Jerome Robbins (Oct 11, 1918 - Jul 29, 1998) made the most freighted political choice of his life at the fraught intersection of career, family, religion and sexuality. The conflict between those forces is unenviable, but telling. If one were looking to identify a quintessentially Jewish American genius of the 20th century, Robbins’s mix of brilliance and neuroses, rebellion and fascination with tradition — along with his struggle to define himself and his work as equally American and Jewish, his broad sympathy for the status of the outsider, and his guilt — would make him a worthy choice.
Arturo Souto Feijoo (April 5,1902 - July 3, 1964) was an important Spanish painter who studied in Seville and Madrid and then traveled to Paris in the 1920s where he was influenced by the avant-garde. Prior to his exile from Spain following the Spanish Civil War, Souto exhibited throughout Europe. While living in Havana, Mexico, and the U.S. during the 1940s until his death in 1964, Souto continued to exhibit and developed a reputation as one of the outstanding Spanish painters of the twentieth century.
In 1933, the Soviet Union began construction work on what would become some of the world’s most beautiful subway stations. The Moscow Metro opened in 1935. Built mainly by hand, the train stations resemble a palace more than a place of transit. And they were palaces of a sort: they articulated, through architecture, the Soviet creed that the worker, not a king, queen or Tsar, reigned supreme. The irony—and tragedy—is that these palaces required the punishment of the very people they venerated: working conditions on these palatial subway sites were notoriously cruel.
Fly over “Datong County”, a region in northern China, and you’ll see two giant pandas. One is waving at you. They are made of thousands of solar panels. Together, and with the other adjacent panels included, they form a 100-megawatt farm covering 248 acres. It’s actually a relatively small solar park by China’s standards – but it is certainly patriotic. “It is designed and built as the image of the Chinese national treasure – the giant panda,” explains a document from Panda Green Energy, the company that constructed the farm.