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

Painting at center of Caravaggio mystery unveiled

Art officials on Tuesday unveiled the painting at the center of the latest Caravaggio mystery, after the Vatican newspaper first suggested and then denied that the canvas was the work of the Italian master. The "Martyrdom of St. Lawrence" will now be subjected to X-rays and other analyses to ascertain its attribution. But art officials and scholars attending the unveiling agreed the painting did not look like a Caravaggio - but rather like the work of one or more of his fo

A Museum Display of Galileo Has a Saintly Feel

The Galileo case is often seen starkly as science’s first decisive blow against not only faith but also the power of the Roman Catholic Church. It has never been quite that simple, though. Galileo was a believer, devastated at being convicted, in 1633, of heresy for upending the biblical view of the universe. Now a particularly enduring Catholic practice is on prominent display in, of all places, Florence’s history of science museum, recently renovated and renamed to honor Galileo:

Scott McLemee: Lifestyles of Mad Men

The first three seasons of "Mad Men" (the fourth begins on Sunday) were set in a world recognizable from The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard’s landmark work of pop sociology from 1957. Reviving the spirit of muckraking to probe the inner workings of postwar affluence, Packard reported on how the ad agencies on Madison Avenue used psychological research to boost the manipulative power of their imagery and catchphrases. To prime the consumer market, habits and attitudes lef

Mod mad world of '64: year of Mad Men's fourth season

The crew at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce may have eluded their London-based bosses by starting their own agency as Season 3 of Mad Men ended, but they couldn’t escape the British pop-culture invasion. Or other political, social and artistic changes hovering like clouds over their world. As Season 4 cranks up Sunday, it’s Thanksgiving 1964. President Lyndon Johnson, elected by a landslide, has ordered the first bombings in North Vietnam. The slaying of three civil-rights activists in

Cleaning Up Intersection of Ancient and Modern in Israel

The director of the Israel Museum was leading a visitor to see a provocative contemporary sculpture of a naked African youth when, stepping over protective cloths and around an exhibit of late Canaanite sarcophagi, he nearly ran into four workmen carrying the million-year-old horns of a wild bull. The horns are the oldest items in the museum’s collection, and something about the juxtaposition of contemporary social consciousness, ancient ceremony and prehistoric beast summed up the

Natasha Simons: Mad Men and the Paradox of the Past

[Natasha Simons is assistant to the editor of National Review.] Mad Men is a show about an unbending generation on the cusp of dissolution; Matthew Weiner, the show’s head writer, has often said that the majority of America in the early ’60s was still, by and large, living in the domestic ’50s. Weiner, a Baby Boomer, has a conflicted relationship with this time period. Because it is thegeneration of his parents, he wants to explore it and pore over it; because it’s the generation th

Restoration of Eakins' "Gross Clinic" deemed a successful operation

As a young conservator, fresh from graduate school, Mark S. Tucker found himself facing a humbling task. In 1980, he joined the conservation department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was thrown into preparations for the large retrospective of Thomas Eakins' work the museum would be mounting in 1982. That's when he first encountered Eakins' 1875 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, owned at the time by Jefferson Medical College. "I did a very, very min

America's ageing beach boys to record the history of surfing's golden age

It is almost 50 years since the Beach Boys sang about surfing and California girls, and began to take a once outlawed sport into mainstream culture. With surfing now a global industry and a hobby for millions, an ambitious plan has been launched to document the first days of the sport. The Surfing Heritage Foundation, based in the southern Californian town of San Clemente, is seeking to collect the oral history of the sport by talking to its oldest living practitioners. It wants to

Long lost Charlie Chaplin film found at antiques fair

A long lost Hollywood silent film featuring Charlie Chaplin is to be screened for the first time in nearly a century after being discovered at an antiques fair. The comedy called A Thief Catcher was made in 1914 and was missing for so many years that Chaplin's appearance in it as a buffoon policeman had been forgotten. The 10-minute movie was discovered by the American cinema historian, Paul Gierucki, who bought a can of old film marked "Keystone" at an antiqu

Iraq’s Modern Art Collection, Waiting to Re-emerge

What’s left of Saddam Hussein’s showcase collection of 20th-century Iraqi art is crammed into three dingy galleries of a formerly grand museum on Haifa Street here. The rest of the building once known as the Center for Contemporary Art has become a warren of offices and cubicles fortified by bricks, barbed wire and sandbags and closed to the public. Hundreds of works are packed away in a hot, dusty storeroom, tended to by a doting but frustrated staff. Many of the paintings there ar

