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

Oscar Wilde's blue plaque turns Worthing's gentlefolk red

Oscar Wilde's links with the genteel south coast town of Worthing should be severed because he was a child abuser, say campaigners. In 1894 he lived in the resort, penning The Importance of Being Ernest there and naming character Jack Worthing in its honour. For years a blue plaque has boasted of his time at Esplanade Court on the seafront, but now some want to rid the town of the honour. Feelings have become heated since Chris Hare, a local historian, raised the questio

Real 'Defiance' family is from Brooklyn

Growing up in Brooklyn, Robert Bielsky heard the story at the dinner table about how his father and uncles fought the Nazis and saved more than 1,200 fellow Jews by hiding in the woods. Now that tale is a Hollywood movie called “Defiance” and Bielsky is still reeling from the surreal experience of seeing the newest James Bond play his father, Tuvia Bielski, on the big screen. “Daniel Craig kinda looks like my dad,” said Bielsky, 50, who changed the spelling of his last nam

Titian saved 'thanks to £17.5m Scottish Executive pledge'

A £50 million Renaissance masterpiece by Titian has been saved from being sold on the open market thanks to a £17.5 million contribution from the Scottish Executive, it has been claimed. In August the National Galleries of Scotland and the London-based National Gallery joined forces to buy Diana and Actaeon, Titian's 1550s masterpiece that he painted for King Phillip II of Spain. The Duke of Sutherland offered the painting to them for £50 million - which experts believe is a k

Titian saved 'thanks to £17.5m Scottish Executive pledge'

The sum would enable the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and the London-based National Gallery to buy Diana and Actaeon from the 7th Duke of Sutherland. In August he offered it to them for £50 million - which experts believe is a knock-down-price - on condition they raised the funds by December 31. The National Gallery is also said to have pledged £12.5 million. A source close to the deal refused to confirm a deal had been completed, saying negotiation

Thatcher finds a permanent home at No 10: First look at the £100,000 portrait Brown ordered as a lasting tribute

A portrait of Margaret Thatcher, commissioned by Gordon Brown as his personal tribute to her achievements, is to be unveiled in Downing Street next month. The stunning work by Richard Stone, one of the world’s leading portrait artists, is revealed for the first time today by The Mail on Sunday. The painting, which is not yet finished, depicts the Iron Lady at the height of her powers just after the Falklands War in 1982. Mr Brown told Lady Thatcher he intended to

Search Expanded for Art Stolen from Berlin Gallery

Police widened their search Sunday for 30 works of art, including prints by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, that were stolen from a Berlin gallery on New Year's Eve. A police spokeswoman said authorities in other countries had been asked to look out for the missing sculptures and etchings, worth an estimated 180,000 euros ($250,000). They were stolen from the Fasanengalerie, a private gallery in the fashionable Charlottenburg district of western Berlin. Th

BBC Four series on medieval Islamic scientists

Isaac Newton is, as most will agree, the greatest physicist of all time. At the very least, he is the undisputed father of modern optics,­ or so we are told at school where our textbooks abound with his famous experiments with lenses and prisms, his study of the nature of light and its reflection, and the refraction and decomposition of light into the colours of the rainbow. Yet, the truth is rather greyer; and I feel it important to point out that, certainly in the f

Britain’s Galápagos offers insight into evolutionary ideas

The living laboratory where Charles Darwin developed much of his evolutionary thinking, described by scientists as “Britain’s Galápagos”, is to reopen to the public next month to mark the bicentenary of the great biologist’s birth. A £900,000 revamp of Down House, the Darwin family home near Orpington, Kent, will give visitors fresh insights into the story of evolution, with a new exhibition and the opportunity to be guided around its grounds by leading intellectuals.

Kubrick Holocaust film to be told in installation

Stanley Kubrick was one of the greatest, and often demanding, film directors of all time, making movies from Spartacus to Full Metal Jacket. And if it had not been for his friend Steven Spielberg, there may also have been one called Aryan Papers, set in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw Ghetto. The story of the movie Kubrick never made - despite investing enormous energy into it - is to be told through a new art installation at the British Film Institute in London by the Turner-prize nominat

Cutty Sark 'Not Ready To Reopen'

