Triptych

Champion turf mare Triptych died after running into a truck while a night watchman was making midnight rounds at Claiborne Farm in Paris, Ky. Triptych, in foal to Mr. Prospector, died Wednesday of a hemorrhage caused by multiple pelvic fractures. The accident occured when the watchman drove onto a field containing Triptych and 10 other mares and turned off the vehicle's lights to prevent blinding the horses. Some of the mares ran toward the truck and didn't stop.

Paintings with a fuzzy, blissed-out, sun-bleached look have a venerable contemporary history, beginning with Vija Celmins and Gerhard Richter in the 1960s, continuing with Ellen Phelan in the 1980s and then on to Luc Tuymans more recently. Now, among others, add young Beijing painter Song Kun to the accomplished roster. At Walter Maciel Gallery, Song is showing 20 oil paintings made since 2008. All horizontal, all 18 inches high and 24 inches wide, they include a few single-panel works and one triptych; most are diptychs.

Champion turf mare Triptych died after running into a truck while a night watchman was making midnight rounds at Claiborne Farm. Triptych, in foal to Mr. Prospector, died Wednesday of a hemorrhage caused by multiple pelvic fractures, according to Claiborne manager John Sosby. The 7-year-old mare was owned by Peter M. Brant and Robert Levy, who purchased her for $3.4 million at a March, 1988, auction. The daughter of Riverman out of Trillion had 41 starts, 14 victories and earnings of $2.6 million in a career that ended last November in a fourth-place finish in the Breeders' Cup Turf at Churchill Downs.

John Adams is inescapable these days. "On the Transmigration of Souls," which opened the New York Philharmonic season in September, has just won the Pulitzer Prize and is the first artistic work commemorating Sept. 11 that is likely to last. The Los Angeles Philharmonic recently staged the oratorio "El Nino" and took it to New York as the highlight of Lincoln Center's current Adams festival.

Paintings with a fuzzy, blissed-out, sun-bleached look have a venerable contemporary history, beginning with Vija Celmins and Gerhard Richter in the 1960s, continuing with Ellen Phelan in the 1980s and then on to Luc Tuymans more recently. Now, among others, add young Beijing painter Song Kun to the accomplished roster. At Walter Maciel Gallery, Song is showing 20 oil paintings made since 2008. All horizontal, all 18 inches high and 24 inches wide, they include a few single-panel works and one triptych; most are diptychs.

Who is cashing in on art at New York's upcoming round of big-ticket auctions and why are these collectors unloading their treasures? Most of the sellers aren't telling. While the auction houses thrive on highly publicized "single owner" sales featuring celebrated collections, the majority of items listed in auction catalogs are sold anonymously. In the catalogue for Christie's May 3 sale of contemporary art, for example, owners of only 11 of the 64 items offered are identified.

It's not often one is treated to a spirited black comedy bursting with fresh, fluid dancing and an athletic, metaphysical spectacle on the same bill, but such was the case Friday night at Occidental College's Keck Theater. Two disparate but equally intriguing works--Michael Mizerany's premiere, "Bound," and "Triptych," by Stephanie Gilliland Dance Company--were each flawlessly performed and hyper-alive.

Father Jerome Tupa is not a missionary, but he understands the urgency of a mission. As a Benedictine monk at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., he belongs to a Catholic order that emphasizes prayer and work within a religious community. During an artistic pilgrimage to all of California's 21 missions, he began to appreciate the work of his long-ago fellow traveler, Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan who launched the building of these churches, starting in 1769.

SOMEWHERE between a dorm-room poster of Monet's waterlilies and the Robert Rauschenberg painting owned by Eli Broad is another level -- the beginnings of an art collection that can be built by anyone with a few grand to spend.

Fourteen horses--seven from the United States, five from Europe and two from Canada--will be racing for a winner's purse of $600,000 in the Arlington Million today at Woodbine Racetrack. The race was moved to Woodbine for one year while Arlington Park, on the outskirts of Chicago, undergoes major repair from a 1985 fire. Triptych, a 6-year-old French mare, is the 7-2 early favorite.

For more than 20 years, choreographer Liz Lerman and her Maryland-based Dance Exchange have become well-known for community-based work that explores relationships between history and identity. Collecting people's stories and turning them into movement, Lerman has struggled to establish a lifeline between dance and everyday audiences. Part of her approach has been the development of site-specific works, such as tours of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

It's not often one is treated to a spirited black comedy bursting with fresh, fluid dancing and an athletic, metaphysical spectacle on the same bill, but such was the case Friday night at Occidental College's Keck Theater. Two disparate but equally intriguing works--Michael Mizerany's premiere, "Bound," and "Triptych," by Stephanie Gilliland Dance Company--were each flawlessly performed and hyper-alive.

Because Steven Levi's triptych of a play, "Cherry Soda Water," is unashamedly literary, it's also open about literary roots. Its California coastal town setting and hard-bitten people are directly from John Steinbeck, which is a strength. Levi's taste for having characters launch into florid speech and melodramatic displays is straight from Tennessee Williams, which gets to be a problem.

'Women on the Margins" is a book in disguise. It looks like an act of pious retrieval, the kind of tradition-making that women's studies took off on a quarter of a century ago, as old-fashioned as the space program. But despite the title, this isn't something we've read before.

The fascination of art lies importantly in the way its objects come encrusted with history. Sometimes this patina of time is a visual distillation of the events of the artist's life, or of the roundelay of the object's proud possessors. Sometimes it is a narrative told by the work or the details of its physical reality, its medical history, so to speak. This is the account of the way it was made and the way it aged. Usually the saga of an art object consists of all these threads intertwined.

In the home of Michael B. and Ron S., the canine is king. Here, paintings of dogs, dog statuettes, and dog tapestries abound. * In the home of Coester T., everything hanging on the wall is crooked--from framed prints to drying socks. Christine T. has nothing to eat in her refrigerator. Monica and Jack P. fetishize order. William F. likes a mess. In every home, there are stories--hidden behind potted plants, stuffed under sofa cushions, in the wallpaper carefully selected for the guest bathroom.

"Basel Mural I," an abstract painting by Sam Francis, is one of the high points of the Norton Simon Museum's contemporary art collection. Stretching nearly 13 feet high and 20 feet wide, the free-spirited, dripped and splashed composition commands a full wall at the Pasadena museum. But it's only one of three panels made in 1956-58 for the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland. The triptych will never again be whole. But -- in one of those twists of human will and fate that spice up the provenance of artworks -- two substantial sections of a panel damaged more than 40 years ago and salvaged by the artist have been reunited with the Simon's painting.

The difference between timeless and dated choreography is very subtle. The work of Los Angeles Choreographers & Dancers too often veers into the latter state. There is no such thing as lock-step progress in the evolution of contemporary dance, but sitting in front of this company at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, one gets the feeling that the last 25 years have passed it by. Louise Reichlin directs a racially diverse ensemble of nine women and one man, some of whom are strong performers.

"I'm the guinea pig," said artist Joe Goode, whose work opened the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new "Laboratory" series Thursday. Designed by Howard N. Fox, the museum's curator of contemporary art, the series is intended to allow artists to create works of unusual scope in the museum galleries.

The difference between timeless and dated choreography is very subtle. The work of Los Angeles Choreographers & Dancers too often veers into the latter state. There is no such thing as lock-step progress in the evolution of contemporary dance, but sitting in front of this company at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, one gets the feeling that the last 25 years have passed it by. Louise Reichlin directs a racially diverse ensemble of nine women and one man, some of whom are strong performers.