National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, 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 funds for construction; the core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, Chester Dale; the Gallery's collection of paintings, prints, sculpture and decorative arts traces the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder. The Gallery's campus includes the original neoclassical West Building designed by John Russell Pope, linked underground to the modern East Building, designed by I. M. Pei, the 6.1-acre Sculpture Garden.
The Gallery presents temporary special exhibitions spanning the world and the history of art. It is one of the largest museums in North America. Pittsburgh banker Andrew W. Mellon began gathering a private collection of old master paintings and sculptures during World War I. During the late 1920s, Mellon decided to direct his collecting efforts towards the establishment of a new national gallery for the United States. In 1930 for tax reasons, Mellon formed the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, to be the legal owner of works intended for the gallery. In 1930–1931, the Trust made its first major acquisition, 21 paintings from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg as part of the Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings, including such masterpieces as Raphael's Alba Madonna, Titian's Venus with a Mirror, Jan van Eyck's Annunciation. In 1929 Mellon had initiated contact with the appointed Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Charles Greeley Abbot. Mellon was appointed in 1931 as a Commissioner of the Institution's National Gallery of Art.
When the director of the Gallery retired, Mellon asked Abbot not to appoint a successor, as he proposed to endow a new building with funds for expansion of the collections. However, Mellon's trial for tax evasion, centering on the Trust and the Hermitage paintings, caused the plan to be modified. In 1935, Mellon announced in The Washington Star, his intention to establish a new gallery for old masters, separate from the Smithsonian; when asked by Abbot, he explained that the project was in the hands of the Trust and that its decisions were dependent on "the attitude of the Government towards the gift". In January 1937, Mellon formally offered to create the new Gallery. On his birthday, 24 March 1937, an Act of Congress accepted the collection and building funds, approved the construction of a museum on the National Mall; the new gallery was to be self-governing, not controlled by the Smithsonian, but took the old name "National Gallery of Art" while the Smithsonian's gallery would be renamed the "National Collection of Fine Arts".
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 museum completed. At the time of its inception it was the largest marble structure in the world; the museum stands on the former site of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station, where in 1881 a disgruntled office seeker, Charles Guiteau, shot President James Garfield. As anticipated by Mellon, the creation of the National Gallery encouraged the donation of other substantial art collections by a number of private donors. Founding benefactors included such individuals as Paul Mellon, Samuel H. Kress, Rush H. Kress, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Chester Dale, Joseph Widener, Lessing J. Rosenwald and Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch; the Gallery's East Building was constructed in the 1970s on much of the remaining land left over from the original congressional action. Andrew Mellon's children, Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, funded the building.
Designed by 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 Museum's collection of modern paintings, drawings and prints, as well as study and research centers and offices. 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 location provides an outdoor setting for exhibiting a number of pieces from the Museum's contemporary sculpture collection; 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 museum's operations and maintenance. All artwork, as well as special programs, are provided through private funds; the museum is not part of the Smithsonian Institution. Noted directors of the National Gallery have included David E. Finley, Jr. John Walker, J. Carter Brown.
Earl A. "Rusty" Powell III was named director in 1993. In March 2019 he was be succeeded by Kaywin Feldman, past director and president of the Minneapolis In
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives and airbrushes, can be used; the final work is called a painting. Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing in elements such as drawing, composition, narration, or abstraction. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, abstract, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by religious art. Examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery, to Biblical scenes Sistine Chapel ceiling, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other images of Eastern religious origin. In art, the term painting describes the result of the action; the support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, canvas, glass, pottery, leaf and concrete, the painting may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, paper, gold leaf, as well as objects.
Color, made up of hue and value, dispersed over a surface is the essence of painting, just as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music. Color is subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West; some painters, theoreticians and scientists, including Goethe 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 formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as F or C♯. For a painter, color is not divided into basic and derived colors. Painters deal with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, Cobalt blue, so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not speaking, means of painting.
Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, because of this, the perception of a painting is subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to "light" in painting, "shades" to dynamics, "coloration" is to painting as the specific timbre of musical instruments is to music; these elements do not form a melody of themselves. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting to include, as one example, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense; some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of 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, many others; these images can be printed onto traditional canvas. Jean Metzinger's mosaic-like Divisionist technique had its parallel in literature. I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables I use strokes which, variable in quantity, cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature.
