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

Ideas America won't entertain: Why a London theatre season on Afghanistan couldn't happen in the US

During rehearsals for my new play Blood and Gifts, for the Tricycle Theatre's The Great Game: Afghanistan I've been irritated by a question I didn't have the answer to. Back home in New York City, when a colleague asks me what I'm working on, I tell them I'm contributing to a 12-play cycle of works set against seminal events in Afghan history. I tell them the cycle will be performed by a cast of 20 and run in rep over three nights, augmented by a film festival and lecture series. And they look a

Turner and Italy: National Gallery Edinburgh, exhibition review

Turner & Italy begins in 1802, when the Peace of Amiens made travel on the Continent possible for British artists, and J M W Turner crossed the Alps for his first, brief glimpse of the country that was to play such a crucial role in his art. What is so striking about the first oil paintings resulting from this early contact with Italy is how relatively conventional they are, at least by comparison with what was to come. Take, for example, Château de St Michael, Bonneville, Savo

How a forest fire may have pushed Thoreau to Walden Pond

BY THE SPRING of 1844 Henry David Thoreau had accomplished almost nothing. He was 26 years old and had spent the better part of his life more or less adrift. In the seven years after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau tried to support himself in a variety of ways, as a teacher, tutor, writer, surveyor, and as a general handyman. He lived for a time with his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and later in New York City with Emerson's brother, only to return to Concord to reside once again with

History Channel documentary on Patton panned

The History Channel’s new ten-part series on George S. Patton—which began, inappropriately enough, on Friday, April 10, just in time for Easter—is an ambitious attempt to recast the age-old formula of the “war documentary” with the methods and computer-generated visual tricks of “war games,” the digitized kind that fascinate and even obsess male teenagers and some adults on computers and PlayStation. Carl Lindahl, of Flight 33 Productions, is to be congratulated for trying to breathe new life in

A Wild Cossack Rides Into a Cultural Battle

MOSCOW — Russia’s latest action hero galloped onto movie screens here this month, slicing up Polish noblemen like so many cabbages. Taras Bulba, the 15th-century Cossack immortalized in Nikolai Gogol’s novel by that name, disdains peace talks as “womanish” and awes his men with speeches about the Russian soul. When Polish soldiers finally burn him at the stake, he roars out his faith in the Russian czar even as flames lick at his mustache. A lush $20 million film adapta

The story behind theft of the Mona Lisa

On a mundane morning in late summer in Paris, the impossible happened. The Mona Lisa vanished. On Sunday evening, August 20, 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s best-known painting was hanging in her usual place on the wall of the Salon Carré, between Correggio’s Mystical Marriage and Titian’s Allegory of Alfonso d’Avalos. On Tuesday morning, when the Louvre reopened to the public, she was gone. Within hours of the discovery of the empty frame, stashed behind a radiator, the story broke in a

How Handel played the markets

I am a bit old now for scoops, but I seem to have run into one the other day, deep behind the scenes at the Bank of England. BBC Radio 3 asked me to take part in the extensive commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the death of the great Anglo-German composer, George Frideric Handel. They wanted to know about Handel's money and how he made it, ending up with a fortune (maybe £3m in today's money) in financial times no less tumultuous than our own day.

New film 'may give IRA dissidents ammunition'

One of Ireland's foremost historians has warned that a Hollywood take on the 1916 Easter Rising might be exploited by dissident republicans in their campaign against the peace process. Easter Sixteen stars Guy Pearce as James Connolly, the Irish Marxist who took part in the rising and was executed at Dublin's Kilmainham jail, and Ian Hart as Thomas Clarke, another key figure in the uprising. Paul Bew, a professor of Irish politics and a leading historian, has expressed

California returns 'looted art'

The US state of California has returned three Renaissance paintings that were confiscated from Jewish art dealers in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. The 16th-Century paintings were returned to the heirs of their former owners, Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, who died during the Holocaust. After World War II, the paintings ended up in the collection of US newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst. They have been on display at a California museum for over 30 ye

Photo exhibition shows life in China in 1870s

A remarkable set of photographs portraying life in China in the late Qing Dynasty is to go on public display for the first time. Taken between 1870 and 1871 by the Scottish photographer John "China" Thomson, the images reveal with often startling intimacy a cast of characters from orphans and street gamblers, to beautiful peasant girls and their high-born ladies. Hailed as a pioneer of photojournalism, Thomson spent two years travelling more than 5,000 miles

