Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

A Cézanne Resurfaces, Shedding Light on a Series

For nearly six decades a Cézanne watercolor depicting Paulin Paulet, a gardener on the artist’s family estate near Aix-en-Provence, was familiar to scholars only as a black-and-white photograph. No one knew if the actual work, a study for Cézanne’s celebrated “Card Players” paintings, still existed and, if it did, who owned it.But the watercolor recently surfaced in the home of a Dallas collector and is now heading to auction at Christie’s in New York on May 1, officials at the company said on Monday. It is estimated to sell for $15 million to $20 million.Cézanne’s images of workers on his family farm — pipe-smoking men sitting around a table, their expressions dour, their dress drab, absorbed in a game of cards — are among his most recognizable works. Some are pictured alone; others are shown in groups of two or more. Paulet is the only one of the figures to appear in all five paintings in the “Card Players” series....

Minnesota library salutes 'America's game'

With the return of spring comes baseball. This year, though, fans can go beyond Target Field -- to the public library.To coincide with the Minnesota Twins' home opener on April 9, the Hennepin County Library will host an exhibit and panel discussion at the Minneapolis Central Library.The exhibit, "Baseball: America's Game," will feature a collection of works following the sport's history from its modest mid-19th century beginnings to the widely followed Major League Baseball of today. Photos, video and other memorabilia from George Brace's photos of baseball heroes to Jim Dow's triptychs of major league stadiums, the display traces the history of baseball....

‘Mad Men’ Opens Its Fifth Season on AMC

There was no question that “Mad Men” would get around to the civil rights movement. From the start, racism was the carbon monoxide of the show: a poison that couldn’t always be detected over the pungent scent of cigarettes, sexism, anti-Semitism, alcoholism, homophobia and adultery, but that sooner or later was bound to turn noxious.......“Mad Men” returns to AMC for a fifth season on Sunday, and times have changed — again. African-Americans are now picketing on the street, chanting for fair employment and equal opportunity. It’s a tinderbox summer of riots and protests, and the reception from some who are working on Madison Avenue is less than supportive. Advertising may be a cool profession that draws talented, sophisticated people, but even some of them can be bigots. '“Mad Men” distinguished itself by depicting not just the fashion of the 1960s but also the attitudes that are now so unfashionable. The show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, found a sly, satirical way to revive the crudest forms of sexism and prejudice that were typical then but are nowadays carefully airbrushed out of television....

19th-Century Themes, Some Resonant Today

AT first glance, an 1839 oil painting, “Catching Rabbits,” showing two boys with a dead rabbit and a wooden trap, does not seem to have a political message. Likewise, an 1835 canvas, “The Sportsman’s Last Visit,” depicting a young woman coquettishly listening to one man as she ignores another in the room, seems to have no agenda beyond an amusing look at a suitor spurned.Both, however, are part of “Facing the Issues: William Sidney Mount and Current Events,” an exhibition at the Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages that seeks to link paintings by Mount, who lived in Stony Brook and did much of his work here, with the political, economic and social events of his time. Some of them even have relevance today.

In Texas Tradition, Museums That Enshrine the Quirky

McLEAN, Tex. — No one can remember if the brassiere factory on Kingsley Street here put up barbed wire to keep intruders out. These days, hundreds of strands of barbed wire draw people in.The old factory building is now home to the Devil’s Rope Museum, a sprawling tribute to the history of barbed wire and fencing tools. It is a wayward cow’s worst nightmare: Bent-corner plate barb, double-plate locked link wire, Bagger’s 1876 barbed single-strand rod and — in the Rare Wire exhibit, protected from the public and overzealous collectors in a glass case — Dodge’s rotating star barb and fixed star on single strand from 1881.In McLean, a town of about 800 east of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle, the museum is a bona fide tourist attraction: Anita Seaney, the curator, said it had 6,000 visitors last year....

Prominent French Families Battle Over a Missing Monet

PARIS — More than 70 years after ihttp://hnn.us/node/add/hnnt was plundered by the Nazis, a missing painting by Monet that depicts the shimmering blue rapids of the Creuse River has pitted two of the wealthiest and most prominent families in France against each other.Ginette Heilbronn Moulin, 85, the chairwoman of the Galeries Lafayette department store chain, is pursuing a claim that the Wildenstein family, an international dynasty of French art dealers, is concealing information about the stolen work. The canvas, which belonged to the Heilbronn family, vanished in 1941 after a Gestapo raid on a family bank vault.Last summer, after Ms. Moulin filed a criminal complaint against the Wildensteins, the French authorities ordered a preliminary investigation. An anti-art-trafficking squad is sifting through World War II documents to pick up the trail of the work, “Torrent de la Creuse,” Monet’s 1889 study of the confluence of the Creuse and the Petite Creuse Rivers....

