Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. It was the first American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role filled by Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism. In the United States, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky. Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic, or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst, David Alfaro Siqueiros; the newer research tends to put the exile-surrealist Wolfgang Paalen in the position of the artist and theoretician who fostered the theory of the viewer-dependent possibility space through his paintings and his magazine DYN.
Paalen considered ideas of quantum mechanics, as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of the totemic vision and the spatial structure of native-Indian painting from British Columbia and prepared the ground for the new spatial vision of the young American abstracts. His long essay Totem Art had considerable influence on such artists as Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Around 1944 Barnett Newman tried to explain America's newest art movement and included a list of "the men in the new movement." Paalen is mentioned twice. Motherwell is mentioned with a question mark. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey his "white writing" canvases, though not large in scale, anticipate the "all-over" look of Pollock's drip paintings; the movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus, Synthetic Cubism.
Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working in New York who had quite different styles, to work, neither abstract nor expressionist. California abstract expressionist Jay Meuser, who painted in the non-objective style, wrote about his painting Mare Nostrum, "It is far better to capture the glorious spirit of the sea than to paint all of its tiny ripples." Pollock's energetic "action paintings", with their "busy" feel, are different, both technically and aesthetically, from the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning's figurative paintings and the rectangles of color in Mark Rothko's Color Field paintings. Yet all four artists are classified as abstract expressionists. Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists' works, most of these paintings involved careful planning since their large size demanded it.
With artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Emma Kunz, on Rothko, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, abstract art implied expression of ideas concerning the spiritual, the unconscious, the mind. Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s, it had been influenced not only by the Great Depression, but by the muralists of Mexico such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of these painters. Abstract expressionism arose during World War II and began to be showcased during the early forties at galleries in New York such as The Art of This Century Gallery; the McCarthy era after World War II was a time of artistic censorship in the United States, but if the subject matter were abstract it would be seen as apolitical, therefore safe. Or if the art was political, the message was for the insiders. While the movement is associated with painting, painters such as Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, others, collagist Anne Ryan and certain sculptors in particular were integral to abstract expressionism.
David Smith, his wife Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, Ibram Lassaw, Theodore Roszak, Phillip Pavia, Mary Callery, Richard Stankiewicz, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson in particular were some of the sculptors considered as being important members of the movement. In addition, the artists David Hare, John Chamberlain, James Rosati, Mark di Suvero, sculptors Richard Lippold, Raoul Hague, George Rickey, Reuben Nakian, Tony Smith, Seymour Lipton, Joseph Cornell, several others were integral parts of the abstract expressionist movement. Many of the sculptors listed participated in the Ninth Street Show, a famous exhibition curated by Leo Castelli on East Ninth Street in New York City in 1951. Besides the painters and sculptors of the period the New York School of abstract expressionism generated a number of supportive poets, including Frank O'Hara and photographers such as Aaron Siskind and Fred McDarrah, (
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making, he is best known for founding the art movement Art Brut, for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime. Dubuffet was born in Le Havre to a family of wholesale wine merchants who were part of the wealthy bourgeoisie, his childhood friends included the writers Georges Limbour. He moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian, becoming close friends with the artists Juan Gris, André Masson, Fernand Léger. Six months upon finding academic training to be distasteful, he left the Académie to study independently. During this time, Dubuffet developed many other interests, including music and the study of ancient and modern languages.
Dubuffet traveled to Italy and Brazil, upon returning to Le Havre in 1925, he married for the first time and went on to start a small wine business in Paris. He took up painting again in 1934 when he made a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history, but again he stopped. Years in an autobiographical text, he boasted about having made substantial profits by supplying wine to the Wehrmacht. In 1942, Dubuffet decided to devote himself again to art, he chose subjects for his works from everyday life, such as people sitting in the Paris Métro or walking in the country. Dubuffet painted with strong, unbroken colors, recalling the palette of Fauvism, as well as the Brucke painters, with their juxtaposing and discordant patches of color. Many of his works featured an individual or individuals placed in a cramped space, which had a distinct psychological impact on viewers. In 1943, the writer George Limbour, a friend of Dubuffet from childhood, took Jean Paulhan to the artist's studio.
