Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
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Painting by Salvador Dalí, Made in the U.S., on Temporary Loan to the Dalí Foundation
Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin at The Imperial War Museum (UK)
PBS Airing Documentary on Allied Bombing of Germany Monday Night
100 Years After the Death of Henri Rousseau, Fondation Beyeler Celebrates with Exhibition
Photo exhibition opens in Liverpool showing 1870s life in China (UK)
Photographic Exhibition Marks Centenary of Scott's Voyage to South Pole (UK)
Jews in Oscar films: Are they vile throwbacks to Jewish stereotypes?
Getty Museum to Explore Representations of Medieval Architecture
1897 Overhead railway footage screened as part of programme for Museum of Liverpool (UK)
E. Boston students make game of 1775 Revolutionary War battle
'Drunk History' with Will Ferrell gulps down Sundance short film prize
Huntington Acquires Extensive Collection of Charles Dickens' Letters
Selection of French Masterpieces from the Pushkin Museum on View in Budapest
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Steven Fielding: The Problem With Biopics
Source: History and Policy (UK) (2-8-10)
[Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History and Director of the Centre for British Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. He is writing a book for Bloomsbury on fiction and British politics from An Ideal Husband to In the Loop. He is also a member of the History & Policy Network.]
If journalism is the first draft of history the biopic is now a close second, having become the staple output of many television drama departments. Recently figures as diverse as the Queen, Margaret Thatcher and Winnie Mandela have been given the treatment.
Historians undoubtedly ground their teeth as these accounts gave the protagonist undue importance and distorted events for dramatic effect. For their mantra has long been that history is made through the interaction of structure and agency, a process in which the individual, however famous, plays but a part. However recent US research [Andrew Butler et al, 'Using popular films to enhance class room learning', Psychological Science, 20:9 (2009)] shows that even amongst Ivy League students, film versions of the past can exert more influence on perceptions of the past than do academic texts. The power of the moving image compared to the immobile word has long been suspected. As Gore Vidal wrote of the Hollywood historical romances of his youth: 'we are both defined and manipulated by [cinematic] fictions of such potency that they are able to replace our own experience, often becoming our sole experience of reality'. From what we know of media effects, this process of confusing fiction for reality is made more certain if the same kind of fiction is transmitted over a prolonged period....
The biopic genre is not new - George Arliss won an Oscar for Disraeli (1929) - and is an obvious offshoot of the publishers' venerable stand-by, the biography. Yet at the present moment... it poses potential dangers. It reinforces the journalistic desire to personalise politics, casting politicians as minor celebrities: politics is thereby presented as a process in which the majority play no part, except in the crowd scenes. While in earlier biopics, the likes of Disraeli were treated like heroes - in the 1929 film he outsmarts a Russian spy - in contemporary biopics the subjects are all people of questionable character....
The current crop of political biopics is not only inaccurate historically but potentially harmful to our civic culture. Political scientists have tried to find ways of 'reengaging' the people with politics. Gordon Brown appears to think that a new electoral system for Westminster might do the trick. So far little consideration has been given to whether the way in which most people gain an understanding of our political past might effect how they think about current politics. Historians could help by taking such versions of the past seriously and recognizing that historiography now exists as much on the screen as on the page. They might encourage their own students to critically engage with how political history has been represented - and ask for example why Disraeli was depicted as a lion in 1929 but by the time Mrs. Brown (1997) was released he had become preoccupied only with spin. Outside the seminar room they should ask those responsible for producing these representations - commissioning editors, producers and writers - to discuss why they depict our recent political history in the ways they do. If even politicians are now expected to be more accountable then why not those who represent them on the screen?
Painting by Salvador Dalí, Made in the U.S., on Temporary Loan to the Dalí Foundation
Source: Artdaily.org (2-9-10)
The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí presented the loan of the work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pommegranate One Minute Before Awakening (1944), from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid). The oil painting will be exhibited at the Drawings Room (number 6) of the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres from 9 February until 2 May 2010.
The painting depicts a woman (Dalí's wife, Gala) sleeping while sunbathing naked during a calm day on rocks floating over the sea, possibly at Port Lligat. An elephant with incredibly long, extremely thin legs walks across the sea's horizon while carrying an obelisk. Near the woman float two drops of water and a small pomegranate. From a larger pomegranate comes a fish that spews a tiger from which comes another tiger, while in front of that second tiger a rifle's bayonet touches (or nearly touches) the woman's right arm. It was painted while Dalí and his wife Gala were living in America.
The bayonet, as a symbol of the stinging bee, may thus represent the woman's abrupt awakening from her otherwise peaceful dream. This is an example of Sigmund Freud's influence on surrealist art and Dali's attempts to explore the world of dreams in a dreamscape.
The bee around the smaller pomegranate is repeated symbolically. The two tigers represent the body of the bee (yellow with black stripes) and the bayonet its stinger. The fish may represent the bee's eyes, because of similarity of the fish's scaly skin with the scaly complex eyes of bees.
The elephant is a distorted version of a well-known sculpture by Bernini that is located in Rome. The smaller pomegranate floating between two droplets of water may symbolize Venus, especially because of the heart-shaped shadow it casts. It may also be used as a Christian symbol of fertility and resurrection. This female symbolism may contrast with the phallic symbolism of the threatening creatures...
How Did Chinese Artists Learn and Practice Their Craft?
