1.
Jean Marais
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Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais, also known as Jean Marais, was a French actor, writer, director and sculptor. He performed in over 100 films and was the muse of acclaimed director Jean Cocteau, in 1996, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his contributions to French Cinema. A native of Cherbourg, France, Marais was a son of Alfred Emmanuel Victor Paul Villain-Marais and his wife, in 1933, Marais was discovered by filmmaker Marcel LHerbier who purchased one of his paintings, then cast him in two films LÉpervier and LAventurier. Marais starred in movies directed by Jean Cocteau, for a time his lover and a lifelong friend, most famously Beauty. In the 1950s, Marais became a star of swashbuckling pictures, in the 1960s, he played both the famed villain and the hero of the Fantômas trilogy. In 1963, he was a member of the jury at the 3rd Moscow International Film Festival, after 1970, Maraiss on-screen performances became few and far between, as he preferred concentrating on his stage work. He performed on stage until his eighties, also working as a sculptor and his sculpture Le passe muraille can be seen in the Montmartre Quarter of Paris. In 1985, he was the head of the jury at the 35th Berlin International Film Festival and he was featured in the 1995 documentary Screening at the Majestic, which is included on the 2003 DVD release of the restored print of Beauty and the Beast. Marais appears on the sleeve of The Smiths single This Charming Man. He was married for two years to the actress Mila Parély, with whom he performed in Cocteaus Beauty. Marais, who was bisexual, was the muse and lover of Jean Cocteau until Cocteaus death, after Cocteaus death, Marais wrote a memoir of Cocteau, LInconcevable Jean Cocteau, attributing authorship to Cocteau-Marais. He also wrote an autobiography, LHistoire de ma vie, published in 1975, from 1953 until 1959, his companion was the American dancer George Reich. In the early 1960s, Marais adopted a young man, Serge Ayala and this adopted son, who became a singer and an actor, committed suicide in 2012 at age 69. Marais died from disease in Cannes, Alpes-Maritimes, in 1998. He is interred there at Vallauris cemetery and his life story became the inspiration for the 1980 François Truffaut film The Last Metro. Place Jean-Marais Jean Marais at the Internet Broadway Database Jean Marais at the Internet Movie Database Eternel Jean Marais Jean Marais at Find a Grave Jean Marais at the Films de France
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French literature
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This article is a general introduction to French literature. For detailed information on French literature in specific periods, see the separate historical articles in the template to the right. Literature written in French language, by citizens of nations such as Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Senegal, Algeria, Morocco. As of 2006, French writers have been awarded more Nobel Prizes in Literature than novelists, poets and essayists of any other country, France itself ranks first in the list of Nobel Prizes in literature by country. French literature has been for French people an object of pride for centuries. The French language is a dialect derived from Latin and heavily influenced principally by Celtic. Today, French schools emphasize the study of novels, theater, the literary arts are heavily sponsored by the state and literary prizes are major news. The Académie française and the Institut de France are important linguistic and artistic institutions in France, Literature matters deeply to the people of France and plays an important role in their sense of identity. As of 2006, French literary people have been awarded more Nobel Prizes in Literature than novelists, poets and essayists of any other country, a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form. For most of the 20th century, French authors had more Literature Nobel Prizes than those of any other nation. M. G, le Clézio 2014 – Patrick Modiano Grand Prix de Littérature Policière – created in 1948, for crime and detective fiction. Grand Prix du roman de lAcadémie française – created 1918, Prix Décembre – created in 1989. Prix Femina – created 1904, decided each year by an exclusively female jury, Prix Goncourt – created 1903, given to the author of the best and most imaginative prose work of the year. Prix Goncourt des Lycéens – created in 1987, Prix Littéraire Valery Larbaud – created in 1957. Prix Médicis – created 1958, awarded to an author whose fame does not yet match their talent, Prix Renaudot – created in 1926. Prix Tour-Apollo Award – 1972–1990, given to the best science fiction published in French during the preceding year. Prix des Deux Magots – created in 1933, a short history of French literature Burgwinkle, William, Nicholas Hammond, and Emma Wilson, eds. The Cambridge history of French literature Cobb, Richard, Promenades, an appreciation of modern French literature Harvey, Paul. The Oxford companion to French literature Denis Hollier, ed, a New History of French Literature, Harvard University Press,1989,1150 pp. France, Peter
3.
