Guilty Pleasures
By NewsPress Now
Ariana Grande and Dalton Gomez are officially divorced
LOS ANGELES | Ariana Grande and Dalton Gomez are now divorced.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judgment dissolving their marriage of nearly three years became official Tuesday, six months after the 30-year-old pop star filed a petition to divorce the 28-year-old real estate broker.
The two separated more than a year ago, according to court papers. They had a pre-nuptial agreement, had no children and had no significant legal disputes in the split, allowing it to move quickly and cleanly through the court system.
The terms of their settlement were agreed upon in October, they had only to wait the required six months before a judge’s order could take effect.
Under the agreement, Grande will make a onetime payment of $1,250,000 to Gomez with no future alimony, give him half of the proceeds of the sale of their Los Angeles home, and will pay up to $25,000 toward his attorneys’ fees.
Like the vast majority of California divorces, Grande’s petition cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split.
The couple began dating in January 2020, and quarantined together during the pandemic. They appeared together in the video for the Justin Bieber charity single “Stuck With U” in May of that year, and announced their engagement in December.
Grande and Gomez were married in a tiny private ceremony at her home in Montecito, California, on May 15, 2021.
Grande, the Florida-born singer and actor, released her seventh studio album, “ eternal sunshine,” on March 8.
She is playing the good witch Glinda alongside Cynthia Erivo ‘s Elphaba in the two-part film adaptation of the stage musical “ Wicked,” scheduled for release in November.
Milan exhibit sheds new light on Renaissance altarpiece
MILAN | An unprecedented exhibition opening Wednesday at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan reunites for the first time in over 450 years eight surviving panels of the Augustinian Altarpiece by the early Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, while possibly solving one of its enduring mysteries.
Museums have tried and failed in the past to assemble the remaining eight panels, spread among five museums in Europe and the United States, of the original 30-piece polyptych. They include the Poldi Pezzoli, owner of one panel, in 1996 and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2018.
The Frick Collection in New York, owner of four of the panels, came closest a decade ago, gathering six.
Poldi Pezzoli Museum director Alessandra Quarto succeeded this time, after learning that the owner of four of the pieces, the Frick Collection in New York, would be closed for six months. The Frick Collection agreed to the loan, making it easier to bring on board museums in London, Washington, D.C. and Lisbon.
In the exhibition, four large flanking panels of saints are staggered against a blue background, flanking a blank wall where the missing central panel would have been. The piece has been missing for centuries and no sketches or records of its subject exist.
“What jumps out is the art and the exuberant monumentality of Piero della Francesca, because the whole is much more than the sum of its parts,’’ said co-curator Machtelt Bruggen Israels of the University of Amsterdam. “The research we have done have allowed us to reveal the biggest mystery that remained around this work.’’
New evidence gathered during scientific study of the four major panels leading up to the exhibition indicates that the missing central panel depicted the coronation of the Virgin, not the previously believed Virgin and Child enthroned, Israels said.
Infrared and stereomicroscopic studies revealed traces of two wings, one pink, one blue, on panels that would have flanked the central piece, indicating angels. The wings, Israels said, would have been scraped off when the altarpiece was disassembled and the wing fragments would no longer have made sense.
Experts also detected the image of a foot beneath a brocade dress on the left panel, featuring St. Michael the Archangel, and owned by the National Gallery, London, suggesting a kneeling central figure of the Virgin. A similar step and corresponding angel wing is found on the opposite panel, depicting St. John the Evangelist, belonging to The Frick Collection.
The angels, together with the kneeling Virgin, are typical of depictions of the coronation. Until the recent study, the pink and blue paint fragments of the wings had been detected, but not fully understood, said co-curator Nathaniel Silver of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
“It was a huge ah-a!,’’ Silver said. “It was one of these things that had come up previously as an idea, but there wasn’t the surviving technical evidence to add to the argument.”
Curators hope that the new exhibition could prompt private collectors to look closely at their pieces, in the hopes of recovering any of the missing 22 pieces.
Augustinian hermits in della Francesca’s native Borgo San Sepolcro commissioned the altarpiece in 1454, and it hung in its original church for less than 100 years. It was disassembled after being moved to another church, and such depictions fell out of favor, Israels said. A panel showed up in a private collection in San Sepolcro as early as 1620.
The four big panels included in the exhibition showed up on the art market in Milan in the 1800s. The whereabouts of one smaller panel was recorded in the 1800s, Israels said, but the others — including the prized central panel — have been lost from view for centuries.
“I think it is very difficult, if not impossible” that the missing panels would resurface, said Xavier Salomon, deputy director and chief curator of The Frick Collection in New York. “The last time any of these were seen together was probably here in Milan. So, I would just suggest to anyone who has an attic in Milan, to have a look around.”
Ned Blackhawk’s ‘The Rediscovery of America’ honored by the Lukas prize project
NEW YORK | An exploration of racism on social media and a history of Native Americans are among the winners of J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards, which celebrate literary excellence, social relevance and original reporting.
Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” which won a National Book Award last fall, received the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize. Dashka Slater’s “Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed” won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, also a $10,000 honor. “Accountable” is the first book for young audiences to receive the Lukas book prize.
Two books received Lukas Work-in-Progress awards, each worth $25,000: Lorraine Boissoneault’s “Body Weather: Notes on Illness in the Anthropocene” and Alice Driver’s “The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company.”
The awards, established in 1998 and named for the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author and investigative journalist, are presented by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Previous winners include Robert Caro, Jill Lepore and Isabel Wilkerson.
Michael Tilson Thomas to lead New York Philharmonic opening subscription program
NEW YORK | Michael Tilson Thomas is to conduct the opening subscription program of the New York Philharmonic season, three years after the conductor announced he was being treated for a brain tumor.
The 79-year-old is to lead the orchestra in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 with Emanuel Ax and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on Sept. 12, 13 and 15, the orchestra said Tuesday.
Tilson Thomas said in August 2021 that he had has undergone surgery for a brain tumor. He has continued to lead an active schedule but with fewer performances: Tilson Thomas led four concerts with the New York Philharmonic in March 2023. He was founder of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida, and music director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1995-2020.
The philharmonic will be without a music director for two seasons. Jaap van Zweden leaves this summer after six years, and Gustavo Dudamel starts in 2026-27, after he leaves the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Dudamel leads three weeks of subscription programs, one in March 2025 and two in May 2025 that include the world premiere of a work written and sung by Kate Soper, Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 11 and Mahler’s Seventh. He will conduct the philharmonic’s parks concerts for the first time in June 2025.
Dudamel becomes music director designate in 2025-26. He has conducted the orchestra 29 times starting with his 2007 debut.
Ken-David Masur, a son of former music director Kurt Masur, conducts a new work by Augusta Read Thomas on Sept. 19 and 21.
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra music director Manfred Honeck will lead an opening gala on Sept. 24 that includes Tony Award winner Cynthia Erivo.
Herbert Blomstedt, who turns 97 in July, is to conduct Schubert’s Sixth Symphony and Brahms’ Violin Concerto with Hilary Hahn from Feb. 26 through March 2.
Soprano Renée Fleming and tenor Rod Gilfry feature in Kevin Puts’ “The Brightness of Light” from May 16–18, 2025, with Juanjo Mena conducting,
Pianist Yuja Wang will be the orchestra’s artist in residence.
—From AP reports