Source: Artdaily.org (2-9-10)
A new installation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997), demonstrates how Chinese artists learned, historically, from earlier masterpieces and from nature. It showcases more than 100 works—including paintings, sketches, drawings, calligraphies, and poetry manuscripts—by Xie Zhiliu (pronounced "shay jer leo"), one of modern China's leading artists and connoisseurs. It also marks the 100-year anniversary of his birth. A number of his sketches and copies will be accompanied by photographs of earlier works that inspired him and by his own completed works, in order to trace how he developed his unique style. Drawn primarily from a recent gift to the Metropolitan Museum from the artist's daughter Sarah Shay, the works on view comprise the first solo exhibition of Xie Zhiliu's works to be organized outside China.
"The field of Chinese painting is singularly lacking in examples of how traditional artists practiced their craft," said Maxwell K. Hearn, Douglas Dillon Curator in the Museum's Department of Asian Art. "This rich body of material provides a unique resource for studying one major artist's creative process in detail. Chinese paintings are often the freehand creations of master draftsmen who wielded a brush with confidence borne of years of practice. But Xie's preparatory drawings reveal another set of methods, in which a seemingly spontaneous work was often preceded by one or more sketches and a finished draft that could serve as a template for the final composition. Liberated from the need to visualize the completed work in advance, Xie was able to concentrate on making his brushstrokes in the finished work as dynamic and beautiful as possible."
Xie Zhiliu was a native of Changzhou, a city with a strong tradition of bird-and-flower painting, a genre in which Xie excelled. Moving to Chongqing to escape the Japanese occupation in 1937, he became a close friend of renowned painter Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), who introduced him to the Buddhist cave murals of the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang. After the war, he became an advisor and preeminent connoisseur on painting and calligraphy for the Shanghai Museum as well as a professor of painting. Due to his access to the rich holdings of the museum, which enabled his close study of Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasty painting (a topic on which he published), Xie expanded his style. Between 1983 and 1990 he led a team of scholars in evaluating the collections of China's leading cultural institutions, a project that resulted in a 24-volume illustrated index of more than 70,000 paintings and calligraphies.
The installation will be divided thematically. The first two galleries, entitled "Tracing the Past," present Xie's early studies of figures, narratives, and bird-and-flower paintings of the Song dynasty (960-1279). His sketches of Buddhist figures based on his study of the Dunhuang murals are also included here. In the two galleries that follow, Xie's admiration for the master painter Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) and other bird-and-flower specialists is highlighted through a number of Xie's precise copies of these artists' paintings...
Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin at The Imperial War Museum (UK)
Source: Artdaily.org (2-9-10)
Imperial War Museum North in Manchester presents the largest ever UK exhibition about the life and work of Don McCullin, one of the world’s most acclaimed photographers, to mark his 75th year. Many items are on public display for the very first time.
For more than 50 years, McCullin’s images have shaped our awareness of modern conflict and its consequences. His courage and integrity, as well as the exceptional quality of his work, are a continuing inspiration and influence worldwide. A unique collaboration between McCullin and the Imperial War Museum, this major new exhibition contains over 200 photographs, objects, magazines and personal memorabilia, and shows how war has shaped the life of this exceptional British photographer and those across the globe over the last half-century.
The exhibition examines McCullin the man, with an extraordinarily uncompromising drive to be on the frontline and document events as they unfold, the influences on his work and his impact on others. It reveals the moral dilemmas of bearing witness to and photographing conflict. Set in the context of world events and major changes in photography and journalism which have occurred in his lifetime, items on display for the first time include his US Issue Army Helmet worn in Vietnam, colour photographs from El Salvador, 1982 and Vietnam, 1972 and his most recent work, documenting the former Roman Empire.
Newly commissioned footage by the Imperial War Museum featuring Don McCullin reappraising his life as a photojournalist provides an intimate insight into his experiences in his own words. Most black and white images have been handprinted by McCullin himself and are stunning examples of his darkroom skills. Key images will also be displayed via lightboxes, banners and projections - methods that have never before been used to display his work...
Monday, February 8, 2010
PBS Airing Documentary on Allied Bombing of Germany Monday Night
Source: Commentary Magazine (2-8-10)
[Jonathan Tobin is executive editor of COMMENTARY.]
Tonight, PBS’s American Experience series will broadcast a new documentary titled The Bombing of Germany, about the strategic-bombing campaign carried out against the Nazis by American forces in World War II. Coming from the liberal-leaning PBS and in an era where denunciations of American military actions — even in the “good war” against Nazi Germany — have become commonplace, it would have been no surprise if this film was yet another revisionist attempt to decry Allied tactics as immoral. This impression is reinforced by the introduction to the film on PBS’s website, which highlights the number of German civilian casualties incurred by Allied bombing and the “defining moments that led the U.S. across a moral divide” that would make it easier to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan. Indeed, the narration heard during the opening moments of The Bombing of Germany goes straight to this conclusion when it says that by the time the war ended, the bombing left “both German cities and America’s lofty ideals in ruins.”...
It is telling that the documentary treats the achievement of air superiority over Normandy before the D-Day landings in France as the Allied Air Forces' greatest achievement. But it does not mention that both American and British air commanders bitterly resented being distracted from their plans to level Germany in order to support the landings by softening up military targets in France. But that is just the prelude to what the filmmakers and some of their consultants see as the moral turning point of the war for America — the bombings of Berlin and Dresden in February 1945 in which there was no pretense that the attack was anything but an attempt to destroy the city. The Dresden raid, immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, has been widely represented by many American, English, and German historians as immoral because the beautiful medieval city was not considered a military target and heretofore had been spared the devastation that rained down on other German cities. It is here that author Don Miller, one of the prominent voices heard in the film, describes the raid as the crossing of “a moral threshold ... that we will not deliberately bomb civilians … once we crossed the moral divide in Berlin, it made everything else, including the atomic bomb, a little bit easier.”