Photo exhibition shows life in China in 1870s (Beijing)

Taken between 1870 and 1871 by the Scottish photographer John "China" Thomson, the images reveal with often startling intimacy a cast of characters from orphans and street gamblers, to beautiful peasant girls and their high-born ladies. Hailed as a pioneer of photojournalism, Thomson spent two years travelling more than 5,000 miles in pursuit of the images that historians say are unique in their empathy towards their subjects. As well as shooting traditional,

California returns 'looted art'

The 16th-Century paintings were returned to the heirs of their former owners, Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, who died during the Holocaust. After World War II, the paintings ended up in the collection of US newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst. They have been on display at a California museum for over 30 years. Copies of two of the paintings will stay on display at Hearst Castle along with the original of the third painting belonging to the couple...

'Seeing History Through Indians’ Eyes (PBS/Documentary)

IN his two-decade career as a filmmaker Ric Burns has made histories of the exploration of the American West and the settlement of New York City without resorting to the use of dramatic re-creations. In the passionate debate among filmmakers over the documentary form he sides with those who find the acting and low-budget effects too often cheesy and distracting. Dramatic re-creations were as alien to him as documentary and period work were to Chris Eyre, an American Indian director

Where Culture Is Another Casualty (Italy/earthquake)

In the aftermath, tending to the injured and the dead comes first. But local residents as well as teams of officials have already begun to assess the cultural damage. The earthquake 12 years ago that ravaged Umbria wasn’t nearly as severe but it made headlines abroad because it damaged tourist sites like the famous basilica in Assisi. Less glamorous, Abruzzo is rich in its own heritage, which is priceless to the people here. “I lived in Latin America and South America for many years

Simon Schama's new documentary on America is hopeful

The revolution in America is finally over, asserts historian Simon Schama in this documentary series, but the quantum cultural change has coincided with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Much of Schama's four-part snapshot on modern American life was filmed in the months leading up to Barack Obama's election as U.S. president, which marked "a historic shift in America's self-perception." Even a decade before, believes Schama, it would have been inconcei

Eisa Davis’s play is a rhythmic collage of scenes, songs and reminiscences about the life of Angela Davis, the scholar and activist.

“Wake up,” Mom says. “It’s time to go to the demonstration.” So dawns another politically engaged morning in the unorthodox Berkeley, Calif., household that was home to Eisa Davis, the actress (“Passing Strange”) and author of the engaging new free-form autobiographical show, “Angela’s Mixtape,” that opened on Thursday night at the Ohio Theater, a co-production of New Georges and the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. Ms. Davis’s full name is Angela Eisa Davis. Leapfrog the midd

Archiving Writers' Work in the Age of E-Mail

Leslie Morris is used to handling John Updike's personal effects. For decades, Mr. Updike had been sending a steady stream of manuscripts and papers to Harvard University's Houghton Library, where Ms. Morris serves as a curator. But in late February, several weeks after the iconic writer died, some boxes arrived with unexpected contents: approximately 50 three-and-a-halfand five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks — artifacts from late in the author's career when he, like many of his pe

Germany Says Art Restitution Will Continue

Germany’s culture minister said that ending the nation’s longstanding practice of restoring artwork stolen by Nazis to Holocaust victims and their descendants was “out of the question,” Bloomberg News reported. The minister, Bernd Neumann, was responding to remarks made in Der Spiegel by Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, who said that such restitutions should end.

Jefferson’s Blind Spots and Ideals, in Brick and Mortar

— Stand in the garden of Monticello here and look back at the home Thomas Jefferson designed, a view made famous by the United States nickel, and you get some hint of how this founding father thought about the new nation taking shape around him. The building invokes reason, proportion and balance, but you stand on a man-made plateau that seems to hover in space, open to the sweep of clouds and the distant mountains. Veneration for antiquity and revolutionary daring are brought together. The home

Art in Israel

This article follows a number of artistic movements and events anchored in Israeli ideology, politics, and content. It offers a selective, partial panorama of art in Israel from 1948 through the first decade of the twenty-first century. The article presents a sequence of synchronic historical pictures defined by the specific context of each decade, in which each work is representative of an idea or artistic concept in local Israeli artistic discourse. ### The conjunctio