George Jones died last Friday, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, four months before he was set to begin “The Grand Tour,” a farewell jaunt across 60 cities that was to be the final note of a legendary career. I planned on getting tickets to the closest show, in Northampton, Massachusetts. If he played “Choices,” I might have cried.

When I was growing up, there was maybe nothing I hated more than country music. It was schmaltzy and sentimental, the only emotion it evoked was sadness. I was not sad; I was angry. I would come home from school, listen to Black Flag, and punch the pillows on my bed over and over again. I had long hair, roughly to my shoulders, and couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous than a cowboy hat. Boring, depressed people listened to country music, I imagined. I was young, and wanted my music fast and dumb.

At some point, though, I started to realize there wasn’t much difference between my rock ’n’ roll idols and country music outlaws. Iggy Pop may have rolled around in broken glass, but Merle Haggard was in and out of jail for robbery and other crimes most of his young life. Lou Reed and Waylon Jennings probably would have gotten along – they definitely both had a thing for drugs. Let’s not forget that Johnny Cash, in song, claimed to have shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. All of a sudden, the Ramones didn’t seem as cool as they once did.

Jones, who was 81 at the time of his death, was part of this lineage. I first became aware of the Possum, as he was affectionately called, through “The Grand Tour,” a profile on the country legend by writer Nick Tosches (published by Texas Monthly in 1994 and featured in slightly altered form in The Nick Tosches Reader). Jones, who struggled with alcoholism (a famous story involves Jones driving his riding lawnmower to the liquor store in Beaumont, Texas, after his second wife took away his car keys) and a nasty cocaine addiction, was a legendary rabble-rouser, the kind of character the music world just doesn’t produce anymore. He went through the highest highs and the lowest lows and made it out the other side, a country ballad writ large. In between the troublemaking, Jones recorded over 100 albums, won two Grammy’s, was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2008, and continued to tour until his death.

I was lucky enough to sit at the foot of the Possum in 2010. My mother, with an implied smirk, had mentioned to me over the phone that she was going to see Jones at the Dutchess County Fair, a local jubilee in upstate New York whose main attraction is a well-regarded pig race and fried meat on a stick, with a friend from work. To her surprise, I not only knew who George Jones was, but was a fan and desperately wanted to go.

I’m still not sure why she was shocked. Country music – which, by the way, I can’t remember my mother ever listening to – had been a thing that bonded us together in recent years. Two or three years earlier, I had joined her on a road trip from Florida back up to New York, and we decided, on a whim, to stop in Nashville for the night. We visited the Ryman Auditorium, went drinking at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, and visited RCA Studio B, where Elvis Presley recorded many hits and Dolly Parton drove her car through the side wall of the building (the dent is still visible today).

At the Jones concert on the fairgrounds, I was definitely the youngest person in the crowd of, maybe, 150 people; the entire front row was made up of elderly women with walkers. As the sun started to set, Jones emerged (late of course, some habits die hard) and launched right into a quick set of hits: “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “The Grand Tour,” “You’re Still On My Mind.” Jones wobbled around the stage, his paunch and Bermuda shirt making him resemble a Florida retiree, telling corny and rehearsed jokes before each song. The crowd was loving it. I’ll never forget the sight of a large man who looked like a lumberjack bawling his eyes out in the seat right next to us, alone. The whole thing felt like a surreal church service, with Jones leading the saddest, heart-wrenching sermon you’ve ever heard.

People who listen to George Jones tend to have gone through hell, it seems. And with each passing year, Jones seems a little less bizarre to me, a little less of a joke. It was announced this weekend that a public funeral honoring the singer would be held on Thursday at the Grand Ol’ Opry. You better believe a river of tears will flow through Nashville on that day. I thought about calling my mother and see if she wanted to take another road trip. 

Michael Fassbender has signed on to play Macbeth in a British-Australian co-production of Shakespeare’s play to be supported by Film 4. The director will be the Australian Justin Kurzel, best known for 2011’s “The Snowtown Murders” (aka “Snowtown”). The adaptation is by Todd Louiso and Jacob Koskoff, and the producers are the “The King’s Speech” duo Iain Canning and Emile Sherman, who previously worked with Fassbinder on “Shame.”

According to Screen Daily, they are in talks with “at least one leading Hollywood actress” to play Lady Macbeth. Charlize Theron, who channeled toxicity into the evil stepmother in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” might fancy her chances. So, too, Amy Adams, who was effectively Lady Macbeth to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s cult guru in “The Master.” Only she and Laura Linney, opposite Sean Penn in “Mystic River,” have mustered the Scottish queen’s virulence in recent years. My personal choice would be Rachel Weisz, though Jennifer Lawrence could blindside them all.

Shakespeare based “the Scottish play,” his shortest tragedy, on the account in Raphael Holinshed’s “Chronicle” of the reigns of Duncan I (1034-40) and Macbeth (1040-57). The former was killed by the latter in battle at Bothangowan, near Elgin, in Moray, in northeast Scotland. The new film will apparently be set during the same era and not stint on “visceral” battle scenes.

The three most famous Macbeth movies are those directed by Orson Welles (1948), Akira Kurosawa (“Throne of Blood,” 1957), and Roman Polanski (1971). Welles’s version, shot in 23 days on a Western backlot at Republic Studios, is Shakespeare filtered through film noir, a shadowplay of nightmarish images (thanks to cinematographer John L. Russell), though it never escapes staginess. Jeanette Nolan, making her screen debut, was far more vicious as the corrupt police chief’s wife, Bertha Duncan, in 1953’s “The Big Heat.” MacBeth's spiked crown looked like t might have been thought up by J.R.R. Tolkien or, at least, Peter Jackson's costume designer.