Medieval French literature
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Medieval French literature is, for the purpose of this article, literature written in Oïl languages during the period from the eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth century. For historical background, see History of France, France in the Middle Ages or Middle Ages, for other national literary traditions, see Medieval literature. The language in southern France is known as langue doc or the Occitan language family, also known under the name of one of iys dialects, the Western peninsula of Brittany spoke Breton, a Celtic language. Catalan was spoken in the South, and Germanic languages and Franco-Provençal were spoken in the East, the various dialects of Old French developed into what are recognised as regional languages today. Languages which developed from dialects of Old French include Bourguignon, Champenois, Franc-Comtois, Francien, Gallo, Lorrain, Norman, Anglo-Norman, Picard, Poitevin, Saintongeais and Walloon. From 1340 to the beginning of the century, a generalized French language became clearly distinguished from the other competing Oïl languages. This is referred to as Middle French, the vast majority of literary production in Old French is in verse, the development of prose as a literary form was a late phenomenon. The French language does not have a significant stress accent or long and this means that the French metric line is not determined by the number of beats, but by the number of syllables. The most common lengths are the ten-syllable line, the eight-syllable line. Verses could be combined in a variety of ways, blocks of assonanced lines are called laisses, the choice of verse form was generally dictated by the genre. The Old French epics are written in ten-syllable assonanced laisses. The earliest extant French literary texts date from the ninth century, the first literary works written in Old French were saints lives. The Canticle of Saint Eulalie, written in the half of the ninth century, is generally accepted as the first such text. It is a poem that recounts the martyrdom of a young girl. The best known of the early Old French saints lives is the Vie de Saint Alexis, the life of Saint Alexis, a translation/rewriting of a Latin legend. Saint Alexis fled from his familys home in Rome on his wedding night and dwelled as a hermit in Syria until a mystical voice began telling people of his holiness. In order to avoid the earthly honor that came with such fame, he left Syria and was back to Rome. He was only identified later when the pope read his name in a letter held in the saints hand
4.
17th-century French literature
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In reality, 17th-century French literature encompasses far more than just the classicist masterpieces of Jean Racine and Madame de La Fayette. In Renaissance France, literature was largely the product of encyclopaedic humanism, a new conception of nobility, modelled on the Italian Renaissance courts and their concept of the perfect courtier, was beginning to evolve through French literature. In the mid-17th century, there were an estimated 2,200 authors in France, under Cardinal Richelieu, patronage of the arts and literary academies increasingly came under the control of the monarchy. Henry IVs court was considered by contemporaries a rude one, lacking the Italianate sophistication of the court of the Valois kings, the court also lacked a queen, who traditionally served as a focus of a nations authors and poets. Henrys literary tastes were largely limited to the chivalric novel Amadis of Gaul, in the 1620s, the most famous salon was held at the Hôtel de Rambouillet by Madame de Rambouillet, a rival gathering was organized by Madeleine de Scudéry. The word salon first appeared in French in 1664 from the Italian word sala, before 1664, literary gatherings were often called by the name of the room in which they occurred -- cabinet, réduit, alcôve, and ruelle. For instance, the term derives from literary gatherings held in the bedroom. Nobles, lying on their beds, would receive close friends, ruelle refers to the space between a bed and the wall in a bedroom, it became a name for these gatherings, often under the wing of educated women in the first half of the 17th century. In the context of French scholastica, academies were scholarly societies which monitored, fostered, academies first appeared in France during the Renaissance, when Jean-Antoine de Baïf created one devoted to poetry and music, inspired by the academy of Italian Marsilio Ficino. The first half of the 17th century was marked by a growth in private academies. Academies were generally more formal and more focused on criticism and analysis than salons, however, certain salons were closer to the academic spirit. In the mid-17th century, academies gradually came under government control and sponsorship, the first private