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

Works of naive American art featured at the National Gallery of Art

As told by most museums the history of American painting before modernism is usually a fairly dull tale. The narrative is dominated by artists with academic training who emulated European models. And all too often their work is dispensed in homogenous chunks, sorted according to big names or schools, periods and subjects. You know the drill: it reaches from John Singleton Copley and colonial portraitists to the Ashcan School. In between come Hudson River, Luminist, genre and trompe

Documentary on Clinton Tests Campaign Finance Law

It has been about a decade since the Supreme Court considered a case arising from the tangle of lawsuits and investigations that once threatened to engulf the administration of President Bill Clinton. The nation may have moved on, but the court has not. Next month, as Hillary Rodham Clinton settles in as secretary of state, the court will have a look at “Hillary: The Movie,” a scathingly hostile look at Mrs. Clinton in the tradition of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Che: Steven Soderbergh’s biopic continues Hollywood’s worship of a brutal man

Most of what you’ve heard about Steven Soderbergh’s Che is true. At four and a half hours, the film, now playing in selected domestic markets and available on video on demand, is extremely long. And even at this length, the film skips over the least convenient, indeed morally repulsive, period of Ernesto Guevara’s life. It’s a testament to Soderbergh’s skill that the film still has some merit—above all, the director’s typically meticulous composition and audacious experiments with form—but it fa

Slumdog Courage: What is Written?

[Alison Downie is a PhD candidate in Systematic Theology at Duquesne University. Her area of specialization is Feminist Theology.] Just as the unlikely Jamal Malik won twenty million rupees, his very “foreign” (and therefore unlikely) movie recently took home an armful of Oscars. Both the events of Slumdog Millionaire and the event of the film itself trigger theological reflection in a time when the daily national news is full of the loss and the meaning of money, Ponzi scheme exp

IBM's "Antique Attic" gallery

You can—and should—lose hours digging through IBM's "Antique Attic", an online catalog of the actual old machines they hold on hand for posterity's sake.

New movie, Katyn, receives high praise from Stanley Kauffmann

The Polish director Andrzej Wajda, who has had a sixty-year career, crowns it with a consummate film. Katyn seems to be the work that he has been moving toward all of his busy life. Katyn Forest is the place, or the main place, where more than twenty thousand Poles were massacred in 1940. Most of them were army officers, some of them were intelligentsia--professors, lawyers, doctors, scientists. Wajda's father was one of the officers. Katyn is thus something other than just one more film

Constable's parents captured on canvas

Anne Lyles, Tate curator and authority on the work of Constable, and writer and critic Martin Gayford, have confirmed that a portrait of Ann Constable, Constable's mother, is by the artist. They have also provisionally re-identified a portrait of Constable's father, Golding Constable that was previously thought to depict his schoolmaster. The portraits, now thought to make a pair, have been in the collection at Colchester and Ipswich Museum service since 1926.

Thomas Gainsborough portraits to go on show for first time in the UK

Gainsborough's previously unseen works, which could be worth around £500,000 if ever sold, will be displayed at Dunster Castle in Somerset. The portraits were painted for members of a family which were related by marriage to the aristocratic owners of the castle and have been in the family ever since. The pictures show the Honourable George Somerville and his daughter Ann on the day of her wedding to Reverend Thomas Fownes in 1764. She is wearing a white si

Beatles and Rolling Stones photographs: New shots of John Lennon and Mick Jagger found

These are just a few of the never before seen private snaps of the world's two biggest bands coping with growing fame as they toured America in the 1960s. The behind-the-scenes, intimate and unguarded shots, have been unearthed after spending 45 years in a duffel bag of The Beatles and Rolling Stone's former tour manager. The collection of more than 50 pictures, which are being revealed to the public for the first time are part of 3,500 taken by Bob Bonis, the US tour m

Why is a 1920s proletarian novel a smash best seller (and film) in Japan in 2009?

