Word: emperors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fields of French art and society from 1863 to 1874, years when France preferred academic painters, with their lusty goddesses and uplifting battle scenes. But what France preferred was under challenge by a rising (and sometimes backbiting) new group of artists. At the same time, the vainglorious Emperor Louis-Napoléon was stumbling into the calamities of war and revolution. Eventually art would imitate life; all the old orders would come crashing down; and Manet, Monet and Cézanne would emerge from the wreckage. King's account of that all-important crack-up is full of smart pleasures...
...appear on the map. But these details were well known in China by the time the map was supposedly drawn in the 18th century, argue critics such as Li Xiaocong, a cartography expert at Peking University. "It's simply not logical," says Li, "to use a map drawn in [Emperor] Qianlong's time to prove the existence of a map that might have been drawn during the reign of Yongle"?some three centuries earlier, in the Ming era. Li adds: "We don't even know if that Ming map existed...
MARCH OF THE PENGUINS LUC JACQUET Last year's top movie love story? Not Brangelina, nor Naomi Watts and her cybergorilla, but this true fable of domestic devotion among Antarctica's emperor penguins. For months, while the mother forages for food, the father struggles to keep the egg safe in a -80°F chill. This French documentary, for which its heroic makers deserve the Légion d'Honneur and cups of steaming cocoa, became a $77 million sleeper hit in North America. Now that it's winter, watch the film again on DVD, and be warmed...
...brilliance of the work rests not just upon the quality of the print's resolution, however, but also upon this conceptual turn: the photo is not really of the Emperor, but of his wax figure at Madame Tussaud's museum in London. Wax statues look almost laughably fake in person, but Sugimoto exploits the power (or perhaps the weakness) of the camera's single eye to flatten perspective and encourage illusion, thereby creating an image that looks more real, more human than the wax object he is photographing. In the next room are similar shots of King Henry VIII...
...During Japan's time as a colonial power, the shrine was a focal point of the country's native religion, used by political leaders to help justify national conquests. They proclaimed that the souls of those who sacrificed their lives at war for Japan and its Emperor would live forever, venerated as gods, at Yasukuni. Soldiers, pilots and seamen heading into battle would frequently bid farewell to each other by saying, "See you at Yasukuni." Since 1945, Yasukuni has remained a quiet but potent and enduring symbol for the country's die-hard nationalists. Since 1959, priests at Yasukuni have...