Kurosawa’s 16th-century samurai version, which starred Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada as the treacherous Washizu and his wife, pared down Shakespeare’s plot and dramatis personae, turning the witches, for example, into a single old woman. It is memorable for its misty moor, its “Cobweb Castle,” and Washizu’s refusal to relinquish his ambition even as he is pierced by multiple arrows.

Polanski’s version, which he co-scripted with the theater critic Kenneth Tynan, was the first film he made after his wife Sharon Tate and her friends were slaughtered by the Manson gang in 1969. The play’s sense of inexpungable evil must have gone very deep with the Polish director. He cast Jon Finch as Macbeth and Francesca Annis, then at her most powerful, as Lady Macbeth – she comes the closest to Ellen Terry’s pale and terrible queen, as painted by John Singer Sargent in 1889. Polanksi’s film is also memorable for its desolate seascapes and the Third Ear Band’s score.

“Polanski’s imagery, evoking a characteristically cruel, irrational, and blood-boltered world,” Tom Milne wrote in London’s Time Out, “is often magnificently strange and hieratic: the death of the Thane of Cawdor, for instance, hanged by way of a massive iron collar and chain from a high tower in a courtyard ringed by cloaked soldiers; or the almost pagan ritual of Macbeth’s coronation, starting with his bare feet stepping into the huge footprints embedded in the sacred stone.”

At the center of the critical debate over the status of John Singer Sargent's watercolors lies the question of their relation to his far more famous landscapes and portraits in oil. Were these a frustrated professional's non-commercial, modernist experiments, or simply “diaries in water-colour” that portray “exactly what the upper-class tourist sees,” as Sargent's indefatigable critic Robert Fry wrote in 1926? The exhibition “John Singer Sargent Watercolors,” which pools the holdings of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and is currently on view at the former institution (through July 28, after which it travels to the latter, and then to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), chiefly favors the first thesis, though it by no means settles the debate.

“It's all wrapped up in his giving up of portraiture,” the Brooklyn Museum's Teresa A. Carbone, who co-curated with the MFA Boston's Erica E. Hirshler, said during a walkthrough. “This is an artist who's trying to get away from that part of his work.” Sargent, who all but shut down his lucrative portraiture business after he turned 50 in 1906, had been painting watercolors since he was 12, and this is where his engagements with the modernist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries register most plainly. A close friend of Claude Monet who was also influenced by Camille Pissarro and Edouard Manet — whose ethereal watercolor “Irises” (1880) he bought at an 1885 studio sale when he was living in Paris — Sargent comes off as a card-carrying Impressionist in many of his watercolors.

The 93 examples in this exhibition were almost all purchased by the Brooklyn Museum and the MFA Boston from two shows at New York's Knoedler Gallery in 1909 and 1912. Sargent insisted that the works in those exhibitions, which he'd been reluctant to show and marked the first major presentation of the lifelong expat's watercolors in America, be sold in their entirety, with Brooklyn buying up 83 of the first exhibition's 86 works for about $20,000, and the MFA pre-purchasing the second exhibition before it even opened. Selections from those two purchases, plus nine oil paintings, are exhibited in a series of thematic galleries whose walls are painted a striking shade of orange, a surprising choice that helps set the luminescent compositions aglow. “As opposed to a rich blue or green that absorbs color,” the Brooklyn Museum's director Arnold Lehman explained at the exhibition preview, “this orange — or pumpkin, or clementine — really makes the colors pop.”

The exhibition's most engaging series are the landscape and cityscape paintings devoted to Venice (1902-04), Italian gardens (1903-1910), and rock quarries in the Italian Alps (1911), as well as a few countryside paintings from England, France, and Spain that could be mistaken for Paul Cézanne's radical Post-Impressionist canvases of just a few years earlier. Works like “Magnolias” (circa 1908) and “Gourds” (1908), both tightly cropped paintings of details from Italian gardens, flirt with abstraction in large areas made up of dots, dashes, and drips of colors. In “Port of Soller,” also from 1908, Sargent distills the Spanish port on Mallorca to a warm, geometric composition of blue quadrangles and orange lines evocative of Georges Braque's proto-Cubist renderings of l'Estaque.

Sargent's paintings of Venetian canals and Italian gardens subvert the conventions of the day more subtly, too, with surprising angles, framing devices, and jarringly truncated views. About half of “Venice: Under the Rialto Bridge” (1909), for instance, consists of the dark, triangular underside of a bridge, the water of the canal below inflecting it with light patterns he rendered through a subtle layering of washes. Virtually all of his Venice watercolors were painted from gondolas, making for unusually low angles of vision, some of them partly obstructed by the bow of his craft. His paintings of Italian gardens almost unanimously eschew conventional perspectives, offering views of the backs and sides of marble statues, while others are immersed in patterns of light and shade.

Renderings of sunlight dominates the exhibition's final gallery, which is devoted to his 1911 paintings of marble quarries near Florence and a thematic selection titled simply “Sunlight on Stone.” “He's painting stone less than he's painting light,” Hirshler said of the works in these sections during the exhibition preview. Paintings like “Carrara: Little Quarry” and “Carrara: Monsieur Dervillé's Quarry” consist chiefly of pale, contrasting color washes that convey the warm yellow of Mediterranean sunlight and the rich orange of the earth. The dark shadows between massive blocks of stone and an occasional quarryman lend volume and scale to images that might otherwise register as pure abstraction.

Still, certain pieces in the “Sunlight on Stone” section, as well as some of the boat and port paintings found in the “Water Craft” section, lend credence to Fry's critique. Works like “White Ships” (circa 1908) or “In a Levantine Port” (circa 1905-06) come off very much as pages from a watercolor diary, and echo a complaint lodged in 1908 by the Morning Post's art critic who wrote that in Sargent's watercolors, “Everything seems to be represented with an equal vividness and skillful indifference.” Architectural compositions like “Genoa: The University” (circa 1911) and “Villa Falconiere” (1907) portray light and perspective masterfully, but offer little else of interest. But such a complaint barely seems worth articulating in light of the nearby painting “Corfu: Lights and Shadows” (1909), which tracks the shadows cast by tree branches on the white wall of a small shack in vivid hues of turquoise, blue, purple, yellow, and orange. One of the exhibition's stand-outs, that Fauvist-toned piece marks another moment of convergence between Sargent and the contemporaneous modernist movements from which art historians have typically kept him cloistered.

