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Stockholm honours Carl Larsson with major exhibition
Updated: February 27 2009, 11:54 CET
STOCKHOLM: Tomorrow Prince Eugens Waldemarsudde, originally the home of Prince Eugen, son of Oscar II (1865-1947), in Stockholm opens its doors to a major exhibition about the life and work of one of Sweden’s most famous artists: Carl Larsson (1853-1919). The show features some 100 works, including several from Prince Eugen's personal collection, and shows a rich selection of paintings, watercolours and sketches from his time in Grez, France, and at Sundborn.
Larsson’s art is multifaceted, ranging from simple caricature to luminous plein air painting. However, he is best known for his images of family life at rural Sundborn. On graduating from the Academy Larsson worked as an illustrator for books, magazines and newspapers prior to spending some years in Paris in an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as an artist in the city. Success finally came when he left Paris and moved to Grez, a Scandinavian artist’s colony outside Paris where he met his future wife Karin Bergöö and underwent an artistic transformation after abandoning his pretentious oil painting in favour of watercolours, indeed it was during this period that he produced some of his finest works.
Waldemarsudde, became state-owned after the Prince's death and in accordance with his will, and is now among the most-visited art museums in Sweden. The complex consists of a castle-like main building - the Mansion - finished in 1905 and designed by the Swedish architect Ferdinand Boberg, and a Gallery Building, added in 1913. The estate also includes the original manor-house building, known as the Old House and an old linseed mill, both dating back to the 1780s. Prince Eugen was one of his generation's foremost landscape painters and many of his best-known works, including Molnet (the Cloud) and Det gamla slottet (The Old Castle), are part of the collections at Waldemarsudde. He was also an art collector and his collection of Swedish turn-of-the-19th-century art is one of the foremost in the country.
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Agatha Christie’s holiday home open to the public
Updated: February 24 2009, 16:07 CET
DEVONSHIRE: This weekend the National Trust will open Greenway, the rural Devonshire holiday home of the famous detective writer Agatha Christie to the public. Artefacts used by Christie to embellish some of her most gruesome murder mystery stories will go on public view for the first time.Christie took her family to Greenway House in Devon, from 1938 to 1959, where she entertained guests by reading them extracts from her latest manuscripts.
The building, which overlooks the River Dart, was given to the National Trust by Christie’s family in 2000, and visitors to the property have been able to walk through its woodland gardens since then, but were not allowed into the house because Christie's daughter and son-in-law Rosalind and Anthony Hicks still used it as their home. The house remained closed to the public until after the death of Rosalind and Anthony Hicks, the author’s daughter and son-in-law, in 2004 and 2005. Upon their deaths the house itself and the majority of its contents were passed to the National Trust. Then the trust discovered that the building was on the verge of collapse, and has cost £5.4 million to restore. The house was completed on time and within budget with the help of volunteers who put in 10,000 hours over two years.
Now visitors will be able to see objects such as a brass-studded trunk that, in fiction, concealed the body of a murder victim. Hercule Poirot, Christie’s Belgian detective, inspected the trunk in the short story The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest. The item, known as an Iraqi kist, was brought back from Baghdad by Christie after she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, on an archaeological dig. The house was the setting for Dead Man’s Folly, another Poirot mystery that was adapted for film starring Peter Ustinov. Visitors will be able to walk the same floorboards as the fictional murderer and even rent part of the house for holidays.
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Dead Man Walking on stage in Copenhagen
Updated: February 19 2009, 20:03 CET
COPENHAGEN: The next few days will be focused on film. While, after the Oscar night on Friday, the world is talking about this years winners, the Royal Theare (Det Konigelige Teater) in Copenhagen brings the opera version of Tim Robbins’famous movie ‘Dead Man Walking’. The opera by Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally, starring Miriam Treichl (Sister Helen Prejean), Samuel Jarrick (Joseph de Rocher) and Bengt Krantz (George Benton), is a guest performance by the Malmö Opera conducted by Joseph Wolfe.
The opera illustrates the cry of prison wardens and inmates when a death row convict is marched to the death chamber. Tim Robbins movie from 1995, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, is based on Sister Helen Prejean’s books about her experiences from her voluntary work among death row inmates in American prisons. A caring nun, Sister Helen receives a desperate letter from a death row inmate trying to find help to avoid execution for murder. Over the course of the time to the convict's death, Sister Helen begins to show empathy, not only with the pathetic man, but also with the victims and their families. In the end, Sister Helen must decide how she will deal with the paradox of caring for that condemned man while understanding the heinousness of his crimes. The title comes from the traditional call in the United States of "Dead man walking, dead man walking here" from a prison guard as a condemned prisoner is led onto Death Row. The phrase may have originally come from the 1909 poem by Thomas Hardy titled The Dead Man Walking.
Susan Sarandon won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role. Sean Penn was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Tim Robbins for Best Director and its main track, ‘Dead Man Walkin', by Bruce Springsteen for Best Song.
Sister Helen has become a leading American advocate for the abolition of the death penalty.
The international premiere of the opera was in January 2006, at the Calgary Opera in Calgary, Canada.
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Venice celebrates carnival and the Italian Futurism
Updated: February 16 2009, 21:10 CET
VENICE: This weekend Venice started its famous annual Carnival celebrations. Specially for this years celebrations the city turned its centerpiece St Mark's Square into a Renaissance garden, with nearly 4,000 plants. Investments include 1.5 million euros from the city's marketing agency and another 4 million euros from commercial partnerships. Organizers expect 800,000 to 1 million visitors for carnival, whose end marks the beginning of Lent. The festival signals the restart of Venice's tourist season, which runs into the fall.
But the carnival is not the only thing Venice is celebrating and not the only event to attract tourists. This week the Peggy Guggeheim Collection opens her doors to Masterpieces of Futurism a small exhibition on the occasion of the centenary year of the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinettis founding manifesto of Italian Futurism, focusing on the Futurist masterpieces of the Gianni Mattioli Collection, with additional paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and other private collections. The show includes iconic paintings by each of the five artists who signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting in 1910, Balla, Boccioni, Carr, Russolo and Severini, and by other artists related to the movement (Rosai, Sironi, Soffici). A preliminary section alludes to related contemporary avant-gardes (Divisionism, Cubism, Orphism, Vorticism)
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Paris celebrates Holidays
Updated: February 12 2009, 20:42 CET
PARIS: There are still a few weeks for visitors who want to see the major holiday exhibition Les Vacances... quelle histoire ! (Holidays...what an adventure!) at Muse de La Poste in Paris. This exhibition about more than two centuries of history of holidays in France, give visitors the chance to escape to the seaside or to the mountains for a while. On show are over 100 objects including posters, objects, calendars, postcards, stamps, photographs, bathing suits films, items from collections built up by thermal spas, maps, reconstitutions and an interactive virtual installation producing souns and smell.
Every summer, thousands of holidaymakers head for the coast and each winter thousands of skiers head for the snow. These seasonal migrations, which have become massive since the 1950`s, are light years away from the timid beginnings of the concept, in the early part of the 19th century, when French holidaymakers were few and far between. Holidays by the sea involved exposing varying degrees of flesh to the sun and modesty had to evolve accordingly. In the same way, several decades would pass before the mountains began to attract hikers and skiers
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