Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ...
Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
This page features links to reviews of movies, documentaries and exhibits with a historical theme. Listings are in reverse chronological order. Descriptions are taken directly from the linked publication. If you have articles you think should be listed on the Pop Culture page, please send them to the editor editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
SOURCE: AP (9-24-12)
Britain's Royal Collection Trust has gone Pop Art with the purchase of four famous Andy Warhol portraits of Queen Elizabeth II.
The colorful screenprints are based on a formal photograph of the queen wearing a tiara and necklace that was used during her Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977.
They will form part of the Portraits of a Monarch exhibit starting in November at Windsor Castle. The purchase was announced Monday, but royal officials refused to say how much was paid for the portraits...
SOURCE: NYT (9-23-12)
ROCK TAVERN, N.Y. — Double bully!
It was like seeing double as Joe Wiegand beheld a life-size bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt being completed recently at a foundry in this town outside Newburgh.
“They nailed it,” Mr. Wiegand, 47, said of the likeness achieved by the sculptors.
Mr. Wiegand should know. He makes a living dressing and speaking in the role of Roosevelt at events — a Roosevelt repriser, he calls it — and is such a dead-ringer for the 26th president, down to his robust build and mustache, that he was hired to model for the statue months earlier....
SOURCE: NYT (9-19-12)
When I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid opened at the Louvre more than 20 years ago, many argued that this 70-foot-tall structure had destroyed the classical beauty of one of the world’s great museums. But today, as crowds wait on long lines outside the pyramid, which serves as the Louvre’s main entrance, what once seemed audacious has become as accepted a part of the city’s visual landscape as the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe.
Now the museum is again risking the public’s wrath as it introduces the most radical architectural intervention since the pyramid in 1989. Designed to house new galleries for Islamic art, it consists of ground- and lower-ground-level interior spaces...
SOURCE: WSJ (9-13-12)
If you know any of Aaron Copland's music, then you probably know "Hoedown," the finale of "Rodeo," the score that Mr. Copland wrote in 1942 for Agnes de Mille's ever-popular ballet about love among the cowpokes. "Hoedown" is a high-stepping orchestral fantasy based on "Bonaparte's Retreat," a 19th-century fiddle tune that Mr. Copland ran across in "Our Singing Country," a 1941 book co-edited by Alan Lomax, the celebrated folk-song collector. The version of "Bonaparte's Retreat" found in "Our Singing Country" was transcribed from a recording made by Mr. Lomax on a 1937 trip to Kentucky for the Library of Congress. It's a note-for-note rendering of the way the song was played by a fiddler named Bill Stepp. Every time you hear a symphony orchestra perform "Hoedown," you hear the ghost of Mr. Stepp's supremely virtuosic playing....
SOURCE: NYT (9-11-12)
When the Society of Antiquaries of London was celebrated in an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art this year, you could see how the society gradually discovered and interpreted Britain’s history, shaping a nation’s understanding of itself. Now, in a new show at the Grolier Club, “In Pursuit of a Vision,” you see the American counterpart to that narrative in a survey of the collections of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. The American society was partly inspired by the London one, but what a different world it imagines, and what a different sense of...
SOURCE: NYT (9-5-12)
The American Folk Art Museum in New York, which almost went out of business last year because of financial struggles, has appointed a new director, the museum announced Wednesday.
The board selected Anne-Imelda Radice, who recently served as director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that supports libraries and museums. She will start next week.
Struggling under a deficit and disappointing attendance, the museum was forced to close its 10-year-old flagship building in Midtown in 2011 and move to a smaller location near Lincoln Center in Manhattan. After considering dissolution and the transfer of its collections to another institution, the museum decided to continue operating with the help of financial infusions from trustees and the Ford Foundation....
SOURCE: NYT (9-3-12)
TELLURIDE, Colo. — A film festival held almost 9,000 feet above sea level on a holiday weekend may not be the likeliest setting for philosophical speculation, but for the past four days the Telluride Film Festival has offered something like a seminar on the nature of truth. In an age of reality television, journalistic fakery and political mendacity everyone knows that words and images can distort and mislead. And film is a particularly unstable medium, alluring us with a promise of honesty while it feeds us ever more elaborate fantasies....
Or else we might start with movies that are obviously about real people and events and just as obviously works of entertaining make-believe. In Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson,” for example, the role of Franklin D....
