May
7,
2004
Front-Page
News
Remembrance
of Things Past In the May issue of Travel
and Leisure magazine,
Professor Chris Benfey recalls the summer sessions held at Mount
Holyoke from 1942 to the end of World War II, when many of Europe’s
leading intellectuals-in-exile gathered to discuss poetry, philosophy,
and art. The Pontigny sessions, as they were known, were a re-creation
of the symposia held in France before the war, and the records
of the discussions they sparked were only recently discovered in
the College archives. For three summers, intellectual history was
made on the Mount Holyoke campus. The painter Robert Motherwell
read his first essay defending Abstract Expressionism, Wallace
Stevens met Marianne Moore, and Claude Levi-Strauss introduced
American audiences to the field of structural anthropology. Benfey
writes of those years and of his own searches in Normandy for the
traces of one of the most vibrant periods of cultural exchange
between France and America. Benfey was also directly involved in
a Weissman Center symposium and celebration of the Pontigny encounters
at Mount Holyoke last fall. The
Travel and Leisure article is also available online at travelandleisure.com.
No SAT-isfaction An article about upcoming changes to the SAT
in the April 19 Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Jane Brown, vice
president for enrollment, about Mount Holyoke’s SAT-optional
policy. In the article, Inquirer staff writer Alfred Lubrano
noted that the “holistic, comprehensive review” favored
by MHC and a number of other colleges “lets college admissions
officers look more deeply at a student’s life and school
work without what Jane Brown, Mount Holyoke’s vice president
for enrollment, calls the ‘blunt instrument’ of the
SAT. ‘We would never define a student by the accomplishment
of a single morning of effort,’ she said.” The Inquirer article focuses on the addition of an essay requirement to the
exam, and quotes critics who doubt the stated goals of the change. “The
changes were made, test-makers say, to bring the SAT more in
line with school curriculums and improve student writing,” Lubrano
wrote. “Critics question, however, whether monetary, not
scholarly, concerns inspired the alterations, which come as a
growing number of colleges are relying less on standardized tests
as the most accurate predictor of student performance. Ultimately,
for the 2.2 million students who will take the test, the change
won’t be easy.” The article, distributed through
the Knight-Ridder wire service, appeared in more than a dozen
other newspapers, including the Kansas City
Star, the Charlotte
Observer, and the San Luis Obispo Tribune.
Miller’s Tale Art professor Marion Miller’s paintings,
recently on display at the Crealde School of Art in Winter Park,
Florida, won great praise from the Orlando
Sentinel in a review
published earlier this month.
Miller’s show, Figures: Stable and in Motion, combined canvases dealing
with two subject areas: portraits and self-portraits, and equestrian subjects.
“Marion Miller’s oil paintings are the kind of brainy images we’d
expect of someone who started as a philosophy major and progressed to painting
from life,” wrote reviewer Philip E. Bishop. “Miller cites as her
influences both Jan Vermeer, the Dutch master of the quiet interior, and the
impressionist Edgar Degas, whose horses and jockeys often spilled out of the
picture frame. From Vermeer she draws an interest in carefully arranged patterns
and counterbalanced masses. From Degas, she learned the effectiveness of eccentric
perspective and the tension between foreground and background. Especially in
the portraits, viewers might just as well be reminded of Edward Hopper, another
painter who understood the loneliness of the solitary figure who’s never
quite at home. As Crealde curator Rima Jabbur says, ‘We are glimpsing a
private yet inaccessible world.’”
Miller also has a number of works currently in a group show at the new Oxbow
Gallery at 275 Pleasant Street in Northampton.
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