Rather than firmly designating Sargent as an unheralded avant-gardist or a Sunday watercolorist, “Watercolors” supports both camps, finding formal daring and conventional choices among this career oil painter's more personal pursuits. The image of the artist as a middle-class traveler is inescapable. “By the early-1900s virtually every wealthy American industrialist either wants or has a Sargent oil portrait,” Hirshler noted. By then he had also bought a house on London's plush Tite Street and begun a major mural commission for the Boston Public Library. His oil portraits and landscapes made him one of the most successful artists of his time, and their huge popularity only makes the formal daring of his less-famous watercolors more startling and revelatory.

“John Singer Sargent Watercolors” continues at the Brooklyn Museum through July 28. To see highlights from the exhibition, click the slideshow.

– Abramovic Creating a Ballet: After conquering the worlds of cinema and opera, performance artist extraordinaire Marina Abramovic is trying her hand at ballet, collaborating with the Belgian choreographers SidiLarbiCherkaoui and DamienJalet on a new version of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero" for the ParisOperaBallet. "In my own work I am completely in control, but the interesting thing with collaboration is to give up part of yourself, the ‘I,’" Abramovic said. "When you are very tired or in pain, you have to find another energy, to break through to another level… I can’t help with making choreography, but I can help with how to channel energy to achieve another kind of state. Like Maria Callas said, when you perform, half of your brain has to be extremely conscious and the other half extremely free." [NYT]

– Smithsonian Announces Sequester Closures: From May 1 through September 30, the Smithsonian Institute will be forced to close at least three areas at its Washington D.C. facilities due to budget cuts engendered by sequestration. The three closures announced thus far are the Commons room at the Smithsonian Castle, a room in the "African Mosaic" exhibition in the National Museum of African Art's permanent collection galleries, and sections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's third-floor permanent collection galleries. [Washington City Paper]

– Arte Povera Storms the Louvre: To launch "Counterpoint," a new series of contemporary art exhibitions, the Louvre invited Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the founders of the Arte Povera movement, to install his works throughout the mega-museum and collaborate with its staff on a full program of events and performances. The exhibition, "Year 1: Earthly Paradise," includes a neon light work that reads "Love differences!" installed in the Louvre palace's oldest section, and a sculptural installation suspended inside the large glass pyramid greeting visitors as they enter. [Artdaily]

– Van Gogh's Bedroom Walls Were Violet: When Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum reopens on May 1, its major exhibition "Van Gogh at Work" will reveal the fruits of an eight-year collaborative research project between the museum, the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency, and scientists from the oil company Shell, perhaps most surprisingly that the walls of the artist's room in the 1888 painting "The Bedroom," long thought to be a light shade of blue, were originally painted violet. "You discover more clearly that van Gogh was a very methodical artist, which runs counter to the general myth that he was a manic, possibly slightly deranged man who just spontaneously threw paint at the canvas," said the museum's director, Axel Rüger. "He was actually someone who knew very well about the properties of the materials he used, how to use them, and also he created very deliberate compositions. In that sense it’s a major insight in that it gives us a better notion of van Gogh the artist. He was very goal-oriented." [NYT]

– Jewish Museum Buys Bronze Lion: Yesterday New York's Jewish Museum snapped up a North German bronze lion aquamanile (a vessel for pouring water, typically for washing hands) from Sotheby's sale of Judaica from the collection of Michael and Judy Steinhardt. "The piece is an engaging example of the lion aquamanile form, simple in its ornamentation but striking," said Jewish Museum curator Susan L. Braunstein. "There are currently only two other known aquamanilia from the medieval era bearing Hebrew inscriptions." [Press Release]

– Artist Rolls Out "College Degree" Toilet Paper: For his latest irreverent project, the artist Leon Reid IV is selling rolls of toilet paper stamped with the words "College Degree" for $25, a not-so-subtle commentary on the costs incurred by contemporary college students. "I'm not trying to make a work of art, but a point here that this generation feels disillusioned that they spent so much money and time and effort and got little results," Reid said. "The work is totally functional." [DNAinfo]

– Canada Researches Holocaust-era Art: Canada has begun its term as the leader of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance— a coalition of 31 countries — by launching a $190,000 initiative to research the provenance of Holocaust-era artworks at six of its major museums, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the latter of which just returned a painting by the 17th-century Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst to the heir of Hamburgian Jewish collector Bruno Spiro last week. "With the support of the Government of Canada, directors of Canadian art museums and galleries will develop their professional expertise and contribute to the international call for transparency, justice and closure, in one of the most sordid chapters of 20th-century history," said Canadian Art Museum Directors Association president Josephine Mills. [TAN]

– Longtime MICA Prez Retires: Fred Lazarus IV, who has been the president of the Maryland Institute College of Art since 1978, has announced that he will retire at the end of the next school year, in May 2014. Under his tenure MICA has grown from a local institution to a nationally recognized art school, while its enrollment has doubled, its endowment has been increased by 25 times, and the size of its campus has grown tenfold. "I have been able to watch gifted young people come in as freshmen, graduate with all of the promise in the world, and then take their places as art and design leaders, business owners, and catalysts for societal change," Lazarus said. "Our amazingly accomplished faculty, dedicated staff, and incredible supporters have built this institution into a center for the reinvention of art and design education." [Press Release]

– Saudi Arabia's First Artist-Run Gallery: The conceptual artist (and army colonel) Abdulnasser Gharem is planning to open the Amen Art Foundation in Riyadh, which would be Saudi Arabia's first artist-run art space, supporting young artists and promoting arts education. "We have so many good artists here. The galleries and, unfortunately, auction houses are starting to move in but there are no institutions or foundations here to help the younger artists," Gharem said. "This country is full of people who have the [necessary] money. But the problem will be getting the government's permission to launch the foundation. Such art foundations are not part of our culture." [TAN]

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For breaking news throughout the day check our blog IN THE AIR.

