THIS WEEK: A SELECTIVE GUIDE

KIRCHNER, "EN PLEIN AIR" AND SOMETHING ELSE IN BEIJING | August 5th 2008

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938) Street Scene (Friedrichstraße in Berlin) (Straßenszene [Friedrichstraße in Berlin]). Detail, 1914. MoMA

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Our guide to what's on around the world, compiled by Ariel Ramchandani

DRESDEN DOLLS AND BERLIN PROSTITUTES

Berlin at the dawn of the first world war was not a very hospitable place. In "Kirchner and the Berlin Street", a new show at the Museum of Modern Art, Deborah Wye, the curator, has gathered seven of Kirchner's imposing street scenes, arranging them like shop windows along a promenade. The artist began his career in Dresden as a member of Die Brücke, a collective of German expressionists at the dawn of the 20th century. He painted colourful, primitivist, anti-establishment works with his friends, models and girlfriends (a few of these jewel-toned ladies are on view here). But after his move to lonely, tense Berlin, Kirchner's paintings turn dark. Angular prostitutes leer above the viewer, painted in sickly, witchy greens. In his sketchbooks, also on view, the scribbles cross each other messily--one gets the feeling that he dared not look away from the heaving urban claustrophobia, even for a second.

"KIRCHNER AND THE BERLIN STREET", through November 10th, MoMA, New York

STARS BENEATH THE STARS

Film stars never die, according to the organisers of this summer's festival of outdoor cinema in Paris, who have embraced the theme "Ava, Rita, Gina...les stars ne meurent jamais". Bring a picnic to Parc La Villette for an evening with such treats as "Et Dieu Créa La Femme", with Bridget Bardot, or "Le Port de L’Angoisse", with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. (There is even "Basic Instinct", with Sharon Stone, for a different sort of night.) This Friday features a triple-bill of "The Godfather" films. What's better than Pacino en plein air?

Cinéma en Plein Air, through August 15th, Paris

THE FRINGE OF MY KILT

For a few weeks every summer, Edinburgh becomes the centre of all things new and avant garde. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year is bigger (and perhaps better) than ever, with an overwhelming 31,000 performances at 247 venues, including nearly 840 world premieres from 46 countries. These numbers hardly convey the creativity (and pure strangeness) on offer, such as a new show from Brendan Burns, a famously foul-mouthed Australian comedian and Fringe favourite, who won the top comedy prize last year. Some productions are already earning plaudits, such as "Architecting", a play about the American south by the TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment), a New York ensemble, which was praised by the Telegraph for being "fiercely intelligent", with "moments of penetrating satirical humour."

THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE, through August 25th, Edinburgh

ALSO IN BEIJING...

Granted, there are other things you could be doing in Beijing this month. But consider taking a break from all the cheering and sweating (and the smog and heat), and head to the Contemporary Chinese Art gallery in the 978 art zone. Unlike some of the officially sanctioned art commissioned for the Olympics, this group show features the edgier work of young Chinese artists who have been driving the art market. Highlights from the exhibition, which surveys pieces created since 1989, include Zhang Dali's chilling installations, which comment on Chinese communities and workers, and Zhao Bo's graphic, cartoonish works, which are eerily, colourfully sinister.

AUGUST GROUP SHOW, through August 27th, Chinese Contemporary, Beijing

MANIFEST DESTINY

There was something poignant about Great Salt Lake that moved Robert Smithson to create "Spiral Jetty", his famous 1,500 foot rock-and-earth sculpture, which juts into the body of water. “He didn’t look for beautiful places", said Lynne Cooke, a curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, which owns the piece. "But rather despoiled landscapes where industry and the wild overlap,” she told the New York Times (for an article about the controversial possibility of oil drilling near the work). Smithson's sculpture is just one of the stops Erin Hogan makes in "Spiral Jetta", a newly released memoir of her quirky, lonely journey to all of the great "monuments of American land art". The director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, Hogan trades her desk for a Jetta and sets out to experience these works for herself. In doing so, she "shows how the human body is meant to be a participant in these grand constructions," praises the New Yorker. Tom Vanderbilt at the New York Times also enjoys this "unashamedly honest, slyly uproarious, ever-probing book" for the way it understands that "art doesn't magically have the power to change lives, but it can, perhaps no less powerfully, change ways of seeing."

Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas