LEO BOIX recommends a ravishing, full-bodied drama about the intensely demanding and emotional art of Kabuki theatre
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Visual arts round-up 2022 with Christine Lindey
(L to R) Kathe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child, 1903; Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, August - September 1887
[(L to R) Kathe Kollwitz Museum Koln Public domain Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam]
On the day of the election, MARTIN GOLLAN reflects on the perennial relationship between the far-right and the back-hander
MARY CONWAY is gripped by the powerful emotional journeys portrayed by the parents of the perpetrator and victims of a mass shooting
LEO BOIX reviews a novel where shadows deceive and mortality looms, and a poetry collection that refuses to dim
ROBIN STYLES welcomes a boundary pushing work of fiction exploring the life and ideas of the godmother of modernism
PAUL DONOVAN recommends an energetic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, that emphasises how psychiatry is a tool in the hands of a racist agenda
INSPIRED curating at the National Gallery managed to provoke a multitude of ideas by juxtaposing just two life-size portraits — Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Madame Moitessier of 1856 and Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Book of 1932.
The contrast between the arch-traditionalist and the quintessential modernist embodied the cultural and social change from France’s 19th-century bourgeois rule and values to the progressive ones of the first decades of the 20th century.
Ingres’s portrait being commissioned by her father-in-law, a minister of state, Picasso’s painting being a non commissioned portrait of his current young partner. Yet Picasso paid tribute to his predecessor by choosing to pose his sitter to echo that of Ingres’s portrait.
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CHRISTOPHE IMMER of the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt reports on a Berlin conference on the politics of art and the legacy of Marxist critic Hans Hess
KEVIN DONNELLY accepts the invitation to think speculatively in contemplation of representations of people of African descent in our cultural heritage
JOHN GREEN welcomes a remarkable study of Mozambique’s most renowned contemporary artist
BLANE SAVAGE recommends the display of nine previously unseen works by the Glaswegian artist, novelist and playwright