Dubuffet's work at that time was unknown. Paulhan was impressed and the meeting proved to be a turning point for Dubuffet, his first solo show came at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris. This marked Dubuffet's third attempt to become an established artist. In 1945, Dubuffet attended and was impressed by a show in Paris of Jean Fautrier's paintings in which he recognized meaningful art which expressed directly and purely the depth of a person. Emulating Fautrier, Dubuffet started to use thick oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, coal dust, pieces of glass, straw, gravel and tar; this allowed him to abandon the traditional method of applying oil paint to canvas with a brush. The impasto technique of mixing and applying paint was best manifested in Dubuffet's series'Hautes Pâtes' or Thick Impastoes, which he exhibited at his second major exhibition, entitled Microbolus Macadam & Cie/Hautes Pates in 1946 at the Galérie René Drouin, his use of crude materials and the irony that he infused into many of his works incited a significant amount of backlash from critics, who accused Dubuffet of'anarchy' and'scraping the dustbin'.
He did receive some positive feedback as well—Clement Greenberg took notice of Dubuffet's work and wrote that'rom a distance, Dubuffet seems the most original painter to have come out of the School of Paris since Miro...' Greenberg went on to say that'Dubuffet is the one new painter of real importance to have appeared on the scene in Paris in the last decade.' Indeed, Dubuffet was prolific in the United States in the year following his first exhibition in New York. After 1946, Dubuffet started a series of portraits, with his own friends Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, George Limbour, Jean Paulhan and Pierre Matisse serving as'models', he painted these portraits in the same thick materials, in a manner deliberately anti-psychological and anti-personal, as Dubuffet expressed himself. A few years he approached the surrealist group in 1948 the College of Pataphysique in 1954, he was friendly with the French playwright and theater director Antonin Artaud, he admired and supported the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline and was connected with the artistic circle around the surrealist André Masson.
In 1944 he started an important relationship with the resistance-fighter and French writer, Jean Paulhan, strongly fighting against'intellectual terrorism', as he called it. Dubuffet achieved rapid success in the American art market due to his inclusion in the Pierre Matisse exhibition in 1946, his association with Matisse proved to be beneficial. Matisse was a influential dealer of contemporary European Art in America, was known for supporting the School of Paris artists. Dubuffet's work was placed among the likes of Picasso and Rouault at the gallery exhibit, he was only one of two young artists to be honored in this manner. A Newsweek article dubbed Dubuffet as the'darling of Parisian avant-garde circles,' and Greenberg wrote positively about Dubuffet's three canvasses in a review of the exhibit. In 1947, Dubuffet had his first solo exhibition in America, in the same gallery as the Matisse exhibition. Reviews were favorable, this resulted in Dubuffet having at least an annual, if not a biannual exhibition at that gallery.
Due to his participation in a steady stream of art exhibitions within his first few years
Robert Desnos
Robert Desnos was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day. Robert Desnos was born in Paris on 4 July 1900, the son of a licensed dealer in game and poultry at the Halles market. Other sources state Desnos was the son of a Parisien café owner. Desnos attended commercial college, started work as a clerk, he worked as an amanuensis for journalist Jean de Bonnefon. After that he worked as a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir; the first poems by Desnos to appear in print were published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes and in 1919 in the avant-garde review Le Trait d'union, the same year in the Dadaist magazine Littérature. In 1922 he published his first book, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms, with the title Rrose Sélavy. In 1919 he met the poet Benjamin Péret, who introduced him to the Paris Dada group and André Breton, with whom he soon became friends. While working as a literary columnist for Paris-Soir, Desnos was an active member of the Surrealist group and developed a particular talent for automatic writing.
