Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager; as of 2018, the company's current music director is Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The Met was founded in 1880 as an alternative to the established Academy of Music opera house, debuted in 1883 in a new building on 39th and Broadway, it moved to the new Lincoln Center location in 1966. The Metropolitan Opera is the largest classical music organization in North America, it presents about 27 different operas each year from late September through May. The operas are presented in a rotating repertory schedule, with up to seven performances of four different works staged each week. Performances are given in the evening Monday through Saturday with a matinée on Saturday. Several operas are presented in new productions each season. Sometimes these are shared with other opera companies.
The rest of the year's operas are given in revivals of productions from previous seasons. The 2015–16 season comprised 227 performances of 25 operas; the operas in the Met's repertoire consist of a wide range of works, from 18th-century Baroque and 19th-century Bel canto to the Minimalism of the late 20th century. These operas are presented in staged productions that range in style from those with elaborate traditional decors to others that feature modern conceptual designs; the Met's performing company consists of a large symphony-sized orchestra, a chorus, children's choir, many supporting and leading solo singers. The company employs numerous free-lance dancers, actors and other performers throughout the season; the Met's roster of singers includes both international and American artists, some of whose careers have been developed through the Met's young artists programs. While many singers appear periodically as guests with the company, such as Renée Fleming and Plácido Domingo, long maintained a close association with the Met, appearing many times each season until they retired.
The Metropolitan Opera Company was founded in 1880 to create an alternative to New York's old established Academy of Music opera house. The subscribers to the Academy's limited number of private boxes represented the highest stratum in New York society. By 1880, these "old money" families were loath to admit New York's newly wealthy industrialists into their long-established social circle. Frustrated with being excluded, the Metropolitan Opera's founding subscribers determined to build a new opera house that would outshine the old Academy in every way. A group of 22 men assembled at Delmonico's restaurant on April 28, 1880, they established subscriptions for ownership in the new company. The new theater, built at 39th and Broadway, would include three tiers of private boxes in which the scions of New York's powerful new industrial families could display their wealth and establish their social prominence; the first Met subscribers included members of the Morgan and Vanderbilt families, all of whom had been excluded from the Academy.
The new Metropolitan Opera House opened on October 22, 1883, was an immediate success and artistically. The Academy of Music's opera season folded. In its early decades the Met did not produce the opera performances itself but hired prominent manager/impresarios to stage a season of opera at the new Metropolitan Opera House. Henry Abbey served as manager for the inaugural season, 1883–84, which opened with a performance of Charles Gounod's Faust starring the brilliant Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson. Abbey's company that first season featured an ensemble of artists led by sopranos Nilsson and Marcella Sembrich, they gave 150 performances of 20 different operas by Gounod, Bellini, Verdi, Mozart, Bizet and Ponchielli. All performances were sung in Italian and were conducted either by music director Auguste Vianesi or Cleofonte Campanini; the company performed not only in the new Manhattan opera house, but started a long tradition of touring throughout the country. In the winter and spring of 1884 the Met presented opera in theaters in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington D.
C. and Baltimore. Back in New York, the last night of the season featured a long gala performance to benefit Mr. Abbey; the special program consisted not only of various scenes from opera, but offered Mme. Sembrich playing the violin and the piano, as well as the famed stage actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in a scene from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; the Metropolitan Opera began a long history of performing in Philadelphia during its first season, presenting its entire repertoire in the city during January and April 1884. The company's first Philadelphia performance was of Faust on January 14, 1884, at the Chestnut Street Opera House; the Met continued to perform annually in Philadelphia for nearly eighty years, taking the entire company to the city on selected Tuesday nights throughout the opera season. Performances were held at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, with the company presenting close to 900 performances in the city by 1961 when the Met's regular visits ceased. On April 26, 1910, the Met purchased the Philadelphia Opera House from Oscar Hammerstein I.