An Indian man has taken his dual obsessions for gold and fame to an extreme level by getting one of the world's most expensive shirts made for himself in solid 22 karat gold.

Spain's El Celler De Can Roca edged past Denmark's Noma and Italy's Osteria Francescana to be named the world's best restaurant on Monday in a ceremony in London.

The restaurant owned by the three Roca brothers Joan, Jordi and Josep, captured the top spot on The World's 50 Best Restaurants list organized by Britain's Restaurant magazine and sponsored by the mineral water company S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna.

Another Spanish eatery, Mugaritz, in San Sebastian, and New York's Eleven Madison Park rounded out the top five.

"El Celler de Can Roca in Girona has long been hailed as one of Spain's most exciting places to eat, and having spent two years at No. 2 on the list, the three brothers have swapped places with Denmark's Noma, which held the top ranking for the last three years," organizers said in a statement.

"The Roca brothers' restaurant has gained global acclaim for its combination of Catalan dishes and cutting-edge techniques and the passion that they share for hospitality," it added.

Spanish restaurants captured three of the top 10 spots and five on the entire list announced at London's Guildhall. Arzak, also in San Sebastian, came in at No. 8, just behind London's Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, which was seventh.

D.O.M. in Sao Paulo, Brazil, placed sixth, while Steirereck in Vienna, Austria, was ninth and Vendome in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, was tenth.

Chef Grant Achatz, from Alinea in Chicago, which was 15th on the list, was presented with the Chef's Choice Award.

Britain's Restaurant Magazine has published the annual list since 2002.

In addition to Eleven Madison Park and Alinea, the United States had four other restaurants on the list, including Per Se at No. 11, Le Bernardin at 19 and Daniel at 29, all in New York City, and The French Laundry in Yountville, California.

L'Arpege in Paris was France's top restaurant, coming in at No. 16. Like the United States, France had six restaurants on the list, the highest number.

Astrid y Gaston in Lima, Peru, was the top South American restaurant at No. 14, having risen 21 places since last year, while Narisawa in Tokyo topped Asian eateries at No. 20.

Australia's Attica in Melbourne was 21 and a new entry on the list.

Nadia Santini from the Dal Pescatore restaurant in Italy was named The Veuve Clicquot World's Best Female Chef.

The One To Watch Award was given to South Africa's The Test Kitchen in Cape Town.

The list is compiled from the votes of The Diners Club World's 50 Best Restaurants Academy, which includes 900 international leaders in the restaurant industry.

According to legend, Jim Baker was an amateur bodybuilder. During his stint in the Marines during WWII, he apparently shot down 13 Japanese fighter planes single handedly as his boat was sinking. After the war, it is said, he challenged “Argentina Bill,” the world heavyweight jujitsu champion, to a fight and took him out in 17 seconds. Later, according to stories, after an altercation involving a dog he was taking care of, Baker killed his neighbor with several swift judo chops. There have been whispers of an illicit scandal with a famous television actress, which may or may not have ended badly.

But the most amazing part of Jim Baker’s legend is his transformation into Father Yod, health-food guru and spiritual leader of the disenfranchised youth. This final act of a remarkable life is the subject of a new documentary, “The Source Family,” premiering at New York’s IFC Center on May 1. Featuring interviews with many of Father Yod’s followers, the film traces the origins of the group, who lived together in a Hollywood Hills mansion until, due to local pressure, they escaped to Hawaii before their dramatic demise.

“We wanted to tell the story as much as possible from the family’s point of view,” co-director Jodi Wille said in a phone conversation with ARTINFO. “We wanted to show a dynamic range of experiences and then leave it up to the viewer to interpret that information themselves.”

Father Yod was known in Los Angeles through the Source, a legendary health food restaurant that was visited by famous clientele who, at least for a little while, wanted to see what all this turning on, tuning in, and dropping out was all about: Steve McQueen was said to have frequented the restaurant, and was reportedly a friend of Baker’s; the actor Donald Sutherland was said to have been another regular customer; and Woody Allen made fun of the restaurant in a famous scene in “Annie Hall.”  

Wille discovered the Family through their music. The group, under a number of different names, made dozens of recordings, long lost artifacts of psychedelic rock that have traded hands on the collector’s market for years. Father Yod took center stage on these records and in their performances in the Los Angeles area, chanting, screaming, and banging a drum while the Family trudged along behind him.

After years of picking up bits of information from various sources, Wille got in contact with Isis Aquarian, a member of the Family who was appointed historian and archivist by Yod, with the plan to pitch to them the idea of doing a book. It turns out, they were already working on one.

With the help of Isis, Wille put together “The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, YaHoWa13, and the Source Family,” released by Process Books. Filled with original photographs, documents, and remembrances from former Family members, the book is an essential piece of counterculture history. A cult of beautiful people in the Hollywood Hills who ran a health-food restaurant, wore white flowing robes, and were led by a charismatic huckster who had 14 “spiritual” wives and drove a Rolls Royce? It’s practically begging to be made into a movie. “I realized a documentary totally had to be made,” Wille said, “and if I didn’t do it, somebody else would.”

The challenge the filmmakers faced was in creating an accurate portrait of the Family that was realistic from the perspective of those inside the group but also truthful about Father Yod’s life, warts and all, without making a mockery of its subject.

“You can’t just have the light, you have to have the dark to have balance,” co-director Maria Demopoulos said. “The lucky thing is that Father Yod didn’t hide anything from the Family. He took those experiences, like when he killed the man with his bare hands, or the bank robbery, and turned them into wisdom teachings. He was this unique teacher, in that he wasn’t just preaching to people, saying do this or do that, he was saying this is what happened to me in my life, and here’s some wisdom that I got from it.”

So far, the response to the film has been positive, and, according to the directors, people are drawn to the Source Family and the ideas behind the group more than ever. “It has a lot to do with how people are dissatisfied right now with the dominant paradigm,” Wille said. “They’re dissatisfied with consumer culture, things seem to be falling apart, quite similar to the environment the Source Family and other cults from that period grew from.”

But the biggest surprise, according to the filmmakers, has been the response from the Family members themselves, who not only support the film but are using the experience to reconnect with old friends, many of whom they knew nothing about during their time together decades ago. Although many of them are living lives far removed from their time as members of one of the grooviest cults to have ever existed, Willie is amazed to keep hearing the same thing, over and over.

“I would absolutely do it again.”

LOS ANGELES — Upon its release back in 1972, John Boorman’s man-versus-nature classic, “Deliverance,” featured a fading TV star, Burt Reynolds, opposite a burgeoning Jon Voight on a fateful canoe trip down a backwoods river.

Based on the best-selling novel by poet laureate James Dickey, the movie became a box-office hit with three Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. 

Boorman, Voight, Reynolds, and Ned Beatty gathered before a screening Saturday morning at Hollywood’s Chinese Multiplex 1 to reflect on their experiences making the movie. The talk was part of the TCM Classic Film Festival, which ran April 25 through 28.

“I just wanted a job,” Reynolds told a packed house. Up until “Deliverance,” he was mainly known for playing Quint the blacksmith on the TV western “Gunsmoke.” At the age of 35, he was a little old to be breaking into movies.

“When I left there, I was walking down the street,” he said about his audition. “I screamed in the air, ‘I think I got it!’ And there were a lot of people going, ‘I think he’s got it!’ not even knowing what the hell I was talking about.”

“Of course Burt was happy to get in a movie like this. It was a movie,” quipped Beatty, who was in a raucous mood, taunting the crowd and griping about promoting the movie for no pay.

Reynolds, a former stuntman, recalled going over the falls one day on the river after camera tests using a dummy proved unconvincing. The result was a broken coccyx and a separated kidney.

“We go to rushes the next day and I said [to the director], ‘How do you feel, John?” laughed Reynolds. “He said, ‘It looks just like a dummy.’”

Voight, who was nominated in 1969 for “Midnight Cowboy,” was coming off a flop called “The Revolutionary” and was skittish about his next project.

“I was a little bit frightened of the rape scene,” he said about the infamous scene in which Ned Beatty’s character is raped by a hillbilly. Boorman told him he had Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando standing by if he wasn’t interested, leaving the actor wondering, “If he can get Brando or Nicholson, what the hell’s he doing with me?”

So Voight consulted his wife, actor Marcheline Bertrand, who thought the script was brilliant.

“Marcheline was always smarter than Jon, no big friggin’ news there,” noted Beatty, who was plucked from regional theater to play the part of the rape victim, Bobby.

“I cast Ned ’cause he was angry,” smiled Boorman. “He walked into the interview in Warner saying, ‘I don’t want to be in your fuckin’ film.’ So I said, ‘I’m casting you anyway.’”

“Deliverance” tells the story of four Atlanta suburbanites who test their mettle on a disastrous canoe trip. With Vietnam raging overseas and an environmentalist movement taking root at home, the 1970 novel has been called a cautionary tale about man’s relationship to nature, as well as an incisive look at our fractured psyche during wartime.

The movie adaptation is regarded as a classic and represents a career high for both the cast and the director.

“I’ve done 70 movies and four television series,” Reynolds said, reflecting on his career. “And of all of them, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve only been in one movie.”

As South America establishes itself as a powerful force in contemporary art, a Latin wind is blowing over London. Smart dealers are increasingly showcasing artists from the region, catering to collectors whose interest has been piqued by what can only be described as a trend. As we speak, the Brazilian Fernanda Gomes is showing at Alison Jacques and the Mexican Pedro Reyes is at Lisson Gallery. It’s the hotly-tipped Argentinean artist Adrian Villar Rojas who will inaugurate the new Serpentine Gallery building next fall.

In the midst of all this is Pinta, a boutique fair dedicated exclusively to art from South America, Spain, and Portugal. Opening on June 4th, the fourth London edition (the venture also has a New York branch) appears to be stronger than ever, with its largest number of participating galleries to date. Among the newcomers this year are Carl Freedman (London), Galería Paula Alonso (Madrid), and Josée Bienvenu Gallery (NYC).

“There’s an interest in Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese art in London, and Pinta has, in a humble way, created this trend,” London manager Andrea Harari told ARTINFO UK. Unlike in the U.S., where geographical proximity has a fostered greater visibility of South American art, it is seen as “fresh” and “different” in the UK, she continued.

Pinta has pulled out all the stops to secure its place as the reference for South American art in Europe. Special projects curated by the collector for Latin American art in London Catherine Petitgas and curator Kiki Mazzucchelli feature Armando Andrade, Tonico Lemos, and Rodrigo Matheus. The fair will include the first edition of ART Numérique, gathering works focussed on new technology, and representatives from London institutions will share insights into their forthcoming programme involving South American artists (including Villar Rojas’ show at the Serpentine, the Whitechapel Gallery’s Latin American Art in Britain, and Damian Ortega at the Freud Museum).

Pinta founders Argentinean PR guru Alejandro Zaia and collector Mauro Herlitka have deftly created a strong institutional network around the fair via the Pinta Museum Acquisition Programme. Matched funding is available to public galleries wishing to purchase art from the fair. Although the amount for individual grants hasn’t been revealed, organizers say that since 2007, this programme has allowed more than £1m worth of art to be purchased from the fair. This year, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and The Essex Collection of Art from Latin America are expected to take part.