The most devastating line of the film is its last, in which historian Conrad C. Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, confronts the moral dilemma of killing civilians in a righteous war against an immoral opponent. While the question of the deaths of civilians is one we must ponder, Conrad insists, “The most unethical act for the Allies in World War II would have been allowing themselves to lose.”...
Sunday, February 7, 2010
100 Years After the Death of Henri Rousseau, Fondation Beyeler Celebrates with Exhibition
Source: Artdaily.org (2-7-10)
One hundred years after the death of the French artist Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), the Fondation Beyeler is devoting an exhibition to this pioneer of modernism. Forty outstanding works provide a concise overview of the development and diversity of his oeuvre. A customs official, Rousseau had no formal art training and initially painted in his free time. Many years passed before his art, non-academic and long considered merely naive, found recognition in the Paris salons. In addition to the legendary jungle pictures characteristic of his late work, Rousseau also painted views of Paris and environs, as well as figures, portraits, allegories and genre scenes. With Monet, Cézanne, van Gogh and Gauguin, Rousseau was one of the artists whose visual inventions paved the way for incipient modernism. After the great Impressionists and their direct heirs had developed a new view of the visual world, Rousseau tapped sources beyond the academic tradition for modern artists to come. Never having attended an art school and supposedly naive, he brought genres such as the imaginary, dreamlike landscape to an unexpected culmination in his jungle paintings.
The exhibition illustrates how Rousseau brought together aspects of civilization and nature and adapted highly diverse themes to his visual conception. Individual motifs such as leaves and trees, but also figures and entire compositional schemes or elements were transferred from picture to picture. These basic patterns, expanded by means of combination and variation into a rich range of motifs and genres, were applied both to French and exotic subject matter. Rousseau defined the picture space by staggering pictorial elements from background to foreground, a method that would later be adopted by the Cubists. This additive pictorial structure, in the form of painted collage, anticipated the autonomy of the picture plane that would become so characteristic of modernism and fascinated young artists such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger.
In order to bring out these special aspects of Rousseau’s oeuvre, the exhibition employs two forms of presentation. On the one hand, it shows Rousseau’s thematic focuses on the basis of groups of works distributed among the different exhibition rooms. An introductory documentation room is followed by rooms devoted to portraits and the small-format French landscapes, and finally by the large hall, whose effect is primarily determined by the jungle pictures. Within this arrangement, space is reserved for a selection of special groupings and pairs of paintings in which the conventional genre borderlines are purposely transcended. This enables us to trace the migration of motifs and play of oppositions that are so typical of Rousseau. For instance, the late jungle painting Forêt vierge au soleil couchant, c. 1910, is directly confronted with the figurative Les joueurs de football, 1908. The ball hovering over the players recalls a setting sun, spirited from the forest picture – a well-nigh surrealistic composition that would later inspire Max Ernst and René Magritte.
Also for the first time in the present exhibition, three major Rousseau works will be shown in immediate proximity with one another, works in quite different genres yet based on a nearly identical compositional scheme: the rural scene La noce, 1904-05, La muse inspirant le poète, 1909 (from the series known as “portrait landscapes”), and Joyeux farceurs, a jungle painting of 1906...
Photo exhibition opens in Liverpool showing 1870s life in China (UK)
Source: Lee P Ruddin (2-7-10)
China: Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-1872 is a photographic exhibition showcasing 150 images of China’s peoples and its landscapes. This is the first display outside of China devoted to John Thomson (1837-1921) and his 5,000 mile journey. Its premiere at the Merseyside Maritime Museum is fitting.
Born in Edinburgh two years before the birth of photography, Thomson’s Chinese work established him as the pioneer of photojournalism. The Scot first travelled to Asia in 1862, where he set up a professional studio. His major expedition did not begin until 1870, however, two years after he settled in Hong Kong. In those two years he travelled from Guangdong to Fujian, and then to eastern and northern China, including the imperial capital Beijing, before heading down to the River Yangtse.
The exhibition follows the same geographic route as if taking visitors on his journey. An equally deft touch - so deft, in truth, it is as equally in danger of being overlooked - is the fact that there are three different colours for the wall fabrics: wisteria for Beijing and the north, celadon-green for Shanghai and the Treaty ports on the east coast, and sea-green-blue for the south (Canton, Hong Kong and Macao). Within each section there are groupings of like subjects: the land and the river, the people, and the built environment. Add to this, a short film which features Thomson’s original photographs alongside modern versions and you have an exhibition thoroughly worth visiting as it tours the UK (Hartlepool and Glasgow in late 2010 and early 2011 respectively).
“These pictures are fascinating because they reveal a world that most artists of that period ignored,” said Betty Yao, curator and organiser of the world premiere at the Beijing World Art Museum, last April. “Most material from this late Qing era is stuffy, formal and posed, but Thomson’s work is full of life.”
What is doubly remarkable, though, was that Thompson - a foreigner let us not forget - had the ability to gain access to women and capture intimate moments while using cumbersome equipment at a time when glass plate negatives needed to be coated with emulsion before exposure.