He, together with writers such as Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, would form the literary vanguard of surrealism. André Breton included two photographs of Desnos sleeping in his surrealist novel Nadja. Although he was praised by Breton in his 1924 Manifeste du Surréalisme for being the movement's "prophet", Desnos disagreed with Surrealism's involvement in communist politics, which caused a rift between him and Breton. Desnos continued work as a columnist. In 1926 he composed The Night of Loveless Nights, a lyric poem dealing with solitude curiously written in classic quatrains, which makes it more like Baudelaire than Breton. Desnos fell in love with a singer whose obsessed fans made his love impossible, he wrote several poems for her, as well as the erotic surrealist novel La liberté ou l'amour!. Critic Ray Keenoy describes La liberté ou l'amour! as "literary and lyrical in its outpourings of sexual delirium". By 1929 Breton definitively condemned Desnos, who in turn joined Georges Bataille and Documents, as one of the authors to sign Un Cadavre attacking "le bœuf Breton".
He wrote articles on "Modern Imagery", "Avant-garde Cinema", "Pygmalion and the Sphinx", Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet filmmaker, on his film titled The General Line. His career in radio began in 1932 with a show dedicated to Fantômas. During that time, he became friends with Picasso, Hemingway and John Dos Passos, he wrote including Littérature, La Révolution surréaliste and Variétés. Besides his numerous collections of poems, he published three novels, Deuil pour deuil, La Liberté ou l'amour! and Le vin est tiré. During World War II, Desnos was an active member of the French Résistance network Réseau AGIR, under the direction of Michel Hollard publishing under pseudonyms. For Réseau Agir, Desnos provided information collected during his job at the journal Aujourd'hui and made false identity papers, was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 February 1944, he was first deported to the German concentration camps of Auschwitz in occupied Poland Buchenwald, Flossenburg in Germany and to Terezín in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945.
Desnos died in Malá pevnost, an inner part of Terezín used only for political prisoners, from typhoid, a month after the camp's liberation. There is a moving anecdote about Desnos's last days after the liberation while being tended to by a young Czech medical student, Josef Stuna, who recognised him thanks to reading Breton's Nadja. Susan Griffin relates a story recounted differently by González Yuen, that exemplifies Desnos' surrealist mindset. However, this poem has never existed; the belief in its existence started after a misunderstanding. A Czech newspaper Svobodné noviny published his obituary which ended by the sentence "In a strange, tragic way his verses have fulfilled" followed by a quote from Desnos' poem I Dreamt About You So Much translated by a Czech poet Jindřich Hořejší and printed in six lines; when re-published in France in Les Lettres Françaises, the sentence was translated in a wrong way: "A strange and tragic fate gave a concrete meaning to a poem, the only one found with him and dedicated to his spouse" followed by an erroneous translation of the aforementioned verses.
Due to this the legend of "The Last Poem" survived well into the 1970s. It was thanks to a Czech translator Adolf Kroupa and his two well-founded articles in Les Lettres Françaises that this false belief in the poem started to cease to exist. Desnos was married to Youki Desnos Lucie Badoud, nicknamed "Youki" by her lover Tsuguharu Foujita before she left him for Desnos. Desnos wrote several poems about her. One of his most famous poems is "Letter to Youki", written after his arrest, he is buried at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. Desnos' poetry has been set to music by a number of composers, including Witold Lutosławski with Les Espaces du sommeil and Chan
Landscape painting
Landscape painting known as landscape art, is the depiction of landscapes in art – natural scenery such as mountains, trees and forests where the main subject is a wide view – with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works, landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is always included in the view, weather is an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, develop when there is a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects; the two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present from its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism. Landscape views in art may be imaginary, or copied from reality with varying degrees of accuracy.
If the primary purpose of a picture is to depict an actual, specific place including buildings prominently, it is called a topographical view. Such views common as prints in the West, are seen as inferior to fine art landscapes, although the distinction is not always meaningful; the word "landscape" entered the modern English language as landskip, an anglicization of the Dutch landschap, around the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art, with its first use as a word for a painting in 1598. Within a few decades it was used to describe vistas in poetry, as a term for real views; however the cognate term landscaef or landskipe for a cleared patch of land had existed in Old English, though it is not recorded from Middle English. The earliest forms of art around the world depict little that could be called landscape, although ground-lines and sometimes indications of mountains, trees or other natural features are included; the earliest "pure landscapes" with no human figures are frescos from Minoan Greece of around 1500 BCE.