Rhythm, for artists such as Piet Mondrian, is important in painting as it is in music. If one defines rhythm as "a pause incorporated into a sequence" there can be rhythm in paintings; these pauses allow creative force to intervene and add new creations—form, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art, it directly affects the aesthetic value of that work; this is because the aesthetic value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the aesthetic value. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul. Wassily Kandinsky used musical terms to identify his works. Kandinsky theorized that "music is the ultimate teacher," and subsequently embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions.
Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, yellow is the color of middle C on a brassy trumpet. In 1871 the young Kandinsky learned to play the cello. Kandinsky's stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" illustrates his "synaesthetic" concept of a universal correspondence of forms and musical sounds. Music d
Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Stockbridge is a town in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Metropolitan Statistical Area; the population was 1,947 at the 2010 census. A year-round resort area, Stockbridge is home to the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Austen Riggs Center, Chesterwood and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French. Stockbridge was first settled by English missionaries in 1734, who established it as a mission for the Mahican Indian tribe known as the Stockbridge Indians; the township was set aside for the tribe by English colonists as a reward for their assistance against the French in the French and Indian Wars. The Reverend John Sergeant from Newark, New Jersey, was their missionary. Sergeant was succeeded in this post by Jonathan Edwards, a notable Christian theologian associated with the First Great Awakening. First chartered as Indian Town in 1737, the village was incorporated on June 22, 1739 as Stockbridge; the English colonists named it after Stockbridge in England.
Although the Massachusetts General Court had assured the Stockbridge Indians that their land would never be sold, the agreement was rescinded. Despite the aid by the tribe during the Revolutionary War, the state forced their relocation to the west, first to New York State and to Wisconsin; the village was taken over by British-American settlers. With the arrival of the railroad in 1850, Stockbridge developed as a summer resort for the wealthy of Boston and other major cities. Many large houses, called Berkshire Cottages, were built in the area before World War I and the advent of the income tax. One estate on the Lenox border, was adapted for use as the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since 1853, Stockbridge has benefited from the presence of the Laurel Hill Association, a village beautification society; the Stockbridge Bowl Association maintains and preserves the natural beauty of Stockbridge Bowl and the surrounding Bullard Woods. Stockbridge was the home of a freed slave, late in her life.
The former slave engaged the attorney Theodore Sedgwick to file a freedom suit on her behalf, based on the statements in the new state constitution in 1780. In the case with a slave named Brom, the county court ruled that they were both free under the constitution, their case served as precedent to a case before the State Supreme Court ending slavery in Massachusetts. Freeman transferred as a free woman to work in the household of Sedgwick. Working in the household was Agrippa Hull, a free black veteran of the war, who became the largest black landowner in Stockbridge. Freeman was buried in the Sedgwick family plot at the Stockbridge Cemetery. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a daughter of Theodore and his wife, became a renowned 19th-century literary figure, she was born in Stockbridge in 1789. She is the author including her most famous, Hope Leslie. In the Curtisville area, now known as the Interlaken part of Stockbridge, Albrecht Pagenstecher, an immigrant from Saxony, established the first wood-based newsprint paper mill in the United States, in March 1867.
Pagenstecher went on to found "numerous pulp and paper mills throughout the Northeast and Canada" and serve on the Board of Directors of the International Paper Company. The town has a tradition as an art colony; the sculptor Daniel Chester French lived and worked at his home and studio called Chesterwood. Norman Rockwell painted many of his works in Stockbridge, home to the Norman Rockwell Museum. According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 23.7 sq mi, of which 22.7 sq mi is land and 0.93 sq mi, or 3.97%, is water. Stockbridge is bordered by Richmond to the northwest, Lenox to the north and northeast, Lee to the east, Great Barrington to the south, West Stockbridge to the west; the town is located 13.5 miles south of Pittsfield, 35 miles southeast of Albany, New York, 45 miles west-northwest of Springfield, 130 miles west of Boston. Set among the Berkshire Mountains, Stockbridge is drained by the Housatonic River, which runs through the center of town; the river is fed by several marshy brooks and lakes, including Mohawk Lake to the west, Agawam Lake to the south, Lake Averic in the northwest, Lake Mahkeenac known as the Stockbridge Bowl, to the north.
