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Seventy years to the day (20th April) Hitler's birthday present still causes controversy. A 50th birthday gift to the leader of the Third Reich (who was born on 20th April 1889), an erotic masterpiece by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Cupid Complaining to Venus, is the subject of a play shortly to open on the Brighton Fringe. Set against the background of the G Summit riots, Keith Wait's new play excited much controversy when it premiered at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, by probing the ownership question marks that stand over the history of the famous old master painting, Cranach's Cupid Complaining to Venus, which hangs in the National Gallery in London. Having disappeared before the First World War and glimpsed tantalisingly in Switzerland and Germany, later it gradually found its way up through the Nazi hierarchy to Hitler himself by a series of coercions and bribes. Looted by American troops, it was given as a love token to the commander's mistress. Zionist activists, Nazi sympathisers, New York criminals, all have the painting in their sights. When it vanishes again, who will remind us of "the fearless girl reporter", who burnt Nazi flags as she posed in the nude with Cranach's erotic masterpiece.

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2009 (1 listings)