1.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
2.
Painting
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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
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Cubism
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Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century, the term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris during the 1910s and extending through the 1920s. The movement was pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Andre Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of form in the late works of Paul Cézanne. The impact of Cubism was far-reaching and wide-ranging, Cubism spread rapidly across the globe and in doing so evolved to a greater or lesser extent. In essence, Cubism was the origin of a process that produced diversity. In France, offshoots of Cubism developed, including Orphism, Abstract art, in other countries Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, De Stijl and Art Deco developed in response to Cubism. Other common threads between these movements include the faceting or simplification of geometric forms, and the association of mechanization. Cubism began between 1907 and 1911, Pablo Picassos 1907 painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. Georges Braques 1908 Houses at L’Estaque prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to refer to bizarreries cubiques, Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, as the first Cubist paintings. A second phase, Synthetic Cubism, remained vital until around 1919, english art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, The Cubist Epoch. Douglas Coopers restrictive use of terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris. Alternative interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed, wider views of Cubism include artists who were later associated with the Salle 41 artists, e. g. John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with the mechanical diagram. The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram, The diagram being a symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearance but these too will be treated as not as imitations or recreations. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Polynesian, Micronesian, artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. Picassos paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as seen in Les Demoiselles dAvignon
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Dada
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Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland at the Cabaret Voltaire, in New York, and after 1920, in Paris. The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with the radical left. Others note that it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness, still others speculate that the word might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning in any language, reflecting the movements internationalism. The roots of Dada lay in pre-war avant-garde, the term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to characterize works which challenge accepted definitions of art. Cubism and the development of collage and abstract art would inform the movements detachment from the constraints of reality, the work of French poets, Italian Futurists and the German Expressionists would influence Dadas rejection of the tight correlation between words and meaning. Works such as Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, and the ballet Parade by Erik Satie would also be characterized as proto-Dadaist works, the Dada movements principles were first collected in Hugo Balls Dada Manifesto in 1916. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I, avant-garde circles outside France knew of pre-war Parisian developments. Futurism developed in response to the work of various artists, many Dadaists believed that the reason and logic of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos, for example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest against this world of mutual destruction. According to Hans Richter Dada was not art, it was anti-art, Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend, as Hugo Ball expressed it, For us, art is not an end in itself. But it is an opportunity for the perception and criticism of the times we live in. A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man. Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a systematic work of destruction and demoralization. In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege, to quote Dona Budds The Language of Art Knowledge, Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition
5.
Surrealism
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Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream, leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I, the word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works, after the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the son of writer. He admired the young writers anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition, later Breton wrote, In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most. Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and they began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields, continuing to write, they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada form of attack on prevailing values. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin, freuds work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness, as Salvador Dalí later proclaimed, There is only one difference between a madman and me. Beside the use of analysis, they emphasized that one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power, the group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to people from false rationality, and restrictive customs. Breton proclaimed that the aim of Surrealism was long live the social revolution. To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism, in 1924 two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established, leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Guillaume Apollinaire, the other group, led by Breton, included Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Jacques Baron, Jacques-André Boiffard, Jean Carrive, René Crevel and Georges Malkine, among others. Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, in the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority
6.
Avant-garde
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The avant-garde are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox, with respect to art, culture, and society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, the avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, the avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. Several writers have attempted, with limited success, to map the parameters of avant-garde activity, the Italian essayist Renato Poggioli provides one of the best-known analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon in his 1962 book Teoria dellarte davanguardia. Other authors have attempted both to clarify and to extend Poggiolis study, bürgers essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-historians such as the German Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry critically argues for an approach to these positions. Subsequent criticism theorized the limitations of these approaches, noting their circumscribed areas of analysis, including Eurocentric, chauvinist, and genre-specific definitions. The concept of avant-garde refers primarily to artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is opposed to cultural values. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch, phony, faked or mechanical culture, for instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales became the measure. It has become common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, nevertheless, an incisive critique of vanguardism as against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s. Since then it has been flanked by what he called avant-garde ghosts to the one side, and this has seen culture become, in his words, a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it. Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether, although most avant-garde composers have been men, this is not exclusively the case. Women avant-gardists include Pauline Oliveros, Diamanda Galás, Meredith Monk, there are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to the avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus, Happenings, and Neo-Dada, Avant-garde – Wikipedia book Barron, Stephanie, and Maurice Tuchman. The Avant-garde in Russia, 1910–1930, New Perspectives, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Los Angeles, CA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art ISBN 0-87587-095-3, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 0-671-20422-X Berg, Hubert van den, and Walter Fähnders
7.
Impressionism
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Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the art community in France. The development of Impressionism in the arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting and they constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner. They also painted scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were painted in a studio. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air, the Impressionists, however, developed new techniques specific to the style. The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style. In the middle of the 19th century—a time of change, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris, the Académie was the preserver of traditional French painting standards of content and style. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits were valued, landscape, the Académie preferred carefully finished images that looked realistic when examined closely. Paintings in this style were made up of brush strokes carefully blended to hide the artists hand in the work. Colour was restrained and often toned down further by the application of a golden varnish, the Académie had an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, and artists whose work was displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries represented the values of the Académie, represented by the works of artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the early 1860s, four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and they discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life rather than historical or mythological scenes. A favourite meeting place for the artists was the Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy in Paris, where the discussions were led by Édouard Manet. They were soon joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, during the 1860s, the Salon jury routinely rejected about half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends in favour of works by artists faithful to the approved style. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manets The Luncheon on the Grass primarily because it depicted a woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While the Salon jury routinely accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, the jurys severely worded rejection of Manets painting appalled his admirers, and the unusually large number of rejected works that year perturbed many French artists
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Pointillism
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Pointillism /ˈpɔɪntᵻlɪzəm/ is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the technique in 1886, branching from Impressionism, the term Pointillism was coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists, and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation. The movement Seurat began with this technique is known as Neo-Impressionism, the Divisionists, too, used a similar technique of patterns to form images, though with larger cube-like brushstrokes. The technique relies on the ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to blend the color spots into a range of tones. It is related to Divisionism, a technical variant of the method. Divisionism is concerned with theory, whereas pointillism is more focused on the specific style of brushwork used to apply the paint. It is a technique with few serious practitioners today, and is seen in the works of Seurat, Signac. However, see also Andy Warhols early works, and Pop Art, the practice of Pointillism is in sharp contrast to the traditional methods of blending pigments on a palette. Pointillism is analogous to the four-color CMYK printing process used by some printers and large presses that place dots of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow. Televisions and computer monitors use a technique to represent image colors using Red, Green. If red, blue, and green light are mixed, the result is something close to white light, painting is inherently subtractive, but Pointillist colors often seem brighter than typical mixed subtractive colors. This may be partly because subtractive mixing of the pigments is avoided, the painting technique used for Pointillist color mixing is at the expense of the traditional brushwork used to delineate texture. The majority of Pointillism is done in oil paint, anything may be used in its place, but oils are preferred for their thickness and tendency not to run or bleed. Pointillism also refers to a style of 20th-century music composition, different musical notes are made in seclusion, rather than in a linear sequence, giving a sound texture similar to the painting version of Pointillism. This type of music is known as punctualism or klangfarbenmelodie
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Abstract art
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Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective, the arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related terms. They are similar, but perhaps not of identical meaning, Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete, even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities, Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational art often contains partial abstraction, both geometric abstraction and lyrical abstraction are often totally abstract. It is at level of visual meaning that abstract art communicates. One can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy or Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it, in Chinese painting, abstraction can be traced to the Tang dynasty painter Wang Mo, who is credited to have invented the splashed-ink painting style. While none of his paintings remain, this style is seen in some Song Dynasty Paintings. A late Song painter named Yu Jian, adept to Tiantai buddhism and his paintings show heavily misty mountains in which the shapes of the objects are barely visible and extremely simplified. This type of painting was continued by Sesshu Toyo in his later years, another instance of abstraction in Chinese painting is seen in Zhu Deruns Cosmic Circle. The painting is a reflection of the Daoist metaphysics in which chaos, in Tokugawa Japan some zen monk-painters created Enso, a circle who represents the absolute enlightenment. Usually made in one spontaneous brush stroke, it became the paradigm of the minimalist aesthetic that guided part of the zen painting, three art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art were Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism. Artistic independence for artists was advanced during the 19th century, patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livelihood for artists. Expressionist painters explored the use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations
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United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
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France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
12.
