think Yoko is a wonderful artist,” Ms. Saad, 40, said. “She’s amazing, revolutionary, and I don’t think she’s given enough credit.”Her son, who was named after George Harrison, said, “I want to see Yoko — now!”Ms. Ono, who has not appeared in public in recent years, was not there. In 2019, at the Women’s March in Manhattan, she was photographed in a wheelchair. Two years before that, she mentioned that she was suffering from an illness, without specifying what it was. Representatives for Ms. Ono did not reply to emails seeking comment.Phillip Ward, left, and Jennifer Barton, the organizers of “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe event on Saturday was conceived by the writer and curator Phillip Ward in the spirit of Ms. Ono’s conceptual art projects. He organized it with the public relations executive Jennifer Barton. In social media posts before the event, Mr. Ward and Ms. Barton asked participants to “say something nice about Yoko,” “bring your bells” and “make a wish.”A playlist of 39 tracks, including “Yes, I’m a Witch,” boomed out of the sound system as the celebrants gathered in the sunshine on a 32-degree morning. Around 10:30, the artist and activist Peter Cramer climbed onto the stage and grabbed the microphone, announcing, “I’ve got a song about Yoko. It’s called ‘She Thinks She’s Jackie Onassis.’”He danced and rang hand bells as he sang in a sharp falsetto voice: “Yoko! Oh, no! Oh, no! She thinks she’s Jackie Onassis!” A few people who appeared to be tourists stopped and stared at him. Moments after his brief performance, Mr. Cramer, 66, made it clear that he was a fan.“When I was a teenager,” he said, “I was in love with the Beatles — but I found that her music was much more in your face. I was getting into the whole punk scene, and it seemed a little more appropriate. It was aware of the troubles of the world in a way that appealed to my ear.”Peter Cramer, left, and Pascal Perich rang hand bells in honor of Yoko Ono.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAt a table near the stage, celebrants wrote messages to Ms. Ono on cardboard tags and picked up white carnations and button-size hand mirrors that said “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono” on one side. After the event, Mr. Ward and Ms. Barton delivered a white bag filled with the messages to the service entrance of the Dakota, the grand apartment house overlooking Central Park that has been Ms. Ono’s main residence since 1973.In his birthday message to the artist, Pascal Perich, a 51-year-old photographer, said he wrote “We are all dancing in the stars” in French, his native language. Asked to explain what he meant by that, he said, “It was just the first thing that came to my mind.”“I just love Yoko and Yoko’s work,” Mr. Perich continued. “She’s like the hummingbird that takes the little drop of water to the giant forest fire. And the animal tells him, ‘What you are doing is for nothing.’ And the hummingbird says, ‘No, I am just doing my part.’”The writer and musician Jesse Paris Smith, who is the daughter of the singer, songwriter and author Patti Smith and her late husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, also wrote a message. “I said, ‘Yoko is a true warrior of hope, peace and love for us all,’” Ms. Smith, 35, said. “When I think of her, I think of these wonderful universal truths. It might seem corny or cheesy, but it’s so deeply needed, and she embodies all of those things.”The artist Jack Waters, 68, said that “Grapefruit,” Ms. Ono’s 1964 collection of instructional poems, was a “seminal piece for me,” despite the fact that he didn’t really understand it when he first came across it as a teenager. “I think Yoko made her biggest impression on Beatles fans, but I grew up in a family where there was a lot of art and culture, so we knew her for her artwork,” he said.A pocket mirror that reads “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono” was given to fans.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesPascal Perich wrote a note to Yoko Ono.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMany of the poems in “Grapefruit” ask readers to imagine different scenarios. In an interview with the BBC two days before his death, Mr. Lennon acknowledged that the book had directly inspired “the lyrics and the concept” of his 1971 ballad “Imagine” and expressed the regret that he had not properly acknowledged his wife’s contribution at the time. In 2017, the credits were formally changed to list Ms. Ono as the song’s co-writer.In recent years, she has gained new fans and greater respect among critics. The shift came partly as a result of “Yes Yoko Ono,” a retrospective that had its debut in 2000 at the Japan Society in New York before it moved to other cities. In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman wrote that the exhibition revealed Ms. Ono to be “a mischievous, wry conceptual artist with a canny sensibility” who was “way ahead of her time in giving acute visual form to women’s issues.”Another wave of appreciation came with the 2021 release of Peter Jackson’s documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” In his depiction of the group’s rehearsals, recording sessions and rooftop performance in January 1969, Ms. Ono made for a riveting presence.As the author Donald Brackett details in “Yoko Ono: An Artful Life,” a biography published last