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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‘Not all was pastoral and pleasant’
The English ‘countryside’ is a commodity, but given the density of the population it is astounding how ardently it is safeguarded as a painterly, poetic, and photographic image, writes DAVID YEARSLEY
(L to R) Striding Edge and Red Tarn, Helvellyn; St Hedda’s in Egton Bridge
[(L to R) Tim Stevens/CC and Maigheach-gheal/CC]
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
WE WERE just shy of two weeks and 200 miles into a walk across northern England, from the Cumbrian seaside town of St Bees on the island’s west coast to Robin Hood’s Bay on the east. A couple more hours and we’d march — or, in my case, limp — across the finish line of the itinerary popularised by the famed rambler and guidebook author Alfred Wainwright in his 1973 A Coast to Coast Walk, a copy of which I had in my back pocket.
The path now led gently down to the headlands above the North Sea, a blue plain stretching towards a horizon flecked by oiler tankers. To our left Whitby Abbey, the setting of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, glowered, as Gothic ruins do.
Twelve days earlier, on our walk down to the beach at St. Bees under sunny skies with our feet fresh and backpacks filled to bursting, we fell into step and conversation with a woman in shorts and sandals. She was the vicar in the ancient Anglican Priory of St Bega whose tower we could see a quarter mile away.
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