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

Behind Fairy Tale Drawings, Walls Talk of Unspeakable Cruelty (Holocaust)

JERUSALEM — He occupies the driver’s seat with an air of insouciance, a blue helmet atop his head, two proud white steeds under his command and a sly smile across his lips. Bruno Schulz looks out at the world from his painting as if he owns it. But like much else in his life, cut short by a Nazi bullet, this is pure fantasy. The work and story of Schulz, a Jewish writer and painter in Poland who was forced to illustrate a children’s playroom in a Nazi officer’s home and then killed,

China Fails to Halt Sale of Looted Relics at Paris Auction

Two bronze heads originally looted from China were sold for nearly $35.9 million without commissions after fierce protests and a failed legal challenge.

Boom in sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

BOOKS do not sell themselves: that is what films are for. “The Reader”, the book that inspired the Oscar-winning film, has shot up the bestseller lists. Another recent publishing success, however, has had more help from Washington, DC, than Hollywood. That book is Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. Reviled in some circles and mocked in others, Rand’s 1957 novel of embattled capitalism is a favourite of libertarians and college students. Lately, though, its appeal has been growing. Accordi

The art of nothing: Pompidou Centre celebrates half a century of minimalism

Art exhibitions without exhibits are nothing new. Nothing has been a recognised art form for half a century. But the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris can claim a cultural first this week: a retrospective exhibition of 51 years of exhibitions without exhibits by nine different artists. How can a museum retrospectively exhibit nothing? With great care. The 500-page catalogue costs €39 (£34). The exhibition, Voids, a Retrospective, fills, or fails to fill, five rooms in the French nat

Long lost play, The Story of Vasco, by Ted Hughes is to have its premiere

An unpublished play by Ted Hughes that had escaped the notice of scholars will be performed for the first time, after the discovery of the manuscript in a university library. Hughes, who died in 1998, wrote The Story of Vasco in the late 1960s, but his version of the play was never performed because it was intended to be adapted into a libretto for an opera. The play is an adaptation of a French drama by Georges Schehadé, but Hughes infused it with his own language an

Galileo's finger goes on display in Italy

The digit will be part of a landmark exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of his first observations of the skies. The finger – the middle digit from Galileo's right hand – is mounted on a marble base and encased in a crystal jar. It will be among 250 objects which will go on display in Florence as part of an exhibition entitled Galileo: Images of the Universe from Antiquity to the Telescope, which opens next month in Florence. The finger was removed whe

Celebrating 90 Years of Bauhaus

In times of gloom and doom, there is often a need for the charismatic energy of great ideas. Back in 1919 German architect Walter Gropius regarded the miserable period following the end of the World War I as a "catastrophe of world history." His response was a bold and yet surprisingly pragmatic utopian vision -- the Bauhaus. By establishing this new kind of art school he managed to create a cultural wonder that continues to have a profound impact to this day. This year m

“Frost/Nixon’s” Unsung Hero?

John W. Dean’s latest column at findlaw.com concerns Frost/Nixon. That’s not especially surprising in itself. But what is downright strange is that Dean has not seen Ron Howard’s film or Peter Morgan’s play because, he says, “scheduling” conflicts haven’t permitted him to do so. So why is Dean writing about Frost/Nixon? It would appear that his big concern is that the film and play overglorify the role of James Reston Jr. in the development of David Frost’s line of questioning that

Five hundred years of sacred history in one place

For medieval Christians, Jerusalem was the omphalos of the world--the navel. It was there that this world was connected to the world to come. Dante parodied this spiritualized geography in his Divine Comedy, where the descent into and beyond the bottomless pit of Inferno inverted into the mountain of purgatory whence the ascent to paradise could begin. On the Bebelplatz in Berlin, between the opera house and the old university, the Nazis celebrated their ascendency by burning the books of Jews a

The Dark Side of the 50s (documentary)

Now that the Oscars are over, how about considering a small film, untainted by any glamour whatsoever. Morgan Dews’s documentary Must Read After My Death, which opened this past Friday in New York and Los Angeles, is a real-life version of Hollywood’s “Revolutionary Road.” Both movies hit hard at the myth of the sunny ’50s. In its reliance on homemade movies, Dews’s film is also reminiscent of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2004). Dews’s film, however, has no single narra

