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

£5.4million Turner masterpiece lost to the British nation

The painting, entitled Pope's Villa at Twickenham, had been on display at Sudeley Castle, the Gloucestershire home of Lady Ashcombe, for more than 160 years but was sold last year for £5.4 million at Sotheby's to an anonymous American buyer. Lady Ashcombe, whose son Henry Dent-Brocklehurst, is a film producer, and a friend of Elizabeth Hurley, decided to sell the painting to maintain the castle. The Government initially barred its export for three months, in an attemp

Abraham Lincoln in His Own Words (N-Y Historical Society)

A draft of the epoch-making “House Divided” speech, stirring notes for an address against slavery, a telegram encouraging General Ulysses S. Grant at a turning point in the Civil War, and the resolution for the Thirteenth Amendment bearing the President’s signature: These are among the rare and important letters, papers and official documents in Abraham Lincoln’s own hand that will be on display, as the New-York Historical Society presents, in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of Ame

Col. Jack Brennan On The Real Story Behind Frost/Nixon

The unexpected face of Lincoln (Exhibit)

A new exhibit at Washington's National Portrait Gallery celebrates Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. As Thalia Assuras reports, the exhibit shows an unexpected side of Lincoln.

Movie About China's Schindler Tells Story of Unlikely German Hero

John Rabe was a member of the Nazi party and the German electronics giant Siemens' man in China during the build-up to WWII. But he also helped save about 250,000 Chinese from the clutches of Japan's military machine."Ten years ago it was not possible to conceive that there was such thing as a good Nazi," said Ulrich Tukur, who plays Rabe in a film about his life that had its world premiere at this year's Berlin Film Festival. "The Third Reich is indeed typical of the depths that humans c

The Rise of the House of Rockwell

ALTHOUGH Norman Rockwell’s ability to capture small-town bonhomie made him the leading illustrator of his time, these days his vision is often derided as anachronistic and hokey. One might expect the museum that manages his legacy to be similarly stuck in time. But Rockwell himself was more complex and worldly than is often acknowledged today, and so is the Norman Rockwell Museum here — what some might call a hip and savvy institution masquerading in square clothing. Capitalizing on

Fragments of 'butchered' Renaissance masterpiece reunited for first time

Only three pieces from Paolo Veronese's 16th century masterpiece the Petrobelli Altarpiece were thought to have survived. The 18ft-high canvas was cut up in 1788 to be "sold just like meat in a butcher's shop", as one contemporary art dealer put it. But in a 'Eureka!' moment Xavier Salomon, curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London, identified the fourth part after visiting the Blanton Museum of Art in Texas. When he starting work on

James Whitmore, Character Actor Skilled in One-Man Shows, Dies at 87

James Whitmore, a leading character actor whose craggy face became a familiar one to film, television and stage audiences for decades and who won wide acclaim for a pair of one-man performances, as the humorist Will Rogers and a vinegary Harry S. Truman, died Friday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 87. The cause was lung cancer, his son Steve told The Associated Press. He said his father had received the cancer diagnosis a week before Thanksgiving. Mr. Whitmore foun

Ford's Theater reopens next week after 18 months of work

Could any assassination have been more overtly theatrical? It’s where Alfred Hitchcock must have gotten some of his ideas. But stand inside Ford’s Theater, which is reopening here next week after 18 months of renovation, as part of the first stage in the creation of an extensive museum devoted to Lincoln, and the reality becomes even more extraordinary. Barely 12 feet above the stage’s floor is the balustrade on which Lincoln collapsed after John Wilkes Booth shot a bullet from a .4

NYT review of Will Ferrell's You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush

The 43rd president of the United States, who is known for his gift for instant nicknames, is generously sharing his talent these days with audiences at the Cort Theater, home to “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush.” Toward the end of this largely unsurprising, uh, celebration of one man’s life and accomplishments, Mr. Bush, reincarnated by the comedian and movie star Will Ferrell, asks theatergoers to tell him their occupations, so he can give them the gift of his own pet n

A.P. Says It Owns Image in Obama Poster

The image of President Barack Obama made ubiquitous by Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster looked especially familiar to The Associated Press, which says the artwork infringes on its copyright to a photograph of Mr. Obama, The A.P. reported. Mr. Fairey has acknowledged that his poster, a mixed-media stenciled collage depicting Mr. Obama on a red, white and blue field, is based on an A.P. photograph, above left, taken by Mannie Garcia in April 2006.

Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR (Documentary review)

A number of years ago, the critic Amy Taubin, in a hilarious review of a misbegotten movie from Abel Ferrara, wrote that it “inspires the ontological question ‘What are films, and why is this not one of them?’ ” The same question buzzed through my mind while watching the weirdly compelling if almost unclassifiable “Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR,” the latest work from the filmmaker, poet, archivist and cinematic avenging angel Jonas Mekas. “Lithuania,” I hasten to add, is certainly not m

Backtracking Brandeis President: ‘I Screwed Up’

President Obama has given college presidents a management strategy for controversy: admit it when you screw up. Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandeis University, sent out an e-mail message to his campus Thursday that partially pulled back from the university’s plans to sell its art collection and shut down its art museum. “I take full responsibility for causing pain and embarrassment in both of these matters. To quote President Obama, ‘I screwed up,’ ” Reinharz’s e-mail message sai

A new look at Maggie on the BBC

Lindsay Duncan's screen persona, which could be summarised as "posh totty ice maiden" – sexy in a forbidding, patrician kind of way – does nothing to prepare me for the warm, down-to-earth actress who greets me over a platter of iced fairy cakes. "I had better not at this point," she says when offered the gateau. "Too much sugar and too much coffee and you start talking absolute bollocks." She is slighter than I imagined, and somehow translucent in the

After two centuries, St Michael restored to Veronese's altarpiece

He was part of an elite artistic triumvirate alongside Titian and Tintoretto, and his imposing altarpieces featuring saints, celestial creatures and supplicating patrons were the most admired in Renaissance Italy. Then one of the 16th-century painter Paolo Veronese's largest works, an altarpiece, was cut up and sold off to different buyers across the world. Until now, the face of St Michael from the Petrobelli Altarpiece, which was regarded as the work's crowning glory,

Pacino to play King Lear in new film adaptation

Al Pacino is to reunite with director Michael Radford for a big-screen version of King Lear, Variety reports. Pacino has never played Lear before, on stage nor on screen, but the 68-year-old actor does have some form in taking Shakespeare out of the theatre and into the cinema: his Looking for Richard, a bravura chronicle of his personal investigation into the facts and fictions behind the Bard's Richard III, was widely praised in 1996. King Lear will mark his second co

Pablo Picasso at the National Gallery, London

A hundred years ago, in the summer of 1909, a young artist stood staring at a brick factory. Pablo Picasso's stare still holds us when we look at his big black eyes, from his own early self-portraits to photographs of the old, famous, rich artist at home in the south of France. In his fearsome Self-Portrait, done on 30 June 1972, unshaven, looking at the approaching End, his eyes are huge circles set inside kite-shaped sockets, with one pupil huge, the other small - as if sight is finally failin

Monet painting sells for £11.2 million, £4 million below estimate

Dans la Prairie, the 1876 picture by the impressionist artist, had been expected to sell for around £15 million - it show's the artist's wife reclining in a lush, flower-filled meadow at Argenteuil, north of Paris. But the image of a woman in a field of wild flowers sold for just £11,241,250 at an auction at Christie's in London. Monet's La Promenade d'Argenteuil had been predicted to sell for £5 million but failed to find a buyer. But Monet was not the

Bones bring colonial times back to life (Smithsonian Exhibit)

It's a tale of toil, starvation and death, set forth in messages from the grave. The saga of life in 17th century America — "Written in Bone" — goes on display Saturday at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Some 340 objects, including artifacts and human bones, are on display for two years, with discussions of how cold cases from colonial times shed light on what life was like for some of the earliest English and Africans to settle in Americ

'The Power of Public Speaking' - British Library's interactive exhibition

The Sound and the Fury: The Power of Public Speaking opened yesterday at the British Library, providing a taster of the library’s extensive sound archive collections. It is an interactive exhibition which charts the history and power of public speaking through a varied selection of famous speeches in world history from the last 150 years: from William Ewart Gladstone’s transatlantic greeting to Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, in 1888, to Obama’s inauguration speech last January.