Hunting scenes those set in the enclosed vista of the reed beds of the Nile Delta from Ancient Egypt, can give a strong sense of place, but the emphasis is on individual plant forms and human and animal figures rather than the overall landscape setting. The frescos from the Tomb of Nebamun, now in the British Museum, are a famous example. For a coherent depiction of a whole landscape, some rough system of perspective, or scaling for distance, is needed, this seems from literary evidence to have first been developed in Ancient Greece in the Hellenistic period, although no large-scale examples survive. More ancient Roman landscapes survive, from the 1st century BCE onwards frescos of landscapes decorating rooms that have been preserved at archaeological sites of Pompeii and elsewhere, mosaics; the Chinese ink painting tradition of shan shui, or "pure" landscape, in which the only sign of human life is a sage, or a glimpse of his hut, uses sophisticated landscape backgrounds to figure subjects, landscape art of this period retains a classic and much-imitated status within the Chinese tradition.
Both the Roman and Chinese traditions show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes backed with a range of spectacular mountains – in China with waterfalls and in Rome including sea, lakes or rivers. These were used, as in the example illustrated, to bridge the gap between a foreground scene with figures and a distant panoramic vista, a persistent problem for landscape artists; the Chinese style showed only a distant view, or used dead ground or mist to avoid that difficulty. A major contrast between landscape painting in the West and East Asia has been that while in the West until the 19th century it occupied a low position in the accepted hierarchy of genres, in East Asia the classic Chinese mountain-water ink painting was traditionally the most prestigious form of visual art. Aesthetic theories in both regions gave the highest status to the works seen to require the most imagination from the artist. In the West this was history painting, but in East Asia it was the imaginary landscape, where famous practitioners were, at least in theory, amateur literati, including several Emperors of both China and Japan.
They were also poets whose lines and images illustrated each other. In the 1830s the British inventor William Talbot creates the process of calotype and in 1844 he publishes the first book with photo illustrations: "The Pencil of Nature"Talbot, W. H. F.. The Pencil of Nature: in 6 parts. However, in the West, history painting came to require an extensive landscape background where appropriate, so the theory did not work against the development of landscape painting – for several centuries landscapes were promoted to the status of history painting by the addition of small figures to make a narrative scene religious or mythological. In early Western medieval art interest in landscape disappears entirely, kept alive only in copies of Late Antique works such as the Utrecht Psalter. A revival in interest in nature mainly manifested itself in depictions of small gardens such as the Hortus Conclusus or those in millefleur tapestries; the frescos of figures at work or pl
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s those associated with post-structuralism, his ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory, clinical psychoanalysis. Lacan was born in the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacan's three children, his father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger brother entered a monastery in 1929. Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas between 1907 and 1918. An interest in philosophy led him to a preoccupation with the work of Spinoza, one outcome of, his abandonment of religious faith for atheism. There were tensions in the family around this issue, he regretted not persuading his brother to take a different path, but by 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he was living in rooms in Montmartre.
During the early 1920s, Lacan engaged with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. Having met James Joyce, he was present at the Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922, he had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, he attended meetings of Action Française, of which he would be critical. In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. Between 1927 and 1931, after completing his studies at the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he specialised in psychiatry under the direction of Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle. Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso.
For a time, he served as Picasso's personal therapist. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded and published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. " interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis," Dylan Evans explains, speculating that "perhaps Lacan never abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as'convulsive beauty', its celebration of irrationality." David Macey writes that "the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated... to the young Lacan... shared the surrealists' taste for scandal and provocation, viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself". In 1931, after a second year at the Saint Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his Diplôme de médecin légiste and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist; the following year he was awarded his Diplôme d'État de docteur en médecine for his thesis On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality. Its publication had little immediate impact in French psychoanalytic circles but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan's circle of surrealist writers and artists.
In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent Freud a copy of his thesis which Freud acknowledged with a postcard. Lacan's thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom Lacan called Aimée, its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas. In 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud's 1922 text, "Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität" as "De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l'homosexualité" in the Revue française de psychanalyse. In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, to last until 1938. In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris, he began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the same year presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad on the "Mirror Phase".
