【推荐1】Christ Mocked, by the Florentine master Cimabue, was sold at auction(拍卖)for €24 million in 2019. But the Chilean buyers never got to include the work in their collection because the French government refused to give it an export licence.

Ministers declared the painting a national treasure, officially giving the Louvre 30 months to raise the funds for its purchase. The Louvre recently reached an agreement with the owners.

Laurence des Cars, the president of the Louvre, said it was a “great joy” to have acquired the painting, which “constitutes a crucial landmark in the history of art”. The museum did not say how much it had paid, nor who had sold the painting, which will be exhibited in 2025.

The painting was spotted four years ago by Philomene Wolf, an auctioneer, when she was asked to assess the content s of a house that was being cleared. The owner, in her nineties, thought it was a painting from Russia of no value and was preparing to put it in the dustbin.

Wolf was struck by its quality and guessed that it could be Italian. Experts using modern technology confirmed that it was by Cimabue, who is widely regarded as having opened the gateway to Renaissance art. It is believed to date from 1280. Christ Mocked is one of about 15 known Cimabue’s works.

The Louvre launched an appeal on Tuesday for donations to buy another painting, The Basket of Wild Strawberries by Jean Simeon Chardin, the 18th-century French still life(静物画)master. The work, which was first exhibited in 1761, was in a private collection from the 19th century until last year, when it was sold for €24.3 million to an American art museum at an auction in Paris.

Luckily, many groups and individuals donated two-thirds of the sum. The museum must pay the remaining € 8 million and is hoping that members of the public will help to ease the burden by responding to its appeal, which aims to raise € 1.3 million.

【推荐2】The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor, for advancing the world’s understanding of women’s progress in the work force. She is the third woman to have won the Economics Nobel, which was first awarded in 1969, and the first one to be honored with it solo rather than sharing in the prize.

Dr. Goldin, 77, was the first woman to be offered tenure (终身职位) in Harvard’s economics department in 1989. Dr. Goldin’s research on female employment and the gender wage gap over the past 200 years showed that employment among married women decreased in the 1800s, as the economy moved away from agriculture and toward industry. Women’s participation then increased in the 1900s, as the service industry began to expand as a part of the economy. Dr. Goldin has described the 1970s in particular as a “revolutionary” period when women in the US began to marry later, pursue higher education, and make major progress in the labor market.

Dr. Goldin has also illustrated how the process of closing the gender wage gap has been uneven over the course of history. In the past, gender wage gaps could be explained by education and occupation. But Dr. Goldin has shown that most of the earnings difference is now in the same jobs. Notably, it kicks in after the birth of a woman’s first child. Goldin and her colleagues once found the gap in pay started to widen a year or two after a woman had her first baby.

She hoped people would learn from her work how important long-term changes are for understanding the labor market. “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equality, ” she said. While there has been “monumental progressive change, at the same time there are important differences” which often tie back to women doing more work in the home.

【推荐1】Bags and rolls of circulation (发行) quality 2022 American Women, Anna May Wong quarter dollars will be offered to the public on Oct 25 by the United States Mint (美国铸币厂).

The American Women Quarters Program is a four-year program that celebrates the achievements and breakthroughs made by women to the development and history of the US. Beginning in 2022, and continuing through 2025, the US Mint will bring out up to five new designs each year.

Anna May Wong was born in 1905 in Los Angeles to second-generation Chinese-American parents. Wong always took a strong interest in movies and often spent her time and money as a child seeing films in theaters. As early as the age of nine Wong began asking filmmakers for roles, and by age 11 she had come up with her stage name: Anna May Wong.

Anna May Wong is considered by many to be the first Chinese-American Hollywood movie star. She starred in dozens of productions, with some of the more famous ones being Shanghai Express (1932), Bits of Life (1921), and The Toll of the Sea (1922), which was one of the very first films made in color.

She was a figure of foreign fashion around the world, loved by high society in London, Berlin and elsewhere. In 1934, the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York voted her the “world’s best dressed woman”; in 1938 Look magazine named her the “world’s most beautiful Chinese girl” .

However, Hollywood’s unfair treatment against Asian people continued to influence Wong’s entire career, looking her as “foreign atmosphere” rather than recognizing her talent and skill.

Wong was straightforward about her disappointment with Hollywood, and she worked against the unfair treatment. “I was so tired of the parts I had to play,”she said in an interview with Film Weekly. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the bad guy and so cruel? We are not like that.”

【推荐2】Xu Beihong was born in 1895 in Yixing, Jiangsu province. When he was only six, he began to learn the Chinese classic works and calligraphy under the direction of his father, who was a local portrait painter. At the age of nine, his father taught him art. His family was poor and at the age of eleven, young Xu had to leave home with his father and sell paintings to make a living. After several years, Xu achieved local success and recognition, but his father developed a serious illness and died shortly afterwards. Xu's early experiences of hardship and loss became the basis of the realism in his artistic creations.

In 1917, he went to Japan and studied art in Tokyo, and later, he was able to spend eight years studying art in Europe. He then returned to China to teach. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Xu became president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and chairman of the Chinese Artists' Association.

Xu was primarily known for his Chinese ink paintings of horses and birds. However, his experiences in Europe drove his desire to create a new form of national art that combined the traditional Chinese paintings techniques with Western perspective and methods of composition to reflect a modern China. His talent and hard work led to the development of a new style of Chinese painting and an approach to art that is still taken by art institutions across China.

【推荐3】Born in a musical family in 1925 in New Orleans, Renald Richard spent his childhood filled with music. At the age of 13, he went to see a band perform at a church where he fell in love with trumpet. So he started lessons on it, and later played it in the high school band. After high school, he was sent into military service and played his trumpet in the United States Navy Band. After ending up studying music at Xavier University of Louisiana, he played clubs on the famous Bourbon Street and also toured with many bands.

In 1954, Richard was approached by Jeff Brown, the manager of musician Ray Charles. He invited Richard to join Ray Charles’ new band. “To be selected by Ray Charles was an honor to me. Ray Charles was exacting.” said Richard, “He was a perfectionist and was rather demanding about his music.”

Renald Richard toured all over the South and West with Ray Charles. Sitting in the back seat of the car on the way to a concert, Richard wrote the song “I Got a Woman” for Charles, which became Ray Charles’ first number one radio hit. In 1954,Renald Richard left Ray Charles’ band. However, he stayed friendly with Ray Charles over the years. He became the high school’s band director in his hometown until 1962. Four years later, he moved again to New York City. Over the years, Richard has written many other songs that have been recorded by artists including Joe Turner, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley to name a few. Living now in Southern Florida, Richard is still active at the age of 92. As you can see, Renald Richard’s musical days are by no means near an end.

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