The following is the foreword to the book JUILLIARD published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in conjunction with the American Masters program JUILLIARD. Foreword by Frank Rich American culture, like the nation that is ever reinventing it, is so sprawling and varied that it's hard ...
"New York City is endless. They said that the buildings on Wall Street would ruin New York, and a generation ago they said that Rockefeller Center would ruin New York. They didn’t. And the reason these buildings go up so close to each other is ...
Long regarded as "the First Lady of American Theater," Helen Hayes earned international esteem and affection during a career that spanned more than eighty years on stage and in films, radio, and television. As a screen actor she won two Oscars, as a stage actor ...
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who ...
"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." Considered one of the greatest jazz composers of all time, Duke Ellington had an enormous impact on the popular music of the late 20th century. Among his more than two thousand songs are such ...
Plácido Domingo is one of the most loved and listened to opera singers of the 20th- century. He was born in 1941, into a musical family in the Barrio de Salamanca section of Madrid. His parents were both singers, and when he was five they ...
Born a few months before the twentieth century (July 7th, 1899), Cukor was a man of medium height and solid, stocky build, features sharp as perfect projection on a movie screen. His movements, gestures and eyes all gave the same impression: a contained but constantly ...
"To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with." In 1940, a young painter named Robert Motherwell came to New York City and joined a group of artists — including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, ...
American Masters - Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces premiered on PBS in 2000. When we think of the silent film era, we think of actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Clara Bow, stars who created trademark personas and spent their entire careers testing the ...
The work of William Styron, which includes novels such as SOPHIE’S CHOICE and THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, has generated both praise and controversy over the past fifty years. Grounded in history and epic in sweep, his fiction has grappled with some of the most ...
