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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21st-century poetry
'History as error and correction': collections from Marcos Ana and Paul Mills
ANA FAN: Che Guevara in his Bolivian 'tree library'
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
THE SPANISH communist poet Marcos Ana (1920-2016) was Spain’s longest-serving political prisoner. Captured by Italian troops at the end of the civil war, he spent the next 23 years in Franco’s prisons, often in solitary confinement.
In prison Ana started writing poems, which were smuggled out and published as Poemas desde la Carcel (Poems from Prison, 1960). They were written “...in the depth of night, by the poor light of a peculiar lamp, assembled from an old inkwell, a little alcohol that I smuggled from the sick bay and a wick plaited from the lace of an espadrille.
“Afterwards when eyes and keys were waking up, I would hide my words in a shoe and while walking in the prison yard, on a circular path that led nowhere, I would memorise the poems, giving them form and harmony.”
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