Diverse shots including beautiful peasant girls and high-born ladies are indicative of Thomson’s work more generally. ‘A Cantonese Maid, Guangdong’ 1869-1871 is emblematic of his central focus and the human side. To be sure, it was his desire to present the human aspect of life in China through everyday street scenes which set him apart from his peers.
Orienatlist works - be they of art or literature, have a fraught history. Photography is no different. Ever since 1978 and the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, such masterpieces have been prone to attack by Saidian revisionists. As Roger Scruton writes in City Journal (‘What Ever Happened to Reason?’ Spring 1999), however, “It is the very attempt to embrace other cultures – an attempt that has no parallel in the traditional art of Arabia, India, or Africa – that makes Western art a hostage to Said’s cavilling strictures.”
Rest assured, though, charges relating to misrepresenting, sensationalising or generalising the East for imperial gain by the West cannot be laid here. Thomson had a great enthusiasm for exploring exotic places, admittedly. But so did many of his Victorian contemporaries. And while some may highlight his famous comment, “the camera should be a power in this age of instruction to instruct the age”, to use the word orienatlist to describe Thomson in anything other than a non-pejorative sense would be to seriously misrepresent, sensationalise and generalise the orientalist here.
Notwithstanding Said’s hegemonic-like presence over China: Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-1872, however, it is still possible to appreciate the photographs solely for their pictorial beauty. Since we should not forget that it was Thomson’s curiosity for Eastern culture and love of China that brought us the first photographic social documentation of its people.
For those not yet convinced, you need only refer to three particular photographs:
‘Three Chinese Ministers at the Office for Foreign Affairs’ 1871-1872. In our first portrait, Thomson shows us that Chinese officials did not spend their time in idleness and luxury; rather they led laborious lives dressed in simple robes.
‘Prince Gong (1833-1898)’ 1871-1872. Thomson, in our second photograph, features a moderniser and a pro-Western figure at the heart of the Chinese government: one who was “quick of apprehension, open to advice, and comparatively liberal in his views”.
‘Pepo Dwellings in Zuojhen (Zuozhen) Tainan, Taiwan’ 1871. It is particularly interesting to note that while the Chinese regarded the Siraiya as ‘savages’, Thomson, in our third and final example, found their dwellings were “superior to those of Chinese squatters, and the people themselves were better dressed”.
When he returned to Britain, Thomson took up an active role informing the public about China, using his pictures to illustrate talks and lecture of his own, which earned him the moniker ‘China’ Thomson.
“He was caught up in the whole Victorian fervour for exploration and discovery,” explains Rachel Mulhearn, the Maritime Museum’s director. “Thomson himself commented that the steamships had brought places like China closer to the Western world, and that’s why it’s of particular interest to us.
“His project coincided with the emergence of the Blue Funnel line and Liverpool was forging strong trading links with China at the time,” she adds. “In 1868, he went to John Kong. Just two years previously, Blue Funnel had started its steamship services and, in 1869, the Suez Canal opened,” she tells Laura Davis at the Liverpool Daily Post.
Like many ports, its role was to serve the gateway between the world of raw materials and that of manufacturing. Early nineteenth century trade with China was no different. With the revision of the East India Company’s charter, Liverpool merchants sent out manufactured goods like railway engines, building materials and pottery and brought back raw materials like silk and cotton wool and, of course, tea.
As Ms. Mulhearn’s already said, in 1866 Alfred Holt’s Blue Funnel Line began steamer services between Liverpool and Asia. This legendary service was celebrated in a modest display in the same building back in 2006. As the exhibition webpage reminds those unable to attend, “The origins and development of Liverpool’s Chinese community, one of the oldest in Europe, are partly due to the Blue Funnel connection.”
To coincide with the exhibition, China: Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-1872, paintings and ship models connected to the China trade are also on display. The ships featured in the paintings were voyaging between Liverpool and China around the time of Thomson’s expedition. And the ships models are examples of vessels that Thomson would have seen during his travels around China.
China: Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-1872 runs at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Albert Dock, Liverpool until 6 June 2010. Free admission. The exhibition catalogue is available for purchase from mid-March.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Photographic Exhibition Marks Centenary of Scott's Voyage to South Pole (UK)
Source: Artdaily.org (2-6-10)
Marking the centenary of Scott's epic voyage to the South Pole, the Getty Images Gallery, in association with the Scott Polar Research Institute, is presenting a new photographic exhibition which will feature the work of Herbert Ponting, the photographer who accompanied the expedition. "The Journey South" will run from 4th February until 6th March.
Herbert Ponting's beautiful and graphic photographs record the conditions faced by Robert Falcon Scott's team of men before their final push to the pole and before tragedy ultimately struck in 1912. Ponting also captured the stark beauty of Antarctica 100 years ago, in a series of landscape shots which remain iconic and timeless to this day. The collection provides a stirring testament to the heroism and bravery of all involved and perfectly encapsulates the spirit of adventure and discovery that marked the epic journey. The glass plate negatives from which these images are taken are preserved in the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. This part of the collection is represented by Getty Images.
Herbert Ponting was a self-taught photographer who spent time travelling through the Far East, photographing people and places, before joining the crew of the Terra Nova on their journey south. He recorded the difficult living conditions under which the expedition members and their animals lived and worked...
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Jews in Oscar films: Are they vile throwbacks to Jewish stereotypes?
Source: LA Times (2-3-10)
Three of this year's Oscar best picture nominees have something unusual in common -- they have leading characters who are open, self-proclaimed Jews.