Lee Ruddin: Understandng Pakistan through the Film "Bhutto"

[Lee P Ruddin is Roundup Editor for HNN.] Last week’s triple attack in Lahore has only increased talk of terrorists taking over Pakistan’s Punjab province. Commentators had expressed concerns for the existence of the Pakistani state long before suicide bombers struck the bustling capital city, though, given the fissures within the Army – the country’s strongest institution. Yet it is the decline in capacity of institutions more generally that has earned the country its “critical”

Anne Frank graphic novel released

A graphic novel based on the diaries of Anne Frank was released Friday in the Netherlands. The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam said it is hoping the format will encourage more youngsters to discover Anne Frank's story. An English-language version of the graphic novel will be available in North America in September. Frank is the young Jewish girl whose family spent two years in hiding in Amsterdam as the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. Just 13 when she and he

Mark Twain's Favorite Novel

As Hemingway put it, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Even as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ death this year, the novels he wrote as Mark Twain still hold an envied place in the annals of literature. A great writer, and also a complex personality, Twain was the premier humorist of his day — the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts gives an annual award for humor named after him. Yet the l

Of Local History and Hepcats

The more things change – from the landscape to the language — the more there is to talk about. Bronx News Network flags a screening of rarely seen, mostly ’70s- and ’80s-era documentaries about the Bronx as part of the Anthology Film Archives’ series “The Outer Boroughs on Film.” For example, “Lincoln Hospital” (1970) looks at how one Bronx community joined together to rescue local mental health services after the failure of a city plan for their improvement. A trailer

Natalia Rulyova: Poetry in Pictures: a Film about Joseph Brodsky

[Natalia Rulyova is Director of Russian Studies at the University of Birmingham] Andrei Khrzhanovskii did not intend his latest film A Room and Half to be a biopic about the Russian Nobel Prize winner poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996). The film is a sensitive cinematic interpretation of Brodsky’s texts and, in particular, the essay with the same title (in Russian version), which was written in 1985 when the exiled poet lived in USA. The English title of the essay differs slightly: ‘In

“Steve McCurry Retrospective” at Birmingham Museum (UK)

Snapped in 1984 at the Nasir Bagh Afghani refugee camp in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan War, the famous “Afghan Girl” photograph shot its subject and creator to international fame when it graced the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985. The young Pashtun orphan lifted to iconic status remained anonymous until 2002, however, when the Magnum photographer Steve McCurry located her. And now, for the first time in the UK, McCurry’s “Afghan Girl”, together with the story of his meeting wi

A Portraitist, and His Images of the Famous, Come to Light

Faces of great men, and a grande dame or two, peek out from the linseed-scented clutter of Robert Seyffert’s studio in the South Bronx. Their portraits, rendered in luminous oils or bold strokes of charcoal, resonate with life, though they were made almost a century ago. To Mr. Seyffert, they are a testament to their creator — his grandfather, Leopold Gould Seyffert — and the distinguished businessmen, philanthropists, politicians and artists who sat before him for portraits that gr

Jeremiah Moss: Nighthawks State of Mind

[Jeremiah Moss is the author of the blog Vanishing New York.] IN 1941, Edward Hopper began what would become his most recognizable work, one that has become an emblem of New York City. “‘Nighthawks,’” Hopper said in an interview later, “was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.” The location was pinpointed by a Hopper expert, Gail Levin, as the “empty triangular lot” where Greenwich meets 11th Street and Seventh Avenue, otherwise known as Mulry Square

Morris Dickstein: The 1950s at War and at Home

[Morris Dickstein is the author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre at CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Gates of Eden and Leopards in the Temple, among other works. (Photo: Nancy Crampton)] Last week I took in two riveting films from the 1950s that reminded me, if I needed reminding, of the enduring fascination and complexity of an era in American life that is still not well understood. Not su

Michael Winship: This Fourth of July, Celebrate 1776 -- The Movie

[Michael Winship is senior writer at Public Affairs Television in New York City.] As we commemorate the Fourth of July, one of the joys -- and there are many -- of life in these United States is that you never know what the hell we, the people, will say next. There's the delightful teenage girl in Montclair, New Jersey, who when informed this week that the nice married couple nearby had been arrested as Russian intelligence agents, joked to The New York Times, "The