Arthur Rackham
Arthur Rackham was an English book illustrator. He is recognized as one of the leading literary figures during the Golden Age of British book illustration, his work is noted for its robust pen and ink drawings, which were combined with the use of watercolour. Rackham's 51 color pieces for the Early American tale became a turning point in the production of books since - through color-separated printing - it featured the accurate reproduction of color artwork; some of his best-known works include the illustrations for Rip Van Winkle, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Rackham was born in Lewisham still part of Kent, as one of 12 children. In 1884, at the age of 17, he was sent on an ocean voyage to Australia to improve his fragile health, accompanied by two aunts. At the age of 18, he worked as a clerk at the Westminster Fire Office and began studying part-time at the Lambeth School of Art. In 1892, he left his job and started working for the Westminster Budget as a reporter and illustrator.
His first book illustrations were published in 1893 in To the Other Side by Thomas Rhodes, but his first serious commission was in 1894 for The Dolly Dialogues, the collected sketches of Anthony Hope, who went on to write The Prisoner of Zenda. Book illustrating became Rackham's career for the rest of his life. By the turn of the century, Rackham had developed a reputation for pen and ink fantasy illustration with richly illustrated gift books such as The Ingoldsby Legends, Gulliver's Travels and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm; this was developed further through the austere years of the Boer War with regular contributions to children's periodicals such as Little Folks and Cassell's Magazine. In 1901 he moved to Wychcombe Studios near Haverstock Hill, in 1903 married his neighbour Edyth Starkie. Edith suffered a miscarriage in 1904, but the couple had one daughter, Barbara, in 1908. Although acknowledged as an accomplished black-and-white book illustrator for some years, it was the publication of his full colour plates to Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle by Heinemann in 1905 that brought him into public attention, his reputation being confirmed the following year with J.
M. Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, published by Stoughton. Income from the books was augmented by annual exhibitions of the artwork at the Leicester Galleries. Rackham won a gold medal at the Milan International Exhibition in 1906 and another one at the Barcelona International Exposition in 1912, his works were included in numerous exhibitions, including one at the Louvre in Paris in 1914. From 1906 the family lived in Chalcot Gardens, near Haverstock Hill, until moving from London to Houghton, West Sussex in 1920. In 1929 the family settled into a newly built property in Surrey. Arthur Rackham died in 1939 of cancer at his home. Arthur Rackham is regarded as one of the leading illustrators from the'Golden Age' of British book illustration which encompassed the years from 1890 until the end of the First World War. During that period, there was a strong market for high quality illustrated books which were given as Christmas gifts. Many of Rackham's books were produced in a de luxe limited edition vellum bound and signed, as well as a smaller, less ornately bound quarto'trade' edition.
This was sometimes followed by a more modestly presented octavo edition in subsequent years for popular books. The onset of the war in 1914 curtailed the market for such quality books, the public's taste for fantasy and fairies declined in the 1920s. Arthur Rackham's works have become popular since his death, both in North America and Britain, his images have been used by the greeting card industry and many of his books are still in print or have been available in both paperback and hardback editions. His original drawings and paintings are keenly sought at the major international art auction houses. Rackham's illustrations were chiefly based on robust pen and India ink drawings. Rackham perfected his own uniquely expressive line from his background in journalistic illustration, paired with subtle use of watercolour, a technique which he was able to exploit due to technological developments in photographic reproduction. With this development, Rackham's illustrations no longer needed an engraver to cut clean lines on a wood or petal plate for printing because the artist had his works photographed and mechanically reproduced.
Rackham would first block in shapes and details of the drawing with a soft pencil, for the more elaborate colour plates utilising one of a small selection of compositional devices. Over this, he would carefully work in lines of pen and India ink, removing the pencil traces after the drawing had begun to take form. For colour pictures, Rackham preferred the 3-colour process or trichromatic printing, which reproduced the delicate half-tones of photography through letterpress printing, he would begin painting by building up multiple thin washes of watercolour creating translucent tints. One of the disadvantages of the 3-colour printing process in the early years was that definition could be lost in the final print. Rackham would sometimes compensate for this by over-inking his drawings once more after painting, he would go on to expand the use of silhouette cuts in illustration work in the period after the First World War, as exemplified by his Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Rackham contributed both colour and monotone illustrations towards the works incorporating his images – and in the case of Hawthorne's Wonder Book, he provided a number of part-coloured block images simil
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children: his stories express themes that transcend age and nationality. Andersen's fairy tales, of which no fewer than 3381 works have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well, his most famous fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Little Match Girl" and "Thumbelina". His stories have inspired ballets and animated and live-action films. One of Copenhagen's widest and busiest boulevards is named "H. C. Andersens Boulevard". Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark on 2 April 1805, he was an only child. Andersen's father Hans, considered himself related to nobility.