As the market for South American art continues to grow, it isn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination to dream up an edition of Pinta in Asia. But Herera remains cautious. “That could be a possibility,” she told ARTINFO UK, “but for the time being we want to establish ourselves here in London.”

Full list of exhibitors (newcomers*)

Name: Sara VanDerBeek

Age: 36

Occupation: Artist

City/Neighborhood: New York

While sculpture has always been a part of your photographic process, you have not always shown sculpture in conjunction with photography. What sort of dialogue do you hope to create between these two different media? How does working on stand-alone sculptures differ from creating sculptures that will be shown alongside your photographs? 

I really enjoy thinking about space and scale with sculpture. I like how confusing scale can be in photography, and now making things to be seen in the round it’s a new understanding and exploration of form and scale. My hope is that the photographs and the sculptures inform each other but that there is also space for interpretation and an openness to their relationship that allows for a more abstract or dream-like experience in the show. The images are in some ways a view into my process but are also, in their color, or their use of mirrored glass, meant to rest somewhere between something actual and something imaginary. 

For your current show at Metro Pictures you traveled to Paris, Rome, and Naples, exploring classical female figures. Which differences between neoclassical depictions of women and contemporary depictions of women from different regions stand out as the most striking, or interesting, to you?

I have often used found imagery of classical figures in the past but was very excited to be photographing them myself and exploring the incredible collections in these cities. My time in the National Archeological Museum in Naples was particularly inspiring. I focused on ancient and neo-Classical female figures and was intrigued by the seemingly opposing qualities of beauty and ubiquity inherent in their creation. I noticed the repetitions of goddesses and poses amongst the different collections and experienced these sculptures as both image and form. I saw in their multiplicity a photographic quality that also felt like it spoke to contemporary practices — they were a meeting of image and object, of symbolism, idealized form and were in a way a means of communication. Neo-classical is interesting to me because it developed during a tumultuous time, and is an interesting combination of classical shapes and modernist ideals. 

Much of your work explores the way things like objects or memories become images. Can you talk a little about this process? Conversely, how do you think images shape our memories? 

The way I structure or organize the forms I make or photograph comes out of an attempt to translate an experience into an image or an object, and/or to conflate the two processes. In earlier works I would arrange the compositions of the assemblages and the final image in a structure that I thought was similar to how the mind organized memories. Layering and shifting scales were important. I think images play a very important part in the shaping of our memory. Probably because I am a visual person, I think that the mind organizes via imagery, and that what is remarkable about memory is that it all sits together; a shared universal event, tragic, or wonderful can be very present in the foreground of your mind, then it shifts and a small intimate moment becomes just as large. Now I feel my process is less about the simultaneity of memory or recollection, and more about the singular experience expanded. I strive to physically realize something that is ephemeral or fleeting. 

What project are you working on now?

I am just near completing the work for my show at Metro Pictures. Additionally, I will have a solo presentation with Altman Siegel at Frieze NY, and then shortly following, I am organizing and participating in a three-person show alongside my brother Johannes VanDerBeek and my studio mate Ryan Johnson at White Flag projects in St. Louis in June. 

What’s the last show that you saw?

Amanda Ross-Ho, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. 

What’s the last show that surprised you? Why?

I saw a great show at SFMoMA about three photographers working in South Africa during apartheid [“South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk”]. It was a surprise because I had not heard of two of them before the exhibition and I found the images, in their detail and intensity, really fascinating.

Describe a typical day in your life as an artist.

I try to look at a book while having coffee in the morning, I usually feel the most open to new ideas or figuring things out in the morning and in the later evening. After breakfast, I go to my studio and am there most of the day, unless I have a meeting at my print lab or a fabricator. I return later in the night, have dinner and watch something or attempt to read for an hour. 

Do you make a living off your art?

I am very grateful that I am able to live and work off of the sale of my artworks, and from my experience of owning and operating a gallery I understand the great efforts that go into making that possible. I think it is a very generous act on behalf of an individual or an institution to want to purchase and care for a work of art over time. It’s a great responsibility, and I am very appreciative. I put most of the money I make back into producing new work, and again am grateful that I am able to pursue new ideas due to the sale of my work.

What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?

It’s not an item, it’s an individual and that’s my assistant Max Palmer. Which leads me to mention he came recommended by Julie Pochron, an equally indispensable person. She is an amazing artist and printer — she works with me on all of my prints, and she and all those who work at her studio are crucial to my process. Matthew Dipple, my boyfriend, is also incredibly important for feedback and support, he is very helpful at all stages but especially at the end.

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

My trip this past fall was very inspiring for my current work, and in general I find traveling and photographing [to be] the start of much of my process, but I also get ideas from books, and publications, current events, and my studio.

Do you collect anything?

New York Times newspapers.

What is your karaoke song?

I learned my lesson and will never attempt a Beyoncé song again. So, I would say Fleetwood Mac, “Landslide.” Recently I heard Sonic Youth’s version of the Carpenters “Superstar” and I thought that would be a good karaoke song.

What’s the last artwork you purchased?

I bought these beautiful jewelry pieces by my sister-in-law Anya Kielar recently. Otherwise, sadly, I haven’t bought artwork in a while, but when we had [Soho gallery, run by VanDerbeek, Johannes VanDerBeek, and Kielar] Guild & Greyshkul, occasionally I would buy a work by an artist we worked with. We currently have a print by Mariah Robertson that I bought a few years ago hanging in our living room that I love to stare at.

What’s the first artwork you ever sold?

My good friend in high school’s father kindly bought a sculpture I made.

What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw happen in a museum or gallery?

