IN: The Osmonds are an American family music group with a long and varied career. The Osmond Brothers began as a barbershop quartet consisting of brothers Alan, Wayne, Merrill and Jay Osmond. They were later joined by younger siblings Donny and Jimmy, both of whom enjoyed success as solo artists as well. With the addition of Donny, the group became known as The Osmonds, and enjoyed its greatest success as both a boy band and a hard rock ensemble.

Donny, and to a lesser extent, Marie and Jimmy, soon began to emerge as solo artists. Jimmy was becoming "big in Japan", and in 1972 had a #1 hit in the United Kingdom with "Long Haired Lover from Liverpool". Marie, then 13 years old, hit #1 on the US country chart in 1973 with "Paper Roses" (a song originally recorded by Anita Bryant a decade prior). Donny had a string of pop hits with a string of covers of earlier teen-pop songs, including "Go Away Little Girl" (#1, originally by Steve Lawrence), "Puppy Love" (#3, a Paul Anka composition) and "The Twelfth of Never" (#8, originally recorded by Johnny Mathis). From 1971 to 1976, he had 12 Top 40 hits, including 5 in the Top 10; for most of these, the Osmonds were still performing as a full band, but backing and giving star billing to Donny for songs on which he sang lead.  Donny's popularity, and his numerous solo hits, have led many to assume he was the group's lead. Merrill was nevertheless the usual lead singer; Donny would usually sing the choruses on songs billed to The Osmonds, thus being a "co-lead". (The family resemblance between Donny and Merrill at the time likely made the confusion worse; in later years, Merrill grew out his beard and let his hair go gray to distinguish the two.) Donny's emergence as a solo star and the record company's desire to appeal to the teen-girl audience often thrust Donny out in front of the group.  By now the family was touring, recording, creating and producing for five technically separate artists: The Osmonds, Donny Osmond, Marie Osmond and Jimmy Osmond -- plus Donny and Marie had begun recording duets and had hits with "I'm Leaving It Up to You" (#4) and "Morning Side of the Mountain" (#8). Through all the stress and pressures created by these many efforts, the family hung together. The 2001 ABC-TV movie Inside the Osmonds depicts the family mottoes as being "It doesn't matter who's out front, as long as it's an Osmond" family, faith, and career. In that order".  The original Osmonds as a group still produced hits. In 1974, "Love Me for a Reason" reached #10 in the US and #1 in the UK. The Irish boy band Boyzone took the song to #2 in the UK in 1994.
QUESTION: Was the albulm a success?
IN: Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian (; Dutch: ['pit 'mondrija:n], later ['mondrijan]; 7 March 1872 - 1 February 1944), was a Dutch painter and theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements. Mondrian's art was highly utopian and was concerned with a search for universal values and aesthetics. He proclaimed in 1914: Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality.

When the 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left the Netherlands for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of neoplasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London's Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan.  At the age of 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final Manhattan studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about to recreate the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records. Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had inhabited. He was there for only a few months, as he died in February 1944.  After his death, Mondrian's friend and sponsor in Manhattan, artist Harry Holtzman, and another painter friend, Fritz Glarner, carefully documented the studio on film and in still photographs before opening it to the public for a six-week exhibition. Before dismantling the studio, Holtzman (who was also Mondrian's heir) traced the wall compositions precisely, prepared exact portable facsimiles of the space each had occupied, and affixed to each the original surviving cut-out components. These portable Mondrian compositions have become known as "The Wall Works". Since Mondrian's death, they have been exhibited twice at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (1983 and 1995-96), once in SoHo at the Carpenter + Hochman Gallery (1984), once each at the Galerie Tokoro in Tokyo, Japan (1993), the XXII Biennial of Sao Paulo (1994), the University of Michigan (1995), and - the first time shown in Europe - at the Akademie der Kunste (Academy of The Arts), in Berlin (22 February - 22 April 2007).
QUESTION:
Did Piet Mondrian had a favorite colors ?