Impressionists

George Kirby Kirby excelled as Nat King Cole, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and even Ella Fitzgerald. Marilyn Michaels Impressions of singers Connie Francis, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Ethel Merman are her forte. Frank Gorshin Gorshin was the first impressionist to become a headliner imitating such stars as Burt Lancaster and George Burns.

Violeta Parra grew up in poverty in rural Chile and became an internationally recognized musician, her songs covered by such luminaries as Joan Baez and Shakira. With its grand arc, her story would fit nicely into the standard biopic format, but director Andrés Wood wisely opts for a more impressionistic approach in "Violeta Went to Heaven. " His feature matches its subject in turbulence and intensity, scrambling chronology in a revelatory way. Francisca Gavilán's lead performance burns with a dark radiance that's anything but self-congratulatory.

Think Degas, and chances are you think Impressionism. And why not? The upward trajectory of the Frenchman's career as a painter is nearly coincident with the rising fortunes of Impressionist art. Born in 1834, Edgar Degas was studying art in Paris in the 1860s, the formative years of what would soon come to be called Impressionist painting and, not incidentally, of his own developing work. His severely classical style, guided by a reverence for Ingres, was beginning to loosen up.

"Renoir" is a lush, involving film that deals not with one Renoir but two, as well as the strong-minded woman who was a key player in both their lives. The year is 1915, the setting the gorgeous landscape of the French Riviera, and Renoir the father, the recently widowed 74-year-old Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste (the veteran Michel Bouquet), is hungry for inspiration. His son, future filmmaker Jean Renoir, is only 21, a wounded World War I veteran come home to the family compound at Cagnes-sur-Mer to convalesce.

Like Ruth Wallach (Saturday Letters, Jan. 9), I am not thrilled by the idea of an exhibit of Hollywood costumes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, though I have not seen the show yet and cannot judge it. I also regret that the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit will not come to the West Coast. But to describe "A Day in the Country" as a "laughably small" exhibit "of some of the countryside paintings by some of the Impressionists" is ludicrous. Is Wallach herself so provincial as to imagine there could be an exhibit of all the countryside paintings by all the Impressionists?

Re Christopher Knight's Aug. 12 commentary, "Lasting Favorable Impressions": Yes, Mr. Knight, there is someone who loathes the Impressionists. I hate the bright colors that look like they are straight out of the tube, I hate the childish, unfinished look, I hate the myopic fuzziness, I hate what Impressionism developed into in the 20th Century. But most of all I hate the media dictators of the last 40 years who have made the Impressionists into everlasting images of the "avant-garde" and untouchable cultural icons.

Veteran impressionist Rich Little admits it's tough getting a handle on contemporary stars. "How are you going to imitate Ashton Kutcher or Brad Pitt or Matt Damon?" asked Little over a cup of coffee at the Beverly Hilton. "Jack Nicholson is larger than life, so is Clint Eastwood. But there are not many people like Nicholson who are around today -- larger than life, with very distinctive voices. How do you do George Clooney? I have worked at it. If you do Tom Hanks, you have got to do 'box of chocolates,' and even that is kind of old now. Good actors, but not voices.

Although Los Angeles has a big intellectual community and an international reputation, its County Museum gives the impression that it is a provincial town where people are only interested in the Hollywood glitz and glamour. Why is it that the East Coast enjoys exhibitions of Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, the royal garments of India, ancient Egyptian artifacts, etc., while all we get here are laughably small exhibits of some of the countryside paintings by some of the Impressionists, and (thank God!

"The Golden Land," the exhibition of California landscape paintings and photographs at the San Diego Museum of Art, makes for an ironic combination of the development industry, land and art. The exhibit of more than 100 paintings and photographs, which opened last weekend and continues through Jan. 18, is funded by the Fieldstone Co., a Southern California firm that has built hundreds of single-family homes in San Diego County.

The American Impressionist movement flourished in Connecticut in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and now the Constitution State has created the Connecticut Impressionist Art Trail, highlighting 11 museums and major collections. Some of the sites include Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum and the New Britain Museum of American Art and some of the artists include William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam and Mary Cassatt. Trail brochures are available from the Connecticut Impressionist Art Trail, P.

SAN DIEGO - In the history of American art, Charles Reiffel is probably the best early Modernist painter you've never heard of. Celebrated in his own day for Expressionist landscapes of remarkable verve and complexity, he quickly fell off the national radar screen after his death in 1942, just before turning 80. I was unaware of his work until 2008, when seven paintings turned up - and stood out - in a group show . Now, however, the artist...

One thing I've always admired about Patti Smith is her refusal to be characterized. Rocker, poet, artist, mother: She seems to inhabit each of these roles almost effortlessly, moving among them as if the only difference was in our heads. And why not? For Smith, they all come out of the same impulse, a kind of ecstatic self-engagement, in which the line separating life and creativity, the mundane and the mystical, is an illusion, a border we create to bound ourselves. "Oh, God, I fell for you," she sings at the end of her 1979 song "Dancing Barefoot," and since the first time I ever played that record, I've heard this as a prayer, a benediction, as if it were God she had fallen for. Such a sensibility - fluid, visionary, risky - marks the 11 pieces in "Woolgathering" (New Directions: 80 pp., $18.95)

George Kirby Kirby excelled as Nat King Cole, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and even Ella Fitzgerald. Marilyn Michaels Impressions of singers Connie Francis, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Ethel Merman are her forte. Frank Gorshin Gorshin was the first impressionist to become a headliner imitating such stars as Burt Lancaster and George Burns.

Veteran impressionist Rich Little admits it's tough getting a handle on contemporary stars. "How are you going to imitate Ashton Kutcher or Brad Pitt or Matt Damon?" asked Little over a cup of coffee at the Beverly Hilton. "Jack Nicholson is larger than life, so is Clint Eastwood. But there are not many people like Nicholson who are around today -- larger than life, with very distinctive voices. How do you do George Clooney? I have worked at it. If you do Tom Hanks, you have got to do 'box of chocolates,' and even that is kind of old now. Good actors, but not voices.

David Frye, whose impressions of Presidents Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and other prominent political figures vaulted him to popularity in the 1960s and '70s, has died. He was 77. Frye died Monday of cardiopulmonary arrest at his Las Vegas home, Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy said Saturday. He had a wide-ranging cast of characters , but he specialized in impressions of the era's political figures such as Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace and Nelson Rockefeller. "Frye bobs and weaves among the political heavyweights armed with perfect pitch and deadly accuracy," Time magazine wrote in 1970.

The festival runs until the end of September, but check the schedules because some events and exhibits may have closed or relocated. If you go For information on the Impressionist Normandy Festival , go to http://www.normandie-impressionniste.fr/en and http://www.impressionism-normandy.com.

Benjamin Lopez sat at a table in the courtyard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, watching people take their seats for the Friday night jazz performance. A slight man with a nervous smile, Lopez is the visitor services manager at the museum--a job that keeps him in the background, people-watching. In his four years at the museum, Lopez has seen thousands of singles pass through the galleries; one eye on the art, another on fellow museum-goers.

An 89-year-old La Mesa man seeking to recover an Impressionist masterpiece seized from his Jewish family by the Nazis has the right to sue Spain and the cultural foundation that has the painting on display at a Madrid museum, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. Claude Cassirer, who fled Nazi Germany as a youth, said he was delighted by the 9-2 decision of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals clearing the ownership dispute for trial. But he expressed concern about the long legal road still ahead.