[Norma Field teaches in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago and is a Japan Focus associate. She is the author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End.] Japan's best-known proletarian novel, Kani Kosen (depicting conditions aboard a crab-canning factory ship operating off Soviet waters)[2] [1] by Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), enjoyed an utterly unanticipated revival in the course of 2008. Many attribu

$60K for vintage films depicting the life of blacks in Oklahoma in the 1920s

A historian has netted $60,000 from the auction of vintage films depicting the life of blacks in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Currie Ballard, the assistant secretary to the state Senate, first sold a copy of the films to the Oklahoma Historical Society, then had his collection of 29 film reels auctioned at the Swann Auction Galleries in New York. Ballard says the buyer wanted to remain anonymous but that the films were purchased by an Ivy League university.

Does the World Still Care About American Culture?

[Richard Pells is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (Basic Books, 1997). He is working on a book titled Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture, to be published by Yale University Press.] For most of the 20th century, the dominant culture in the world was American. Now that is no longer true. What is m

Darwin’s Wake Splashed Artists, Too

NEW HAVEN | The artist stands in the distance, gazing up at the striated chalk cliffs on the coast of Kent, England. His family is gathering shells in the shallow tidal pools of Pegwell Bay that, with the receding waters, have a look of barren desolation. The sky is an unearthly yellow from the glowering late light of an autumn sun. Above, Donati’s Comet leaves a trail that would not be seen for another two millenniums. This painting, by William Dyce, “Pegwell Bay, Kent — A Recollec

Chinese art buyer won't pay, saying artifacts were looted from China

Admire the gumption: After bidding $40.4 million for two bronze sculptures at Yves Saint Laurent's estate auction, Chinese collector Cai Mingchao has refused to pay up, saying that the sculptures were looted from China. The refusal to pay for political purpose is, according to art experts, a first, and tarnishes Saint Laurent's record $476 million estate sale. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Cai joins a months-long dispute between Christie's and China over the fate of the bronzes

Group protests Nevada city's funds to Mark Twain church

A group that advocates separation of church and state is protesting a Nevada city's decision to provide funding to a church that Mark Twain helped build as a fledgling writer in the 1860s. Americans United for Separation of Church and State contends Carson City supervisors' votes concerning the First Presbyterian Church violated the First Amendment. City and church officials disagree, saying the money is merely going toward additional costs stemming from an agreement that pa

Revealing the Cracks in Communism

Two teenage punk girls back-comb their hair while they talk about hating school and running away from home; a wizened old woman who has just celebrated her 60th wedding anniversary confides that she married the wrong man; a single mother carries out dirty and repetitive tasks in a factory before speaking about her loneliness and the difficulties of raising her disabled daughter alone. This is a film depicting women, young and old, frankly talking about their hopes and fears, their

Despite Hopes of Hollywood Visit, Iran’s Leaders Stick to the Same Script

An official delegation of Hollywood actors and filmmakers met with their Iranian counterparts in Tehran over the weekend, the first such visit to a country that banned American movies 30 years ago. But the Iranian government quickly crushed any cinematic illusion of an Obama-era thaw in relations, denouncing the meeting on Sunday and demanding that Hollywood apologize for its “insults and accusations against the Iranian nation.” The nine members of the Academy of Motion

The Apollo: Uptown Shrine’s Upbeat Anniversary

JAMES BROWN, the Godfather of Soul, pressed huge tips into his hand for errands and urged him to read. The comedian Jackie (Moms) Mabley sent him to the store to buy chitlins or pork chops, to be shared with everyone, cooked on a hot plate. Flip Wilson sent him out for food too but locked the door to his dressing room for privacy as he washed and ironed (badly) his polyester suits between acts These memories belong to Billy Mitchell, the resident historian and tour guide at the Apol

Exhibition exposes sex slavery at Nazi camps

They told us we were in the camp brothel, that we were the lucky ones. We would eat well and have enough to drink. If we behaved and fulfilled our duties nothing would happen to us." So begins the wrenching account of Frau W., a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrueck north of Berlin who between mid-1943 and December 1944 was forced to work as a sex slave for her fellow detainees. Her story forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition at Ravensbrueck abou

Norwegian Nobel Laureate, Once Shunned for Nazi connections, Is Now Celebrated

It’s all you would expect of a national jubilee: street theater, brass bands, exhibitions and commemorative coins. A statue is to be unveiled, and a $20 million architectural gem of a museum is under construction. Yet the honoree is not a war hero, nor even a patriot. It is the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who welcomed the brutal German occupation of Norway during World War II and gave his Nobel Prize in Literature as a gift to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hams