The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan's stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan having omitted to hand in his text to the appropriate authorities. Lacan's attendance at Kojève's lectures on Hegel given between 1933 and 1939, which focussed on the Phenomenology and the master-slave dialectic in particular, was formative for his subsequent work in his formulation of his theory of the mirror stage for which he was indebted to the experimental work on child development of Henri Wallon, it was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a contribution to the 1938 l’Encyclopédie française entitled "La Famille" (reprinted in 1984 as “Les Complexes fami
Aix-en-Provence
Aix-en-Provence, or Aix, is a city and commune in Southern France, about 30 km north of Marseille. A former capital of Provence, it is in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, of which it is a subprefecture; the population of Aix-en-Provence numbers 143,000. Its inhabitants are called Aixois or, less Aquisextains. Aix was founded in 123 BC by the Roman consul Sextius Calvinus, who gave his name to its springs, following the destruction of the nearby Gallic oppidum at Entremont. In 102 BC its vicinity was the scene of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae, where the Romans under Gaius Marius defeated the Cimbri and Teutones, with mass suicides among the captured women, which passed into Roman legends of Germanic heroism. In the 4th century AD it became the metropolis of Narbonensis Secunda, it was occupied by the Visigoths in 477. In the succeeding century, the town was plundered by the Franks and Lombards, was occupied by the Saracens in 731 and by Charles Martel in 737.
Aix, which during the Middle Ages was the capital of Provence, did not reach its zenith until after the 12th century, under the houses of Barcelona/Aragon and Anjou, it became an artistic centre and seat of learning. Aix passed to the crown of France with the rest of Provence in 1487, in 1501 Louis XII established there the parliament of Provence, which existed until 1789. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the town was the seat of the Intendance of Provence. Current archeological excavations in the Ville des Tours, a medieval suburb of Aix, have unearthed the remains of a Roman amphitheatre. A deposit of fossil bones from the Upper Continental Miocene gave rise to a Christian dragon legend. Aix-en-Provence is situated in the south of France, in a plain overlooking the Arc river, about a mile from the right bank of the river; the city slopes from north to south and the Montagne Sainte-Victoire can be seen to the east. Aix's position in the south of France gives it a warm climate, though more extreme than Marseille due to the inland location.
It has an average January temperature of 5 °C and a July average of 23 °C. It has an average of only 91 days of rain. While it is protected from the Mistral, Aix still experiences the cooler and gusty conditions it brings. Unlike most of France which has an oceanic climate, Aix-en-Provence has a Mediterranean climate; the Cours Mirabeau is a wide thoroughfare, planted with double rows of plane trees, bordered by fine houses and decorated by fountains. It follows the line of the old city wall, divides the town into two sections; the new town extends to the west. Situated on this avenue, lined on one side with banks and on the other with cafés, is the Deux Garçons, the most famous brasserie in Aix. Built in 1792, it was frequented by the likes of Émile Zola and Ernest Hemingway; the Cathedral of the Holy Saviour is situated to the north in the medieval part of Aix. Built on the site of a former Roman forum and an adjacent basilica, it contains a mixture of all styles from the 5th to the 17th century, including a richly decorated portal in the Gothic style with doors elaborately carved in walnut.
The interior contains 16th-century tapestries, a 15th-century triptych, depicting King René and his wife on the side panels, as well as a Merovingian baptistery, its Renaissance dome supported by original Roman columns. The archbishop's palace and a Romanesque cloister adjoin the cathedral on its south side; the Archbishopric of Aix is now shared with Arles. Among its other public institutions, Aix has the second most important Appeal Court outside of Paris, located near the site of the former Palace of the Counts of Provence; the Hôtel de Ville, a building in the classical style of the middle of the 17th century, looks onto a picturesque square. It contains tapestries. At its side rises a handsome clock-tower erected in 1510. On the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville is the former Corn Exchange; this ornately decorated 18th-century building was designed by the Vallon brothers. Nearby are the remarkable thermal springs, containing lime and carbonic acid, that first drew the Romans to Aix and gave it the name Aquae Sextiae.