Think about it: It's almost impossible to find any goyim in the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man," a slyly satiric look at the Jewish community in a 1967-era Midwestern town. A big chunk of Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" revolves around a raucous band of Nazi-scalping Jewish soldiers who've been assembled to go after the Fuhrer and his high command. And Lone Scherfig's "An Education," costars Peter Sarsgaard as an unscrupulous young Jewish real-estate speculator who woos a 16-year-old British schoolgirl eager to see the world.
An-education You'd think this might be cause for celebration, or at least a show in pride, in the Jewish community, especially since you can often go years at a time without seeing openly Jewish characters in Hollywood films. But are Jews happy? As my grandfather (who spoke Hebrew with a Southern accent) used to say: Not in a million years. In fact, the Jewish Journal just ran a provocative cover story entitled: "Realism or Anti-Semitism: Negative Depictions of Jews Raise the Age Old Question."
Written by Tom Tugend, the piece attempts to be even-handed, saying that "A Serious Man" and "An Education," depending on the viewpoint, "represent either vile throwbacks to Jewish stereotypes in Nazi propaganda movies or creative works of art that show Jews, like other ethnicities, as multidimensional human beings." But it turns out that most of the people in the story actually had very little problem with the films. Tugend interviews all sorts of smart folks who defend the movies' portrayal of Jews, including historian Neal Gabler and UCLA professor Howard Suber. Even Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman supports "An Education," who said: "To call it anti-Semitic would suggest that any depiction of bad behavior by a Jew is beyond the pale. That is not the view of ADL, and ADL does not find the film offensive."...
Remember, "An Education" is based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber about her teenage affair with a man who was Jewish. So it's not a work of imagination, where you could ask the question, as many did of Spike Lee when he cast John Turturro as a sleazy Jewish nightclub owner named Moe Flatbush in "Mo' Better Blues": Why make him Jewish?...
As for "A Serious Man," while it is clearly a work of fiction, it is also clearly based on the Coen brothers' youthful memories of growing up in a closeknit Jewish suburb of Minneapolis. As someone who is roughly the same age as the Coens, I watched the film with a delirious sense of recognition....
It also seems fitting that when the Journal asked Ethan Coen what he would say to people who believe their film is anti-Semitic, he struck just the right note of "Basterds"-style defiance by responding: "Too bad, you big crybaby -- that's what David Mamet would say."...
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Brooklyn's Loew's Kings Theater to finally get a makeover
Source: NYT (2-2-10)
The rusting, dirt-caked marquee that hangs outside the Loew’s Kings Theater over a bustling commercial stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn last promoted a film in 1977. Years of neglect have left the interior rotted by time, stripped by thieves and desecrated by vandals and pigeons.
New York City, which seized the building decades ago in lieu of back taxes, has long teased the neighborhood with proposals to restore the lost luster of a local landmark. But this time, the city says, it is for real.
A developer has signed an agreement, made a down payment on a $70 million renovation and plans to turn the building back into a functioning entertainment venue, this time presenting live performances, city officials said Tuesday.
“We’re on our way to making that dream come true,” said Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, who is to formally announce the restoration in his State of the Borough address Wednesday....
Some original touches survive, like dusty crystal chandeliers still hanging in the lobby. The stage has aged less gracefully; it is flanked by torn burgundy curtains covered in droppings from birds that roosted inside until a broken skylight was sealed.
David Anderson, the president of ACE Theatrical, said it would take a while to evaluate the extent of the damage, but he emphasized the company’s commitment to the original design. “We’ll be able to recreate what it looks like when it was first put into use,” he said. “We’ll be able to very accurately recreate what is no longer there and restore what is there.”
“It’s an absolutely wonderful space,” said Richard J. Sklenar, executive director of the Theater Historical Society of America. “There’s nothing there that can’t be taken care of; $70 million sounds like it can do the job.”
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Getty Museum to Explore Representations of Medieval Architecture
Source: Artdaily.org (2-2-10)
The architectural wonders of soaring cathedrals and majestic palaces are some of the greatest achievements of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, March 2–May 16, 2010, Building the Medieval World: Architecture in Illuminated Manuscripts explores representations of medieval architecture in manuscript illumination where artists incorporated examples of medieval church and domestic architecture into scenes drawn from scripture, literature, and history. Architectural settings were also employed to symbolically convey the importance of individuals and events, and artists frequently used architectural elements as decorative motifs to frame text and images.
“This exhibition demonstrates how the daily presence of towering and monumental architectural forms in both cities and in the countryside fascinated medieval viewers and crept into the fictional world of the painted page,” explains Christine Sciacca, assistant curator of manuscripts and curator of the exhibition.
Images found in manuscripts offer insight into how medieval buildings were used as well as reveal the daily life that took place inside and around them. Manuscripts also frequently served as historical documents of medieval architecture. The dedication or renovation of a church was often represented in books of prayer and music created to celebrate the occasion. Manuscripts also depicted buildings associated with a book’s owner, constituting a kind of visual inventory of his architectural possessions. Some of the images found in this exhibition are schematic, merely suggesting the overall look of a structure, while others provide exact records of what particular buildings looked like when their images were painted onto the page...
Sunday, January 31, 2010
1897 Overhead railway footage screened as part of programme for Museum of Liverpool (UK)
Source: Lee P Ruddin (1-31-10)
Members of the public were invited to attend a screening of the famous Lumière Brothers’ Liverpool Overhead Railway (LOR) films at Liverpool FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) on Friday.
