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

Crimean Museum Displays Looted Art From Germany

Some 200 works from an art collection in Aachen, Germany, disappeared into the former Soviet Union at the end of World War Two. Parts of these works have now surfaced in Ukraine, prompting a rare exchange initiative. The exhibition"Phantom Gallery" in Aachen's Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum is unusual and for many visitors, irritating. In part, empty frames hang on the darkly painted walls or black-and-white photographs -- reproductions of artwork whose whereabouts are unknown. "We are showi

Jewels of the Prado go under Google Earth's microscope

No image can match the real thing, but Madrid's Prado museum has edged closer to that ideal by teaming up with Google Earth in a pioneering project that allows art lovers to zoom in on some of the gallery's best loved masterpieces. Fourteen of the museum's finest works, including Velazquez's Las Meninas, Goya's Third of May and Rubens' The Three Graces have been photographed to such a high resolution that details barely discernible to the naked eye become visible online.

Nothing from Byzantium in the RA's big show - they can't afford the hotel bills

The Byzantium exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts - an ambitious survey of the thousand-year-long Byzantine Empire - is brimming with gleaming objects from Belgrade and Baltimore; from Moscow and Milan; from Sofia and St Petersburg. But, oddly, there are no artefacts from, well, the city of Byzantium itself - modern-day Istanbul. A recent piece in an English language newspaper in Istanbul has lamented this state of affairs, attributing it to the fact that the Turkish authorities require

Google Earth launches online Prado art gallery

Viewers will be able to scroll around a three-dimensional representation of the gallery with a computer mouse, to look at high resolution images of works such as Las Meninas by Velázquez; The Annunciation by Fra Angelico or The Third of May by Goya. A Google spokesman said: "The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). "With this high level resolution you are able to see fine detai

Embodiment of Claude Monet's Impressionism goes under the hammer

Dans La Prairie was painted in 1876 and features the artist's wife Camille almost submerged in a flower-strewn field in Argenteuil, to the north of Paris - a place that was to become one of the most important cradles of Impressionism and was also featured in the works of Manet and Renoir. The painting was first shown at an exhibition in Paris in 1877 and its colour-filled canvas, built with darting brushstrokes, was seen as the embodiment of the new trend of "Impressionism&quo

Monroe Last Pictures Row Settled

The pictures were among some 2,500 pictures taken of the film star by famous photographer Bert Stern at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles in 1962 for Vogue magazine just before her drug overdose death that year. The photos show Monroe, star of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and other movies, in various gently erotic poses behind a piece of transparent, white gauzy fabric. Stern later recreated the shots in February 2008 with actress Lindsay Lohan. The

Visions of India past and present on display at Mumbai exhibition

Colourful, chaotic and charming; India is also an enchanting and overawing country of extremes, with an immensely rich history and cultural diversity. Vasco de Gama landed on the Malabar coast in the south-western state of Kerala in 1498. The prospects of developing trade links with India sparked considerable European interest in India. Throughout the sixteenth century, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Danish and English traders increasingly set up coastal trading centres exporting commodities such as

Happy Birthday! Motown Turns 50

In the months leading up to the presidential election, much was made about the size of the crowds and the energy level at Obama rallies. For clues, some looked to the Obama playlist—the songs that served as the soundtrack for those frenzied events. True to his overall political strategy, Obama’s playlist cut across various popular genres—country music stalwarts Brooks and Dunn were as likely to be heard as much as the McFadden and Whitehead disco-era classic “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.”

Almost Killing Hitler

The July 20, 1944, attempt was one of perhaps 15 by the German Resistance, which was neither negligible nor contemptible. Impressed by a written report from a colonel, Adolf Hitler exclaimed, "Finally a general staff officer with imagination and intelligence!" The report's author, who had those qualities in quantities commensurate with his courage, would be repeatedly brought to Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. He was Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg.