A persistent speculation suggests that Andersen was an illegitimate son of King Christian VIII, but this notion has been challenged. Andersen's father, who had received an elementary school education, introduced Andersen to literature, reading to him the Arabian Nights. Andersen's mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was an illiterate washerwoman. Following her husband's death in 1816, she remarried in 1818. Andersen was sent to a local school for poor children where he received a basic education and had to support himself, working as an apprentice to a weaver and to a tailor. At fourteen, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor. Having an excellent soprano voice, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at the theatre told him. Taking the suggestion Andersen began to focus on writing. Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Danish Theatre, held great affection for Andersen and sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, persuading King Frederick VI to pay part of the youth's education.
Andersen had by published his first story, "The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave". Though not a stellar pupil, he attended school at Elsinore until 1827, he said his years in school were the darkest and most bitter of his life. At one school, he lived at his schoolmaster's home, where he was abused, being told that it was "to improve his character", he said the faculty had discouraged him from writing, driving him into a depression. A early fairy tale by Andersen, "The Tallow Candle", was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012; the story, written in the 1820s, was about a candle. It was written while Andersen was still in school and dedicated to a benefactor in whose family's possession it remained until it turned up among other family papers in a local archive. In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with the short story "A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager", its protagonist meets characters ranging from Saint Peter to a talking cat. Andersen followed this success with a theatrical piece, Love on St. Nicholas Church Tower, a short volume of poems.
Although he made little progress writing and publishing thereafter, in 1833 he received a small travel grant from the king, thus enabling him to set out on the first of many journeys through Europe. At Jura, near Le Locle, Andersen wrote the story "Agnete and the Merman", he spent an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante the same year, inspiring the title of "The Bay of Fables". In October 1834, he arrived in Rome. Andersen's travels in Italy were to be reflected in his first novel, a fictionalized autobiography titled The Improvisatore, published in 1835 to instant acclaim. Andersen's initial attempts at writing fairy tales were revisions of stories that he heard as a child, his original fairy tales were not met with recognition, due to the difficulty of translating them. In 1835, Andersen published the first two installments of his Fairy Tales. More stories, completing the first volume, were published in 1837; the collection comprises nine tales, including "The Tinderbox", "The Princess and the Pea", "Thumbelina", "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes".
The quality of these stories was not recognized, they sold poorly. At the same time, Andersen enjoyed more success with two novels, O. T. and Only a Fiddler. Much of his work was influenced by the Bible as when he was growing up Christianity was important in the Danish culture. After a visit to Sweden in 1837, Andersen became inspired by Scandinavism and committed himself to writing a poem that would convey the relatedness of Swedes and Norwegians. In July 1839, during a visit to the island of Funen, Andersen wrote the text of his poem Jeg er en Skandinav to capture "the beauty of the Nordic spirit, the way the three sister nations have grown together" as part of a Scandinavian national anthem. Composer Otto Lindblad set the poem to music, the composition was published in January 1840, its popularity peaked in 1845, after which it was sung. Andersen returned to the fairy tale genre in 1838 with another collection, Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. First Booklet (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn.
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George Cruikshank
George Cruikshank was a British caricaturist and book illustrator, praised as the "modern Hogarth" during his life. His book illustrations for his friend Charles Dickens, many other authors, reached an international audience. Cruikshank was born in London, his father, Isaac Cruikshank, was one of the leading caricaturists of the late 1790s and Cruikshank started his career as his father's apprentice and assistant. His older brother, Isaac Robert followed in the family business as a caricaturist and illustrator. Cruikshank's early work was caricature, he illustrated the first, 1823 English translation of Grimms' Fairy Tales, published in two volumes as German Popular Stories. On 16 October 1827, he married Mary Ann Walker. Two years after her death, on 7 March 1851, he married Eliza Widdison; the two lived at North London. Upon his death, it was discovered that Cruikshank had fathered 11 illegitimate children with a mistress named Adelaide Attree, his former servant, who lived close to where he lived with his wife.
