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
RIGHT in the heart of Vienna sits Judenplatz (Jewish Square), an area where Jews began to settle in about 1150.
Eight hundred lived there by 1400, including merchants, bankers and scholars. But the pogroms instigated by Duke Albrecht V in 1421, culminating in the last 200 being burned alive on a pyre, obliterated the Jewish presence for the next two centuries.
That obliteration resumed just over 500 years after Judenplatz got its name and eight months after Austria’s Anschluss (“reunification”) with Nazi Germany.
On May 16 1944, Romani families in Auschwitz-Birkenau armed themselves with stones, tools, and sheer collective will, forcing the SS to retreat – leaving a legacy of defiance that speaks directly to the fascisms of today, says VICTORIA HOLMES
WILL STONE witnesses an experimental piano concerto inspired by the work of a young Jewish victim of the Nazis
The decision highlights the tension between freedom of expression and the state’s role in shaping historical memory at former concentration camps, reports LEON WYSTRYCHOWSKI