year, Ms. Ono was once the target of frequent misogynist and racist attacks in British and American publications. “It was horrifying,” Mr. Brackett said in a phone interview, describing the press accounts he came across during his research.John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the 1968 launch of “You Are Here,” their joint art exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London.Mirror Syndication International/Mirrorpix, via Getty ImagesMs. Ono stayed the same over the years, unwaveringly fierce in her art and mostly mild in her public statements. Little by little, many of the skeptics came around. “She once said, ‘You change the world by being yourself,’” Mr. Brackett said. “And she has undergone an evolution, maybe even a transformation, both as a pop culture figure and as a figure in the art world.”In March 1965, when the Beatles’ jaunty “Eight Days a Week” was the No. 1 song in the United States, Ms. Ono performed “Cut Piece” at the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. She knelt on the stage, stoic, as audience members one by one cut off her clothing with fabric shears. That performance puzzled some of those who saw it at the time but is now considered groundbreaking. In “Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance,” an essay published last year in The New Yorker, the cultural historian Louis Menand called “Cut Piece” “a truly great work of art.”Jennifer Barton, left, and Jesse Paris Smith sang Yoko Ono songs into the microphone as part of the 90th birthday celebration.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAs a child, Ms. Ono survived the Allied bombings of Tokyo, the city of her birth. That gave her something in common with Mr. Lennon, who was born during a lull in the Germans’ aerial attacks on Liverpool. Perhaps as a result of their common early experience, Ms. Ono and Mr. Lennon repeatedly explored the idea that the inner life is at least as important as the outside world. Mr. Lennon hit on this theme in the Beatles’ songs “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Rain” and “There’s a Place,” and Ms. Ono seems to have made it a part of her art from the very beginning.“I remember, when we were evacuated during the war, my brother was really unhappy and depressed and really hungry, because we did not have very much food,” she said in a 2013 interview. “So I said, ‘OK, let’s make a menu together. What kind of dinner would you like?’ And, he said, ‘Ice cream.’ So I said, ‘Good, let’s imagine our ice-cream dinner.’ And we did, and he started to look happy. So I realized even then that just through imagining, we can be happy. So we had our conceptual dinner, and this is maybe my first piece of art.”Ms. Ono was among a pioneering group of artists who worked out of former factories and warehouses in Lower Manhattan. While living on Chambers Street in 1961, she came up with the conceptual art piece “Painting to Hammer a Nail,” which instructs the viewer to hammer nails into a canvas.The abstract painter Martha Edelheit, 91, was part of that scene. At the celebration on Saturday, she recalled her first encounter with Ms. Ono: “I walked in when she was doing an art exhibit — I think she was hammering nails into a wall.” Ms. Edelheit, who has a solo exhibition at the Eric Firestone Gallery in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan through next month, added, “I’ve always loved what she’s done for the world as an artist.”The artists Ethan Shoshan and Martha Edelheit paid their respects to Ms. Ono on Saturday.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesJim Fouratt, a gay rights activist and nightlife impresario, said he got to know Ms. Ono because of his role in the music world. At the Central Park happening, he recalled a time in the 1980s when she attended a show by the singer-songwriter Diamanda Galás at a club he ran, Danceteria.“Diamanda was never nervous about anybody,” Mr. Fouratt, 81, said. “But that night it took her 15 minutes to get on the stage because Yoko had planted herself right there. When it was over, and Yoko went backstage, all Diamanda could do was throw her arms around her, and she started to cry. It was a beautiful moment — that kind of recognition of a strong woman doing exactly what she wanted to do. That was the sisterhood between those two women.”In his message to Ms. Ono, Mr. Fouratt wrote: “Never look back. The adventure is the future.”The artists and fans in Central Park weren’t the only ones sending best wishes to Ms. Ono. Her son, Sean Ono Lennon, had set up a website, Wish Tree for Yoko Ono, that allowed people to send their messages online. By Monday afternoon, the site had collected more than 8,400 statements from her fans.It was not clear to people at the Saturday event if Ms. Ono was at the Dakota or at another one of her residences. “I don’t know if a lot of people know what’s going on with Yoko right now,” Mr. Fouratt said.Death was the theme of the Yoko Ono exhibition “Ex It,” which was installed last year at the Bank of Lithuania in Kaunas, Lithuania. The show comprised 100 wooden coffins of different sizes. In keeping with most of the artist’s other works, “Ex It” was hopeful: Each coffin had a fruit tree growing out of it.Ms. Edelheit, in the red hat, wrote a message to Ms. Ono at a table near the bandshell.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times More