Postwar

Leo and His Circle The Life of Leo Castelli Annie Cohen-Solal Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti Alfred A. Knopf: 544 pp., $35 The ascension of New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch to the Museum of Contemporary Art's helm has occasioned considerable art-world hand-wringing as to the collapsing space between the market and the museum. Of course, these two zones have really never been separate. The dealer Joseph Duveen was the invisible hand responsible for building museum collections across the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

British writer Alan Sillitoe, whose "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" chronicled the bleak postwar realities of Britain's poor, died Sunday. He was 82. The writer's son, David, said his father had died at London's Charing Cross Hospital but gave no other details. Sillitoe, a leading member of the 1950s group of so-called angry young men of British fiction, was acclaimed for his uncompromising social criticism and depiction of domestic tensions — often dubbed kitchen-sink dramas.

The Changeling A Novel Kenzaburo Oe Translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boehm Grove Press: 468 pp., $26 When Kenzaburo Oe won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994, he made a startling claim: Henceforth, he would abandon the autobiographical style that had previously characterized his work. The fruit of that declaration, a sprawling novel about religious sects and nuclear catastrophe called "Somersault," was published in English translation in 2003 to widespread criticism.

As Harrison McIntosh tells his story, he had to be an artist. The diminutive, soft-spoken ceramist who's celebrating his 95th birthday with a retrospective exhibition at Pomona's American Museum of Ceramic Art is a virtuoso of pure, gracefully handmade form whose work represents the classical vein of Southern California's postwar crafts movement in museum collections around the world. He was born in Vallejo and raised in Stockton, not exactly the center of the art universe, but he watched with fascination as the Haggin Museum took shape and opened its doors in 1931 in a park near his school.

Willy Ronis, 99, the last of France's postwar greats of photography who captured the essence of Paris in black-and-white scenes of everyday life, died Sept. 12 at a Paris hospital, said Stephane Ledoux, president of the Eyedea photo agency. Lovers, nudes and scenes from Paris streets, including "Bastille Lovers, Paris 1957," were the mainstay of Ronis' photographs, which reflect the so-called humanist school of photography. Ronis, along with friend Robert Doisneau and photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, were among France's great photographers who emerged after World War II. Photographs of eastern Paris, where Ronis lived, were collected in a book of the Belleville and Menilmontant neighborhoods that reached cult status in France.

As children of the Great Depression, Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman had modest dreams: They wanted to own their home and decorate it with beautiful things. In 1952, the couple left Detroit to start a mom-and-pop arts studio in Culver City, and in the decades that followed they produced hundreds of handmade ceramics, tile mosaics, woodcarvings and rugs -- affordable home furnishings that, starting Sunday, will be elevated to museum pieces.

Deeply conservative Gaza City isn't exactly fertile ground for New Age practices. But women in head scarves and men in suits flapped their arms with gusto while breathing in rhythm in what looked like a yogic chicken dance. The recent scene in a hotel ballroom broke several cultural taboos, such as not letting loose in public, particularly in mixed company. But the dozens of counselors and social workers, stressed and overworked since the recent Gaza Strip war, eagerly cast convention aside to learn about relaxation techniques.

The 1948 home that Greta Magnusson Grossman built in Beverly Hills has a low facade punctuated by unadorned windows. In David Gebhard and Robert Winter's "A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles and Southern California," it is described as "a simple Modern brown box sheathed in vertical board-and-batten." Once inside, however, visitors feel as if they're floating over the steeply sloped lot.

"One thing about that lad," David Thomson's grandmother once announced, "you can always take him to see a picture. Then he's happy for a couple of hours." The young Thomson, who discovered cinema at the movie palaces of Streatham, a middle-class suburb that he describes as "a bit of London's infinity," grew up to be a film critic. He's perhaps best known for "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," an unusual reference book that's both factually comprehensive and unapologetically opinionated.