The company renamed the house the Metropolitan Opera House and performed all of their Philadelphia performances there unti
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax, he is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period. He was a teacher with a long list of students. Jean-Léon Gérôme was born at Haute-Saône, he went to Paris in 1840. He visited Florence, the Vatican and Pompeii, but he was more attracted to the world of nature. Taken by a fever, he was forced to return to Paris in 1844. On his return, he followed, like many other students of Delaroche, into the atelier of Charles Gleyre and studied there for a brief time, he attended the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1846 he tried to enter the prestigious Prix de Rome, but failed in the final stage because his figure drawing was inadequate, his painting, The Cock Fight, is an academic exercise, depicting a nude young man and a draped young woman with two fighting cocks, the Bay of Naples in the background.
He sent this painting to the Salon of 1847. This work was seen as the epitome of the Neo-Grec movement that had formed out of Gleyre's studio, was championed by the influential French critic Théophile Gautier. Gérôme took advantage of his sudden success, his paintings The Virgin, the Infant Jesus and St John and Anacreon and Cupid took a second-class medal in 1848. In 1849, he produced A portrait of a Lady. In 1851, he decorated a vase offered by Emperor Napoleon III of France to Prince Albert, now part of the Royal Collection at St. James's Palace, London, he exhibited Bacchus and Love, Drunk, a Greek Interior and Souvenir d'Italie, in 1851. In 1852, Gérôme received a commission by Alfred Emilien Comte de Nieuwerkerke, Surintendant des Beaux-Arts to the court of Napoleon III, for the painting of a large historical canvas, the Age of Augustus. In this canvas he combines the birth of Christ with conquered nations paying homage to Augustus. Thanks to a considerable down payment, he was able to travel in 1853 to Constantinople, together with the actor Edmond Got.
This would be the first of several travels to the East: in 1854 he made another journey to Greece and Turkey and the shores of the Danube, where he was present at a concert of Russian conscripts, making music under the threat of a lash. In 1853, Gérôme moved to the Boîte à Thé, a group of studios in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Paris; this would become a meeting place for other artists and actors. George Sand entertained in the small theatre of the studio the great artists of her time such as the composers Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Gioachino Rossini and the novelists Théophile Gautier and Ivan Turgenev. In 1854, he completed another important commission of decorating the Chapel of St. Jerome in the church of St. Séverin in Paris, his Last communion of St. Jerome in this chapel reflects the influence of the school of Ingres on his religious works. To the exhibition of 1855 he contributed a Pifferaro, a Shepherd, A Russian Concert, The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ; the last was somewhat confused in effect, but in recognition of its consummate rendering the State purchased it.
However the modest painting, A Russian Concert was more appreciated than his huge canvases. In 1856, he visited Egypt for the first time. Gérôme's recurrent itinerary followed the classic grand tour of most occidental visitors to the Orient; this would herald the start of many orientalist paintings depicting Arab religion, genre scenes and North African landscapes. In an autobiographical essay of 1878, Gérôme described how important oil sketches made on the spot were for him: "even when worn out after long marched under the bright sun, as soon as our camping spot was reached I got down to work with concentration, but Oh! How many things were left behind of which I carried only the memory away! And I prefer three touches of colour on a piece of canvas to the most vivid memory, but one had to continue on with some regret." He did not only gather themes and costumes for his oriental scenes, but made oil studies from nature for their backgrounds. Several of these quick sketches are filled with details that exceed his wished for three touches of colour.
Gérôme's reputation was enhanced at the Salon of 1857 by a collection of works of a more popular kind: the Duel: after the Masked Ball, Egyptian Recruits crossing the Desert and Sesostris and Camels Watering, the drawing of, criticized by Edmond About. In 1858, he helped to decorate the Paris house of Prince Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte in the Pompeian style; the prince had bought his Greek Interior, a depiction of a brothel in the Pompeian manner. In Caesar Gérôme tried to return to a more severe class of work, the painting of Classical subjects, but the picture failed to interest the public. Phryne before the Areopagus, King Candaules and Socrates finding Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia gave rise to some scandal by reason of the subject
Eclogues
The Eclogues called the Bucolics, is the first of the three major works of the Latin poet Virgil. Taking as his generic model the Greek bucolic poetry of Theocritus, Virgil created a Roman version by offering a dramatic and mythic interpretation of revolutionary change at Rome in the turbulent period between 44 and 38 BC. Virgil introduced political clamor absent from Theocritus' poems, called idylls though erotic turbulence disturbs the "idyllic" landscapes of Theocritus. Virgil's book contains ten pieces, each called not an idyll but an eclogue, populated by and large with herdsmen imagined conversing and performing amoebaean singing in rural settings, whether suffering or embracing revolutionary change or happy or unhappy love. Performed with great success on the Roman stage, they feature a mix of visionary politics and eroticism that made Virgil a celebrity, legendary in his own lifetime. Like the rest of Virgil's works, the Eclogues are composed in dactylic hexameter, it is that Virgil deliberately designed and arranged his book of Eclogues, in which case it is the first extant collection of Latin poems in the same meter put together by the poet..