Stockbridge Bowl is the site of a town beach, a boating club, a summer camp, Camp Mah-Kee-Nac. North of the bowl lies parts of Tanglewood. To either side of the bowl lie West Stockbridge Mountain and Rattlesnake Hill. To the south, Monument Mountain peaks on the Great Barrington town line, Beartown Mountain peaks to the east, closer to the Lee town line; the town is nearly bisected by the Massachusetts Turnpike. There are exits in neighboring West Lee. Several state routes, including Route 102, Route 183 and U. S. Route 7 all pass through town, with Routes 102 and 7 sharing a short stretch in downtown Stockbridge, Routes 102 and 183 meeting in the village of Larrywaug. In this village are the Berkshire Botanical Gardens and the Norman Rockwell Museum. South of there, in the village of Glendale, Massachusetts lies Chesterwood; the Housatonic Railroad, the main rail line between Pittsfield and Great Barrington, passes through the town and lies on the southern bank of the river. The town lies along a Berkshire Regional Transit Authority bus line, which provides service between Pittsfield and Great Barrington.
Pittsfield is the site of the nearest regional bus service, as well as regional Amtrak service. There are local airports in Pittsfield and Great Barrington, the nearest national air service is located at Albany
Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher education in Massachusetts; the institution was named after the town, which in turn had been named after Lord Amherst. Established as a men's college, Amherst became coeducational in 1975. Amherst is an undergraduate four-year institution. Students choose courses from 38 major programs in an open curriculum and are not required to study a core curriculum or fulfill any distribution requirements. For the class of 2023, Amherst received 10,567 applications and accepted 1,144, yielding a 10.8% acceptance rate. Amherst was ranked as the best liberal arts college in the country for 2018–19 by The Wall Street Journal, the second best liberal arts college in the country by U. S. News & World Report, 16th out of all U. S. colleges and universities by Forbes in their 2018 rankings.
Amherst competes in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Amherst has had close relationships and rivalries with Williams College and Wesleyan University, which form the Little Three colleges; the college is a member of the Five College Consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other Pioneer Valley institutions: Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Founded in 1821, Amherst College developed out of the secondary school Amherst Academy; the college was suggested as an alternative to Williams College, struggling to stay open. Although Williams remained open, Amherst was formed and diverged from its Williams roots into an individual institution. In 1812, funds were raised in Amherst for Amherst Academy; the academy incorporated in 1816. The institution was named after the town, which in turn had been named after Jeffery, Lord Amherst, a veteran from the Seven Years' War and commanding general of the British forces in North America.
On November 18, 1817, a project was adopted at the Academy to raise funds for the free instruction of "indigent young men of promising talents and hopeful piety, who shall manifest a desire to obtain a liberal education with a sole view to the Christian ministry." This required a substantial investment from benefactors. During the fundraising for the project, it became clear that without larger designs, it would be impossible to raise sufficient funds; this led the committee overseeing the project to conclude. On August 18, 1818, the Amherst Academy board of trustees accepted this conclusion and began building a new college. Moore President of Williams College, still believed that Williamstown was an unsuitable location for a college, with the advent of Amherst College was elected its first president on May 8, 1821. At its opening, Amherst had forty-seven students. Fifteen of these had followed Moore from Williams College; those fifteen represented about one-third of the whole number at Amherst, about one-fifth of the whole number in the three classes to which they belonged in Williams College.
President Moore died on June 29, 1823, was replaced with a Williams College trustee, Heman Humphrey. Williams alumni are fond of an apocryphal story ascribing the removal of books from the Williams College library to Amherst College. In 1995, Williams president Harry C. Payne declared the story false, but many still nurture the legend. Amherst grew and for two years in the mid-1830s it was the second largest college in the United States, second only to Yale. In 1835, Amherst attempted to create a course of study parallel to the classical liberal arts education; this parallel course focused less on Greek and Latin, instead focusing on English, Spanish, economics, etc. The parallel course did not take hold, until the next century. Amherst was founded as a non-sectarian institution "for the classical education of indigent young men of piety and talents for the Christian ministry,". One of the hallmarks of the new college was its Charity Fund, an early form of financial aid that paid the tuition of poorer students.
