Showing Courage in Ukraine With Handfuls of Clay

This article is part of our Design special section about the reverence for handmade objects. In late August 2020, eight humanoid statues appeared in a quiet corner of the Saint-Sophia of Kyiv conservation area, a 12-acre museum complex that is centered on the thousand-year-old Saint-Sophia Cathedral. Called “Shadows,” the clay-and-copper sculptures — each faceless and … Read more

Can a Finnish Sauna Improve Society?

ON A WARM September afternoon in subarctic Finland, the architect Laura Mattila kneels in the grass beside a sauna that she and Mikko Merz, her 49-year-old partner in life and work, built eight years ago in the factory town turned artists’ colony of Fiskars, an hour’s drive west from Helsinki. Mattila, 40, doesn’t mention the … Read more

TEFAF Turns From the Classic to the Contemporary

The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht describes itself as a fair that spans 7,000 years of art history. For a long time, those 7,000 years mainly encompassed pre-20th-century objects: Egyptian figurines, Roman busts, African masks and Rococo clocks. In the last decade, responding to a major shift in collecting patterns, TEFAF has embraced contemporary … Read more

Why Composers Want to Write Operas for Children

A lonely schoolboy named Bertil makes a magical friend who goes by Nils in “Nils Karlsson Däumling,” a children’s opera by Thierry Tidrow based on a fairy tale by Astrid Lindgren. Nils teaches Bertil to change his size by singing a spell-like song. For contemporary classical composers, writing children’s opera can be similarly transfiguring — … Read more