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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Red
by Neil Young
Rosa Luxemburg memorial at the site where her corpse was thrown into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin
[Manfred Brückels/CC]
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
i.m. Rosa Luxemburg
Yours is the ghost in the waters even now.
When you were tipped into the Landwehr Canal
Europe sank. Too many worlds
that might have glanced their way
into being were not hewn.
A rifle butt, a shot to the skull,
the squalor and contempt of a few
hired men, that’s all it took.
History shrank. Peoples and nations
shrank to the drench of your skirt.
In some other version,
I can glimpse you keep on walking
beyond this moment,
the rifle is paused,
the trigger-finger hesitates:
Adolf stews obscurely in a gutter,
the sailors of Kronstadt prevail,
Leon goes back to reviewing,
the world tilts with you, Rosa,
this is your revolution worth knowing.
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by Christopher Norris
The Bard commutes to work for the first time in 45 years