As part of the public programme for the new Museum of Liverpool (MoL), the free lecture showcased new findings of the world’s first tracking shot by Alexandre Promio in 1897. It was introduced by Sharon Brown, curator of land transport and industry for National Museums Liverpool (NML), who also provided an insight into the history of the LOR itself.
Mrs Brown said: “An original LOR motor coach will be a key feature in the new MoL’s Overhead Railway gallery. It will be displayed in an elevated position as part of a re-construction of Pier Head station.”
Dr Richard Koeck, from the University of Liverpool, shared insights into his research and ongoing production of the film animations that contextualised the original Lumière archive footage with historical maps of the time, and retraced the precise route of the films.
“Dr Koeck’s completed work on the Lumière archive footage will also be shown in the gallery,” Brown confirmed, “allowing visitors to get a real taste of what it was like to travel on the world’s first elevated electrified railway line, and what they would have been able to see in 1897 four years after it first opened.”
Opened on 4 February 1893, the LOR was built to ease congestion along the Dock Road following the completion of the dock network in the 1880s and Liverpool’s transformation from a small tidal inlet into the world’s second busiest port, more generally.
The seven-and-a-half-mile route not only eased congestion, though, but also served as a tourist attraction providing amazing views both of the docks themselves and the transatlantic liners on the River Mersey.
There’s no mistaking that getting to see over the dock walls and viewing the hidden world within was a selling point. “Already in 1902,” John Belchem says in his encyclopedic treatment of Liverpool’s history, Liverpool 800: Character, Culture and History (ed.), “one of the guidebooks of the city had a chapter devoted to ‘touring’ the docks by the Overhead Railway, and according to a 1930s poster, it was ‘the best way to see the finest docks in the world and the giant ocean liners’.”
The only surviving motor coach was presented to NML after LOR closed in 1956, and is currently being conserved before being moved to the LOR gallery in the new MoL.
The gallery will also explore stories about the people living and working underneath the rails of the LOR, or the “Dockers’ Umbrella” as it was commonly known, and will feature an original third class Overhead Railway carriage, suspended above the gallery to suggest its working height.
Some further facts about the £72 million MoL, which set to open in Spring 2011:
• Currently under construction at the Pier Head, at the core of the World Heritage Site on its famous waterfront, the MoL is the largest newly-built national museum in the UK for over a hundred years
• The museum will provide 8,000 square meters of public space across three floors, and visitors will have access to over 6,000 objects that are currently in store, many of which have never been on public display before
• The galleries in the museum will focus on four main themes: Port City, Creative City, People’s City and Global City
• Find out more: A display about the museum is open at the Piermaster’s House, Albert Dock. It features a model of the museum and information about the museum’s galleries and the objects and stories on display. It is open daily from 10am to 4:30pm and entry is free
Friday, January 29, 2010
E. Boston students make game of 1775 Revolutionary War battle
Source: Boston Globe (1-29-10)
History has paid little heed to the Battle of Chelsea Creek, a skirmish off East Boston in 1775 often overshadowed by more famous milestones of the American Revolution.
The future may change that: A group of students at the Umana Middle School Academy have helped create a video game that may soon be available for free download to mobile devices. Impatient riders stuck on the Blue Line will be able to relive the battle on an iPhone, tapping on the touch screen as Minutemen with muskets charge the HMS Diana, a British ship that ran aground at low tide....
The mobile application is the product of a unique collaboration between the school; a benevolent software entrepreneur; and the group pushing to build the Boston Museum, a proposed history museum along the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. It is part of a larger effort to create a local historical society in East Boston and expose youngsters to the neighborhood’s rich history, connecting newcomers from El Salvador, Algeria, and beyond with long-time Italian residents....
The full results went on display yesterday at East Boston’s Cultural Exchange Center, where exhibits today and tomorrow range from photographs of local-born Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the famous political clan, to student-built hulls commemorating life in Donald McKay’s shipyard on Border Street, birthplace of the once renowned clipper ships....
'Drunk History' with Will Ferrell gulps down Sundance short film prize
Source: Zap 2 It (1-29-10)
The Sundance Film Festival is awarding some drunken ramblings with a prize. Really.
"Drunk History: Douglass and Lincoln," directed by Jeremy Konner, has taken home the Sundance Jury Prize in short filmmaking, while Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland's "The Six Dollar Fifty Man" took home the international short prize.
For those not familiar with the "Drunk History" shorts that have become a YouTube sensation, the premise is simple: Someone knocks back enough drinks to become thoroughly sloshed and then narrates a historical event. That occasionally incoherent voiceover is then used as the background while known actors reenact the event.
In the "Douglass and Lincoln" short, Jen Kirkman drank two bottles of wine before she was ready to discuss President Abraham Lincoln (played by Will Ferrell) meeting with abolitionist Frederick Douglass (Don Cheadle). It's a bit bizarre, even though the actors play the roles straigh, lipsynching to the voiceover.
Somehow, we don't think these will be used as approved classroom viewing materials....
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Terracotta Army to Conquer Canada from 2010 - 2012
Source: Artdaily.org (1-28-10)
The launch of the 2010-2012 Canadian national tour of The Warrior Emperor and China’s Terracotta Army was announced this morning at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). At the event, attended by media and special guests including The Honourable Michael Chan, Ontario Minister of Tourism and Culture, it was confirmed that the Government of China has named the ROM as the Canadian tour’s organizing museum, as well as its premiere venue. The national tour, marking the first time that the Terracotta Army has appeared in Canada, will encompass four venues across the country. Following the ROM’s engagement, commencing in late June 2010, the exhibition will travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. Representatives from each of these provincial museums were in attendance at the announcement.
