Monday 26 February, 2007

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 26.02.2007

Art collector and Picasso-friend Heinz Berggruen (info in German) died in Berlin on Friday aged 93. Berggruen's grandiose collection of classic modern art is on show at Berlin's Berggruen Museum. The paper prints the last of a series of memories written by Bergruen, who started his career before the war as Berlin correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, the forerunner of the FAZ: "Kristallnacht was still way in the future, but there were signs that things weren't going to continue as peacefully as we'd been used to. I increasingly felt the presence of a hard political – or politicised – Germany, a Germany of countless brown uniforms and screeching demagogues.... One day a short letter came from Frankfurt. For reasons I could well surmise, it was no longer possible to publish my articles with my signature. I had to accept that, and although they would not be printed anonymously, as a precautionary measure they would be published only with my initials (h.b.)."


Spiegel Online 26.02.2007

Marc Pitzke reports of the dramatic scene at the Oscar awards ceremony. "At the end, he can hardly believe it himself. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck leaps ecstatically from his seat on the aisle of the Kodak Theatre. He hugs his team, hugs his friend and Oscar-competitor Guillermo del Toro, whose film 'Pan's Labyrinth was the actual favourite. Hugs Clive Owen and Cate Blanchett, who hand him the golden statue. 'Oh my god,' he calls breathless. 'And I've already cried.'" See Wolf Biermann's review of "The Lives of Others" here.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 26.02.2007

Birgit Sonna takes a look at sexy Judith with Holofernes' head (more) in the Munich exhibition "Conrat Meit - Bildhauer der Renaissance" (Conrat Meit – Sculptor of the Renaissance). "Judith is an anaemic beauty, exactly 30 centimetres long and buck naked. The perfectly wavy hair is bound stylishly around her head, the bloody and purposeful act of the previous night is nowhere to be seen in her expression. Were it not for the freshly hacked-off head of Captain Holofernes in the one hand and the huge sword in the other, one would never believe that the feminine figure, carved in milky alabaster, with the soft facial features has just saved her hometown and people with the unbelievably martial act, single-handedly."


Saturday 24 February, 2007

Frankfurter Rundschau 24.02.2007

Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer's study, "Fromms - Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F. unter die deutschen Räuber fiel" (Fromms – how the Jewish condom maker Julius F. fell to the German robbers) is a portrait of the industrialist Julius Fromm, whose condom business was expropriated by the Nazis. Oliver Pfohlmann is fascinated by both the historical figure and the book. "He made a remarkable path from uneducated and penniless cigarette seller who studied chemistry in the evenings, to highly responsible director of an international enterprise. Equally remarkable was his interest in modernity as manifest in the factory he built in 1929/30 in Berlin-Köpenick in the Neue Sachlichkeit style. The continuous window fronts erased the distinction between the inside and outside, as Fromm's paper-thin rubbers promised to do."


Die Tageszeitung 24.02.2007

Ulf Erdmann Ziegler went to the major Op Art exhibition in Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle with a few questions in mind: "Would it be a buzzing funfair like the wild psychedelic revival in 'Summer of Love'? Or a groping attempt to seize a thought from its beginnings to the present like the show 'Nothing'? Martina Weinhart, curator of 'Op Art' has chosen a third way by digging to the very root of the movement. In fact Weinhart goes so far as to include the artists' group Zero, so that a whitewashed throat with whitewashed fingernails from 1959 is interpreted as a disturbance of the visual field. Günter Uecker as Op Art artist – you've got to hand it to Weinhart for coming up with that."


Der Tagesspiegel 24.02.2007

You really do live and learn, says stage and film director Patrice Chereau in an interview with Christine Lemke-Matwey about his life and work. Berlin's Academy of Arts is currently featuring an homage to Chereau: "As a young man I wouldn't have known what to do with a work like 'Cosi fan tutte.' It's so free, Mozart and Da Ponte came up with such wonderful descriptions of love, seduction and eroticism in the work. To do something like that you need a certain sovereignty. Not everything on stage is concrete, not everything has to do with politics or society." See an interview with Chereau here, and a review of his Cosi fan tutte here.