Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Largest Van Gogh exhibition since 1968 to be staged at Royal Academy of Arts

The Academy hopes the exhibition, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters, will give the lie to the idea that the painter was a "reckless and unreflective genius". A selection of the surviving 902 letters that he wrote will go on display beside 65 paintings and 30 drawings. Most of the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote were "progress reports" to his brother and benefactor Theo, said curator Ann Dumas. A smattering were to fellow ar

Errol Flynn 'worked as a Nazi spy and met Adolf Hitler'

The Australian-born star, who was known for his anti-Semitic views, worked undercover for the Germans during the Spanish Civil War, according to a controversial biography. Charles Higham alleges that Flynn was employed to gather information on German socialists who fought against General Franco, helping contribute to the death of hundreds of volunteers and their families. The hard-drinking and womanising actor's life is currently being celebrated with a special festiv

Photography exhibition exposes East Germany's last decade

Situated on Pariser Platz, the bustling Berlin square in front of the Brandenburg Gate, the Academy of Arts overlooks what was once the dividing line between East and West. It is apt then, that from July 10 to October 11 this should be the location for an exhibition of photographs taken in the former East Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But while it is the breaching of the Iron Curtain that is often the subject for such exhibitions, this display does not concern it

“New Radicals: from Sickert to Freud” opens at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK

Fifty paintings spanning the first 50 years of the 20th century, and all taken from the Walker Art Gallery’s permanent collection, are on show at the William Brown Street venue until 20 September 2009. “New Radicals: from Sickert to Freud” explores the creative development of British Art from 1900 to the post war era. Divided into four sections (Groups and Gatherings, Modernists, A Sense of Place and Independent Spirit), the free exhibition highlights some of the key figures and ar

Stolen Beauty: A Greek Urn’s Underworld

Italy’s biggest prize in the war against looting antiquities went on view recently at the Villa Giulia in Rome. Italians didn’t seem to care much. The prize is the notorious, magnificent sixth-century B.C. red-figure krater by the Greek artist Euphronios, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art lately returned: the “hot pot,” as Thomas Hoving, the former Met director who bought it in 1972, mischievously took to calling it. A show of recovered spoils at the Quirinale in Ro

What is the Codex Sinaiticus, and what does it reveal about the Bible?

Why are we asking this now? It is the oldest Bible in the world. The 4th-century book is considered to be one of the most important texts in existence. Until this week, no one alive has seen all its 800 pages together in one place because in the 19th century the document was split into sections and is now in four different locations – London, St Petersburg, Leipzig and Egypt. But the creation of an online virtual Codex Sinaiticus permits anyone to see the manuscript in its entirety

First 'instant' Jackson biography hits shelves in China

As British publishers race to be first to market with a Michael Jackson memoir, two Chinese writers have produced an "instant biography" after working non-stop for 48 hours. Jiang Xiaoyu and Xing Han subsisted on a diet of coffee and cigarettes to produce the 130,000-word Moonwalk in Paradise, which they claim is the fastest biography written since the King of Pop's death on 25 June. It was available in shops in China on Saturday 4 July, just nine days after Jackson's deat

Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' 110 years after it was first published

Like some deeply bruised cloud hovering thunderously above a summer picnic, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness threatens us still, more than a century since its publication. Few works have entertained, excited and troubled minds as much. It has inspired music – including a forthcoming opera by Tarik O’Regan – and spawned numerous radio, theatre, film and television adaptations, the most famous being Apocalypse Now. TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men did more for the work’s projection towards

Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania await word from Confederacy museum

Museum of the Confederacy executive director Waite Rawls has his hands full in Appomattox, where he wants to begin his system of museums. The negotiations in Appomattox have left Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County leaders a bit out of the loop. They said they haven't heard from Rawls in months. The private Richmond museum has the world's largest collection of Civil War artifacts and is looking to have a location here as well. Fredericksburg City Council

Mark Twain Home and Museum needs $10M by end of 2010

HANNIBAL, Mo. (WGEM) - The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum is seeking $10-million endowment by the end of 2010 to continue its ongoing operations, according to a news release issued Monday morning. "A significant endowment will carry the museum through good times and bad times when we're all dead and gone," Dr. Cindy Lovell, executive director for the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum, said in the news release. "Mark Twain will live forever in his writings, bu