The exhibition showcases one of the most significant archaeological finds in history: the 1974 discovery, in China’s northern Shaanxi province, of thousands of life-sized terracotta sculptures of Chinese warriors. These extraordinary figures, along with countless treasures yet to be uncovered in the elaborate underground tomb complex of China’s First Emperor, were created during the Qin Dynasty, 2,200 years ago.
“This truly awe-inspiring exhibit will be the must-see attraction of 2010 for visitors to the ROM,” said Michael Chan, Minister of Tourism and Culture. “The Terracotta Army exhibit is yet another example of the current cultural renaissance that is helping re-establish Toronto as an exciting centre of creativity and excellence.
“The ROM takes great pride in being chosen as the organizing museum for this important Canadian tour,” states William Thorsell, the ROM’s Director and CEO. “We look forward to introducing our visitors to China’s rich cultural legacy, focusing on these extraordinary terracotta warriors. We are thrilled to present them to Canadian audiences and honoured to be accorded this sign of respect and trust by the Government of China.”
Dr. Chen Shen, Senior Curator and Bishop White Chair of Far Eastern Art and Archaeology in the ROM’s World Cultures department is the exhibition’s curator and responsible for developing the content of the Canadian tour. Dr. Shen emphasizes, “This Canadian national tour is a newly developed and contextually different presentation than previous, international displays. The number of full sized warriors and the exhibition’s scope makes this the largest display of the First Emperor’s terracotta army ever to be seen in North America. Many of the artifacts displayed during the upcoming Canadian tour have never before left China. In fact, some have not yet been displayed in any museum in China. This is a major triumph for the ROM and its Canadian tour partners.””..
Huntington Acquires Extensive Collection of Charles Dickens' Letters
Source: Artdaily.org (1-28-10)
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens announced today it will add to its Library holdings an extraordinary group of 35 letters written by Charles Dickens (1812-1870). The set of letters is one of four new acquisitions selected by the Library Collectors’ Council at its 13th annual meeting on Jan. 16. Also selected were A Monograph of the Paradiseidae, or Birds of Paradise, a spectacularly illustrated, hand-colored ornithological book published in 1873; an important group of photographs of Santa Barbara, Calif., by the firm Hayward and Muzzall produced in the late 1800s; and an elaborately illuminated English manuscript made in the 1590s to commemorate the victorious Siege of Calais in 1347.
“The Huntington’s Library Collectors’ Council consists of some of our most devoted supporters who are also very knowledgeable collectors. We’re thrilled that once again they have expanded the Huntington’s holdings both dramatically and wisely,” said Steve Koblik, president of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
David Zeidberg, Avery Director of the Library at The Huntington, added, “The Council was formed to augment the collections at the high end, meaning members are asked to purchase materials we otherwise couldn’t afford. A rare group of letters by a canonized English literary figure like Dickens is exactly in that vein; and the other three acquisitions greatly enhance our usefulness as a research library in some of our strongest collection areas.”..
Selection of French Masterpieces from the Pushkin Museum on View in Budapest
Source: Artdaily.org (1-28-10)
In its exhibition the Museum of Fine Arts will display selected masterpieces from the uniquely wealthy collection of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The fifty-five works in the exhibition provide an overview of French painting from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The show runs until the middle of April and will greet visitors with prominent works of Impressionism, Symbolism from the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the first avant-garde movements bearing the stamp of the Fauves and the Cubists. The period is conjured up through masterpieces by Courbet, Corot, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso and others.
The Budapest exhibition, which could previously be seen in the exhibition halls of the Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland, does not merely seek to present a picture of the development and most important trends in modern French painting but also to pay tribute to two outstanding Russian collectors active at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin. The bulk of the masterpieces in the present Budapest exhibition originate from the extraordinarily rich, internationally acclaimed collections of these two wealthy Russian textile manufacturers. The fifty-five works selected from the Pushkin Museum’s collection provide a chronological overview of the most dynamic period in French art. The greater part of the works by the pre-eminent artists that represent trends spanning six decades, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, are well known from art albums. The eight separate chapters of the exhibition present this exciting period of art history through masterpieces of remarkable significance: Degas’ Dancer at the Photographer’s, Mount Sainte-Victoire - one of the early pieces from a series painted by Paul Cézanne -, Monet's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, Renoir's In the Garden, Matamoe - one of Gauguin's canvases painted in Tahiti, In the Prison Courtyard - a painting by Van Gogh with a surprising theme -, Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” by Matisse, and Picasso's Acrobat and Young Harlequin. The sections titled Realism, The Barbizon School, Impressionism, Cézanne, Founders of Modernism, Symbolism, The Fauves, and The Start of the Avant-garde provide the systematic framework for the displayed works...
Simon Schama’s “Obama's America” on BBC TV
Source: Lee P Ruddin (1-28-10)
“The Administration has a long way to go to meet the Truman Standard, and its most serious impediment is the Iraq problem.”
―James M. Goldgeier and Derek H. Chollet, American Interest (2006)
A year on from Barack Obama’s inauguration, Simon Schama presents a thought-provoking two-part film in which the British historian analyses the daunting challenges faced by the current administration, starting with the war in Afghanistan and asking: “What price should America pay to defend its freedom and guarantee its security?”