Several scholars have attempted to identify the organizational/architectural principles underpinning the construction of the book. The book is arguably based on an alternation of antiphonal poems with non-dramatic/narrative poems. Beyond this, there have been many attempts to identify other organizational principles. Many of these attempts have been critiqued by Niall Rudd. Rudd refuted a number of cruder organizational theories, including theories that the Eclogues are organized in chronological order by geographic setting, with Italian settings alternating with non-Italian settings into two halves, each featuring a movement from lighter, more peaceful poems to heavier, more emphatic and agitated poemsRudd identified more-convoluted organizational theories. While considering these more plausible than the above, he concluded that "each system has at least one defect, none is so superior to the others as to be Virgil's own"; such systems include: arrangement based on mutually supporting principles, such as topical and arithmetic correspondences arrangement into a series of pairs of poems, bracketing Eclogue 5 with the balancing Eclogue 10 and supported by arithmetical correspondence arrangement into two halves, with corresponding pairs based on lengthMore Thomas K. Hubbard has noted, "The first half of the book has been seen as a positive construction of a pastoral vision, whilst the second half dramatizes progressive alienation from that vision, as each poem of the first half is taken up and responded to in reverse order."
Capping a sequence or cycle in which Virgil created and augmented a new political mythology, Eclogue 4 reaches out to imagine a golden age ushered in by the birth of a boy heralded as "great increase of Jove", which ties in with divine associations claimed in the propaganda of Octavian, the ambitious young heir to Julius Caesar. The poet makes this notional scion of Jove the occasion to predict his own metabasis up the scale in epos, rising from the humble range of the bucolic to the lofty range of the heroic rivaling Homer: he thus signals his own ambition to make Roman epic that will culminate in the Aeneid. In the surge of ambition, Virgil projects defeating the legendary poet Orpheus and his mother, the epic muse Calliope, as well as Pan, the inventor of the bucolic pipe in Pan's homeland of Arcadia, which Virgil will claim as his own at the climax of his eclogue book in the tenth eclogue. Biographical identification of the fourth eclogue's child has proved elusive; the connection is first made in the Oration of Constantine appended to the Life of Constantine by Eusebius of Caesarea.
Some scholars have remarked similarities between the eclogue's prophetic themes and the words of Isaiah 11:6: "a little child shall lead". Eclogue 5 articulates another significant pastoral theme, the shepherd-poet's concern with achieving worldly fame through poetry; this concern is related to the metabasis Virgil himself undertakes thematically in Eclogue 4. In Eclogue 5, the shepherds Menalcas and Mopsus mourn their deceased companion Daphnis by promising to "praise... Daphnis to the stars – / yes, to the stars raise Daphnis". Menalcas and Mopsus praise Daphnis out of compassion but out of obligation. Daphnis willed that his fellow shepherds memorialize him by making a "mound and add above the mound a song: / Daphnis am I in woodland, known hence far as the stars". Not only are Daphnis's survivors concerned with solidifying and eternizing his poetic reputation, but the dead shepherd-poet himself is involved in self-promotion from beyond the grave through the aegis of his will, it is an outgrowth of the friendly poetic rivalries that occur between them and of their attempts to best the gods Pan or Phoebus, at their lyric craft.
At the end of Eclogue 5, Daphnis is deified in the shepherds' poetic praise: "'A god, a god is he, Menalcas!' /... Here are four altars: / Look, two for you and two high ones for Phoebus." Menalcas apostrophizes Daphnis with a promise: "Always your honor and praises will endure." Ensuring poetic fame is a fundamental interest of the shepherds in classical pastoral elegies, including the s
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry. Born in Metz, Verlaine was educated at the Lycée Impérial Bonaparte in Paris and took up a post in the civil service, he began writing poetry at an early age, was influenced by the Parnassien movement and its leader, Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine's first published poem was published in 1863 in La Revue du progrès, a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de Ricard at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent artistic figures of the day: Anatole France, Emmanuel Chabrier, inventor-poet and humorist Charles Cros, the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Catulle Mendes and others. Verlaine's first published collection, Poèmes saturniens, though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality.