academy to fall under governmental control was LAcadémie française, which remains the most prestigious governmental academy in France. Founded in 1634 by Cardinal Richelieu, LAcadémie française focuses on the French language, in certain instances, the values of 17th-century nobility played a major part in the literature of the era. Most notable of these values are the aristocratic obsession with glory, the spectacle of power, prestige and luxury found in 17th-century literature may be distasteful or even offensive. The château of Versailles, court ballets, noble portraits, triumphal arches – all of these were representations of glory, the notion of glory was not vanity or boastfulness or hubris, but rather a moral imperative for the aristocracy. Nobles were required to be generous, magnanimous and to great deeds disinterestedly. Ones status in the world demanded appropriate externalisation, nobles indebted themselves to build prestigious urban mansions and to buy clothes, paintings, silverware, dishes and other furnishings befitting their rank. They were also required to show generosity by hosting sumptuous parties, conversely, social parvenus who took on the external trappings of the noble classes were severely criticised, sometimes by legal action
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18th-century French literature
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In common with a similar movement in England at the same time, the writers of 18th century France were critical, skeptical and innovative. Their lasting contributions were the ideas of liberty, toleration, humanitarianism, equality, and progress, the 18th century saw the gradual weakening of the absolute monarchy constructed by Louis XIV. France was forced to recognize the power of England and Prussia. The Monarchy finally ended with King Louis XVI, who was unable to understand or control the forces of the French Revolution. The new class began to challenge the cultural and social monopoly of the aristocracy, French cities began to have their own theaters, coffee houses and salons, the Rise of the Third Estate culminated in their political victory in the French Revolution. Faith in science and progress was the force behind the first French Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot. The Protestants achieved legal status in France in 1787, the exchange of ideas with other countries also increased. British ideas were important, particularly such ideas as constitutional monarchy and romanticism. Toward the end of the century, a sober style appeared, aimed at illustrating scenery, work. These writers, and others such as the Abbé Sieyès, one of the authors of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. They came from the upper class or Third Estate, sought a society founded upon talent and merit. Their ideas were influenced by those of John Locke in England. They introduced the values of liberty and equality which became the ideals of the French Republic founded at the end of the century and they defended the freedom of conscience and challenged the role of religious institutions in society. For them, tolerance was a value of society. When the Convention placed the ashes of Voltaire in the Pantheon in Paris, while the philosophes had widely different approaches, they all had as a common objective, both for mankind and for individuals, the ideal of happiness. Some, like Rousseau, dreamed of the happiness of the savage, rapidly disappearing, others, like Voltaire. The philosophes were optimists, and they saw their mission clearly, they did not simply observe, the comedies of Marivaux and of Beaumarchais also played a part in this debate about and diffusion of great ideas. The relaxing of morals under the French Regency brought the return in 1716 of the Comédie-Italienne and his major works include Les Fausses Confidences, le Jeu de lamour et du hasard, and lÎle des esclaves
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19th-century French literature
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19th-century French literature concerns the developments in French literature during a dynamic period in French history that saw the rise of Democracy and the fitful end of Monarchy and Empire. French literature enjoyed enormous prestige and success in the 19th century. The first part of the century was dominated by Romanticism, until around the mid-century Realism emerged, in the last half of the century, naturalism, parnassian poetry, and symbolism, among other styles, were often competing tendencies at the same time. Some writers did form into literary groups defined by a name, in other cases, these expressions were merely pejorative terms given by critics to certain writers or have been used by modern literary historians to group writers of divergent projects or methods. Nevertheless, these labels can be useful in describing broad historical developments in the arts