Museum of Modern Art
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The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world. The MoMA Library includes approximately 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, over 1,000 periodical titles, the archives holds primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and they became known variously as the Ladies, the daring ladies and the adamantine ladies. They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7,1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. At the time, it was Americas premier museum devoted exclusively to art. One of Abbys early recruits for the staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami. Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees, Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr, under Barrs guidance, the museums holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. Its first successful exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne. Abbys husband was opposed to the museum and refused to release funds for the venture. Nevertheless, he donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time. During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, the museum also gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars, Boy Leading a Horse was briefly contested over ownership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1941, MoMA hosted the exhibition, Indian Art of the United States. His brother, David Rockefeller, also joined the board of trustees in 1948. David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the garden and name it in honor of his mother
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Cuba
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Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is a country comprising the island of Cuba as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located in the northern Caribbean where the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and it is south of both the U. S. state of Florida and the Bahamas, west of Haiti, and north of Jamaica. Havana is the largest city and capital, other cities include Santiago de Cuba. Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean, with an area of 109,884 square kilometres, prior to Spanish colonization in the late 15th century, Cuba was inhabited by Amerindian tribes. It remained a colony of Spain until the Spanish–American War of 1898, as a fragile republic, Cuba attempted to strengthen its democratic system, but mounting political radicalization and social strife culminated in the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1952. Further unrest and instability led to Batistas ousting in January 1959 by the July 26 Movement, since 1965, the state has been governed by the Communist Party of Cuba. A point of contention during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, a nuclear war broke out during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Culturally, Cuba is considered part of Latin America, Cuba is a Marxist–Leninist one-party republic, where the role of the vanguard Communist Party is enshrined in the Constitution. Independent observers have accused the Cuban government of human rights abuses. It is one of the worlds last planned economies and its economy is dominated by the exports of sugar, tobacco, coffee, according to the Human Development Index, Cuba is described as a country with high human development and is ranked the eighth highest in North America. It also ranks highly in some metrics of national performance, including health care, the name Cuba comes from the Taíno language. The exact meaning of the name is unclear but it may be translated either as where fertile land is abundant, authors who believe that Christopher Columbus was Portuguese state that Cuba was named by Columbus for the town of Cuba in the district of Beja in Portugal. Before the arrival of the Spanish, Cuba was inhabited by three distinct tribes of indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Taíno, the Guanajatabey, and the Ciboney people. The ancestors of the Ciboney migrated from the mainland of South America, the Taíno arrived from Hispanola sometime in the 3rd century A. D. When Columbus arrived they were the dominant culture in Cuba, having a population of 150,000. The name Cuba comes from the native Taíno language and it is derived from either coabana meaning great place, or from cubao meaning where fertile land is abundant. The Taíno were farmers, while the Ciboney were farmers as well as fishers and hunter-gatherers, Columbus claimed the island for the new Kingdom of Spain and named it Isla Juana after Juan, Prince of Asturias. In 1511, the first Spanish settlement was founded by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar at Baracoa, other towns soon followed, including San Cristobal de la Habana, founded in 1515, which later became the capital
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Galicia (Spain)
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Galicia is an autonomous community of Spain and historic nationality under Spanish law. It had a population of 2,718,525 in 2016 and has an area of 29,574 km2. Galicia has over 1,660 km of coastline, including its islands and islets, among them Cíes Islands, Ons, Sálvora, Cortegada. Galicia was incorporated into the Roman Empire at the end of the Cantabrian Wars in 19 BC, in 410, the Germanic Suebi established a kingdom with its capital in Braga, this kingdom was incorporated into that of the Visigoths in 585. The Governor also presided the Real Audiencia do Reino de Galicia, from the 16th century, the representation and voice of the kingdom was held by an assembly of deputies and representatives of the cities of the kingdom, the Cortes or Junta of the Kingdom of Galicia. This institution was forcibly discontinued in 1833 when the kingdom was divided into four provinces with no legal mutual links. During the 19th and 20th centuries, demand grew for self-government and this resulted in the Statute of Autonomy of 1936, soon frustrated by Francos coup detat and subsequent long dictatorship. After democracy was restored the legislature passed the Statute of Autonomy of 1981, approved in referendum and currently in force, the interior of Galicia is characterized by a hilly landscape, mountain ranges rise to 2,000 m in the east and south. The coastal areas are mostly a series of rías and cliffs. The climate of Galicia is usually temperate and rainy, with drier summers. Its topographic and climatic conditions have made animal husbandry and farming the primary source of Galicias wealth for most of its history, allowing for a relative high density of population. With the exception of shipbuilding and food processing, Galicia was based on a farming and fishing economy until after the mid-20th century, in 2012, the gross domestic product at purchasing power parity was €56,000 million, with a nominal GDP per capita of €20,700. There are smaller populations around the cities of Lugo and Ourense. The political capital is Santiago de Compostela, in the province of A Coruña, Vigo, in the province of Pontevedra, is the most populous municipality, with 292,817, while A Coruña is the most populous city, with 215,227. 56% of the Galician population speak Galician as their first language and these Callaeci were the first tribe in the area to help the Lusitanians against the invading Romans. The Romans applied their name to all the tribes in the northwest who spoke the same language. In any case, Galicia, being per se a derivation of the ethnic name Kallaikói, the name evolved during the Middle Ages from Gallaecia, sometimes written Galletia, to Gallicia. This coincides with the spelling of the Castilian Spanish name, the historical denomination Galiza became popular again during the end of the 19th and the first three-quarters of the 20th century, and is still used with some frequency today
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Fernand Cormon
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Fernand Cormon was a French painter born in Paris. He became a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel, Eugène Fromentin, and Jean-François Portaels and his father was the playwright Eugène Cormon. His mother was Charlotte Furais, the actress, the Musée dOrsay has his Cain flying before Jehovahs Curse, and for the Mairie of the fourth arrondissement of Paris he executed in grisaille a series of panels, Birth, Death, Marriage, War, etc. A Chiefs Funeral, and a series of paintings for the Museum of natural history in Paris with themes from the Stone Age. He was appointed to the Legion of Honor in 1880, subsequently he also devoted himself to portraiture. Among his students with whom he was unsuccessful on this point were, for instance, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Louis Anquetin, Eugène Boch, Paul Tampier, Émile Bernard, other students included Alphonse Osbert, Marius Borgeaud, and Theodor Pallady. This article incorporates text from a now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh. Atelier Cormon ~1885 (note e. g. Toulouse-Lautrec, Tampier, Anquetin, last row, second after sculpture, É. Bernard
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Joseph Csaky