Although non-denominational, the initial Amherst was considered a religiously conservative institution with a strong connection to Calvinism, as a result, there was considerable debate in the Massachusetts government over whether the new college should receive an official charter from the state, a charter was not granted until February 21, 1825. As a result of the official charter being granted four years after the official founding of the college, the Amherst seal lists a date of 1825. Religious conservatism persisted at Amherst until the mid-nineteenth century: students who consumed alcohol or played cards were subject to expulsion, there were a number of religious revivals at Amherst where mobs of righteous students would herd less religious students into the chapel and berate them for lack of piety. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the college began a transition towards secularism, culminating in the demolishing of the college church in 1949. Academic hoods in the United States are traditionally lined with the official colors of the school, in theory so watchers can tell where the hood wearer earned his or her degree.
Amherst's hoods are purple with a white stripe or chevron, said to signify that Amherst was born of Williams. Amherst records one of the first uses of Latin honors of any American college, dating back to 1881
Naumkeag
Naumkeag is the former country estate of noted New York City lawyer Joseph Hodges Choate located at 5 Prospect Hill Road, Massachusetts. The estate's centerpiece is a 44-room, Shingle Style country house designed principally by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White, constructed in 1886 and 1887; the estate is noted for its large gardens, which were designed in the mid-20th century by noted landscape designer Fletcher Steele in conjunction with Choate's daughter Mabel. A National Historic Landmark District, Naumkeag is now owned by The Trustees of Reservations, who operate it as a nonprofit museum. Naumkeag was designed by architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White in 1885 as the summer estate for Joseph Hodges Choate, a prominent New York City attorney and American ambassador to England from 1899 to 1905, his daughter Mabel; the house is built in the Shingle Style with a wood-shingled exterior featuring brick and stone towers, prominent gables and large porch, interiors with fine woodwork.
It contains the Choate family's furniture, Chinese porcelain, artwork collected from America and the Far East. The house sits within 8 acres of terraced gardens and landscaped grounds surrounded by 40 acres of woodland and pasture, its grounds were first designed in the late 1880s by Nathan Barrett replanned and expanded between 1926 and 1956 by the noted landscape designer Fletcher Steele. Barrett's original designs included two terraces, perennial beds, an evergreen topiary. Steele's additions include the Afternoon Garden. Colonial settlement of the Prospect Hill section of Stockbridge began with the town's founding as a Native American mission community in the 1730s; the future site of Naumkeag was acquired by New York lawyer David Dudley Field in the 1870s, purchased by Joseph Hodges Choate in 1884. Choate's family had vacationed in Stockbridge, had picnicked on the property. Choate persuaded Field to part with 40 acres on the south side of the hill. Choate was a longtime friend of architect Charles McKim, but most of the architectural design work was done by McKim's partner Stanford White.
Although design work began shortly after the purchase, construction was delayed by the death of Choate's son. The house was completed in 1887 at a cost of about $35,000. White was instrumental in providing the decorations and furnishings of the house, traveling to Europe with the Choates for the purpose; the house underwent a variety of alterations and additions, some guided by architects George de Gersdorff and Charles Platt. The library was expanded in 1897; the number of bathrooms was raised from four to seven in the early years of the 20th century. These changes, which included the addition of a porch to the master bedroom, necessitated the addition of a dormer on the third floor and a number of new windows. During the period of Mabel Choate's ownership only modest changes were made. Joseph Choate first offered the landscape design to Frederick Law Olmsted, but rejected his proposal to place the house halfway down the hill, where a favorite oak tree was located; the landscaping contract was instead given to Nathan Barrett, a self-taught designer best known for his municipal work.
Barrett's vision of the landscape was implemented between 1884 and 1894. His design included formal flower gardens near the house, had a broad meadow slope down the hill, with an orchard and the family cemetery plot at the bottom. For the main fountain Choate commissioned White's friend and sculptor Frederick MacMonnies to produce a work. Between 1895 and 1925 minor changes were made to the gardens under the guidance of Percival Gallagher and Marian Coffin. Design decisions in the years were dominated by Choate's daughter Mabel after Choate's death in 1917. Mabel acquired full control of the estate after her mother's death in 1929. Mabel Choate began her long and fruitful collaboration with designer Fletcher Steele in 1926. Upon her death in 1958 the estate was bequeathed to the Trustees of Reservations, to be "an authentic representation of the times and manner of living which it now reflects."Naumkeag's main house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Its designation was made for the architecture and content of the house, which are well-preserved examples of a Gilded Age country estate, for the innovative landscape design work of Fletcher Steele.
