'Picasso to Warhol' exhibition at Atlanta's High Museum

ATLANTA (AP) — With bright, bold colors, varying formats and iconic images, a new exhibition at Atlanta's main art museum allows visitors to experience dozens of modern art masterpieces and to explore the relationships among the artists who created them.

"Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters" at the High Museum of Art brings together more than 100 works by 14 influential 20th-century artists pulled from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and shown together for the first time in the Southeast.

"We wanted to create 14 intimate, immersive situations for people so they could feel like they had both met these artists and walked through the history of modern art," said High director Michael Shapiro.

On display are examples of artists using traditional subjects — portraits, landscapes, still lifes — in ways that were new, innovative, and sometimes shocking, at the time. They used new styles, like Cubism, and experimented with a variety of media, including mobiles, collage, film and silkscreen.

True to its title, the exhibition opens with paintings and etchings by Pablo Picasso and finishes with pop art pieces and a film by Andy Warhol. Works are clustered by artist, giving visitors a chance to see multiple works by a single artist together to get a more complete look at each artist's career, said MoMA's Jodi Hauptman, lead curator of the exhibition.

"The biggest revelation is the relationships between these works that you can't see in our galleries" because the works aren't displayed together at MoMA, Hauptman said. "Instead of being told about these connections, you actually see them."

Arranged in long, open vistas, the exhibition allows visitors to focus on a single artist but also to get a glimpse of what's to come and to consider the dialogue between the works, Hauptman said.

Standing in front of the opening piece — Picasso's brightly colored, large-format 1932 painting "Girl Before a Mirror" — the visitor can look to the left and see "Two Acrobats with a Dog" from 1905, during Picasso's Rose Period, and then turn to the right to see Henri Matisse's "Dance (I)" in the next part of the gallery.

After considering familiar artists like Picasso and Matisse in the first two galleries, visitors move on to lesser-known but still important artists. Sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and paintings and drawings by Piet Mondrian offer objects or settings stripped down to their bare essence — with Brancusi's streamlined bronze sculpture evoking a bird and Mondrian using grids of horizontal and vertical lines to represent a seascape, a church or a busy city square.

In a side gallery are works by Marcel Duchamp, whom Shapiro describes as probably the most radical artist in the exhibition. Most striking, perhaps is a wood and galvanized iron snow shovel hanging from the ceiling that the artist bought in a hardware store in 1915, then signed, dated and titled it "In Advance of the Broken Arm."

In "Dutch Interior (I)," painted in 1928, Joan Miro uses a Baroque painting of the same name as a model but recreates it as an abstract work. Jackson Pollock's "Number 1A" showcases the artist's well-known drip painting technique, his personal involvement with the painting stamped onto one edge in the form of handprints in paint. Mobiles by Alexander Calder in a side gallery "defy one of the basic rules of sculpture, which is that gravity is in charge," Shapiro said.

In "Map" from 1961, Jasper Johns, the only living artist in the exhibition, blurs the borders of the states in a giant, colorful map of the United States, using brushwork but also clearly identiying each one by name in bold, stenciled letters. Also by Johns are several works featuring numbers, which further illustrates his desire to present traditional, familiar subjects in a new way.

Across one wall of the final gallery are Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans," painted canvases that correspond to the varieties of soup sold by the company in 1962. In the center of the room are more works inspired by commercial products, including "Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box" (1963-64), "Campbell's Tomato Juice Box" (1964) and "Brillo Box (Soap Pads)" (1964).

Also included in the exhibition are works by Fernand Leger, Giorgio Chirico, Louise Bourgeois and Romare Bearden.

A free iPhone and Android application allows visitors to interact with the exhibition using their smart phones. By using one of those phones to take a picture of a piece, visitors can pull up more information, chat electronically with other visitors or pose questions in real time to museum staff.

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If You Go...

PICASSO TO WARHOL: Through April 29 at the High Museum of Art; 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta; http://www.high.org, 404-733-4444. Open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sunday noon-5 p.m. Adults, $18; students with ID and seniors 65 and over, $15; children 5 and under, free.

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Arrested plane passenger distraught over dying brother

Reuters

10:17 p.m. CDT, October 14, 2011

DENVER (Reuters) - An airplane passenger accused of a drunken rage that forced the diversion of an American Airlines jet said on Friday that he was drinking because he was distraught about his dying brother.

Varoujan Khodjamirian, 43, arrested on Thursday night when the plane landed safely in Denver, appeared the following day in federal court on a charge of interfering with a commercial flight crew.

A U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest Khodjamirian, a Long Island resident of Ukrainian descent, was a terrorist.

An FBI arrest affidavit said Khodjamirian had consumed several alcoholic drinks and became loud and disruptive about 90 minutes after takeoff on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, as he started to kick the seats in front of him.

According to the affidavit, flight attendants tried to calm Khodjamirian down, then moved him to the rear of the plane, but he struck one attendant in the face and began yelling threats.

Members of the crew ultimately managed to restrain him with flexible handcuffs, and two attendants sat on him until the plane arrived in Denver, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for Colorado.