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Joseph Csaky was a Hungarian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist, best known for his early participation as a sculptor in the Cubist movement. Joseph Csaky was one of the first sculptors in Paris to apply the principles of pictorial Cubism to his art, a pioneer of modern sculpture, Csaky is among the most important sculptors of the early 20th century. He was an member of the Section dOr group between 1911 and 1914, and closely associated with De Stijl and Purism throughout the 1920s. Csaky fought alongside French soldiers during World War I and in 1922 became a naturalized French citizen and he was a founding member of lUnion des Artistes modernes in 1929. During World War II, Csaky joined forces with the French underground movement in Valençay, in the late 1920s, he collaborated with some other artists in designing furniture and other decorative pieces, including elements of the Studio House for the designer Jacques Doucet. After 1928, Csaky moved away from Cubism into a figurative or representational style for nearly thirty years. He exhibited internationally across Europe, but some of his pioneering artistic innovation was forgotten and his work today is primarily held by French and Hungarian institutions, as well as galleries and private collections both in France and abroad. József Csáky was born in Szeged, Hungary, then part of the monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A provincial southern city, Szeged is now the third-largest in the country, Csaky moved with his family to Budapest at an early age, where he frequented museums and galleries. In 1905 Csaky was accepted at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest, where he studied under the direction of the sculptor Mátrai Lajos, ifj. for one and a half years. In 1907, for six and a half months, he worked in the Zsolnay Factory in Pécs, making ceramic ashtrays and he worked briefly as a metal founder in Budapest, and at one point with a taxidermist. Attracted by its reputation for lights and great artists, Csaky made the decision to move to Paris France and he traveled mostly by foot, walking fifty or sixty kilometers per day during the summer of 1908. In Paris a new world opened up for him and he made a living by doing odd jobs, working as a peddler, stone cutter, and posing as a model for students at a local art school, making 20 francs a week. He later posed for artists in their own studios, making more money. By autumn of 1908 he shared a space at Cité Falguière with Joseph Brummer. Within three weeks of Csakys arrival in Paris, Brummer showed the newcomer a sculpture he was working on, Brummer told Csaky that another artist in Paris, a Spaniard named Pablo Picasso, was painting in the spirit of Negro sculptures. Shortly after, Csaky found a studio at the artists collective La Ruche in Montparnasse, the building had been constructed by Gustave Eiffel, and was adapted as artists studios by the sculptor Alfred Boucher. Among other émigré artists at La Ruche were Alexander Archipenko, Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, with his discovery of the work of Auguste Rodin laying the groundwork for an oeuvre characterized by a mastery of sculptural techniques, Csakys work in stone carving would evolve
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Groupe de femmes
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This sculpture formerly known from a black and white photograph had been erroneously entitled Deux Femmes, as the image captured on an angle showed only two figures. An additional photograph found in the Csaky family archives shows a view of the work. Csakys sculpture was exhibited at the 1912 Salon dAutomne, and the 1913 Salon des Indépendants, the whereabouts of Groupe de femmes is unknown and the sculpture is presumed to have been destroyed. Groupe de femmes is a sculpture, carved in a vertical format with unknown dimensions. The dominating central figure is flanked by a woman to her left and another to the right, two of the women are holding drapery that flows rigidly down to their legs to the base of the sculpture. The figures are constructed with a robust, muscular build, distilled in the form of almost androgynous stature, Csakys Groupe de femmes and the Head are lost sculptures that testify to Csakys early immersion in cubism. This works was likely realized at Csakys studio in La Ruche, petersburg, Jacques Lipchitz from Vilna, Piet Mondrian from Amsterdam, Moïse Kisling from Kraków, Pablo Picasso from Barcelona, Louis Marcoussis from Kraków, Chaim Soutine from Vilnius. During his proto-Cubist phase Csaky had already separated himself from the past, by 1911-12 Csaky participation in the avant-garde milieu was complete. Csaky was one of the first artists to apply Cubist principles to sculpture, michel Seuphor has written, Csaky, after Archipenko, was the first sculptor to join the cubists, with whom he exhibited from 1911 on. They were followed by Duchamp-Villon, brother of Marcel Duchamp and of Jacques Villon, in Groupe de femmes Csaky already showed a new way of representing nature, and the unwillingness to revert to classical, academic or traditional methods of representation. Csaky wrote of the direction his art had taken during the crucial years, true, I was not alone, but in the company of several artists who came from Eastern Europe. I joined the cubists in the Académie de La Palette, which became the sanctuary of the new direction in art, on my part I did not want to imitate anyone or anything. This is why I joined the cubists movement, Joseph Csaky exhibited the sculptures Groupe de femmes, 1911-1912, Portrait de M. S. H. 91, and Danseuse no.405 Jean Metzinger entered three works, Dancer in a café, La Plume Jaune, Femme à lÉventail, hung in the arts section inside La Maison Cubiste. Albert Gleizes, lHomme au Balcon,1912, also exhibited at the Armory show, New York, Chicago, andré Lhote, Le jugement de Paris,1912 František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue à deux couleurs,1912, and Amorpha Chromatique Chaude. Alexander Archipenko, Family Life,1912, sculpture Amedeo Modigliani, exhibited four sculptures of elongated and highly stylized heads Salon dAutomne, Salon des Indépendants, Paris,1913, listed in the catalogue as Groupe de femmes. René Reichard, Joseph Csaky, Frankfurt,1988, n, billy Klüver and Julie Martin, Kiki de Montparnasse, Flammarion,1989, salle XI, rep. p.47. Edith Balas, Joseph Csaky, A Pioneer of Modern Sculpture, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia,1998, fig.5, rep. p.23
18.
Amedeo Modigliani
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Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian Jewish painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a style characterized by elongation of faces and figures, that were not received well during his lifetime. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity, there he came into contact with prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. Modiglianis œuvre includes paintings and drawings, from 1909 to 1914, however, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. His main subject was portraits and full figures of humans, both in the images and in the sculptures, during his life, Amedeo Modigliani had little success, but after his death he achieved greater popularity and his works of art achieved high prices. He died at age 35 in Paris of tubercular meningitis, Modigliani was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion and his maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee. Fluent in many languages, her ancestors were authorities on sacred Jewish texts and had founded a school of Talmudic studies, family legend traced the family lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was an agency with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis. Modigliani’s father, Flaminio, was a member of an Italian Jewish family of successful businessmen, while not as culturally sophisticated as the Garsins, they knew how to invest in and develop thriving business endeavors. When the Garsin and Modigliani families announced the engagement of their children and he managed the mine in Sardinia and also managed the almost 30,000 acres of timberland the family owned. A reversal in fortune occurred to this family in 1883. An economic downturn in the price of metal plunged the Modiglianis into bankruptcy, ever resourceful, Modigliani’s mother used her social contacts to establish a school and, along with her two sisters, made the school into a successful enterprise. Modigliani was the child, whose birth coincided with the disastrous financial collapse of his fathers business interests. Amedeos birth saved the family from ruin, according to an ancient law, the bailiffs entered the familys home just as Eugenia went into labour, the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of her. Modigliani had a relationship with his mother, who taught him at home until he was 10. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about 11, when he was 16 he was taken ill again and contracted the tuberculosis which would later claim his life. After Modigliani recovered from the bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy, Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi
19.
Jean Metzinger
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Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote a theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the Neo-impressionism of Georges Seurat, between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works. From 1908 Metzinger experimented with the faceting of form, a style that would become known as Cubism. His early involvement in Cubism saw him both as an influential artist and an important theorist of the movement. The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view-points is treated, for the first time, in Metzingers Note sur la Peinture, before the emergence of Cubism, painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point. Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote the first major treatise on Cubism in 1912, Metzinger was a founding member of the Section dOr group of artists. During the First World War Metzinger furthered his role as a leading Cubist with his co-founding of the phase of the movement. He recognized the importance of mathematics in art, through a radical geometrization of form as an underlying basis for his wartime compositions. As post-war reconstruction began, a series of exhibitions at Léonce Rosenbergs Galerie de LEffort Moderne were to highlight order, the collective phenomenon of Cubism—now in its advanced revisionist form—became part of a widely discussed development in French culture, with Metzinger at its helm. In terms of the separation of culture and life, this period emerges as the most important in the history of Modernism, for Metzinger, the classical vision had been an incomplete representation of real things, based on an incomplete set of laws, postulates and theorems. He believed the world was dynamic and changing in time, that it appeared different depending on the point of view of the observer, each of these viewpoints were equally valid according to underlying symmetries inherent in nature. Jean Metzinger came from a prominent military family and his great-grandfather, Nicolas Metzinger, Captain in the 1st Horse Artillery Regiment, and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, had served under Napoleon Bonaparte. A street in the Sixième arrondissement of Nantes was named after Jeans grandfather, Jeans younger brother Maurice would become a musician, excelling as a cellist. By 1900 Jean was a student at Académie Cours Cambronne in Nantes, working under Hippolyte Touront, Metzinger, however, was interested in the current trends in painting. Metzinger sent three paintings to the Salon des Indépendants in 1903, and subsequently moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale, from the age of 20, Metzinger supported himself as a professional painter. He would show four times at Weills gallery,17 January-1 February 1913, March 1913, June 1914. It is at Berthe Weills that he would meet Max Jacob for the first time, Berthe Weill was also the first Parisian art dealer to sell works of Picasso. Along with Picasso and Metzinger, she helped discover Matisse, Derain, Amedeo Modigliani, in 1904 Metzinger exhibited six paintings in the Divisionist style at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne
20.
