Compiled by the El Reportero’s staff
Juanes & Paula Fernandes
Colombian singer-songwriter Juanes said that “Hoy me voy,” recorded in Spanish and Portuguese along with Brazil’s Paula Fernandes, is a bridge to overcoming the language barriers between the two cultures.
“The idea of doing a song with someone from Brazil was to build a bridge between two different cultures,” said Juanes in remarks to the daily Folha de Sao Paulo promoting the release in Brazil of his album “MTV Unplugged.”
Joining with Fernandes was for Juanes “a plan to try and do something different and open up a little door.”
With sales exceeding 12 million albums and the winner of 17 Latino Grammys, Juanes is now starting to break into the Brazilian music market.
As part of the release of Juanes’s new album, Universal records in late June staged a private concert in Sao Paulo at which Fernandes – Brazil’s best-selling female singer and an artist who performs in both English and Spanish – also participated.
“It’s not easy to hear songs in Portuguese on the radio stations in Mexico or Argentina. Everything is always in Spanish or English and I understand the same thing happens in Brazil,” said Juanes.
Pablo Picasso’s “Seated Woman” Painting Sells for $13.4 Milion
The 1949 oil painting “Seated Woman” by Pablo Picasso was auctioned off Wednesday at Christie’s in London for 8.5 million pounds ($13.4 million), a much higher price than the experts expected.
The picture was one of the most sought-after works in the auction of impressionist and modern art, in which paintings by Renoir, Signac and Gauguin were also on offer.
“Seated Woman,” a cubist design in tones of purple, black, yellow, green and orange, far surpassed the $11.7 million the experts had estimated.
Another star of the evening was a later work by Picasso, “Woman with Dog” painted in 1962, which was knocked down for 6.9 million pounds ($10.9 million).
The canvas, which had not been shown in public since 1973 in Chicago, is a portrait of his second wife Jacqueline Roque with her dog Kaboul, which the painter created in a period of great changes in his style.
Miro’s “Peinture (Etoile Bleue)” sells for record $37 million in London
Joan Miro’s “Peinture (Etoile Bleue)” sold in London Tuesday at Sotheby’s auction house for 23.56 million pounds ($37 million), a record price for a work by the Spanish artist.
The 1927 piece was part of an extensive sale of impressionist and abstract art, at which works by Picasso, Kandinsky, Bonnard, Monet, Giacometti and De Chirico were also auctioned off.
The picture, described by Miro (1893-1983) as a “key” turning point in his artistic career, incorporates surrealist symbols and elements that the painter would repeat in later works.
The auction of one of Miro’s most representative works comes at a time when the greatest retrospective of his art in the last 50 years is still on view in Washington.
(Hispanically Speaking news contributed to this report).
