GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes
Canvas which challenged feudal stereotypes of women
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
WHEN, at the age of 17, Artemisia Gentileschi painted Susanna and the Elders she might have well been responding to the sexual harassment she had to put up with in the studio of her widowed father Orazio.
If so, Gentileschi’s alter ego Susanna shows determination and courage in refuting the Elders’s debauched advances. They are portrayed as leering, aggressive voyeurs — there is trepidation in this image and the threat of imminent rape.
In the canvas, Gentileschi borrows the chiaroscuro technique from her father’s influential friend Caravaggio, in which the luminous and courageous Susanna is accosted by her tormentors, whose shapes and contours stay in the penumbra.
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