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Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer and Leonide Massine; The Red Shoes (1948).
Jack Cardiff, who died this week, was one of the great cinematographers from the postwar era, a period when British cinema was raised for a time to world-class level. His three films for the Archers, aka Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, are masterpieces of Technicolor [...]

Still from Blowjob by Andy Warhol (1963).
Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now opens today at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and runs until 27 January 2008.
Seduced explores the representation of sex in art through the ages. Featuring over 300 works spanning 2000 years, it brings together Roman sculptures, Indian manuscripts, Japanese prints, [...]

The Netherlands celebrate four hundred years of Rembrandt’s genius.
While looking around for links I noticed this story for the first time:
Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway, neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School, say Rembrandt’s many self-portraits reveal that his eyes are focused in slightly different directions, depriving him of the “stereo” effect that makes vision [...]

Robert Hughes writing in The Guardian about Rembrandt this weekend had this to say about one of the painter’s later works:
He had done pictures of himself that fairly radiate a gloating success, but the deepest was saved for the last decade of his life, when he painted himself as a painter at work, holding brushes, [...]