Henri Le Fauconnier
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Henri Victor Gabriel Le Fauconnier was a French Cubist painter born in Hesdin. Le Fauconnier was seen as one of the leading figures among the Montparnasse Cubists, at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants Le Fauconnier and colleagues Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay caused a scandal with their Cubist paintings. His paintings were exhibited in Moscow reproduced as examples of the latest art in Der Blaue Reiter Almanach. In 1901 Henri Le Fauconnier moved from northern France to Paris and he changed his from Fauconnier to Le Fauconnier and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1904 and 1905, implementing bold colors in line with Henri Matisse. He explored a style and put it into practice, painting nudes or portraits (such as that of the poet Pierre Jean Jouve in 1909. Under the influence of Paul Cézanne he developed his own form of Cubism, back in Paris, he mingles with the artistic and literary gathered around Paul Fort at the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse. At the 1909 Salon d’Automne Le Fauconnier exhibited alongside Constantin Brâncuși, Jean Metzinger, Metzinger had written in 1910 of mobile perspective as an interpretation of what would soon become known as Cubism with respect to Picasso, Braque, Delaunay and Le Fauconnier. At the invitation of Wassily Kandinsky, Le Fauconnier published a text in the catalog of the Neue Künstlervereinigung. He opened his Rue Visconti studio in Paris to artists eager like him to apply the lessons of Cézanne, with Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, he contributed to the Cubist scandal of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants. Le Fauconnier exhibited his vast Les Montagnards attaqués par des ours at the Salon dAutomne of 1912, february 1912 Henri Le Fauconnier was appointed to succeed Jacques-Émile Blanche as chef datelier of the avant-garde school of art Académie de La Palette. Le Fauconnier commissioned Jean Metzinger and André Dunoyer de Segonzac as full-time instructors for the sessions, Eugeniusz Żak. Le Fauconnier was a member of the Section dOr. At the outset of World War I Le Fauconnier moved to the Netherlands where he stayed for six years and his work at this time combined Cubism and Expressionism, which generated considerable success and influence in the Netherlands. He returned to France in 1920 where his paintings became more realistic and he died of a heart attack in Paris.1910, Little Schoolgirl,1907, The Signal,1915 The Huntsman,1912 Henri le Fauconnier The Modernist Journals Project
21.
Vincent van Gogh
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Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings and his suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty. Born into a family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling and he turned to religion, and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881 and his younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, in 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still lifes and his paintings grew brighter in colour as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the south of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include trees, cypresses, wheat fields. Van Gogh suffered from episodes and delusions and though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor and he spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris and his depression continued and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died from his injuries two days later, Van Gogh was unsuccessful during his lifetime, and was considered a madman and a failure. He became famous after his suicide, and exists in the imagination as the quintessential misunderstood genius. His reputation began to grow in the early 20th century as elements of his style came to be incorporated by the Fauves. The most comprehensive source on Van Gogh is the correspondence between him and his younger brother, Theo. Their lifelong friendship, and most of what is known of Vincents thoughts, Theo van Gogh was an art dealer and provided his brother with financial and emotional support, and access to influential people on the contemporary art scene. Theo kept all of Vincents letters to him, Vincent kept few of the letters he received, after both had died, Theos widow Johanna arranged for the publication of some of their letters. A few appeared in 1906 and 1913, the majority were published in 1914, Vincents letters are eloquent and expressive and have been described as having a diary-like intimacy, and read in parts like autobiography
22.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
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Toulouse-Lautrec is among the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period, with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. In a 2005 auction at Christies auction house, La Blanchisseuse, his painting of a young laundress, sold for US$22.4 million. The last part of his name means he was a member of an aristocratic family and his younger brother was born in 1867, but died the following year. After the death of his brother, Henris parents separated and a nanny ended up taking care of him, at the age of eight, Henri went to live with his mother in Paris where he drew sketches and caricatures in his exercise workbooks. The family quickly realised that Henris talents lay in drawing and painting, a friend of his father, René Princeteau, visited sometimes to give informal lessons. Some of Henris early paintings are of horses, a speciality of Princeteau, in 1875, Toulouse-Lautrec returned to Albi because his mother had concerns about his health. He took thermal baths at Amélie-les-Bains and his mother consulted doctors in the hope of finding a way to improve her sons growth, Toulouse-Lautrecs parents, the Comte and Comtesse, were first cousins, and he suffered from congenital health conditions sometimes attributed to a family history of inbreeding. At age 13, Toulouse-Lautrec fractured his right femur, at age 14, he fractured his left. The breaks did not heal properly, modern physicians attribute this to an unknown genetic disorder, possibly pycnodysostosis, or a variant disorder along the lines of osteopetrosis, achondroplasia, or osteogenesis imperfecta. Rickets aggravated by praecox virilism has also been suggested, afterwards, his legs ceased to grow, so that as an adult he was extremely short. He developed an adult-sized torso, while retaining his child-sized legs, additionally, he is reported to have had hypertrophied genitals. Physically unable to participate in many activities enjoyed by males his age and he became an important Post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer, and, through his works, recorded many details of the late-19th-century bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s, after initially failing college entrance exams, he passed his second attempt and completed his studies. Toulouse-Lautrecs mother had high ambitions and, with the aim of her son becoming a fashionable and respected painter and he was drawn to Montmartre, the area of Paris famous for its bohemian lifestyle and the haunt of artists, writers, and philosophers. Studying with Bonnat placed Toulouse-Lautrec in the heart of Montmartre, an area he rarely left over the next 20 years. After Bonnat took a new job, Toulouse-Lautrec moved to the studio of Fernand Cormon in 1882 and studied for a five years. At this time he met Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh, Cormon, whose instruction was more relaxed than Bonnats, allowed his pupils to roam Paris, looking for subjects to paint. During this period, Toulouse-Lautrec had his first encounter with a prostitute, which led him to paint his first painting of a prostitute in Montmartre, a woman rumoured to be Marie-Charlet
23.
Centre Georges Pompidou
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It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, along with Gianfranco Franchini. Because of its location, the Centre is known locally as Beaubourg and it is named after Georges Pompidou, the President of France from 1969 to 1974 who commissioned the building, and was officially opened on 31 January 1977 by President Valéry Giscard dEstaing. As of 2006, the Centre Pompidou has had over 180 million visitors since 1977 and more than 5,209,678 visitors in 2013, including 3,746,899 for the museum. The sculpture Horizontal by Alexander Calder, a mobile that is 7.6 m tall, was placed in front of the Centre Pompidou in 2012. Hoping to renew the idea of Paris as a city of culture and art. Paris also needed a large, free library, as one did not exist at this time. At first the debate concerned Les Halles, but as the settled, in 1968. A year later in 1969, the new president adopted the Beaubourg project, in the process of developing the project, the IRCAM was also housed in the complex. By the mid-1980s, the Centre Pompidou was becoming the victim of its huge and unexpected popularity, its activities. By 1992, the Centre de Création Industrielle was incorporated into the Centre Pompidou, since re-opening in 2000 after a three-year renovation, the Centre Pompidou has improved accessibility for visitors. Now they can access the escalators if they pay to enter the museum. The Centre was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, British architect Richard Rogers, the project was awarded to this team in an architectural design competition, the results of which were announced in 1971. It was the first time in France that international architects were allowed to participate, world-renowned architects Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Prouvé and Philip Johnson made up the jury which would select one design out of the 681 entries. National Geographic described the reaction to the design as love at second sight, an article in Le Figaro declared Paris has its own monster, just like the one in Loch Ness. The Pritzker jury said the Pompidou revolutionised museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, the Centre was built by GTM and completed in 1977. The building cost 993 million 1972 French francs, renovation work conducted from October 1996 to January 2000 was completed on a budget of 576 million 1999 francs. The black-painted mechanical sculptures are by Tinguely, the works by de Saint-Phalle. Video footage of the fountain appeared frequently throughout the French language telecourse, the Place Georges Pompidou in front of the museum is noted for the presence of street performers, such as mimes and jugglers
24.