Adelaide was ostensibly married and had taken the married surname'Archibold'. Cruikshank's early career was renowned for his social caricatures of English life for popular publications, he achieved early success collaborating with William Hone in his political satire The Political House That Jack Built. In the same year he produced the remarkable anti-abolitionist New Union Club, it satirised. His first major work was Pierce Egan's Life in London in which the characters Tom and Jerry, two'men about town' visit various London locations and taverns to enjoy themselves and carouse; this was followed by The Comic Almanack and Omnibus. He gained notoriety with his political prints that attacked the royal family and leading politicians. In 1820 he received a royal bribe of £100 for a pledge "not to caricature His Majesty" "in any immoral situation", his work included a personification of England named John Bull, developed from about 1790 in conjunction with other British satirical artists such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson.
Cruikshank replaced one of James Gillray, as England's most popular satirist. For a generation he delineated Tories and Radicals impartially. Satirical material came to him from every public event – wars abroad, the enemies of Britain, the frolic, among other qualities, such as the weird and terrible, in which he excelled, his hostility to enemies of Britain and a crude racism is evident in his illustrations commissioned to accompany William Maxwell's History of the Irish rebellion in 1798 where his lurid depictions of incidents in the rebellion were characterised by the simian-like portrayal of Irish rebels. Among the other racially engaged works of Cruikshank there were caricatures about the "legal barbarities" of the Chinese, the subject given by his friend, Dr. W. Gourley, a participant in the ideological battle around the Arrow War, 1856–60. For Charles Dickens, Cruikshank illustrated Sketches by The Mudfog Papers and Oliver Twist. Cruikshank acted in Dickens's amateur theatrical company.
On 30 December 1871 Cruikshank published a letter in The Times which claimed credit for much of the plot of Oliver Twist. The letter launched a fierce controversy around. Cruikshank was not the first Dickens illustrator to make such a claim. Robert Seymour who illustrated the Pickwick Papers suggested that the idea for that novel was his; the friendship between Cruikshank and Dickens soured further when Cruikshank became a fanatical teetotaler in opposition to Dickens's views of moderation. In Somerset Maugham's short story "Miss King", Cruickshank's influence is referenced: "She wore a large white cotton nightcap tied under the chin and a white voluminous nightdress that came high up in the neck. Nightcap and nightdress belonged to a past age and reminded you of Cruickshank's illustrations to the novels of Charles Dickens." In the late 1840s, Cruikshank's focus shifted from book illustration to an obsession with temperance and anti-smoking. A heavy drinker, he now supported, lectured to, supplied illustrations for the National Temperance Society and the Total Abstinence Society, among others.
The best known of these are The Bottle, 8 plates, with its sequel, The Drunkard's Children, 8 plates, with the ambitious work, The Worship of Bacchus, published by subscription after the artist's oil painting, now in the Tate Gallery, London. For his efforts he was made vice president of the National Temperance League in 1856; when the invasion scare of 1859 led to the creation of the Volunteer Movement, Cruikshank was one of those who organised Rifle Volunteer Corps. At first his unit was the 24th Surrey RVC, which recruited from working men who were total abstainers and was named'Havelock's Own' in honour of Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, a hero of the Indian Mutiny and pioneer of Temperance Clubs in the army. However, Cruikshank received little encouragement from the Lord-Lieutenant of Surrey, was rebuked for crossing into Kent to recruit. Disgusted, he disbanded his unit in 1862 and began anew in Middlesex, organising the 48th Middlesex RVC; the unit ran into financial difficulties and when Cruikshank was forced to retire due to age, he was replaced as commanding officer by Lt-Col
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, designer, playwright and filmmaker. Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants Terribles, the films The Blood of a Poet, Les Parents Terribles and the Beast and Orpheus, he was described as "one of avant-garde's most influential filmmakers" by AllMovie. Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a town near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte, his father was a lawyer and amateur painter. From 1900–1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a physical relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos who would reappear throughout Cocteau's oeuvre, he left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, Maurice Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes. During World War I Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver; this was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, numerous other writers and artists with whom he collaborated. Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917, it was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie. The piece was expanded into a full opera, with music by Satie, Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel. "If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins." He denied being in any way attached to the movement.