A spa was built in 1705 near the remains of the ancient Roman baths of Sextius. South of the Cours Mirabeau is the Quartier Mazarin; this residential district was constructed for the gentry of Aix by Archbishop Michele Mazzarino brother of Cardinal Jules Mazarin in the last half of the 17th century and contains several notable hôtels particuliers. The 13th-century church of Saint-Jean-de-Malte contains valuable pictures and a restored organ. Next to it is the Musée Granet, devoted to European sculpture. Aix is referred to as the city of a thousand fountains. Among the most notable are the 17th-century Fontaine des Quatre Dauphins in the Quartier Mazarin, designed by Jean-Claude Rambot, three of the fountains down the central Cours Mirabeau: At the top, a 19th-century fountain depicts the "good king" René holding the Muscat grapes that he introduced to Provence in the 15th century.
Georges Bataille
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille was a French intellectual and literary figure working in literature, anthropology, economics and history of art. His writing, which included essays and poetry, explored such subjects as erotism, mysticism and transgression, his work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism. Georges Bataille was the son of Joseph-Aristide Bataille, a tax collector, Antoinette-Aglaë Tournarde. Born on 10 September 1897 in Billom in the region of Auvergne, his family moved to Reims in 1898, where he was baptized, he went to school in Reims and Épernay. Although brought up without religious observance, he converted to Catholicism in 1914, became a devout Catholic for about nine years, he attended a Catholic seminary briefly. However, he quit in part in order to pursue an occupation where he could support his mother, he renounced Christianity in the early 1920s. Bataille attended the École Nationale des Chartes in Paris, graduating in February 1922.
Though he is referred to as an archivist and a librarian because of his employment at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his work there was with the medallion collections. His thesis at the École des Chartes was a critical edition of the medieval manuscript L’Ordre de chevalerie which he produced directly by classifying the eight manuscripts from which he reconstructed the poem. After graduating he moved to the School of Advanced Spanish Studies in Madrid; as a young man, he befriended, was much influenced by, the Russian existentialist, Lev Shestov. Founder of several journals and literary groups, Bataille is the author of a large and diverse body of work: readings, essays on innumerable subjects, he sometimes published under pseudonyms, some of his publications were banned. He was ignored during his lifetime and scorned by contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre as an advocate of mysticism, but after his death had considerable influence on authors such as Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Derrida, all of whom were affiliated with the journal Tel Quel.
His influence is felt most explicitly in the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Nancy, but is significant for the work of Jean Baudrillard, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, recent anthropological work from the likes of Michael Taussig. Attracted to Surrealism, Bataille fell out with its founder André Breton, although Bataille and the Surrealists resumed cautiously cordial relations after World War II. Bataille was a member of the influential College of Sociology which included several other renegade surrealists, he was influenced by Hegel, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, Alexandre Kojève, Friedrich Nietzsche, the last of whom he defended in a notable essay against appropriation by the Nazis. Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a secret society, Acéphale, the symbol of, a headless man. According to legend and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found before the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before the war.
The group published an eponymous review of Nietzsche's philosophy which attempted to postulate what Derrida has called an "anti-sovereignty". Collaborators in these projects included André Masson, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, Jules Monnerot, Jean Rollin and Jean Wahl. Bataille used various modes of discourse to create his work, his novel Story of the Eye, published under the pseudonym Lord Auch, was read as pure pornography, while interpretation of the work has matured to reveal the same considerable philosophical and emotional depth, characteristic of other writers who have been categorized within "literature of transgression". The imagery of the novel is built upon a series of metaphors which in turn refer to philosophical constructs developed in his work: the eye, the egg, the sun, the earth, the testicle. Other famous novels include the posthumously published My Mother, The Impossible and Blue of Noon, with its incest, necrophilia and autobiographical undertones, is a much darker treatment of contemporary historical reality.
During World War II Bataille produced Summa Atheologica which comprises his works Inner Experience, On Nietzsche. After the war he composed The Accursed Share, which he said represented thirty years' work; the singular conception of "sovereignty" expounded there would become an important topic of discussion for Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and others. Bataille founded the influential journal Critique. Bataille's first marriage was to actress Silvia Maklès, in 1928. Bataille had an affair with Colette Peignot, who died in 1938. In 1946 Bataille married Diane de Beauharnais. In 1955 Bataille was diagnosed with cerebral arteriosclerosis, although he was not informed at the time of the t
