To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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‘There is such a thing as ineradicable homosexuality’, Harry Whyte, letter to Stalin, 1934
MATTHEW HAWKINS treads warily through the symphonic history of a subject that our present understanding can only obscure
Detail from The Last Judgement, Michelangelo, 1541, from the upper righthand corner showing male couples embracing as they ascend to heaven
[Public Domain]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, 1400 - 1750
Noel Malcolm
OUP, £25
THE lauded historian Noel Malcolm begins Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by relating an account of how, in 1558, in the household of the Venetian embassy in Istanbul, two young male pages were repeatedly seen flirting and kissing. Other downstairs workers didn’t actually seem to mind, and some were diverted and amused. Those in charge were concerned enough to document and suppress the blandishment, as they didn’t want the household to be seen as resembling local Muslim equivalents, where convention condoned acts of sodomy – or was this just a smear?
Disquisition follows on a grand symphonic scale and the reader is launched into myriad calibrated thoughts. Why are men so strange? Where does recreation end and denigration begin? Is it illuminating or alienating to peer at carnality through a prism of historical and cultural shifts?
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MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s dissection of William Blake