Cocteau wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927. An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking; the popularity was due in no small measure to the presence of his friends. In 1918 he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet, they collaborated extensively and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau got Radiguet exempted from military service. Admiring of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps, exerting his influence to have the novel awarded the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize; some contemporaries and commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship.
Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature. There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral and left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les noces by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much characterised his reaction as one of "stupor and disgust." His opium addiction at the time, Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style, his most notable book, Les Enfants Terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning. In Opium: Journal of drug rehabilitation, he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929, his account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment-to-moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world.
Cocteau was supported throughout his recovery by his friend and correspondent, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Under Maritain's influence Cocteau made a temporary return to the sacraments of the Catholic Church, he again returned to the Church in life and undertook a number of religious art projects. Cocteau's experiments with the human voice peaked with his play La Voix humaine; the story involves one woman on stage speaking on the telephone with her departing lover, leaving her to marry another woman. The telephone proved to be the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, "algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication. Cocteau acknowledged in the introduction to the script that the play was motivated, in part, by complaints from his actresses that his works were too writer/director-dominated and gave the players little opportunity to show off their full range of talents. La Voix humaine was written, as an extravagant aria for Madame Berthe Bovy. Before came Orphée turned into one of hi
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer sometimes spelt in English as Durer or Duerer, without umlaut, was a painter and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe when he was still in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints, he was in communication with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, from 1512 he was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I. Dürer is commemorated by both the Episcopal Churches. Dürer's vast body of work includes engravings, his preferred technique in his prints, altarpieces and self-portraits and books; the woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series, are more Gothic than the rest of his work. His well-known engravings include the Knight and the Devil, Saint Jerome in his Study and Melencolia I, the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation, his watercolours mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his ambitious woodcuts revolutionized the potential of that medium.
Dürer's introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatises, which involve principles of mathematics and ideal proportions. Dürer was born on 21 May 1471, third child and second son of his parents, who had at least fourteen and as many as eighteen children, his father, Albrecht Dürer the Elder, was a successful goldsmith who in 1455 had moved to Nuremberg from Ajtós, near Gyula in Hungary. One of Albrecht's brothers, Hans Dürer, was a painter and trained under him. Another of Albrecht's brothers, Endres Dürer, took over their father's business and was a master goldsmith; the German name "Dürer" is a translation from the Hungarian, "Ajtósi". It was "Türer", meaning doormaker, "ajtós" in Hungarian. A door is featured in the coat-of-arms. Albrecht Dürer the Younger changed "Türer", his father's diction of the family's surname, to "Dürer", to adapt to the local Nuremberg dialect.
Dürer the Elder married Barbara Holper, daughter of his master when he himself qualified as a master in 1467. Dürer's godfather was Anton Koberger, who left goldsmithing to become a printer and publisher in the year of Dürer's birth, became the most successful publisher in Germany owning twenty-four printing-presses and built a number of offices in Germany and abroad. Koberger's most famous publication was the Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493 in German and Latin editions, it contained an unprecedented 1,809 woodcut illustrations by the Wolgemut workshop. Dürer may have worked on some of these; because Dürer left autobiographical writings and became famous by his mid-twenties, his life is well documented by several sources. After a few years of school, Dürer started to learn the basics of goldsmithing and drawing from his father. Though his father wanted him to continue his training as a goldsmith, he showed such a precocious talent in drawing that he started as an apprentice to Michael Wolgemut at the age of fifteen in 1486.
A self-portrait, a drawing in silverpoint, is dated 1484 "when I was a child", as his inscription says. Wolgemut was the leading artist in Nuremberg at the time, with a large workshop producing a variety of works of art, in particular woodcuts for books. Nuremberg was an important and prosperous city, a centre for publishing and many luxury trades, it had strong links with Italy Venice, a short distance across the Alps. After completing his apprenticeship, Dürer followed the common German custom of taking Wanderjahre—in effect gap years—in which the apprentice learned skills from artists in other areas, he left in 1490 to work under Martin Schongauer, the leading engraver of Northern Europe, but who died shortly before Dürer's arrival at Colmar in 1492. It is unclear where Dürer travelled in the intervening period, though it is that he went to Frankfurt and the Netherlands. In Colmar, Dürer was welcomed by Schongauer's brothers, the goldsmiths Caspar and Paul and the painter Ludwig. In 1493 Dürer went to Strasbourg, where he would have experienced the sculpture of Nikolaus Gerhaert.