Schama is a strong supporter of the 44th President, but in Obama’s America: The Price of Freedom (BBC Two) he sounds a note of caution. Schama suggests that while George W. Bush and the Neocons cheapened the “glorious liberation” of the Second World War by “endlessly invoking it in the present,” Obama would be better served by considering Harry Truman’s handling of America’s forgotten war in Korea when planning his strategy for Afghanistan.
The University Professor at Columbia University has taken history to a wider audience with the successes of his earlier BBC work: A History of Britain (2000), The Power of Art (2006), and The American Future: A History (2008).
The accessibility of his programmes, which Schama writes and presents, has won him acclaim for being able to convey subjects considered dry in an absorbing and new-fangled way. His latest TV outing is no different: stirring music, brilliant archive footage and wonderful narration together ensure Obama’s America is another hit in the making. Or, so you would think.
His jocular but never patronizing style has won him a repertoire of television prizes over the years, despite criticism from some about his pushy omniscience and vaingloriously contorted vowels not to mention that he was “dumbing down”.
Talking of which, Schama’s dumbed down the history so much that the Korean War analogy is, frankly, dumb. Being a supporter of the Commander-in-Chief, Schama inevitably signs up to the thesis that the Iraq War was a “war of choice.” Yet some say this is what Korea was, and not the “war of necessity” that Afghanistan is deemed today.
However, it could be argued Schama is not so much talking about the war as Truman’s strategy of containment which finally ended with the disintegration of the Soviet empire. The (flawed) parallel made between General Stanley McChrystal’s request for troops and the showdown between President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur sixty-seven years ago only confirms this.
What is clear, however, is that any talk of Truman equating North Korean actions with those of the Nazis would not fit within Schama’s Neocon-bashing routine. Therein, Schama blasts that in the days after 9/11 “they were not going to draw on the messy lessons of Korea – what they heard instead were the bugles of World War Two.” This is unforgivable on Schama’s part, given that U.S. policy toward Korea changed on the basis of parallels between the North’s aggression and the aggressive actions of Hitler in the 1930s. After watching this one-hour documentary, though, you would not think the analogy with Munich was cited at all during the Korean War. However, I digress.
“[R]ight now, Barack Obama needs all the wisdom he can get,” Schama informs us. He’s right. And there’s no doubting Truman’s example shines bright when it comes to healthcare reform. Yet Walter Russell Mead, author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2002), reminds us that “To engage in a limited war is one of the costliest political decisions an American president can make; neither Truman nor Johnson survived it.” “MacArthur has been proved right,” Mead concludes, “‘There is no substitute for victory.’”
And yet Schama remains fearful of escalating the war. The fact is, though, limited war leads to limited objectives and produces limited results. (Only recently, the two Koreas exchanged fire near their disputed sea border over the need for a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War.) To be sure, Korea teaches us that limited war waged simultaneously with peace talks gives the enemy no reason to fear an escalation.
Regrettably, in an effort to appease the far left of the Democratic Party, President Obama attached a date for troop withdrawal, totally undermining the very message he spent his 35-minute address to the US Military Academy at West Point enunciating – basically that America was engaged for the long-haul, which might have incentivized the Taliban to pursue talks with the Karzai government. Schama understands the middle road option better than most - and its pitfalls, yet it’s he who’s undergone “a kind of historical amnesia” (film two: The End of the Dream).
Obama’s 18 month sunset provision puts Kabul on notice that America’s patience is not unlimited. Rest assured, the president’s commitment to fight within defined boundaries specified at the beginning is the hallmark of limited war. Unlike the Bush Administration, Obama’s has gone some way to meeting the Truman Standard in its Afghanistan problem.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
'Sphinx Alley' Gives Egypt Large Open-Air Museum
Source: Artdaily.org (1-26-10)
Luxor is set to become one of the world's largest open-air museums when a multimillion dollar project to restore the "Sphinx Alley" is complete in March, the governor of Luxor, Samir Farag, said Sunday.
The project to restore the two-mile (three-kilometer) alley that links the grand temples of Luxor and Karnak on the east bank of the River Nile in Luxor has cost $45 million.
Sphinx Alley was originally built with 1,200 statues, with one side lined up with ram-headed sphinxes and the other with regular sphinxes with human heads...
Monday, January 25, 2010
Will Winne Mandela biopic focus on heroism or crimes?
Source: BBC News (1-25-10)
She was known to many as the Mother of the Nation, but Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the once celebrated heroine of the anti-apartheid struggle, is no stranger to controversy.
Now it seems that film-makers on both sides of the Atlantic have seen the dramatic potential.
Jennifer Hudson has been lined up to play the lead role in a Hollywood film of the revolutionary firebrand's life, and the BBC has filmed its own drama, Mrs Mandela, with Sophie Okonedo in the lead role.
But which Winnie Madikizela-Mandela will we see? The central drama in Winnie's life is whether her heroism can outshine her crimes....
When the BBC interviewed her in hiding in 1981, she spoke of plans to mobilise the country around the growing realisation that black workers were crucial to the economy....
Many viewed her as out of control. The innocent-sounding Mandela United Football Club, her personal bodyguard, was terrorising the neighbourhood in Soweto....
RW Johnson, the veteran South African commentator, summed up her popularity.
"She's scary, attractive, powerful, wealthy, an international celebrity - there aren't many people that you can say all those things of... and people respond quite powerfully to that magic," he said....
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