Verlaine's private life spills over into his work, beginning with his love for Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. Mathilde became Verlaine's wife in 1870. At the proclamation of the Third Republic in the same year, Verlaine joined the 160th battalion of the Garde nationale, turning Communard on 18 March 1871, he became head of the press bureau of the Central Committee of the Paris Commune. Verlaine escaped the deadly street fighting known as the Bloody Week, or Semaine Sanglante, went into hiding in the Pas-de-Calais. Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from Arthur Rimbaud, who admired his poetry, he urged Rimbaud to come to Paris, by 1872, he had lost interest in Mathilde, abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new lover. Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872. In Brussels in July 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not injuring the poet.
As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons, where he underwent a re-conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism. The poems collected in Romances sans paroles were written between 1872 and 1873, inspired by Verlaine's nostalgically colored recollections of his life with Mathilde on the one hand and impressionistic sketches of his on-again off-again year-long escapade with Rimbaud on the other. Romances sans. Following his release from prison, Verlaine again traveled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher, teaching French and Greek, drawing at a grammar school in Stickney in Lincolnshire. From there he went to teach in nearby Boston, before moving to Bournemouth. While in England he produced another successful collection, Sagesse, he returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who inspired Verlaine to write further poems.
Verlaine was devastated when Létinois died of typhus in 1883. Verlaine's last years saw his descent into drug addiction and poverty, he lived in slums and public hospitals, spent his days drinking absinthe in Paris cafes. However, the people's love for his art was able to resurrect support and bring in an income for Verlaine: his early poetry was rediscovered, his lifestyle and strange behaviour in front of crowds attracted admiration, in 1894 he was elected France's "Prince of Poets" by his peers, his poetry was admired and recognized as ground-breaking, served as a source of inspiration to composers. Gabriel Fauré composed many mélodies, such as the song cycles Cinq mélodies "de Venise" and La bonne chanson, which were settings of Verlaine's poems. Claude Debussy set to music Clair de lune and six of the Fêtes galantes poems, forming part of the mélodie collection known as the Recueil Vasnier. Reynaldo Hahn set several of Verlaine's poems, his drug dependence and alcoholism took a toll on his life.
Paul Verlaine died in Paris at the age of 51 on 8 January 1896. Much of the French poetry produced during the fin de siècle was characterized as "decadent" for its lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Verlaine used the expression poète maudit in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Aloysius Bertrand, Comte de Lautréamont or Alice de Chambrier, who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or were ignored by the critics, but with the publication of Jean Moréas' Symbolist Manifesto in 1886, it was the term symbolism, most applied to the new literary environment. Along with Verlaine, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Albert Samain and many others began to be referred to as "Symbolists." These poets would share themes that parallel Schopenhauer's aesthetics and notions of will and unconscious forces, used themes of sex, the city, irrational phenomena, sometimes a vaguely medieval setting. I
Tapestry
Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven by hand on a loom. Tapestry is weft-faced weaving, in which all the warp threads are hidden in the completed work, unlike cloth weaving where both the warp and the weft threads may be visible. In tapestry weaving, weft yarns are discontinuous, it is a plain weft-faced weave having weft threads of different colours worked over portions of the warp to form the design. Most weavers use a natural warp thread, such as linen or cotton; the weft threads are wool or cotton, but may include silk, silver, or other alternatives. First attested in English in 1467, the word tapestry derives from Old French tapisserie, from tapisser, meaning "to cover with heavy fabric, to carpet", in turn from tapis, "heavy fabric", via Latin tapes, the Latinisation of the Greek τάπης, "carpet, rug"; the earliest attested form of the word is the Mycenaean Greek, ta-pe-ja, written in the Linear B syllabary. The success of decorative tapestry can be explained by its portability.