Dürer's first painted self-portrait was painted at this time to be sent back to his fiancée in Nuremberg. In early 1492 Dürer travelled to Basel to stay with another brother of Martin Schongauer, the goldsmith Georg. Soon after his return to Nuremberg, on 7 July 1494, at the age of 23, Dürer was married to Agnes Frey following an arrangement made during his absence. Agnes was the daughter of a prominent brass worker in the city. However, no children resulted from the marriage, with Albrecht the Dürer name died out; the marriage between Agnes and Albrecht was not a happy one, as indicated by the letters of Dürer in which he quipped to Willibald Pirckheimer in an rough tone about his wife. He made other vulgar remarks. Pirckheimer made no secret of his antipathy towards Agnes, describing her as a miserly shrew with a bitter tongue, who helped cause Dürer's death at a young age, it is speculated by many scholars Albrecht was bisexual, if not homosexual, due to several of his works containing themes of homosexual desire, as well as the in
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, his works are marked by a frank eroticism. In addition to his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods. Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner; as he developed a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger contemporary Egon Schiele.
Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary, the second of seven children—three boys and four girls. His mother, Anna Klimt, had an unrealized ambition to be a musical performer, his father, Ernst Klimt the Elder from Bohemia, was a gold engraver. All three of their sons displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's younger brothers were Georg Klimt. Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of applied arts and crafts, now the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he studied architectural painting from 1876 until 1883, he revered Vienna's foremost history painter of Hans Makart. Klimt accepted the principles of a conservative training. In 1877 his brother, who, like his father, would become an engraver enrolled in the school; the two brothers and their friend, Franz Matsch, began working together and by 1880 they had received numerous commissions as a team that they called the "Company of Artists". They helped their teacher in painting murals in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Klimt began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings on the Ringstraße, including a successful series of "Allegories and Emblems". In 1888 Klimt received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria for his contributions to murals painted in the Burgtheater in Vienna, he became an honorary member of the University of Munich and the University of Vienna. In 1892 Klimt's father and brother Ernst both died, he had to assume financial responsibility for his father's and brother's families; the tragedies affected his artistic vision and soon he would move towards a new personal style. Characteristic of his style at the end of the 19th century is the inclusion of Nuda Veritas as a symbolic figure in some of his works, including Ancient Greece and Egypt, Pallas Athene and Nuda Veritas. Historians believe that Klimt with the nuda veritas denounced both the policy of the Habsburgs and Austrian society, which ignored all political and social problems of that time.
In the early 1890s Klimt met Austrian fashion designer Emilie Louise Flöge, to be his companion until the end of his life. His painting, The Kiss, is thought to be an image of them as lovers, he designed many costumes that she modeled in his works. During this period Klimt fathered at least fourteen children. Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Wiener Sezession in 1897 and of the group's periodical, Ver Sacrum, he remained with the Secession until 1908. The goals of the group were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring the works of the best foreign artists to Vienna, to publish its own magazine to showcase the work of members; the group declared no manifesto and did not set out to encourage any particular style—Naturalists and Symbolists all coexisted. The government supported their efforts and gave them a lease on public land to erect an exhibition hall; the group's symbol was Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of just causes and the arts—of whom Klimt painted his radical version in 1898.
In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. Not completed until the turn of the century, his three paintings, Philosophy and Jurisprudence were criticized for their radical themes and material, were called "pornographic". Klimt had transformed traditional allegory and symbolism into a new language, more overtly sexual and hence more disturbing to some; the public outcry came from all quarters—political and religious. As a result, the paintings were not displayed on the ceiling of the Great Hall; this would be the last public commission accepted by the artist. All three paintings were destroyed when retreating German forces burned Schloss Immendorf in May 1945, his Nuda Veritas defined his bid to further "shake up" the establishment. The starkly naked red-headed woman holds the mirror of truth, while above her is a quotation by Friedrich Schiller in stylized lettering: "If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please only a few.