Berkshire Cottages Ventfort Hall The Mount Chesterwood Mission House National Register of Historic Places listings in Berkshire County, Massachusetts List of National Historic Landmarks in Massachusetts Broderick, Mosette Glaser. Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture and Class in America's Gilded Age. New York: Knopf. ISBN 9780307594273. OCLC 698447571. McAlester and Lee. Great American Houses and Their Architectural Styles. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 1558597506. OCLC 30154945. Naumkeag, The Trustees of Reservations, 2005; the Trustees of Reservations: official Naumkeag website Lalh.org: "Fletcher Steele at Naumkeag" — online video on the gardens and their designer. U. S. Department of the Interior: "Interior Secretary Designates 12 National Historic Landmarks" —
World War I
World War I known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history, it is one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide. On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb Yugoslav nationalist, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, leading to the July Crisis. In response, on 23 July Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia. Serbia's reply failed to satisfy the Austrians, the two moved to a war footing. A network of interlocking alliances enlarged the crisis from a bilateral issue in the Balkans to one involving most of Europe.
By July 1914, the great powers of Europe were divided into two coalitions: the Triple Entente—consisting of France and Britain—and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Russia felt it necessary to back Serbia and, after Austria-Hungary shelled the Serbian capital of Belgrade on the 28th, partial mobilisation was approved. General Russian mobilisation was announced on the evening of 30 July; when Russia failed to comply, Germany declared war on 1 August in support of Austria-Hungary, with Austria-Hungary following suit on 6th. German strategy for a war on two fronts against France and Russia was to concentrate the bulk of its army in the West to defeat France within four weeks shift forces to the East before Russia could mobilise. On 2 August, Germany demanded free passage through Belgium, an essential element in achieving a quick victory over France; when this was refused, German forces invaded Belgium on 3 August and declared war on France the same day. On 12 August and France declared war on Austria-Hungary.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Alliance, opening fronts in the Caucasus and the Sinai Peninsula. The war was fought in and drew upon each power's colonial empire as well, spreading the conflict to Africa and across the globe; the Entente and its allies would become known as the Allied Powers, while the grouping of Austria-Hungary and their allies would become known as the Central Powers. The German advance into France was halted at the Battle of the Marne and by the end of 1914, the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, marked by a long series of trench lines that changed little until 1917. In 1915, Italy opened a front in the Alps. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915 and Greece joined the Allies in 1917, expanding the war in the Balkans; the United States remained neutral, although by doing nothing to prevent the Allies from procuring American supplies whilst the Allied blockade prevented the Germans from doing the same the U. S. became an important supplier of war material to the Allies.
After the sinking of American merchant ships by German submarines, the revelation that the Germans were trying to incite Mexico to make war on the United States, the U. S. declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. Trained American forces would not begin arriving at the front in large numbers until mid-1918, but the American Expeditionary Force would reach some two million troops. Though Serbia was defeated in 1915, Romania joined the Allied Powers in 1916 only to be defeated in 1917, none of the great powers were knocked out of the war until 1918; the 1917 February Revolution in Russia replaced the Tsarist autocracy with the Provisional Government, but continuing discontent at the cost of the war led to the October Revolution, the creation of the Soviet Socialist Republic, the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by the new government in March 1918, ending Russia's involvement in the war. This allowed the transfer of large numbers of German troops from the East to the Western Front, resulting in the German March 1918 Offensive.