I don’t have an interesting story, but I interned at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, and I found that experience so amazing because I got to be behind the scenes of this great museum. It was more fun then weird, but I loved working in the basement cataloging clothes and going to the staff cafeteria.

What’s your art-world pet peeve?

I don’t have any.

What’s your favorite post-gallery watering hole or restaurant?

I like going to the Carlyle after an opening uptown but that happens about once every two years.

Do you have a gallery/museum-going routine?

I feel like I don’t get to see enough shows to have a routine, but I like to go uptown on a Sunday to the Metropolitan and then Café Sabarsky.

What’s the last great book you read?

Last book I read all the way through was a while ago, I’m slowly making my way through “Villette” by Charlotte Bronte.

What work of art do you wish you owned?

I can’t answer [with] just one: a painting by Matisse, a sculpture by Brancusi, a photograph by Lee Miller, and in contemporary art I would like to own a sculpture by Rachel Harrison, a photograph by Sarah Charlesworth, and a painting by Glenn Ligon.

What would you do to get it?

These are all dreams, so I have no plan.

What international art destination do you most want to visit?

I’d like to visit South America and Mexico sometime soon. I’d also like to visit Japan to see the textiles in Kyoto. 

What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about?

I think Native American artwork and artifacts and dance are remarkable. Both ancient and contemporary works have an incredible use of pattern, symbol, and color. Continuing from an earlier question, I would really love to own a Navajo chief-style blanket from the late 1800s.

Who’s your favorite living artist?

That is too difficult to answer, because I never have just one favorite. 

What are your hobbies?

My hope is this summer it will be roller-skating.

To see works by the artist, click on the slideshow.

Deanna Durbin, the star of Universal musicals who was a box-office phenomenon of the late 1930s and early 1940s, died several days ago at the age of 91.

Pretty but not glamorous, possessed of a sweet and resonant voice that made her seem older than she was, the wholesome, cheerful Canadian made a more sophisticated adolescent than Judy Garland. That’s why Louis B. Mayer, who cast them both in the 1936 short “Every Sunday,” when Durbin was 14, decided not to sign her. Which shows how wrong the MGM chief could be.

At Universal, she began a run of films, produced by Joe Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster, that helped wipe away the Depression and brought her a special Oscar in 1939. “Three Smart Girls” (1936), the first of the six movies in which Koster cannily steered her, is said to have rescued the ailing studio from bankruptcy. The others were “One Hundred Men and a Girl” (1937), which partnered her with the composer Leopold Stokowski; “Three Smart Girls Grow Up” (1939); “First Love” (1939); “Spring Parade” (1940); and “It Started With Eve” (1941).

When Durbin transitioned to ingénue as a Cinderella-ish orphan in “First Love” and had her first movie kiss (with Robert Stack), the nation blushed. When Pasternak quit for MGM, she lost a mentor and a guiding light. Her attempt to grow up on screen foundered because of the studio’s fear of losing a cash cow.

Cast as a missionary in the comedy drama “The Amazing Mrs. Holliday” (1943), she was initially directed by Jean Renoir, but he quit after 47 days of shooting.

“She had just gotten married, she was particularly ravishing, and I was very excited about it,” the French director later said. “The reason I didn’t finish the film is that Deanna Durbin was imprisoned by the genre that made her a success…. But I wasn’t good at this genre, and so it was better for the film to be shot by people more familiar than I was. [She] had become as good as gold, and this film’s script was once again the usual type…. I could have done things the way I wanted, but in the end, each decision was so important. Even a smile, a wink, was discussed by ten people around a green rug. It was difficult for me to work with so much seriousness.”  

Durbin’s insistence on playing a nightclub chanteuse rather than a prostitute in “Christmas Holiday” (1944), and her refusal to be deglamorized, hurt Robert Siodmak’s film noir, though it remains her most interesting picture. She plays a woman devoted to a psychotic racetrack hustler (Gene Kelly, also cast against type) who has an over-affectionate relationship with his mother (Gale Sondergaard). Kelly’s performance laid down the blueprint for Robert Walker in “Strangers on a Train” and Robert De Niro in “The King of Comedy,” and though Durbin lacked the dramatic chops, she looks as fragile as a glass bauble on a Christmas tree.

She also appeared (singing, of course) in the effective comedy noir “Lady on a Train” (1945), a spoof of Cornell Woolrich’s crime fiction, but by now she was marking time. After the comedy “For the Love of Mary” (1948), she retired to France at the age of 26. The Guardian’s obituary cites her telling Pasternak, who tried to persuade her to continue, “I can’t run around being a Little Miss Fix-It who bursts into song — the highest-paid star with the poorest material.” Although Durbin did not identify with her image, which she considered childlike, she made a beloved contribution to Hollywood’s golden era.

Durbin was married three times. Her first two marriages — to assistant director/executive Vaughn Paul (1941-43) and to producer Felix Jackson (1945-49) — ended in divorce. In 1950, she married Charles David, who had directed her in “Lady on a Train.” They raised her daughter Jessica (from her marriage to Jackson) and their son Peter. Her 49-year marriage to David ended with his death in 1999.

Molly Crabapple is a star, though not an art star in the conventional sense — and I mean that as a compliment. “Shell Game,” her recent show featuring nine large, fanciful paintings, closed last week at the LES’s small Smart Clothes gallery, attracting outsized street-level buzz during its brief run. Her style is wiry, vibrant, and representational. The scenes deliberately evoke children’s books that some devilish hacker has gotten into, with a bit of Frida and Diego thrown in there, each staging a scene from the political turbulence of the last years — Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, New York — populated by a swarming bestiary of little allegorical animals, cast in the roles of protesters, policemen, and the like.