Alfred Sisley
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Alfred Sisley was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting en plein air. He deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, among his important works are a series of paintings of the River Thames, mostly around Hampton Court, executed in 1874, and landscapes depicting places in or near Moret-sur-Loing. Over the years Sisleys power of expression and colour intensity increased, Sisley was born in Paris to affluent British parents. His father, William Sisley, was in the silk business, in 1857 at the age of 18, Sisley was sent to London to study for a career in business, but he abandoned it after four years and returned to Paris in 1861. Together they would paint landscapes en plein air rather than in the studio and this approach, innovative at the time, resulted in paintings more colourful and more broadly painted than the public was accustomed to seeing. Consequently, Sisley and his friends initially had few opportunities to exhibit or sell their work and their works were usually rejected by the jury of the most important art exhibition in France, the annual Salon. During the 1860s, though, Sisley was in a financial position than some of his fellow artists. In 1866, Sisley began a relationship with Eugénie Lesouezec, a Breton living in Paris, the couple had two children, son Pierre and daughter Jeanne. At the time, Sisley lived not far from Avenue de Clichy and the Café Guerbois, in 1868, his paintings were accepted at the Salon, but the exhibition did not bring him financial or critical success, nor did subsequent exhibitions. In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War began, and as a result Sisleys fathers business failed, for the remainder of his life he would live in poverty, as his paintings did not rise significantly in monetary value until after his death. Occasionally, however, Sisley would be backed by patrons, the first of these occurred in 1874 after the first independent Impressionist exhibition. Here, as art historian Anne Poulet has said, the landscapes with their constantly changing atmosphere were perfectly attuned to his talents. Unlike Monet, he never sought the drama of the ocean or the brilliantly colored scenery of the Côte dAzur. In 1881 Sisley made a brief voyage to Britain. In 1897 Sisley and his partner visited Britain again, and were married in Cardiff Register Office on 5 August. They stayed at Penarth, where Sisley painted at least six oils of the sea, in mid-August they moved to the Osborne Hotel at Langland Bay on the Gower Peninsula, where he produced at least eleven oil paintings in and around Langland Bay and Rotherslade Bay. They returned to France in October and this was Sisleys last voyage to his ancestral homeland
25.
Claude Monet
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Monets ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. From 1883 Monet lived in Giverny, where he purchased a house and property, Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the fifth floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He was the son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude. Despite being baptized Catholic, Monet later became an atheist, in 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the familys ship-chandling and grocery business and his mother was a singer, and supported Monets desire for a career in art. On 1 April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts, locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a student of Jacques-Louis David. On the beaches of Normandy around 1856 he met fellow artist Eugène Boudin, Boudin taught Monet en plein air techniques for painting. Both received the influence of Johan Barthold Jongkind, on 28 January 1857, his mother died. At the age of sixteen, he left school and went to live with his widowed, childless aunt, when Monet traveled to Paris to visit the Louvre, he witnessed painters copying from the old masters. Having brought his paints and other tools with him, he would go and sit by a window. Monet was in Paris for several years and met other painters, including Édouard Manet and others who would become friends. After drawing a low number in March 1861, Monet was drafted into the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry in Algeria for a seven-year period of military service. His prosperous father could have purchased Monets exemption from conscription but declined to do so when his son refused to give up painting. While in Algeria Monet did only a few sketches of scenes, a single landscape. In a Le Temps interview of 1900 however he commented that the light, after about a year of garrison duty in Algiers, Monet contracted typhoid fever and briefly went absent without leave. Following convalescence, Monets aunt intervened to get him out of the army if he agreed to complete a course at an art school and it is possible that the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet knew, may have prompted his aunt on this matter
26.
Paul Signac
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Paul Victor Jules Signac was a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the Pointillist style. Paul Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863 and he followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter after attending an exhibit of Monets work. He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered and he also painted a series of watercolors of French harbor cities in later years. In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, many of Signacs paintings are of the French coast. He loved to paint the water and he left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited his friends. Paul Signac, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Odilon Redon and Georges Seurat were among the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, the association began in Paris 29 July 1884 with the organization of massive exhibitions, with the device No jury nor awards. The purpose of Société des Artistes Indépendants—based on the principle of abolishing admission jury—is to allow the artists to present their works to public judgement with complete freedom, for the following three decades their annual exhibitions set the trends in art of the early 20th century. At the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, Henri Matisse exhibited the proto-Fauve painting Luxe, Signac purchased the work after the 1905 Salon des Indépendants. In 1908 Signac was elected president of the 24th Salon des Indépendants, in 1886 Signac met Vincent van Gogh in Paris. In 1887 the two regularly went to Asnières-sur-Seine together, where they painted such subjects as river landscapes. Initially, Van Gogh chiefly admired Signac’s loose painting technique, in March 1889, Signac visited Van Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a trip to Italy, seeing Genoa, Florence. In 1888, Signac discovered anarchist ideas by reading Elisee Reclus, Kropotkin and Jean Grave, with his friends Angrand Cross, Maximilien Luce and Camille Pissarro he contributed to Jean Grave’s paper Les Temps Nouveaux. His financial support was considerable, he sent regular cheques and made a gift of his works for five lotteries between 1895 and 1912, from his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colorful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large canvases that are carefully worked out in small, mosaic-like squares of color, quite different from the tiny. Signac himself experimented with various media, as well as oil paintings and watercolors he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink sketches composed of small, laborious dots. The Neo-Impressionists influenced the next generation, Signac inspired Henri Matisse and André Derain in particular, as president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists. Signac served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, in September 1913, Signac rented a house at Antibes, where he settled with Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange, who gave birth to their daughter Ginette on 2 October 1913
27.
Section d'Or
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The Section dOr, also known as Groupe de Puteaux, was a collective of painters, sculptors, poets and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism. Based in the Parisian suburbs, the group held meetings at the home of the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux. Active from 1911 to around 1914, members of the came to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911. The Salon de la Section dOr, held October 1912—the largest and most important public showing of Cubist works prior to World War I—exposed Cubism to an audience still. After the war, with support given by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, the Puteaux Group organized their first exhibition under the name Salon de la Section dOr at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris, October 1912. Following the 1911 Salon exhibitions the group formed by Le Fauconnier, Metzinger, Gleizes, Léger, francis Picabia was introduced to the circle, perhaps by Guillaume Apollinaire with whom he had recently become friendly. Most importantly was the contact established with Metzinger and the Duchamp brothers, the opening address was given by Apollinaire. The 1912 Salon de la Section dOr was arguably the most important pre-World War I Cubist exhibition, in the previous year the Cubists and a large number of their associates had exhibited at the Galerie de lArt Contemporain under the auspices of the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne. This exhibition had received attention in the press, though due to the diversity of the works presented it had been referred to as an exposition des fauves et cubistes. The Salon de la Section dOr, however, was accepted as being entirely Cubist in nature. Over 200 works were displayed, and the fact many of the artists showed artworks representative of their development from 1909 to 1912 gave the exhibition the allure of a Cubist retrospective. The inauguration was held from nine until midnight, for which the precedent was the opening of the 1903 Salon dAutomne. Invitations were widely diffused prior to the show, and many of the guests had to be turned away on opening night. Undoubtedly, due to the success of the exhibition, Cubism became recognized as a tendency, genre or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal. The idea of the Section dOr originated in the course of conversations between Gleizes, Metzinger and Jacques Villon, the groups title was suggested by Villon, after reading a 1910 translation of Leonardo da Vincis Trattato della Pittura by Joséphin Péladan. Peladan attached great significance to the golden section, and other similar geometric configurations. For Villon, this symbolized his belief in order and the significance of mathematical proportions, because it reflected patterns, jean Metzinger and the Duchamp brothers were passionately interested in mathematics. The name La Section dOr represented simultaneously a continuity with past traditions and current trends in related fields, the Section dOr group founded by some of the most prominent Cubists was in effect an homage to Georges Seurat
28.
