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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Book review: The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris
Plastic surgery was pioneered on those injured in World War I. JAN WOOLF reads an account of how this technology emerged, written with grace and love
Developments in technology in WWI meant unprecedented
bloodshed and injury. A British Red Cross horse cart medical aid wagon is pictured here in Egypt 1915
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 Facemaker, by Lindsey Fitzharris
Allen Lane, £20
OFTEN after war, comes technical advance for peacetime: but afterwards, not before, as all funded effort is in the technology of killing.
World War II brought us radar and emotional attachment theory. World War I — that rich man’s war in which 15 million poor men died — plastic surgery, for when returning with a lost limb could make you a hero, a lost face made you a monster.
“The science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying.” But one surgeon met the challenge, Harold Gilles, known as the grandfather of plastic surgery for his pioneering work in reconstructing the faces of soldiers that had had them torn away by the killing machinery.
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JAN WOOLF is beguiled by the tempting notion that Freud psychoanalysed Hitler in a comedy that explores the vulnerability of a damaged individual
