‘Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces From the Leiden Collection’ Review: Dazzling Dutch Paintings - WSJ

Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, January 1889 emerges like a vaguely familiar, climactic apparition about a third of the way through the new blockbuster exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (FLV) in Paris. Here, we find “poor Vincent,” as he is occasionally referred to in the exhibition catalog, smoking a pipe, an activity he associated with calm contemplation. Behind him, swaths of orange and red form a bold contrast to his green jacket and matching green eyes, which steadily look back at us. As the painting’s title notes, we see the artist with his left ear in a white dressing; the work is one of two self-portraits he made after cutting off his earlobe following a fight with Paul Gauguin. While van Gogh, painted in his now iconic style, is immediately recognizable, this particular portrait, like so many paintings in this exhibition of modern art icons, feels almost new.

Through his “distance montage” technique, the Armenian filmmaker’s masterpieces are built around impressions, not stories. Still from We (1969), directed by Artavazd Pelechian, (all images courtesy New York Film Festival)

Sarah Kane revolutionised British theatre with five provocative plays written between 1995 and 1999. Her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, was her most personal, confronting the clinical depression she struggled with for years. The play was first performed posthumously in 2000, after she died by suicide in 1999. The Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama commissioned Philip Venables to adapt the play as an opera, which debuted in 2016. The composer, also known for a certain “in-yer-face” approach, set Kane’s original text almost entirely, realising its 24 disjointed sections in a raw, imaginative score teeming with minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop and consoling nods to the baroque. The libretto shifts between poetic abstraction and scathing exchanges between a patient and a psychologist. An ensemble of six female singers navigates themes of depression, isolation and the agonising choices surrounding medication. One fractured personality … Sophia Burgos, Veena Akama-Makia, Hannah Edmunds and Jacquelyn Stucker in 4.48 Psychosis.