Jacques Villon
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Jacques Villon was a French Cubist painter and printmaker. Born Emile Méry Frédéric Gaston Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, he came from a prosperous, while he was a young man, his maternal grandfather Emile Nicolle, successful businessman and artist, taught him and his siblings. There, he studied law at the University of Paris, to distinguish himself from his siblings, Gaston Duchamp adopted the pseudonym of Jacques Villon as a tribute to the French medieval poet François Villon. His work appeared in the satirical weekly Le Courrier français, in 1903 he helped organize the drawing section of the first Salon dAutomne in Paris. In 1904-1905 he studied art at the Académie Julian, during the First World War, Villon worked as a cartographer for the army. At first, he was influenced by Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, but later he participated in the fauvist, Cubist, by 1906, Montmartre was a bustling community and Jacques Villon moved to Puteaux in the quiet outskirts of Paris. There, he began to more of his time to working in drypoint. During this time he worked closely to develop his technique with other important printmakers such as Manuel Robbe and his isolation from the vibrant art community in Montmartre, together with his modest nature, ensured that he and his artwork remained obscure for a number of years. Villon was instrumental in having the group exhibit under the name Section dOr after the section of classical mathematics. Their first show, Salon de la Section dOr, held at the Galerie La Boétie in October 1912, in 1913, Villon created seven large drypoints in which forms break into shaded pyramidal planes. That year, he exhibited at the Armory Show in New York City and his works proved popular and all his art sold. From there, his reputation expanded so that by the 1930s he was known in the United States than in Europe. In May 2004, an oil painting by Villon dated 1913 entitled LAcrobate, an exhibition of Jacques Villons work was held in Paris in 1944 at the Galerie Louis Carré, following which he received honors at a number of international exhibitions. In 1938 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, in 1947 he was promoted to Officier of the Legion of Honor. In 1950, Villon received the Carnegie Prize, the highest award for painting in the world, the following year he was commissioned to design stained-glass windows for the cathedral at Metz, France. In 1956 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale exhibition, Villon died in his studio at Puteaux. In 1967, in Rouen, his last surviving artist brother Marcel helped organize an exhibition called Les Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, some of this family exhibition was later shown at the Musée National dArt Moderne in Paris. C. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, leading private collections which include the works of Villon are the Joachim Collection of Chicago, the Vess Collection of Detroit, and the Ginestet Collection of Paris
29.
Puteaux
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Puteaux is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located in the heart of the Hauts-de-Seine department 8.7 kilometres from the center of Paris, La Défense, Paris business district hosting the tallest buildings in the metropolitan area, spreads over the northern part of Puteaux and parts of the neighbouring communes Courbevoie and Nanterre. The inhabitants of Puteaux are called Putéoliens, the creation of the city dates from 1148, by Abbot Suger and gave him the name Putiauz. The foundation of Puteaux part of other towns in the region by Abbot Suger, as Carrières-sur-Seine, Vaucresson or Villeneuve-la-Garenne. This appeal was reinforced by certain privileges granted by the Abbot Suger, the name Putiauz comes from the old French Putel, which means a quagmire or swamp and was certainly making reference to the condition of the area before its reorganization. But another etymology exists, hence the name Puteaux would come from Latin puteoli, the name of Puteaux in turn appears to the sixteenth century or seventeenth century. Legend has it that Puteaux inspired the story of the gadfly from La Fontaine, located on the left bank of the river Seine, Puteaux borders Courbevoie to the north, Nanterre to the west and Suresnes to the south. In the east, Puteaux is connected to Paris by the bridge of Puteaux near Neuilly, the territory of the commune of Puteaux also includes the largest part of the Île de Puteaux, on the Seine. Within Puteaux several districts can be distinguished, the district Bas de Puteaux, located between the railway line and the Seine, is the oldest urbanized district. Notable in particular are the old church, the Théâtre des Hauts-de-Seine, the town hall, the town hall was built in 1934 and is a typical example of the architecture of this time. The boulevard Richard Wallace is the Champs-Élysées of Puteaux, the district La Défense is located in the north, separated by the circular boulevard. The district, developed since the end of the 1950s, is one of the business districts in Europe. It mainly consists of buildings, but some notable dwellings can be found within the district as well. Two thirds of the territory of La Défense is located within Puteaux, thus, the CNIT, the Arche de la Défense and the Quatre Temps shopping mall are in Puteaux. The district Île de Puteaux, on there are no dwellings besides some barges. A sporting complex, the Palais des sports, opened in July 2006, tour Pascal B in La Défense and in Puteaux has the head offices of the Bureau dEnquêtes sur les Événements de Mer and of the Ministry of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and Sea. The tax revenue of La Défense makes Puteaux one of the richest communes of France, Puteaux receives forty million euros per year coming from the companies within the district alone. Puteaux does not have a debt and its reserves, placed in Treasury bills
30.
Marcel Duchamp
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Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his artists as retinal art. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind, Marcel Duchamp was born at Blainville-Crevon in Normandy, France, and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Émile Frédéric Nicolle, his grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, paint. Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamps seven children, one died as an infant, Marcel Duchamp was the brother of, Jacques Villon, painter, printmaker Raymond Duchamp-Villon, sculptor Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, painter. At 8 years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers footsteps when he left home and began schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, two other students in his class also became well-known artists and lasting friends, Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont. For the next 8 years, he was locked into a regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not a student, his best subject was mathematics. He also won a prize for drawing in 1903, and at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize and he learned academic drawing from a teacher who unsuccessfully attempted to protect his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamps true artistic mentor at the time was his brother Jacques Villon, whose fluid, at 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting his sister Suzanne in various poses and activities. That summer he painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils. Duchamps early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles and he experimented with classical techniques and subjects. He studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, during this time Duchamp drew and sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use verbal puns, visual puns, or both, such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life. In 1905, he began his military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment. There he learned typography and printing processes—skills he would use in his later work, due to his eldest brother Jacques membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamps work was exhibited in the 1908 Salon dAutomne. The following year his work was featured in the Salon des Indépendants, of Duchamps pieces in the show, critic Guillaume Apollinaire—who was to become a friend—criticized what he called Duchamps very ugly nudes. The group came to be known as the Puteaux Group, or the Section dOr, uninterested in the Cubists seriousness or in their focus on visual matters, Duchamp did not join in discussions of Cubist theory, and gained a reputation of being shy
31.
Guillaume Apollinaire
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Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish descent. Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism. He is credited with coining the term cubism in 1911 to describe the art movement. The term Orphism is also his, Apollinaire wrote one of the earliest Surrealist literary works, the play The Breasts of Tiresias, which became the basis for the 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias. Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki was born in Rome, Italy, and was raised speaking French, Italian, and Polish. He emigrated to France in his teens and adopted the name Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother, born Angelika Kostrowicka, was a Polish noblewoman born near Navahrudak and his maternal grandfather was a general in the Russian Imperial Army who was killed in the Crimean War. Apollinaires father is unknown but may have been Francesco Costantino Camillo Flugi dAspermont, Francesco Flugi von Aspermont was a nephew of Conradin Flugi dAspermont, a poet who wrote in ladin putèr, and perhaps also of the Minnesänger Oswald von Wolkenstein. Apollinaire eventually moved from Rome to Paris and became one of the most popular members of the community of Paris. He became romantically involved with Marie Laurencin, who is identified as his muse. In late 1909 or early 1910, Metzinger painted a Cubist portrait of Apollinaire. In his Vie anecdotique, the poet proudly writes, I am honoured to be the first model of a Cubist painter, Jean Metzinger, in 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the Cubist movement soon to be known as the Section dOr. The opening address of the 1912 Salon de la Section dOr—the most important pre-World War I Cubist exhibition—was given by Apollinaire. On 7 September 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion of aiding and abetting the theft of the Mona Lisa and a number of Egyptian statuettes from the Louvre, but released him a week later. The theft of the statues was committed by a secretary of Apollinaires, Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret. Apollinaire implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was brought in for questioning in the theft of the Mona Lisa. The theft of the Mona Lisa was perpetrated by Vincenzo Peruggia, Apollinaire was active as a journalist and art critic for Le Matin, Intransigeant, and Paris Journal. He once called for the Louvre to be burnt down, Apollinaire wrote the preface for the first Cubist exposition outside of Paris, VIII Salon des Indépendants, Brussels,1911
32.
