Having been mistakenly perceived as a follower of Salvador Dalí, Catalan surrealist painter and writer Àngel Planells (1901–1989) has passed through the history of art practically unnoticed. Yet his work suggests an influence on a number of works by Dalí, proving that a fairer way to define their relationship is as an artistic dialogue. His participation in the groundbreaking International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 is in itself a marker of his quality as an artist, but Planells’ contribution to surrealism is remarkable for his use of astronomy, fantastic scenes redolent of Edgar Allan Poe’s narrative as well as ludic elements and meta-pictorial techniques that contest Fascism.

Figuring the past" geeft een nieuwe kijk op kostuumdrama's die aan het begin van deze eeuw gemaakt zijn en onderzoekt de manieren waarop de hedendaagse cinema het historische verleden herschept. De auteur verkent de relatie tussen visuele motieven en culturele representaties in een aantal belangrijke films van onder anderen James Ivory, Martin Scorsese en Jane Campion. Door te kijken naar de maniëristische voorkeur voor citatie, detail en stilering, pleit de auteur voor een esthetiek van fragmenten en figuren die centraal staan in de historische kostuumdrama's als een0internationaal genre. In gedetailleerde casestudies worden drie belangrijke kenmerken van het genre - het huis, het tableau en de brief - in relatie gebracht met de veranderende begrippen van visuele stijl, melodrama en geslacht.

A unique exhibition entitled '1917. Romanovs & Revolution. The End of Monarchy' will open at the Hermitage Amsterdam in February 2017, exactly a century after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. This will be the only showing of the exhibition in Western Europe. It will include over 250 items from the collections of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and the Artillery Museum in St Petersburg. Using films, photographs, paintings, objets d?art and historical documents, the show will tell the gripping story of fashionable St Petersburg and the art that flourished there in the early twentieth century, of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, and of the explosive political and social circumstances of their reign. Visitors will see and hear how choices and decisions made by the tsar made revolution inevitable and spelled the inescapable end of the 300-year Romanov monarchy in Russia. They will also gain moving intimate insights into the final years of the imperial family, ending in their murder. 1917: the ultimate turning point in the history of Russia. The last tsar and the revolution, on exclusive show in Amsterdam a century after the event.00Exhibition: Hermitage Amsterdam, The Netherlands (04.02.-17.09.2017).