After being devastated by fire in May 2007, work to resurrect the Cutty Sark has been painstaking. Disappointed tourists cannot see anything beyond the boarding that surrounds the world-famous clipper. On site, a rusting skeleton is all that is visible through the tarpaulin and scaffolding. Arson was suspected, but the cause of the fire was more mundane - an industrial vacuum cleaner left on over a weekend. First a crime scene and then a toxic

Owner of Hitler prop in Tom Cruise 'Valkyrie' protests use

Tom Cruise, who fights the Nazis in "Valkyrie," might now have to battle a San Francisco advertising executive who says the couch-jumping star used a replica of one of Adolf Hitler's prized possessions in the movie without permission. Robert Pritikin - who penned such jingles as "Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat" and has a $40 million art collection - owns several Hitler artifacts, including the Fuehrer's notorious globe, which he used to plan U-boat attacks

Anger at plans for 'official' European history

MEPs have given the green light to a multi-million pound state-of-the-art "House of European History" to be opened in Brussels by 2014. The project to "promote an awareness of European identity" is the brainchild of Hans-Gert Poettering, President of the European Parliament and a Federalist German Christian Democrat. "I should like to create a locus for history and for the future where the concept of the European idea can continue to grow,&quo

Matisse sketch stolen in Berlin

More than 30 artworks, including prints by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, have been stolen from a Berlin gallery. The artworks - worth an estimated 180,000 euros ($250,000/£173,000) - were stolen over the New Year holiday. Picasso's 1947 Profil au Fond Noir and Nude in a Rocking Chair (1913) by Matisse are among the pieces missing. The works, including sculptures and etchings, were taken from the Fasanengalerie, a private gallery near western Berlin's

Ukraine asks Barack Obama to help save its White House

Its paint is peeling, its grounds are scruffy and there are no Secret Service agents in sight, but Ukranian students are hoping that US president-elect Barack Obama will help them save their own version of the White House. Built for a nobleman as a country estate a couple of decades after the better-known White House, Ukraine's white house slipped into obscurity and disrepair in the bleak post-Soviet era. It now houses Chernomyn School, and school officials say they have appealed to

Soderbergh takes on 'tough,' controversial 'Che'

Steven Soderbergh made certain his new movie,"Che," about the life of revolutionary Ernesto"Che" Guevara, couldn't be attacked -- at least on a factual level. "I didn't mind someone saying, 'Well, your take on him, I don't really like,' or 'You've left these things out and included these things.' That's fine," Soderbergh said."What I didn't want was for somebody to be able to look at a scene and say, 'That never happened.'" But he's aware that he's going to be accused of romantic

Che - review

As movie-making endeavours go, Steven Soderbergh's Che is up there with the boldest, and possibly most perverse, in recent memory. This $58 million production was made entirely without American financing, and its eschewal of Hollywood formulae is quite startling. Soderbergh isn't interested in grand revelations about the Latin revolutionary hero Che Guevara, in potted psychology, in Che's controversial stature, or even in fitting his life into a two-part, four-hour-plus viewing mar

Museum diplomacy: Directors of rival museums in China and Taiwan to trade visits

The first ever visits will give officials at Beijing's National Palace Museum, in the Forbidden City, a close-up look at some of the 654,000 pieces of jade, scrolls, pottery and bronze war Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang took when they fled to Taiwan sixty years ago. Curators from the National Palace Museum in Taipei will head to Beijing for a chance to examine some of the 600,000 not-so-spectacular pieces of art that were left behind by the Nationalists and are now stored in Chi

As Europe's Cultural Capital 2009, Linz Faces Nazi Past

Some European Capitals of Culture are luckier than others. While this year Liverpool banked on the Beatles, the Austrian town of Linz has to grapple with its connection to Adolf Hitler in 2009. But besides using the opportunity to deal with the fact that Hitler planned to make Linz a major cultural center of the Third Reich, the steel town along the Danube river will offer a host of quirky cultural projects geared towards a wide public rather than a select few. "Li

Copyright Expires on Gandhi Works

It's now open season when it comes to publishing the texts and concepts of Mahatma Gandhi, as copyright law holds that 60 years after someone's death, their written works go into the public domain.

"Grant & Lee: In War and Peace" (Exhibit/N-Y Historical Society)

The stories of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War should be well known to most school kids. But a new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, "Grant & Lee: In War and Peace," explores their lives before and after the war. The first thing you learn as you enter the temporary gallery is that Grant was a much better artist than Lee. Indeed, while Lee was able to go all four years at West Point without a single demerit a