Michael Jackson fans look to beat it down to Paris art show
PARIS: A portrait of Michael Jackson as King Philip II of Spain and an Andy Warhol print are among artworks on display at a show opening in Paris this week dedicated to the late pop star. The ‘Michael Jackson: On the Wall’ exhibition at Paris’ Grand Palais features an array of portraits and Jackson-inspired works including collages, videos and installations. The exhibition was first shown at London’s National Portrait Gallery in June. Nicholas Cullinan, director at the National Portrait Gallery, hoped the Paris show would replicate the success of the event in London. He said 82,500 people visited the exhibition there, including celebrities such as Madonna. Artist Kehinde Wiley’s “Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson)” was the last commissioned portrait of the singer before his death, and it shows the eccentric artist in regal mode, wearing armor and riding a horse. Jackson, dubbed the ‘King of Pop’, died at the age of 50 in 2009. (Reuters)
Anne Frank House Museum revamped for new generation
AMSTERDAM: The Anne Frank House Museum, built around the secret apartment where the Jewish teenager and her family hid from the Nazis, has reopened after being renovated to receive a new generation of visitors whose grandparents were born after World War II. The museum and tiny apartment where Anne wrote her diary — which has become the most widely-read document to emerge from the Holocaust — attract 1.2 million visitors annually. A trip through the museum, which was reopened by Dutch King Willem-Alexander on Thursday, begins with the history of the Frank family, their flight to the Netherlands after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and their decision to go into hiding on July 6, 1942. Visitors pass through the swinging bookcase that concealed the cramped secret annex above a warehouse where Anne, her sister Margot, her father Otto, mother Edith and four other Jews hid until they were arrested by German police on August 4, 1944. The museum then displays the government document registering the Franks’ deportation on a cattle car train to Auschwitz. Anne was later transferred to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where she died in early 1945 aged 15, one of the six million Jews who lost their life under the Nazi regime. Of those that hid in the secret apartment, only Otto survived the war. He was given Anne’s diary, which had been preserved by Miep Gies, a member of the tight circle of Dutch friends that helped the Jews in hiding. The museum concludes with a simple room where the original red-and-white bound diary and several additional pages are on display. (Reuters)