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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Letters From Latin America
Fiction and poetry from Argentinean, Mexican, Latinx and Ecuadorean writers
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
IT’S entirely fitting that The Scent of Buenos Aires (Archipelago Books, £18), the first collection of short stories by Argentinian writer Hebe Uhart to be translated into English, has the reproduction of a painting by Xul Solar on its cover.
The Argentinian visual artist was not only a great painter, sculptor and writer but an inventor of imaginary languages and it is possible to deduce that from Uhart’s well-crafted short stories with their strange narratives exploring the oddities and mysteries of daily life with a new and simple language.
Always revealing, these witty and sometimes cryptic tales are mostly set in Buenos Aires by a writer’s writer who has an acute eye for the uncanny and the mundane.
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CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
MEIC BIRTWISTLE offers an appreciation of the renaissance man GARETH MILES
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America