JANUARY EVENTS

4:   Utah becomes 45^th state, 1896

5:   Waiting for Godot premieres in Paris, 1953

11:  U.S. Surgeon General declares smoking a health hazard, 1964

14:  Treaty of Paris ratified by U.S. Congress, 1784

17:  Martin Luther King Jr. Day

20:  High School Musical film released, 2006

27:  National Geographic Society, founded, 1888 

Champagne Taittinger is the first big Champagne House to establish a vineyard in the UK to make premium sparkling wine in England.  The Domaine Evremond vineyard is a joint venture between Champagne Taittinger--the only Grande Marque Champagne House to be run by its eponymous family--its UK agency Hatch Mansfield Ltd, and friends. These partners anticipate a first full vintage at Domaine Evremond in October 2019--from the vines planted two years ago in May 2017--with a potential release date of 2024.  The Taittinger family has over 80 years of winemaking expertise in Champagne and plans to use this, alongside its British team, to help create a premium sparkling wine of excellence in England.  https://www.domaineevremond.com/2019/06/the-domaine-evremond-journey-continues-a-further-8-5-hectares-planted/ 

The Jerusalem artichoke is not an artichoke at all, as we know the more sophisticated globe artichoke. The Jerusalem version is actually related to the sunflower.  The sunflower is called girasole in Italian--it means gyrating or turning to the sun.  And, at least according to folk etymology, girasole through some slip of nomenclature turned into Jerusalem.  That is even more historically fascinating, considering that the vegetable in question is native to America.  It was indigenous to the central United States and Canada and was first taken to France by Samuel de Champlain in 1616, from which moment it began to flourish.  After its introduction to France, the easily proliferating root vegetable was first referred to as poires de terre (earth pears) or artichauts de Canada (Canadian artichokes).  In today's French kitchens it is known as a topinambour, again for an unusual reason.  At approximately the same time that they were introduced into that country, there was an exhibition of one sort or another being staged in France.  And one of the features of that exhibition was a tribe from Brazil known as topinambours.  The vegetable was thus christened and the name stayed.  https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/09/garden/jerusalem-artichoke-a-colorful-history-and-variety-of-use.html 

Slices of pie arranged in neat rows, glossy candy apples, cherry-topped ice cream sundaes at the brink of melting these are among the most recognizable motifs painted by Wayne Thiebaud, who died on December 25, 2021 at the age of 101.  Born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona and raised in Sacramento, California, Thiebaud is arguably best known for his tantalizing depictions of bakery counters, but his renderings of gumball machines, beach scenes, and the sloping streets of San Francisco are comparably irresistible. Unlike some painters of his generation, Thiebaud began his career as a commercial artist, attending a trade school in Los Angeles and working as a cartoonist, sign painter, and illustrator until the late 1940s.  Nearing the age of 30, he made a permanent shift to fine art, earning a BA from San Jose State College and an MA from Sacramento State College.  Thiebaud taught art for almost three decades, first at the Sacramento Junior College and then at the University of California, Davis.  An eclectic confluence of 20th-century painterly expressions, Thiebaud’s works belonged to no single movement, encompassing instead a unique visual language that sought out the charm in the everyday.  He mastered the textures of frosting, meringue, and donut glaze in thick, rich brushstrokes that reveal the influence of Abstract Expressionism, but his works exude the alluring mystery of an Edward Hopper bar scene.  Thiebaud lent his paintings their distinctive glow through a technique he called “halation,” juxtaposing warm and cool colors to make objects pop.  In a 2018 interview at the Morgan Library and Museum, he described discovering the process while painting a slice of pumpkin pie.  “I mixed a big gob of what I thought was the color and put it on the triangle, and I was horrified,” Thiebaud recalled.  “I made a light yellow drawing and then a blue drawing so I could tell the two different positions, and when I put the pumpkin mist on this color the edges showed up, and I thought, ‘well, that makes it look a little bit better, I’ll leave that in.’”  Valentina Di Liscia  See picture of "Cold Case" (2010/2011/2013), oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches.  (© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY / courtesy of Acquavella Gallery) at https://hyperallergic.com/702320/wayne-thiebaud-whose-paintings-were-almost-good-enough-to-eat-dies-at-101/ 

The term book-wrapt comes from a NY Times article published on December 24th, 2021.  The article says that in the book, The Private Library:  The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom, the author, Reid Byers, goes to the heart of why physical books continue to beguile us.  Individually, they are frequently useful or delightful, but it is when books are displayed en masse that they really work wonders.  Covering the walls of a room, piled up to the ceiling and exuding the breath of generations, they nourish the senses, slay boredom and relieve distress.  Andrea Rosenhaft  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/both-sides-the-couch/202112/i-am-book-wrapt 

Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee, now showing through January 9, 2022 at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA presents the first major critical assessment of works by the artist Doris Lee (1904– 1983).  Lee was one of the most recognized artists in the country during the 1930s and 40s and a leading figure in the Woodstock Artist’s Colony.  In response to the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the decades after World War II, Lee deftly absorbed these innovations into a continuation of her own visual style.  Co-curated by Barbara L. Jones and Melissa Wolfe, Curator of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Simple Pleasures will include over 70 works by the artist spanning from the 1930s through the 1960s from both public and private collections and be comprised of paintings, drawings, prints, and commissioned commercial designs in fabric and pottery.  There will also be a small group of ephemera, such as advertisements by companies that commissioned images from Lee.  The exhibition will travel to three additional venues:  Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA (February 5–May 8, 2022), Vero Beach Museum of Art, FL (June 5–September 18, 2022), and Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN (October 30, 2022– January 15, 2023).   https://thewestmoreland.org/exhibitions/simple-pleasures-the-art-of-doris-lee/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 2478  January 5, 2022