Speaking through an interpreter before a U.S. magistrate, Khodjamirian acknowledged drinking alcohol on the plane and added he had been drinking because his brother was dying and had just two days to live. "That's why I had alcohol."

The judge ordered him to remain in custody at least until next Tuesday, when he is due to return to court to determine if he is eligible for release on bond.

(Corrects flight route in paragraph four)

(Reporting by Robert Boczkiewicz; Editing by Steve Gorman and Jerry Norton)

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Missed connection runs up phone bill

I've been haggling with Travelocity for almost three months about a flight, and I need your help. I recently booked flights from Newark, N.J., to Madrid, Spain, via Continental Airlines and on to my final destination of Barcelona, Spain, via Iberia.

The outbound trip was completed without issue. Unfortunately, the return trip through Brussels was less successful. The itinerary left me just one hour to make my connecting flight in Brussels to the U.S., but I had to claim a bag, go through customs, and then back to get my boarding pass.

When I arrived at the empty Continental ticket counter approximately 35 minutes before my flight, a Continental customer service agent refused to check me in because it was too late. She also told me the next flight was the following morning.

When I tried to dial the Travelocity number for assistance outside the U.S., it wouldn't connect. I tried multiple phones in the airport. I collect called my fiancee in the U.S. and had her call the domestic Travelocity telephone number, and after more than 30 minutes of international telephone calls, I was booked on the flight for the following morning.

I incurred a telephone bill of $378 to correct this situation. Travelocity won't refund my phone bill. Any ideas?

— Jeffrey Grim, Boston

A: Travelocity shouldn't have allowed you to reserve the itinerary that you did.

If your flights were connected on the same itinerary (which they appear to be), then the system should stop you from reserving a flight that doesn't meet the minimum connect-time rules. Something appears to have gone wrong, because you obviously didn't have enough time to transfer to your overseas flight in Brussels.

Travelocity also should have provided you with a number that worked from Brussels. I think you did your best to contact the online travel agency through normal channels before resorting to an expensive collect call.

And yes, calling Travelocity was the best option, since this was an immediate concern. Had it been something less urgent, I would recommend sending an email.

But I think you could have prevented this from happening too. Did you take a moment to read your itinerary after you booked your tickets? If you had noticed the short connection times you could have asked Travelocity to fix it long before your trip.

You had a second chance to fix this when you experienced a tight connection on your inbound flight.

It's unusual for an online travel agency to refund a phone bill, but in this case, I think it should consider doing so, at a minimum. I contacted Travelocity on your behalf. It apologized and agreed to refund your phone bill.

Christopher Elliott is the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine and a co-founder of the Consumer Travel Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for travelers. Read more tips on his blog, elliott.org, or e-mail him at chris@elliott.org.

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Sex-starved stags tangle with tourists at London's Bushy Park

BUSHY PARK, England (AP) — They call it the Beast of Bushy.

For the past week, this massive, short-tempered stag has been charging into British headlines, goring a man in the middle of a picnic and chasing one woman through the brush.

The stag's rampage has cast a shadow of fear over Bushy Park, a quiet suburban expanse of tree-lined avenues and ponds popular with retirees and stroller-pushing parents some 13 miles (21 kilometers) southwest of central London.

"I've been in and out of the park for 20 years, and this is the first time I've heard of people being attacked in such quick succession," said Robert Piper, a sports and wildlife photographer whose dramatic shots of the angry deer have kept it in the headlines.

The beast didn't seem so fearsome Wednesday, when it was seen lazing in the mud and long grass across from the park's model boat pond.

"He's had a rough couple of weeks," joked Piper. But as he inched forward to take a few last photos, the stag lifted a pair of sharpened antlers into the sky.

"Let's not push our luck," he said.

Bushy Park holds 320 deer, which roam freely across a 445-hectare (1,100-acre) area of meadows and forested areas that look much as they did when King Henry VIII used to hunt there.

They are generally gentle creatures — until fall's rutting season.

"Every year there's the odd incident," says park veteran Dick Hill, a 64-year-old retiree with binoculars dangling from his neck. "There have been quite a few of them this year."

Hill said a shortage of female deer could be to blame for the aggressive behavior, although a park official said the unseasonably warm weather — which drew large numbers of visitors at the height of the rutting season — was the deciding factor. The official asked not to be named.

Whatever the cause, this year's stag attacks have produced some dramatic photos. One showed a middle-aged man being bowled over by a charging deer in a picnic area. Hill, who was there, said the man emerged covered in blood.

Another incident, this one witnessed by Piper, showed a woman racing for her life, with the stag so close that its antlers lifted up her black leather jacket. She managed to escape after Piper distracted the animal.

"It was a happy ending," he said. "But it could easily have been a goring."

London's feisty press have traced the path of the stag's rampage under articles bearing names such as "Stag Fright."

Hill said the fuss was a bit overdone, and in any case, the Beast of Bushy's days may be numbered.

The park's deer are regularly culled.

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