Kings and noblemen could transport tapestries from one residence to another. In churches, they were displayed on special occasions. Tapestries were draped on the walls of castles for insulation during winter, as well as for decorative display. In the Middle Ages and renaissance, a rich tapestry panel woven with symbolic emblems, mottoes, or coats of arms called a baldachin, canopy of state or cloth of state was hung behind and over a throne as a symbol of authority; the seat under such a canopy of state would be raised on a dais. The iconography of most Western tapestries goes back to written sources, the Bible and Ovid's Metamorphoses being two popular choices. Apart from the religious and mythological images, hunting scenes are the subject of many tapestries produced for indoor decoration. Tapestries have been used since at least Hellenistic times. Samples of Greek tapestry have been found preserved in the desert of Tarim Basin dating from the 3rd century BC; the form reached a new stage in Europe in the early 14th century AD.
The first wave of production occurred in Switzerland. Over time, the craft expanded to France and the Netherlands; the basic tools have remained much the same. In the 14th and 15th centuries, France was a thriving textile town; the industry specialised in fine wool tapestries which were sold to decorate palaces and castles all over Europe. Few of these tapestries survived the French Revolution as hundreds were burnt to recover the gold thread, woven into them. Arras is still used to refer to a rich tapestry no matter. Indeed, as literary scholar Rebecca Olson argues, arras were the most valuable objects in England during the early modern period and inspired writers such as William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser to weave these tapestries into their most important works such as Hamlet and The Faerie Queen. By the 16th century, the towns of Oudenaarde, Brussels and Enghien had become the centres of European tapestry production. In the 17th century, Flemish tapestries were arguably the most important productions, with many specimens of this era still extant, demonstrating the intricate detail of pattern and colour embodied in painterly compositions of monumental scale.
In the 19th century, William Morris resurrected the art of tapestry-making in the medieval style at Merton Abbey. Morris & Co. made successful series of tapestries for home and ecclesiastical uses, with figures based on cartoons by Edward Burne-Jones. Kilims and Navajo rugs are types of tapestry work. In the mid-twentieth century, new tapestry art forms were developed by children at the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre in Harrania, by modern French artists under Jean Lurçat in Aubusson, France. Traditional tapestries are still made at the factory of Gobelins and a few other old European workshops, which repair and restore old tapestries. While tapestries have been created for many centuries and in every continent in the world, what distinguishes the contemporary field from its pre-World War ll history is the predominance of the artist as weaver in the contemporary medium; this trend has its roots in France during the 1950s where one of the "cartoonists" for the Aubusson Tapestry studios, Jean Lurçat spearheaded a revival of the medium by streamlining color selection, thereby simplifying production, by organizing a series of Biennial exhibits held in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Polish work submitted to the first Biennale, which opened in 1962, was quite novel. Traditional workshops in Poland had collapsed as a result of the war. Art supplies in general were hard to acquire. Many Polish artists had learned to weave as part of their art school training and began creating individualistic work by using atypical materials like jute and sisal. With each Biennale the popularity of works focusing on exploring innovative constructions from a wide variety of fiber resounded around the world. There were many weavers in pre-war United States, but there had never been a prolonged system of workshops for producing tapestries. Therefore, weavers in America were self-taught and chose to design as well as weave their art. Through these Lausanne exhibitions, US artists/weavers, others in countries all over the world, were excited about the Polish trend towards experimental forms. Throughout the 1970s all weavers had explored some manner of techniques and materials in vogue at the time.
What this movement contributed to the newly realized field of art weaving, termed "contemporary tapestry", was the option for working
Ambroise Vollard
Ambroise Vollard was a French art dealer, regarded as one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art at the beginning of the twentieth century. He is credited with providing exposure and emotional support to numerous then-unknown artists, including Paul Cézanne, Aristide Maillol, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Louis Valtat, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Georges Rouault, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, he was an avid art collector and publisher. Born in Saint-Denis, Réunion, he was raised in the French Indian Ocean colony. After his matura in La Réunion, he went to study jurisprudence in France from 1885, for a while in Montpellier at the École de droit in Paris, where he received his degree in 1888. During his studies, Vollard converted himself into an "amateur-merchant" by becoming a clerk for an art dealer, in 1893 established his own art gallery, at Rue Laffitte the center of the Parisian market for contemporary art. There Vollard mounted his first major exhibitions, buying the entire output of Cézanne, some 150 canvases to create his first exhibition in 1895.
