Othello (paintings) Othello (paintings) Othello is a series of paintings executed in 1985 by Nabil Kanso. The subjects of the paintings are loosely based on Shakespeare’s tragedy "Othello". The series comprises 60 paintings dealing with themes of love, race, jealousy, betrayal, and evil. They depict scenes embodying compositions of figural and metaphorical imagery that may be seen as visually reflecting the intimate and dramatic relationship between Othello and Desdemona, and the tense and uneasy relation that passes between and through Othello, Desdemona and Iago. The "Othello" paintings depict a sequence of figural images with oil and acrylic on canvases and paperboards ranging
Othello seeing interracial marriages as "aberrations" that could end badly. Given this view of "Othello", the play become especially controversial in apartheid-era South Africa where interracial marriages were banned and performances of "Othello" were discouraged. The first major screen production casting a black actor as Othello did not come until 1995, with Laurence Fishburne opposite Kenneth Branagh's Iago. In the past, Othello would often have been portrayed by a white actor in blackface or in a black mask: more recent actors who chose to 'black up' include Ralph Richardson (1937); John Gielgud (1961); Laurence Olivier (1964); Anthony Hopkins (1981), and Orson