Stereo for One: A Brief Unaccompanied History

Thirty years ago this month, the Sony Corporation made a huge contribution to human interaction by ensuring there was less of it. No longer would people who did not want to engage the world have to stick fingers in both ears and say, over and over, “La, la, la, I’m not listening!” Thanks to Sony, they now had a portable stereo device called the Walkman, which allowed them to block the sounds of their surroundings with a very private cassette recording of, say, Supertramp. So what if

Looted Iraqi Artifacts (FBI’s Top 10 Art Thefts: A Two-Week Blog Series)

The Statue of Entemena,

Pride and Prejudice temple to be restored by National Trust

A temple featured in the film Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley is being restored to its 18th century glory as part of a £290,000 National Trust project. Work will being next week on The Temple of Apollo, at Stourhead, Wiltshire, which dates from 1765. The National Trust has spent months gathering historic paintings, family records, accounts, letters and visitors' diaries to find out how the monument would have originally appeared. "The ori

"Thomas Paine & Lewes: Revolution and Reason" festival in the UK

“Enough of achievement for one man, surely: to understand the three great revolutions of his age before they happened, to bring politics home to the common people, to build a bridge of common idealism across the Atlantic and the English Channel. Yet this was not all. Scattered through Paine’s writings we can find hints, often much more than hints, of the other ideas which have given vitality to progressive movements for the past two hundred years.”

Pride of Da Vinci's genius walks again after 500 years

It lives. It lives! After almost five centuries, a legendary, artificial monster, which has intrigued scientists and art historians for decades, cranked back into life in central France this week. The monster in question is a friendly-looking, curly-maned, almost life-sized, mechanical lion, which can walk, and move its head and shake its tail and open its jaws. The original was designed in 1517 by a 16th-century special effects man, who later achieved fame as a painter (but was al

Return to Liberty: America's most famous statue reopens her crown

The Statue of Liberty reopened her crown to the public yesterday for the first time since the 9/11 terrorist attacks eight years ago. The first 10 visitors to pass through the inner sanctum of the 122-year-old statue since it was closed for "safety and security reasons" in 2001 marked the country's 4 July Independence Day celebrations by gazing out through her eyes at the Manhattan skyline. The base, as well as the enormous pedestal and observation deck, reopened to the p

Rare Peek at Riches of Past in Rome

For decades now, excavations in the Roman Forum and on the Palatine Hill have yielded grand halls and imperial residences with fanciful frescoes and graceful stucco reliefs. Often, after the initial news media fanfare that usually accompanies such finds and their restoration, many of the ancient habitats have returned to the obscurity from which they emerged. There just aren’t enough custodians to monitor these important archaeological sites, and so they are off limits to the public

"Maannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City” at the Museum of the City of New York (Exhibit/Review)

When I stand on top of a rock overlooking the Harlem Meer with Eric W. Sanderson, after seeing his exhibition, “Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City” at the Museum of the City of New York, I begin to see the city the way the show suggests, the way Mr. Sanderson has come to view it after nearly a decade of historical exploration and computer simulation. Mr. Sanderson, a landscape ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, looks past the man-

Novelist Hans Fallada resented the constraints of the Nazi era but did not desist in his craft

Hans Fallada is the romantic nom de plume invented by a man who lived through some of the most difficult episodes in his country's history and came out indifferently, neither a hero nor a villain. "Hans" recalls the Grimms' Lucky Hans, a fairy-tale fool who smiles even as he is cheated; and "Falada" is the talking horse in another Grimm tale who, though slaughtered by his mistress's treacherous chambermaid, continues to speak truth to power as a taxidermied trophy. Fallada th

Rare Photos of Colonial East Africa Online

An online collection of thousands of rare photographs chronicling Europe’s colonisation of East Africa went live last week, on June 25th, on the website of the Library of Northwestern University (Illinois). The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960 includes approximately 7,610 photographs. It was assembled by the British collector Winterton over about 30 years and organised in 76 separate albums, scrapbooks or loose collections. The collection was acquired by North