Part of the energy Crabapple has generated comes from the way that she has industriously created an audience for herself, tapping into a public hungry for art that is accessible, smart, and a few steps to the left of traditional Chelsea fare (just today, she's made high-res versions of the Smart Clothes images available for free through Creative Commons). She’s collaborated with radical burlesque dancers and lefty journalists (Matt Taibbi calls her “Occupy’s greatest artist”); she has a freewheeling column in Vice. Her story is fascinating: In bubble-era New York, she became the in-house artist for the famously extravagant nightclub The Box. Inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec and his absinthe-injected sceneogaphy, she got to chronicle I-banker decadence at its most extreme, and at close range. “I drew my beloved performers as gods,” she explained recently. “Customers were coke snorting pigs.”

Then, when Occupy Wall Street broke out in 2011, she found herself sucked in — almost literally since her apartment was nearby. Her skills chronicling live-wire performers now went to work depicting the protestors in Zuccotti Park, an act she considered a kind of guerrilla independent journalism, showing a crowd more multilayered than that depicted by the media. She lent her hand to, among other things, an image that was widely circulated after the police raid on Occupy Oakland that wounded a U.S. vet, an arresting graphic of a woman in profile, brandishing an American flag — a literally oblique reference to Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” A swirling cloud of text surrounds her: “Can You See the New World Through the Tear Gas?” 

Since the Occupy movement cooled, Crabapple has traveled with UK journalist Laurie Penny to various political crisis zones, illustrating the book “Discordia.” This experience is what was most directly being limned in “Shell Game.” The painting “Syntagma Athena,” for instance, is her take on her sojourn in crisis-wracked Greece, filled with political references and in-jokes. A marble bust of a woman at its center is defaced with graffiti slogans torn from the anarchist campouts of Athens. Literal fat cats, representing eurocrat officialdom, syphon coins from the people. The feisty little yellow pooches who represent the Greek protesters are a reference to “Loukanikos,” a street dog who became a popular symbol for its willingness to stand at the front line at marches, defending activists from the cops. 

But the canvases are not a groovy form of political reportage. Most of the coverage of “Shell Game” focused on Crabapple’s story itself, and not the paintings, which is a shame — but knowing her story does help give a sense of the vectors the recent work is triangulating. The composition of each canvas — tiny figures swarming over a stage-like space, rotating around a central symbolic female figure — is a conscious callback to Crabapple’s images of burlesque dancers. She’s drawing on and bringing that sense of masquerade and pageantry to her rendering of protest. The orienting female figures always represent some symbol, but they are not necessarily symbols with the same status or moral polarity — in one (the best work at Smart Clothes, in my opinion, dedicated to Occupy London), it is a portrait of her colleague Laurie Penny; in another, the central figure is a ghostly spirit made of floating balloons, representing the evanescent allure of debt.

The point is that these paintings include a personal iconography as well as a topical one, threading together different strands of Crabapple’s experience. Her work, it's worth saying, is also just fun: It's almost a toss off, but I've carefully preserved a little Crabapple-designed $1,000,000 dollar bill from the opening, which features a leering aristocratic cat at the center surrounded by wreathes of “vampire squid” tendrils. I have a good idea what the criticisms of her paintings might be: to a certain conservative gaze, they will be too simplistic and political; to a certain lefty eye, they will be not be sharp enough, too cutesy and thereby implicitly insincere. But their virtues, in my mind, reside in how they both consciously riff on and scramble what you expect about political art: “the best political art,” she wrote recently in the Jacobin, “is the product not of movements but of the flawed, searching individual mind.”

Crabapple has worked as an illustrator, a field where topical commentary has had such a lively place, and she is inspired by figures from this tradition, from Hogarth and Thomas Nast through to Art Spiegelman. Her best works — and I think “Can You See the Future Through the Tear Gas” is a really cool work — have often been a kind of visual caption to urgent words, arresting actions. There is a specific type of talent in that. But the pieces in “Shell Game,” while drawing on that talent, were something else again. They were specifically retrospective in character, about summing up a period of turmoil (“The ecstatic rebellions have faded away under police batons and their own mismanagement,” she wrote.) That, I think, is why their emotional tone is so even-tempered, why the gazes of the figures at their centers are so cool.

The works depict not the moment of battle, but the moment after the battle, when impellent communication is cooling into pictures and memories, and one is sorting out a personal take on it. The bluntness of their allegories feels like the still-urgent presence of the political moment pressing through the canvas; the whimsy and stylization is this urgency being translated into a form where you can reflect on it, even joke about it, and so live with it and face the present — which is a valuable survival skill, for artists and for movements alike.

LOS ANGELES — It’s been a few years since we’ve seen Keanu Reeves star in a major action blockbuster film. The last time was “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” in 2008. He’s kept a relativity low profile since, focusing on indie films like “Generation Um,” which opens in theaters in a limited release on May 3.

In the movie he plays John, a driver for an escort service whose life is going nowhere. At 40-something, he still gets cat-themed birthday cards with checks from his family. He doesn’t have much to say about anything, but two attractive escorts, Violet (Bojana Novakovic) and Mia (Adelaide Clemens), think he’s cool and they become friends.

John steals a video camera and shoots the girls half-naked as they reveal their darkest secrets after an intense night of partying, which forms an intimate bond between the three characters.

But what Reeves didn’t realize when he was cast in the role was that he actually had to film these scenes in character.

“When I was going into the project, I didn’t know that I was literally going to be filming the sequences. I was assuming that the cinematographer would take that over, but the director, Mark [Mann], was like, ‘No, you’re going to do it.’ That was a great trust and really a cool opportunity,” Reeves said at a recent press conference.

The story takes place in a single night and follows the three drunken friends through New York City. But don’t let the title fool you — it’s not really about any particular age group, according to Reeves.

“I don’t think the intention of the title of the film is supposed to be about this generation. It’s bigger than one era. It’s not just a decade generation. It’s now and it’s the past. It’s all about in this moment. I think it’s asking for interruption, which is a kind of connection. I think the characters in the film are seeking to connect but are damaged.”

“Generation Um” is currently available on VOD.