History Channel Launches its First Web Original Series

History has announced plans to launch Great and Telling Tales with Timothy Dickinson, the network’s first original series for the Web The upcoming 12-Webisode History.com exclusive will feature the historian Timothy Dickenson, who is known for his love of strange or unexpected stories. For example, episodes of the series have been titled Great Moon Hoax and Jimmy Carter vs. The Killer Rabbit. Besides Dickenson’s commentary, episodes of the new broadband original will i

Remembering Odetta, Who Sang of Freedom

The poet Maya Angelou sat perched on a tall stool in Riverside Church in Manhattan on Tuesday night, both mimicking and remembering the folk singer Odetta, her longtime friend, who died on Dec. 2 at 77. “We were both tall black ladies with attitude, and most people were really scared of us,” Ms. Angelou told a crowd that filled the pews and balconies as Pete Seeger warmed up offstage. “To be in the ’50s, black and turned away from almost everything and to say, ‘I have come here to s

Romania Shrugs Off Reminder of Its Past

What are the arts worth? In straitened times it’s easy to mistake cost for value. You might also say it’s the difference between cash and culture, the price of something and what’s ultimately priceless. Romanians, it seems, have been prone to confuse the two since even before the revolution that overthrew the country’s Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and executed him and his wife, Elena, nearly 20 years ago. That’s one explanation, at least, for why,

Nepal palace reopens as a museum

Narayanhiti Palace was turned into a museum after the 240-year-old monarchy was abolished last year. It will be open to the public from Friday. Officials at the museum in Kathmandu say of the 90 rooms, only 19 will be opened in the first phase. On Wednesday, former king Gyanendra left for India on his first foreign trip since being deposed last year.

What today’s veterans can learn from tales of the Trojan War

SPIT FLIES FROM the wounded soldier’s mouth and his face pulses, red. “Death! Where are you?” roars Philoctetes, played by the actor Paul Giamatti. “Why, after all these years of calling, have you not appeared?” About 200 military mental-health experts watched him spiral into despair as they worked their way through box lunches, squeezed into a suburban-D.C. hotel conference room. “Earth, swallow this body whole, receive me just as I am, for I can’t stand it any longer,” he moans, breathless. “I

Nazis’ ‘Terrible Weapon,’ Aimed at Minds and Hearts (Exhibition/US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

The most haunting image in “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda,” a major new exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here, may be the first one you see after the introductory videos. At the end of a darkened corridor is a black-and-white photograph on a black background. Underneath, with unornamented simplicity, is a single word: Hitler. It is a campaign poster from 1932, when the Nazi Party was already the second largest in the German Parliament. Th

Miners back Margaret Thatcher funeral play

The Shaw Theatre is to stage a two-week run of Maggie's End, a play by Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood, that begins with the state funeral of the former prime minister and is funded by trade unions including the NUM, which led the miners' strike in the 1980s. "There's little doubt that most Labour supporters would see a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher as the ultimate betrayal by their party and that to acknowledge her in this way would reopen many of the sores of the 1980s,"

Interview: Lindsay Duncan on Margaret Thatcher

What timing the BBC has. After Carol Thatcher was sacked by The One Show for saying “golliwog” off-air, more than one commentator suggested that the real reason for her dismissal was that the BBC has a “vendetta” against her mother. This Thursday, mere weeks later, BBC2 is broadcasting Margaret, a one-off drama about the fall from power of Baroness Thatcher. Supporters of the former Prime Minister may well be rolling their eyes at the prospect of an unflattering portrayal. But Lind

Rare pair of Francis Bacon rugs to go on sale

It had been thought that only three of the painter's early carpet designs remained, including one held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. But an auction house in Wiltshire claims to have found the only surviving works from Bacon's first exhibition of his own designs in 1929. They were apparently donated by an Iranian carpet dealer who had cleaned out one of her storerooms. Ian Bennett, a textile specialist at Netherhampton Salerooms, near Salisbury, told

Margaret Thatcher's portrait to hang in 10 Downing Street

Baroness Thatcher was invited to a private reception being hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the afternoon of February 25. Also expected at the event is Conservative leader David Cameron, who is known to have his own picture of his illustrious predecessor hanging in his office. Mr Brown is understood to have offered Lady Thatcher the honour of an official portrait in Downing Street when she visited him for tea at Number 10 in September 2007, a few months into his