Old-Fashioned or Newfangled, the Old-Fashioned Is Back

AS is his habit, Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” is revealing few details about the fifth season of the hit series, which will return to AMC on Sunday after a 17-month absence. We don’t know if the charismatic sphinx Don Draper has married his secretary or pulled his flailing advertising firm out of the fire. But one prediction is a safe bet: Mr. Draper will dip his beak into an old-fashioned or three....As visible as the cocktail has become, [its renewed popularity] doesn’t approach its glory days. “Its heyday was in the late 1800s, early 1900s,” Mr. Hess said. That’s also the period when the drink acquired the so-square-it’s-hip handle by which we now know it. For decades before that, it was simply called a whiskey cocktail. But when the whiz-bang bartenders of the post-Civil War days started getting too fancy with their add-ons, cocktail purists began calling for a return to sanity. (Cocktail purists seem always to be upset about the current state of the old-fashioned.)Mr. Wondrich points to an 1886 edition of the publication Comment and Dramatic Times as the earliest known print description of the newly christened “Old Fashioned.”

History orders ‘Vikings,’ the network’s first scripted drama series

Showtime has its Borgias and its Tudors, Starz has its Thracian slaves of the ancient Roman Republic, HBO its seven kingdoms of Westeros, AMC its zombies in Atlanta — and now History has its Vikings!The network announced Tuesday that it had made a full first-season commitment for its first scripted drama series ever — about Norse warriors — to debut in ’13.History says that it’s ordered “Vikings” because though “they were the fiercest adventurers of all time,” their story has “never been told.”...

Tanner Colby: "Mad Men" and Black America

Tanner Colby is an author. His forthcoming book, "Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America," will be published in July. Visit him at his website or follow him on Twitter.In everything from their pop-culture references to their meticulous production design, the creators of Mad Men are famously obsessive about the show’s historical accuracy. So it hardly seems possible they would be faithful in their use of period-appropriate underwear yet flub the entire history of race in advertising. In truth, the show is not only accurate in depicting the racial history of the industry, it is spot on in depicting that history as it relates to a place like Sterling Cooper, which is fundamental to the basic premise of the show....

Vatican exhibition covers 1,000 years of European history

RESIGNATION CAN have its drawbacks.Take Pope Celestine V, the hermit from the Abruzzi mountains who reigned as pope for all of five months, from July to December 1294.Celestine got the nod at the age of 80 when four cardinals and two notaries were sent to tell him he had been elected. Making their way up Mount Morrone, they came across a holy man in wornout garments, eyes “swollen from weeping”, with an unkempt beard and confused gaze.Pietro del Morrone, later Celestine V, reportedly knelt down at the cardinals’ feet. Pietro only accepted the papacy to break the stalemate of an electoral conclave that had gone on for more than two years. But he might have been better keeping to his cave in the mountains. Years of the hermit’s life hardly represent the ideal preparation for occupying the seat of Peter.Very quickly, and after having committed a series of errors in office, Celestine realised the mistake he had made and resigned. The problem was that his successor, Boniface VIII, decided it would be bad for business to have two popes knocking around, so he ordered that Celestine be imprisoned even before he himself had been elected....

When a Road Opened Under the Hudson

LATE one November evening in 1927, the cars trying to get into the Holland Tunnel were pressed up against the eastbound entrance — a vehicular scrum, moving nowhere — when their drivers began to communicate in what has since become the customary language of that dense, acrid patch of Jersey City. They began to honk their horns.What moved them to honk then, though, was not what moves drivers to honk now. It wasn’t the other side of the tunnel they were impatient to reach, but the inside of the tunnel itself. A miraculous thing was about to happen — the opening of a road beneath the Hudson River — and their honking was a chorus of excitement.“It’s clear a lot of people absolutely hate the Holland Tunnel now, but at the time it opened they thought it was wonderful,” said Robert W. Jackson, author of a recently published history of it, “Highway Under the Hudson,” which recounts that evening in 1927. “They were enchanted by the whole idea that you could actually drive under water.”...

Smithsonian adds mummies to display of spiritual life in ancient Egypt

“Eternal Life in Ancient Egypt,” Smithsonian Museum of Natural History Ancient Egyptians tried to send their dead into the next world equipped with all the comforts of terrestrial existence. But they clearly left out one thing: moisturizer. Now on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, “Eternal Life in Ancient Egypt” examines the afterlife of the people who built the pyramids, both from a spiritual perspective (intricately ornamented masks, sarcophagi and jewelry) and a physical sense (ancient mummies). The artifacts are beautiful, but it’s hard to pay attention to trinkets, however exotic, when there’s an actual dead body in a glass case just a few feet away, even if it’s a very shriveled 2,000 years old.The museum has four human mummies on display; before a renovation that was completed in November, there were just two. There are also some mummified animals, including a bull, an animal sacred to the Egyptians’ temple priests....