The Satanic Verses: How one book ignited a culture war

The phrase "literary London" is usually employed to nebulous effect but it accurately describes the gathering that took place at the Greek Orthodox church in Bayswater on 14 February, a clear blue St Valentine's Day, in 1989. The occasion was Bruce Chatwin's memorial service, and it was attended by a large contingent of what was and remains an exceptional generation of British or British-based writers. Among them were Martin Amis, Paul Theroux and Salman Rushdie. According

Pooh Bear returns after 80-year gap

A new Winnie-the-Pooh book will be released later this year, more than 80 years after his first adventure. Egmont Publishing announced that Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will be published on October 5. Generations of readers have wondered what became of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh after AA Milne's The House At Pooh Corner, the sequel to Winnie-the-Pooh. The new book will be published simultaneously in the United States. Author D

Andrea Palladio: the man who made ancient modern - at the Royal Academy, London

No other architect has lent his name to an ism. There is no Bramanteism, no Gehryism, Wrenism or Corbusianism. There is, though, Palladianism. The Royal Academy in London, like most galleries, rarely accords architects the same headline billing as your Titians and Van Goghs. But it’s proof enough of the enduring renown of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio on his 500th anniversary (well, last year) that he’s awarded a no-holds-barred blockbuster in the capital complete with bric

Telling the Holocaust Like It Wasn’t

Toward the end of the new film about postwar Germany “The Reader,” a Holocaust survivor in New York curtly instructs a visiting German lawyer named Michael Berg that he would do well to remember that the camps were neither a form of therapy nor a university. “Nothing,” she says, “came out of the camps. Nothing.” With Holocaust Memorial Day to be observed on Jan. 27, it’s a timely admonition. It’s not, however, one that either “The Reader” or a host of memoirs or films about the Thir

The soldier at the centre of the Valkyrie coup

[As Valkyrie, a new film about the plot to kill Hitler in 1944, is released, Justin Cartwright looks at the soldier at the centre of the coup and his vision for his country had it succeeded.] In the film Valkyrie, Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who, on 20 July 1944, placed a bomb next to Hitler in his east Prussian headquarters, the Wolf's Lair. The bomb failed to kill Hitler, merely blowing his trousers to ribbons. That night, when the coup was seen to ha

Bielski brothers in Defiance film were heroes, says survivor

Daniel Craig's latest film Defiance tells the powerful story of three Jewish brothers who fled the Nazi occupation of their Polish town, set up a partisans' camp in dense forest and fought back. But the film has provoked controversy over whether the Bielski brothers, who helped more than 1,200 Jews to escape from the ghettoes, were courageous heroes or ruthless killers who, fighting alongside Soviet partisans, committed atrocities against ethnic Poles. Now Jack Kagan, who as a

Remembrance of Liverpool Past (documentary)

IN “Of Time and the City,” a new documentary by Terence Davies, the city is his hometown, Liverpool, and the time, true to form for this most Proustian of filmmakers, is the past. “The golden moments pass and leave no trace,” Mr. Davies, who narrates the film, says at one point, quoting Chekhov. But his backward-glancing movies are proof to the contrary. They consist almost entirely of traces, constellations of hallowed people and places recalled with an intensity that verges on the religious.

Da Vinci art put in cave in WWII

Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci on show at the National Library of Wales were previously stored there during World War II, researchers have found. Among the other masterpieces stored in the library's secret cave were the Saxon Chronicles, the works of Wycliffe and Chaucer and a large collection of charters including the Magna Carta. There was also a wealth of autographs and letters from the kings and queens of England, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Francis Baco

Nazis' looted art 'should not automatically be returned

Museums should be allowed to keep art looted by the Nazis according to Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy. Despite being the child of Jewish refugees, Sir Norman said he thought "history is history" and descendants "distanced by two or more generations" from the works' original owners did not have an "inalienable right" to reclaim their forbearers' property. Writing in The Art Newspaper, Sir Norman s

Intimate diaries and banal letters live on in France's library of secrets

Everyone's life is a novel, which has not yet been written. Or in some cases, it has been written but never published. In a small town in eastern France, there is a library, or archive, of intimate secrets: a collection of 2,500 unpublished – and mostly unpublishable – autobiographies, diaries, scrapbooks, bundles of letters and collections of emails dating from the early 19th century to last month. "There are as many diarists as there are amateur pianists. They ju

Nazis' looted art 'should not automatically be returned'

Despite being the child of Jewish refugees, Sir Norman said he thought "history is history" and descendants "distanced by two or more generations" from the works' original owners did not have an "inalienable right" to reclaim their forbearers' property. Writing in The Art Newspaper, Sir Norman said an agreement reached in Washington, DC, in 1998 - that committed 44 countries to try to return looted art to the owners or their descendants - should be revi