This was followed by exhibitions of Manet and Vincent Van Gogh. These were was followed by a second Cézanne exhibition, the first Picasso exhibition and Matisse. Much has been made of his physical countenance, his clients included Albert C. Barnes, Henry Osborne Havemeyer, Gertrude Stein and her brother, Leo Stein. Having put on the first Picasso exhibition, in 1930 Vollard commissioned Picasso to produce a suite of 100 etchings which became known as the Vollard Suite. Vollard would write biographies of Cézanne and Renoir. In 1937 he published Recollections of a Picture Dealer. With war approaching, Vollard set out in July 1939 from his cottage in Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre to travel to his mansion on the Rue Martignac, where he had stored 10,000 artworks. Nearing the junction to Pontchartrain, on a wet road, his chauffeur-driven Talbot skidded and somersaulted twice. Having fractured his cervical vertebrae, there he lay with his chauffeur until found dead, aged 73, the following morning. After his death, Vollard's executor was fellow dealer Martin Fabiani, instructed to divide his collection between his heirs: Madelaine de Galea, an alleged mistress.
Due to the Nazi invasion of France, which started on 10 May 1940, Fabiani hurriedly shipped 560 paintings to the United States. Leaving on the SS Excalibur from Lisbon, the ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy in Bermuda on 25 September 1940. Designated "enemy property", the paintings were stored at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa during World War II. Post-war, on 19 April 1949, the London prize court agreed release of the pieces to Fabiani, who returned the works to Vollard's sisters. In gratitude, the sisters donated all of the lithographs by Rouault and Chagall, a single painting by Gauguin to the National Gallery of Canada; the remaining works soon started appearing on the New York City commercial art gallery market, where they were sold. Vollard's former secretary and protegé, Erich Šlomović, a young Serb with Jewish origins, had connections with Vollard, Fabiani as well as Lucien Vollard since about 1938, he had stated his wish to create a museum of French art collected by him in Yugoslavia.
Šlomović had amassed a collection of about 600 works, most of them prints or drawings, with a few important oil paintings, by a combination of exchange, gift and donation. Vollard had put him in direct contact with the most prominent artists of the day and asked him to act as agent for art selling or purchasing purposes. Beginning of 1940, Šlomović put about 200 works in storage in a Societe Generale bank branch vault in Paris. Returning home with about 450 of these works, he exhibited them in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1940. With the advance of German armies in Serbia, he went into hiding, along with his brother Egon, his father and mother Roza, they placed the paintings in crates behind the wall of a farmhouse in the Southern Serbian village of Bacina. Šlomović, his brother and father were soon arrested, like many other Jews in occupied Serbia, killed by the Nazi Germans in 1942 in Belgrade. After the war these were appropriated by the Yugoslav authorities, they were shown only once in 1989 in Belgrade and Zagreb under the name "Slomovic Collection".
A legal battle is underway to determine the ownership of the Belgrade collection, including the Šlomović heirs, the Vollard beneficiaries and the Serbian government. The Paris works were discovered in 1979 when the bank was allowed to open its vault to recover unpaid storage fees. An 11-year legal dispute ensued by the heirs of both Vollard and Šlomović, which delayed their resale. A court in Amiens, ruled in 1996, that the paintings stored in Paris were to be awarded to the Vollard estate; these were sold off by Sotheby's in Paris and in London in June 2010, totaling 30 million euros in proceeds. These included a 1905 Derain painted at Collioure, as well as works by Mary Cassatt, Cézanne, Degas and Renoir. Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde at www.artic.eduChicago Art Institute Miscellaneous papers regarding Ambroise Vollard, 1890-1939. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. Pierre Bonnard, the Graphic Art, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum o
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter best known for his mural painting, who came to be known as'the painter for France'. He became the co-founder and president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, his work influenced many other artists, notably Robert Genin. Puvis de Chavannes was a prominent painter in the early Third Republic. Émile Zola described his work as "an art made of reason and will". Puvis de Chavannes was born Pierre-Cécile Puvis in a suburb of Lyon, France, he was the son of a mining engineer. Being descended from an old noble family of Burgundy, he added the ancestral'de Chavannes' to his name. Throughout his life, however, he spurned his Lyon origins, preferring to identify himself with the'strong' blood of the Burgundians, where his father originated. Puvis de Chavannes was educated at the Amiens College and at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris, he intended to follow his father's profession until a serious illness compelled him to convalesce at Mâcon with his brother and sister-in-law in 1844 and 1845, interrupting his studies.