This offensive was successful, but the Allies rallied and drove the Germans back in their Hundred Days Offensive. Bulgaria was the first Central Power to sign an armistice—the Armistice of Salonica on 29 September 1918. On 30 October, the Ottoman Empire capitulated. On 4 November, the Austro-Hungarian empire agreed to the Armistice of Villa Giusti after being decisively defeated by Italy in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. With its allies defeated, revolution at home, the military no longer willing to fight, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated on 9 November and Germany signed an armistice on 11 November 1918. World War I was a significant turning point in the political, cultural and social climate of the world; the war and its immediate aftermath sparked numerous uprisings. The Big Four (Britain, the United States, It
Beaux-Arts architecture
Beaux-Arts architecture was the academic architectural style taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from the 1830s to the end of the 19th century. It drew upon the principles of French neoclassicism, but incorporated Gothic and Renaissance elements, used modern materials, such as iron and glass, it was an important style in France until the end of the 19th century. It had a strong influence on architecture in the United States, because of the many prominent American architects who studied at the Beaux-Arts, including Henry Hobson Richardson, John Galen Howard, Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan; the "Beaux Arts" style evolved from the French classicism of the Style Louis XIV, French neoclassicism beginning with Louis XV and Louis XVI. French architectural styles before the French Revolution were governed by Académie royale d'architecture following the French Revolution, by the Architecture section of the Académie des Beaux-Arts; the Academy held the competition for the "Grand Prix de Rome" in architecture, which offered prize winners a chance to study the classical architecture of antiquity in Rome.
The formal neoclassicism of the old regime was challenged by four teachers at the Academy, Joseph-Louis Duc, Félix Duban, Henri Labrouste and Léon Vaudoyer, who had studied at the French Academy in Rome at the end of the 1820s, They wanted to break away from the strict formality of the old style by introducing new models of architecture from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Their goal was to create an authentic French style based on French models, their work was aided beginning in 1837 by the creation of the Commission of Historic Monuments, headed by the writer and historian Prosper Mérimée, by the great interest in the Middle Ages caused by the publication in 1831 of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo. Their declared intention was to "imprint upon our architecture a national character."The style referred to as Beaux-Arts in English reached the apex of its development during the Second Empire and the Third Republic that followed. The style of instruction that produced Beaux-Arts architecture continued without major interruption until 1968.
The Beaux-Arts style influenced the architecture of the United States in the period from 1880 to 1920. In contrast, many European architects of the period 1860–1914 outside France gravitated away from Beaux-Arts and towards their own national academic centers. Owing to the cultural politics of the late 19th century, British architects of Imperial classicism followed a somewhat more independent course, a development culminating in Sir Edwin Lutyens's New Delhi government buildings; the Beaux-Arts training emphasized the mainstream examples of Imperial Roman architecture between Augustus and the Severan emperors, Italian Renaissance, French and Italian Baroque models but the training could be applied to a broader range of models: Quattrocento Florentine palace fronts or French late Gothic. American architects of the Beaux-Arts generation returned to Greek models, which had a strong local history in the American Greek Revival of the early 19th century. For the first time, repertories of photographs supplemented meticulous scale drawings and on-site renderings of details.
Beaux-Arts training made great use of clasps that link one architectural detail to another. Beaux-Arts training emphasized the production of quick conceptual sketches finished perspective presentation drawings, close attention to the program, knowledgeable detailing. Site considerations tended toward urbane contexts. All architects-in-training passed through the obligatory stages—studying antique models, constructing analos, analyses reproducing Greek or Roman models, "pocket" studies and other conventional steps—in the long competition for the few desirable places at the Académie de France à Rome with traditional requirements of sending at intervals the presentation drawings called envois de Rome. Beaux-Arts architecture depended on sculptural decoration along conservative modern lines, employing French and Italian Baroque and Rococo formulas combined with an impressionistic finish and realism. In the façade shown above, Diana grasps the cornice she sits on in a natural action typical of Beaux-Arts integration of sculpture with architecture.
Overscaled details, bold sculptural supporting consoles, rich deep cornices and sculptural enrichments in the most bravura finish the client could afford gave employment to several generations of architectural modellers and carvers of Italian and Central European backgrounds. A sense of appropriate idiom at the craftsman level supported the design teams of the first modern architectural offices. Characteristics of Beaux-Arts architecture included: Flat roof Rusticated and raised first story Hierarchy of spaces, from "noble spaces"—grand entrances and staircases—to utilitarian ones Arched windows Arched and pedimented doors Classical details: references to a synthesis of historicist styles and a tendency to eclecticism.
United States
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. Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900.