Albert Gleizes
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Albert Gleizes was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Gleizes was a founding member of the Section dOr group of artists. He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany. Gleizes spent four years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art. He was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, Gleizes exhibited regularly at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris, he was also a founder, organizer and director of Abstraction-Création. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing, La Peinture et ses lois, Vers une conscience plastique, La Forme et l’histoire and Homocentrisme. Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a designer who ran a large industrial design workshop. He was also the nephew of Léon Comerre, a portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome. The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and often skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry, finally, after completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes spent four years in the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army then began pursuing a career as a painter. Gleizes began to paint self-taught around 1901 in the Impressionist tradition and his first landscapes from around Courbevoie appear particularly inspired by Sisley or Pissarro. The density with which these works are painted and their solid framework suggest affinities with Divisionism which were noted by early critics. Gleizes was only years of age when his work titled La Seine à Asnières was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year Gleizes exhibited two paintings at the Salon dAutomne, in 1905 Gleizes was among the founders of lAssociation Ernest-Renan, a union of students opposed to military propaganda. Gleizes was in charge of the Section littéraire et artistique, organizing theater productions, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Gleizes exhibited Jour de marché en banlieue. Tending towards 1907 his work evolved into a Post-Impressionist style with strong Naturalist and Symbolist components, Gleizes and others decide to create an association fraternelle dartistes and rent a large house in Créteil. The Abbaye de Créteil was a community of artists that aimed to develop their art free of any commercial concerns. For nearly a year, Gleizes along with painters, poets, musicians and writers. A lack of income forced them to give up their cherished Abbaye de Créteil in early 1908 and Gleizes moved to rue du Delta near Montmartre, in 1908 Gleizes exhibited at the Toison dOr in Moscow
33.
Roger de La Fresnaye
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Roger de La Fresnaye was a French cubist painter. La Fresnaye was born in Le Mans where his father, an officer in the French army, was temporarily stationed, the La Fresnayes were an aristocratic family whose ancestral home, the Château de La Fresnaye, is in Falaise. His education was based, and was followed from 1903 to 1904 by studies at the Académie Julian in Paris. From 1908 he studied at the Académie Ranson under Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier and this demonstrates the dreamlike symbolist ambience and stylistic character of work by the Les Nabis group. From 1912 to 1914 La Fresnaye was a member of the Section dOr group of artists and he was influenced by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, but his work has a more decorative than structural feel and his prismatic colours reflect the influence of Robert Delaunay. He was a member of the Puteaux Group, an orphist offshoot of cubism led by Jacques Villon and his most famous work is The Conquest of the Air,1913, which depicts himself and his brother outdoors with a balloon in the background. La Fresnaye enlisted in the French army in World War I and his health deteriorated rapidly after the war. He never recovered the physical energy to undertake sustained work, in the later paintings that he did create, he abandoned cubist spatial analysis for a more linear style. He ceased painting in 1922 but continued to draw, de la Fresnaye died in Grasse in 1925 at the age of 40. Artcyclopedia - Links to Fresnayes works Roger de La Fresnaye in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
34.
Armory Show
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Among the many exhibitions that have been held in the vast spaces of U. S. The three-city exhibition started in New York Citys 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, from February 17 until March 15,1913. The exhibition went on to show at the Art Institute of Chicago and then to The Copley Society of Art in Boston, the show served as a catalyst for American artists, who became more independent and created their own artistic language. On 14 December 1911 an early meeting of what would become the Association of American Painters and Sculptors was organized at Madison Gallery in New York, the meeting included Henry Fitch Taylor, Jerome Myers, Elmer Livingston MacRae and Walt Kuhn. In January 1912, Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, and Arthur B, Davies joined together with some two dozen of their colleagues to reinforce a professional coalition, AAPS. They intended the organization to lead the public taste in art, other founding AAPS members included D. Putnam Brinley, Gutzon Borglum, John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke, Leon Dabo, William J. Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Jonas Lie, George Luks, Karl Anderson, James E. Fraser, Allen Tucker, Davies served as president of AAPS, with Kuhn acting as secretary. The AAPS members spent more than a year planning their first project, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, a show of giant proportions, unlike any New York had seen. The 69th Regiment Armory was settled on as the site for the exhibition in the spring of 1912, rented for a fee of $5,000. It was confirmed that the show would travel to Chicago. While in Paris Kuhn met up with Pach, who knew the art scene there intimately, only after Davies and Kuhn returned to New York in December did they issue an invitation for American artists to participate. Pach was responsible for securing loans from these painters for the Armory Show, most of the artists in Paris who sent works to the Armory Show knew Pach personally and entrusted their works to him. The Armory Show was the first, and, ultimately, the only exhibition mounted by the AAPS and it displayed some 1,300 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 avant-garde European and American artists. Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist works were represented, news reports and reviews were filled with accusations of quackery, insanity, immorality, and anarchy, as well as parodies, caricatures, doggerels and mock exhibitions. About the modern works, former President Theodore Roosevelt declared, Thats not art, the civil authorities did not, however, close down or otherwise interfere with the show. Julian Street, an art critic, wrote that the work resembled an explosion in a shingle factory, the painting was purchased from the Armory Show by Fredric C. The exhibition went on to show at the Art Institute of Chicago and then to The Copley Society of Art in Boston, while in Chicago, the exhibition created a scandal that reached the governors office. Several articles in the press recounted the issue, a visit of an investigator to the show and his report on the pictures caused Lieutenant Governor Barratt OHara to order an immediate examination of the entire exhibition
35.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the part of the 20th century. He was married to painter Georgia OKeeffe, Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the first son of German-Jewish immigrants Edward Stieglitz and Hedwig Ann Werner. His father was a lieutenant in the Union Army and he had five siblings, Flora, twins Julius and Leopold, Agnes and Selma. Alfred Stieglitz, seeing the relationship of the twins, wished he had a soul mate of his own during his childhood. Stieglitz attended Charlier Institute, a Christian school and the best private school in New York, the following year, his family began spending the summers at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains, a tradition that continued into Stieglitzs adulthood. So that he would qualify for admission to the City College of New York, Stieglitz was enrolled in a school for his senior year of high school. In 1881, Edward Stieglitz sold his company for US$400,000, Alfred Stieglitz enrolled in the Realgymnasium in Karlsruhe. The next year, Stieglitz studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and he enrolled in a chemistry class taught by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, a scientist and researcher, who worked on the chemical processes for developing photographs. In Vogel, Stieglitz found both the challenge he needed and an outlet for his growing artistic and cultural interests. He received an allowance of $1,200 a month, German artists Adolf von Menzel and Wilhelm Hasemann were his friends. He bought his first camera and traveled through the European countryside, taking photographs of landscapes and peasants in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. In 1884, his parents returned to America, but 20-year-old Stieglitz remained in Germany and collected books on photography and photographers in Europe, through his self-study, he saw photography as an art form. In 1887, he wrote his very first article, A Word or Two about Amateur Photography in Germany and he then wrote articles on the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography for magazines in England and Germany. He won first place for his photography, The Last Joke, Bellagio, the next year he won both first and second prizes in the same competition, and his reputation began to spread as several German and British photographic magazines published his work. In 1890, his sister Flora died while giving birth, Stieglitz considered himself an artist, but he refused to sell his photographs. His father purchased a small business for him so that he could earn a living in his chosen profession. Because he demanded high quality images and paid his employee high wages and he regularly wrote for The American Amateur Photographer magazine
36.
Solo show (art exhibition)
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A solo show or solo exhibition is an exhibition of the work of only one artist. The artwork may be paintings, drawings, etchings, collage, sculpture, the creator of any artistic technique may be the subject of a solo show. Other skills and crafts have similar types of shows for the creators, having solo shows of ones artwork marks the achievement of success and usually is accompanied by receptions and a great deal of publicity. The show may be of current work being produced, those from a time period, or representative work from different periods in the career of the artist. Art exhibitions have a history that dates back to 1623 and it is thought that the first solo exhibition in Britain was staged by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1785, the year after he refused to become a Royal Academician. Generally, as artists begin to show their work they are accepted by commercial gallery owners for display among the works of many or among others who work in the same area, the works of the artists are sold and the galleries take commissions. As artists gain stature and attract a following who will purchase their works in greater numbers, museums also hold exhibitions that change regularly and may choose to feature a solo show of the works of an artist as one of these exhibitions. Works that are gathered on loan from other museums or collectors also may be scheduled for exhibition at one museum as a solo show. Planning for the exhibitions is a long process, museums schedule their exhibitions for a given year well in advance and their negotiations may begin years before the shows are held
37.