A journey to Italy opened his mind to fresh ideas, on his return to Paris in 1846 he announced his intention to become a painter. He studied first under Eugène Delacroix, but only briefly, as Delacroix closed his studio shortly afterwards due to ill health, he studied subsequently under Henri Scheffer and Thomas Couture. His training was not classical as he found that he preferred to work alone, he took a large studio near the Gare de Lyon and attended anatomy classes at the Académie des Beaux Arts. It was not until a number of years when the government of France acquired one of his works, that he gained wide recognition. Puvis de Chavannes made his Salon debut in 1850 with Dead Christ, Negro Boy, The Reading Lesson, Portrait of a Man. In Montmartre, he had an affair with one of his models, Suzanne Valadon, who would become one of the leading artists of the day as well as the mother and mentor of Maurice Utrillo. From 1856, he was in a relationship with the Romanian princess, Marie Cantacuzène.
The couple were together for 40 years, were married before their deaths in 1898. Puvis de Chavannes' work is seen as symbolist in nature though he studied with some of the romanticists, he is credited with influencing an entire generation of painters and sculptors the works of the Modernists. One of his protégés was Georges de Feure. Puvis de Chavannes is best known for his mural painting, came to be known as'the painter for France.' His first commission was for his brother's chateau, Le Brouchy, a medieval-style structure near Cuiseaux in Saône-et-Loire. The principal decorations take the four seasons as their theme, his first public commissions came early in the 1860s, with work at the Musée de Picardie at Amiens. The first four works were Concordia, Bellum, Le Travail and Le Repos. Over the course of his career, Puvis received a substantial number of commissions for works to be carried out in public and private institutions throughout France, his early work at the Musée de Picardie had helped him to develop his classicizing style, the decorative aesthetic of his mural works.
Among his public works are the cycles completed at Amiens, at Marseille, at Lyon and at Poitiers. Of particular importance is the cycle at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Lyon, which includes three significant works, filling the wall space in the main staircase. From left to right, the works are Antique Vision, The Wood Dear to the Arts and the Muses, Christian Inspiration. Puvis' career was tied up with a complicated debate, ongoing since the beginning of the Third Republic, at the end of the violence of the Paris Commune; the question at stake was the identity of France and the meaning of'Frenchness'. Royalists felt that the revolution of 1789 had been an immense disaster and that France had been thrown off course, while the Republicans felt that the Revolution had allowed France to revert to its true course. Works that were to be displayed in public spaces, such as murals, had the important task of fulfilling the ideology of the commissioning party. Many scholars of Puvis's works have noted that his success as a'painter for France' was due to his ability to create works which were agreeable to the many ideologies in existence at this time.
His first Parisian commission was for a cycle at the church of Saint Genevieve, now the secular Pantheon, begun in 1874. His two subjects were L'Education de Sainte Geneviève and La Vie Pastoral de Sainte Geneviève; this commission was followed by works at the Sorbonne, namely the enormous hemicycle, The Sacred Grove or L'Ancienne Sorbonne amongst the muses in the Grand Amphitheater of the Sorbonne. His final commission in this trinity of Republican commissions was the crowning glory of Puvis's career, the works Summer and Winter, at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Many of these works are characterized by their nod to classical art, visible in the careful balanced compositions, the subject matter is a direct reference to visions of Hellenistic Greece in the case of Antique Vision. Puvis de Chavannes was president and co-founder in 1890 of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts founded in Paris, it became the dominant salon of art at the time and held exhibitions of contemporary art, selected only by a jury composed of the officers of the Société.
Those who translated best the spirit of the work of Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes' in their own creations were, in Germany, the painter Ludwig von Hofmann and in France, Auguste Rodin. His easel paintings may be found in many Am
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