Another British Critic Torches ‘Downton Abbey’

Last month, the British historian Simon Schama took aim at “Downton Abbey,” denouncing it in Newsweek as an exercise in “cultural necrophilia,” a “servile soap opera” and a “steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery.” (To which millions of American television viewers apparently replied, “Yes, and…?”)Now, the British poet James Fenton has piled on, if more gently, in the generally Anglophilic pages of The New York Review of Books. In an essay titled “The Abbey That Jumped the Shark,” Mr. Fenton accuses the show not just of absurd plot twists, geographical inconsistencies and excessively buried gay subplots, but of brazenly promoting the class interests of its creator, Julian Fellowes, “aka Julian Kitchener-Fellowes, a k a the Conservative peer the Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, Lord of the Manor of Tattershall.”...

Ronald Radosh: Once Again Oliver Stone Hypes his New TV Documentary: Time to Tell CBS to Cancel It

Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a  Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York. He is a Presidential appointment to the Public Information Declassification Board, for a term extending from 2007 to 2010.  He is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Rosenberg File (1983 and 1997);  Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (2001) Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (2001); Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party (1996) and Red Star Over Hollywood:The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (2006).

"Red Tails" Review: Pilots Who Fought to Soar Above Racism

“Patriotic,” “jingoistic,” “old-fashioned,” “corny” and “inspirational for teenage boys.” Those are the words of George Lucas, the executive producer of “Red Tails,” describing his whiz-bang action film about African-American fighter pilots in World War II on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”Mr. Lucas financed the $58 million movie, which the major studios didn’t want to touch because of the box office limitations of its mostly African-American cast. “It is exactly like ‘Flying Leathernecks,’ only this one was held up for release since 1942, when it was shot,” Mr. Lucas said. In structure and tone, “Red Tails” proudly harks back to the 1940s and ’50s, when good guys were good, and bad guys bad.

A Shady American in the Nanjing Massacre

Eventually, it seems, every senseless waste of life gets its own gauzy tear-jerker. That’s about the only way to justify “The Flowers of War,” in which the veteran Chinese director Zhang Yimou revisits the Nanjing massacre of 1937 by making something resembling a backstage musical, with breaks for the occasional ghastly murder or rape....“Flowers” has received bountiful publicity for being expensive, state-approved and Oscar-submitted, buzz that got louder last week when the film’s British star, Christian Bale, was forcibly prevented from visiting a Chinese activist lawyer being held under house arrest.

Charlotte Bronte manuscript bought for £690,000 by Paris museum

 A Charlotte Brontë manuscript is heading to France after being sold for £690,850 at Sotheby's in London. The miniature booklet, one of six handwritten "Young Men's Magazines" made by the author when she was 14, was bought by La Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits in Paris for more than twice the pre-sale estimate.

Vintage ‘Doctor Who’ Episodes, Believed Lost, Have Rematerialized

He’s a centuries-old Time Lord from an alien planet who can travel the universe and history itself, so why shouldn’t the Doctor be able to make things materialize out of thin air now and then?The BBC has recovered two vintage episodes of “Doctor Who,” the long-running science-fiction adventure series, dating to the 1960s and featuring two of the original actors who played the Doctor, The Guardian reported....

Casanova at the National Library in France

PARIS — Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was a gambler, swindler, diplomat, lawyer, soldier, alchemist, violinist, traveler, pleasure seeker and serial seducer.He was also a prolific writer who documented his adventures and love affairs in a steamy memoir that is one of the literary treasures of the 18th century.Born in Venice, he considered France his adopted country but was forced to flee Paris in 1760 after seducing the wives and daughters of important subjects of King Louis XV and cheating them out of their money.Now Casanova is back in France, celebrated by the French state. The original manuscript of his memoirs, “The Story of My Life,” and other writings of his are on display for the first time at the National Library of France in the exhibition “Casanova — The Passion for Freedom.” He is even being called a feminist....

Smithsonian’s First Ladies Collection Offers More Intimate Look at History

A new exhibition drawing from the First Ladies Collection at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., includes one painted paper fan, a wowzer of a silver tea service, one well-worn silk shoe, a lump of charred wood, a wealth of china, and one sweetly autographed copy of Treasure Island—in addition to the beloved inaugural ballgowns, cocktail dresses, and day suits that typically leave visitors swooning.The collection, one of the most popular exhibitions at the Smithsonian, has been re-examined and re-configured in a new East Wing gallery space in anticipation of a major renovation that will close the museum’s West Wing. This more intimate look at the first ladies—or at least their accoutrement—opens to the public Nov. 19.