291 (art gallery)
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291 is the commonly known name for an internationally famous art gallery that was located in Midtown Manhattan at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City from 1905 to 1917. Originally known as the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, the gallery was created and managed by photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the gallery is famous for two reasons. First, the exhibitions there helped bring art photography to the same stature in America as painting, pioneering artistic photographers such as Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White all gained critical recognition through exhibitions at 291. At the beginning of the 20th century photographys place in the world of art was still very indefinite. Although there had been major exhibitions of photography in the Europe, photographers were not considered real artists, even though many photographers had won awards in international salons. Stieglitz himself had won over 150 awards throughout the world by the end of the 1890s. After more than a year of arguing with the directors of the Camera Club, many of whom did not have any passion for photography as art, Stieglitz gave up and began looking for other forums. In late 1900 he met Edward Steichen, who had trained as a painter. Steichen shared the enthusiasm and passion of Stieglitz, and soon the two were planning how to change the course of photography in America. By the following year they had conceived of an exhibition of photography, the first to be judged by photographers themselves. In March 1902, an exhibition of American Pictorial Photography, arranged by The Photo-Secession opened to critical acclaim, while the journal give him a respected forum for showcasing pictorial photography and for publishing his viewpoints, it was not a financial success. By the end of 1904 Stieglitz was in a difficult position and it was judged by a jury of eminent American painters, including William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, which gave it considerable standing in the art world. Stieglitz and other saw it as a direct challenge to Stieglitzs reputation. Stieglitz countered this move by trying to get some of the best known photographers of Europe to join him as part of a united front. He traveled to London to meet some of the founders of the important photographic group The Linked Ring, including J. Crag Annan, Frederick H. Evans, Alvin Langdon Coburn. He was hoping to convince them to start a chapter of the Linked Ring in the United States and he also met with playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was an avid amateur photographer, about ways to promote photography as an art form. Unfortunately Stieglitz took ill before any of these led to anything. He was tired, frustrated and seeking a new way to carry out his mission of promoting photography for photographys sake – independent of any other art form
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New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
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Modern art
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Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with ideas about the nature of materials. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, more recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art. Matisses two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting, analytic cubism was jointly developed by Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, from about 1908 through 1912. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé, the notion of modern art is closely related to modernism. Although modern sculpture and architecture are reckoned to have emerged at the end of the 19th century, the beginnings of modern painting can be located earlier. The date perhaps most commonly identified as marking the birth of art is 1863. Earlier dates have also proposed, among them 1855 and 1784. In the words of art historian H, harvard Arnason, Each of these dates has significance for the development of modern art, but none categorically marks a completely new beginning. A gradual metamorphosis took place in the course of a hundred years, the strands of thought that eventually led to modern art can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and even to the 17th century. The important modern art critic Clement Greenberg, for instance, called Immanuel Kant the first real Modernist but also drew a distinction, The Enlightenment criticized from the outside. The French Revolution of 1789 uprooted assumptions and institutions that had for centuries been accepted with little question and this gave rise to what art historian Ernst Gombrich called a self-consciousness that made people select the style of their building as one selects the pattern of a wallpaper. The pioneers of art were Romantics, Realists and Impressionists. By the late 19th century, additional movements which were to be influential in art had begun to emerge. The advocates of realism stood against the idealism of the academic art that enjoyed public. The most successful painters of the day worked either through commissions or through public exhibitions of their own work. There were official, government-sponsored painters unions, while governments regularly held exhibitions of new fine
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291 (magazine)
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291 was an arts and literary magazine that was published from 1915 to 1916 in New York City. Initially intended as a way to bring attention to Stieglitzs gallery of the same name, alfred Stieglitz was one of the most active arts promoters in the world in the early 1910s. He was already famous for his own photography, he published the well-known magazine Camera Work, after the Armory Show in 1913, a trio of artists and supporters gathered around Stieglitz at his gallery, encouraged by his recent interest in promoting other art forms in addition to photography. In January 1915 they proposed the idea of starting a new magazine that would showcase the most avant-garde art of Europe and they named the new magazine after the gallery, and with Stieglitzs blessing the four of them began working on the first issue. Compared with his publications, Stieglitz was fairly detached from the project. He later said, I was more or less an onlooker, nonetheless, Stieglitz was not one to sit idly aside while something went on around him. He helped set the tone and direction of the magazine, beginning with its design, both were published in a large folio format. Each issue contained just four to six pages, sometimes hinged together to provide a fold-out spread, due to its size and cutting edge presentation, it had the look and feel of a work of art itself, not a magazine about art. Because of these influences art historian William Innes Homer has said In design and content, a regular subscription initially cost ten cents per issue or one dollar a year, the deluxe edition cost five times as much. Little attempt was made to subscribers, and no more than one hundred signed up for the regular edition. There were only eight known subscribers to the deluxe edition, Stieglitz had 500 extra copies printed of Issue No. 7–8, which featured his photograph The Steerage, because it had recently been published for the first time and attracted very positive comments, he anticipated a huge demand for the image. The demand did not materialize, and none of the copies was sold. Only twelve numbers of 291 were published, but three of them were double numbers so just nine actual issues were printed and it never attracted a wide audience, and the high costs of production became too much to sustain. Stieglitz had hundreds of copies at his gallery when he closed it in 1917. In 1917, Francis Picabia founded the magazine 391 in Barcelona, all issues are highly valued now, and a complete set of the original issues is very rare. One of the sets is in the collection of the U. S. Library of Congress in Washington, DC, a bound reprint edition was published by the Arno Press in 1972 and may be found in large university and public libraries
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Man Ray
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Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in France. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements and he produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his photography, and he was a renowned fashion, Man Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called rayographs in reference to himself. During his career as an artist, Man Ray allowed few details of his life or family background to be known to the public. He even refused to acknowledge that he ever had an other than Man Ray. Man Ray was born as Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and he was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants. He had a brother and two sisters, the youngest born in 1897 shortly after settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray, Man Rays brother chose the surname in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was called Manny as a nickname, changed his first name to Man, Man Rays father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home. He enlisted his children to assist him from an early age, Man Rays mother enjoyed designing the familys clothes and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric. Man Ray wished to disassociate himself from his background. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, Art historians have noted similarities between Rays collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring. Mason Klein, curator of a Man Ray exhibition at the Jewish Museum, titled Alias Man Ray, The Art of Reinvention, Man Ray was the uncle of the photographer Naomi Savage, who learned some of his techniques and incorporated them into her own work. Man Ray displayed artistic and mechanical abilities during childhood and his education at Brooklyns Boys High School from 1904 to 1909 provided him with solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. While he attended school, he educated himself with frequent visits to the art museums. After his graduation, Ray was offered a scholarship to study architecture, Man Rays parents were disappointed by their sons decision to pursue art, but they agreed to rearrange the familys modest living quarters so that Rays room could be his studio. The artist remained in the home over the next four years. During this time, he worked steadily towards becoming a professional painter, Man Ray earned money as a commercial artist and was a technical illustrator at several Manhattan companies
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National Gallery of Art
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The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D. C. located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated an art collection and funds for construction. The Gallery often presents temporary special exhibitions spanning the world and the history of art and it is one of the largest museums in North America. In 1930 Mellon formed the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, when quizzed by Abbot, he explained that the project was in the hands of the Trust and that its decisions were partly dependent on the attitude of the Government towards the gift. Designed by architect John Russell Pope, the new structure was completed and accepted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of the American people on March 17,1941. Neither Mellon nor Pope lived to see the completed, both died in late August 1937, only two months after excavation had begun. At the time of its inception it was the largest marble structure in the world, as anticipated by Mellon, the creation of the National Gallery encouraged the donation of other substantial art collections by a number of private donors. The Gallerys East Building was constructed in the 1970s on much of the land left over from the original congressional joint resolution. It was funded by Mellons children Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, designed by famed architect I. M. Pei, the contemporary structure was completed in 1978 and was opened on June 1 of that year by President Jimmy Carter. The new building was built to house the Museums collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures. The design received a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1981, the final addition to the complex is the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. Completed and opened to the public on May 23,1999, the National Gallery of Art is supported through a private-public partnership. The United States federal government provides funds, through annual appropriations, to support the museums operations, all artwork, as well as special programs, are provided through private donations and funds. The museum is not part of the Smithsonian Institution, noted directors of the National Gallery have included David E. Finley, Jr. John Walker, and J. Carter Brown. Rusty Powell III is the current director, entry to both buildings of the National Gallery of Art is free of charge. From Monday through Saturday, the museum is open from 10 a. m. –5 p. m. it is open from 11 –6 p. m. on Sundays and it is closed on December 25 and January 1. The museum comprises two buildings, the West Building and the East Building linked by an underground passage
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