To please many is bad."In 1902, Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the Fourteenth Vienna Secessionist exhibition, intended to be a celebration of the composer and featured a monumental polychrome sculpture by Max Klinger. Intended for the exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on the walls with light m
Eric Idle
Eric Idle is an English comedian, voice actor, singer-songwriter, musician and comedic composer. Idle was a member of the British surreal comedy group Monty Python, a member of the parody rock band The Rutles, the author of the Broadway musical Spamalot. Idle was born in Harton Hospital, in South Shields, County Durham, to which his mother had been evacuated from the north west of England, his mother, Norah Barron, was a health visitor, his father, Ernest Idle, served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, only to be killed in a road accident while hitch-hiking home for Christmas in December 1945. Idle spent part of his childhood in Wallasey on the Wirral peninsula, attended St George's Road primary school, his mother had difficulty coping with a full-time job and bringing up a child, so when Idle was seven, she enrolled him in the Royal Wolverhampton School as a boarder. At this time, the school was a charitable foundation dedicated to the education and maintenance of children who had lost one or both parents.
Idle is quoted as saying: "It was a physically abusive, harsh environment for a kid to grow up in. I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority. Perfect training for Python."Idle stated that the two things that made his life bearable were listening to Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes and watching the local football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers. Despite this, he disliked other sports and would sneak out of school every Thursday afternoon to the local cinema. Idle was caught watching the X-rated film BUtterfield 8 and stripped of his prefecture, though by that time he was head boy. Idle had refused to be senior boy in the school cadet force, as he supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and had participated in the yearly Aldermaston March. Idle maintains that there was little to do at the school, boredom drove him to study hard and win a place at Cambridge University.
Idle attended Pembroke College, where he studied English. At Pembroke, he was invited to join the prestigious Cambridge University Footlights Club by the president of the Footlights Club, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Footlights Club member Bill Oddie. Idle started at Cambridge only a year after future fellow-Pythons Graham John Cleese, he was the first to allow women to join the club. Idle starred in the children's television comedy series Do Not Adjust Your Set co-starring his future Python fellows Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Terry Gilliam provided animations for the show; the show's cast included comic actors David Jason and Denise Coffey. Idle appeared as guest in some episodes of the television series At Last the 1948 Show, which co-featured Cleese and Chapman. Idle wrote for Python by himself, at his own pace, although he sometimes found it difficult in having to present material to the others and make it seem funny without the back-up support of a partner; the other Pythons worked in teams and Cleese admitted that this was unfair – when the Pythons voted on which sketches should appear in a show, "he only got one vote".
However, he says that Idle was an independent person and worked best on his own. Idle himself admitted this was sometimes difficult: "You had to convince five others, and they were not the most un-egotistical of writers, either." Idle's work in Python is characterised by an obsession with language and communication: many of his characters have verbal peculiarities, such as the man who speaks in anagrams, the man who says words in the wrong order, the butcher who alternates between rudeness and politeness every time he speaks. A number of his sketches involve extended monologues, he would spoof the unnatural language and speech patterns of television presenters. Unlike Palin, Idle is said to be the master of insincere characters, from the David Frost-esque Timmy Williams, to small-time crook Stig O'Tracy, who tries to deny the fact that organised crime master Dinsdale Piranha nailed his head to the floor; the second-youngest member of the Pythons, Idle was closest in spirit to the students and teenagers who made up much of Python's fanbase.
Python sketches dealing most with contemporary obsessions like pop music, sexual permissiveness and recreational drugs are Idle's work characterised by double entendre, sexual references, other "naughty" subject matter – most famously demonstrated in "Nudge Nudge." Idle wrote "Nudge, Nudge" for Ronnie Barker, but it was rejected because there was'no joke in the words'. A competent guitarist, Idle composed many of the group's most famous musical numbers, most notably "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life", the closing number of Life of Brian, which has grown to become a Python signature tune, he was responsible for the "Galaxy Song" from The Meaning of Life and "Eric the Half-a-Bee", a whimsical tune that first appeared on the Previous Record album. After the success of Python in the early 1970s, all six members pursued solo projects. Idle's first solo work was Radio Five; this ran for two seasons from 1973 to 1974 and involved Idle performing sketches and links to records, with himself playing nearly all the multi-tracked parts.
On television, Idle created Rutland Weekend Television, a sketch show on BBC2, written by himself, with music by Neil Innes. RWT was