and their influence was felt in theatre, poetry, prose fiction. Foreign influences played a big part in this, especially those of Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Goethe, Le mal du siècle, a sense of loss, disillusion, and aporia, typified by melancholy and lassitude. Romanticism in England and Germany largely predate French romanticism, although there was a kind of pre-romanticism in the works of Senancour and Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the end of the 18th century. French Romanticism took definite form in the works of François-René de Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant and it found early expression also in the sentimental poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine. The major battles of romanticism in France was in the theater, the dramatic unities of time and place were abolished, tragic and comic elements appeared together and metrical freedom was won. Marked by the plays of Friedrich Schiller, the romantics often chose subjects from historic periods, victor Hugo was the outstanding genius of the Romantic School and its recognized leader. He was prolific alike in poetry, drama, and fiction, all three also wrote novels and short stories, and Musset won a belated success with his plays. Alexandre Dumas, père wrote The Three Musketeers and other novels in an historical setting. Prosper Mérimée and Charles Nodier were masters of shorter fiction, Romanticism is associated with a number of literary salons and groups, the Arsenal, the Cénacle, the salon of Louis Charles Delescluze, the salon of Antoine Deschamps, the salon of Madame de Staël. Romanticism in France defied political affiliation, one finds both liberal, conservative and socialist strains, the expression Realism, when applied to literature of the 19th century, implies the attempt to depict contemporary life and society. The growth of realism is linked to the development of science, history, honoré de Balzac is the most prominent representative of 19th century realism in fiction. His La Comédie humaine, a vast collection of nearly 100 novels, was the most ambitious scheme ever devised by a writer of fiction—nothing less than a contemporary history of his countrymen. Realism also appears in the works of Alexandre Dumas, fils, similar tendencies appeared in the theatrical melodramas of the period and, in an even more lurid and gruesome light, in the Grand Guignol at the end of the century. In addition to melodramas, popular and bourgeois theater in the mid-century turned to realism in the well-made bourgeois farces of Eugène Marin Labiche, from the 1860s on, critics increasingly speak of literary Naturalism
7.
Les Enfants Terribles
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Les Enfants Terribles is a 1929 novel by Jean Cocteau, published by Editions Bernard Grasset. It concerns two siblings, Elisabeth and Paul, who isolate themselves from the world as they grow up and it was first translated into English by Samuel Putnam in 1930 and published by Brewer & Warren Inc. A later English translation was made by Rosamond Lehmann in 1955, the book is illustrated by the authors own drawings. It was made into a film of the name, a collaboration between Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville in 1950, and inspired the opera of the same name by Philip Glass. The ballet La Boule de Neige by the choreographer Fabrizio Monteverde with music of Pierluigi Castellano is based on this novel. The story was adapted by the writer Gilbert Adair for his 1988 novel The Holy Innocents, the story concerns the siblings Paul and Elisabeth who start this story without a father and with a bed-ridden mother, whom Elisabeth looks after. At school Paul is obsessed with the feminine looking Dargelos, while Paul’s school friend Gerard is enthralled by the siblings, however after Paul becomes ill when Dargelos throws a snowball with a stone inside at him, Elisabeth cares for both him and their mother. This game continues after Paul recovers and their mother has died, Elisabeth soon takes up a job as a model, where she meets Agathe, a girl who was orphaned at a young age after her drug-addicted parents committed suicide. Agathe, characterised by her resemblance to Dargelos, soon moves in with Paul. Elisabeth is first to get married to a young man who dies on his way to a business meeting before the married couple can even enjoy a honeymoon. The result of the marriage is that the siblings inherit a large house which they move into, Paul soon finds himself in love with Agathe. Elisabeth cannot stand to see her happy, and knows she must draw him back into their shared private world. Writing of his love to Agathe, Paul stakes his life on her reciprocation, Elisabeth intercepts the letter and prevents it from reaching Agathe. She tells her that Gerard is in love with her, Elisabeth then manages to bully Gerard, who is in love with her, into marrying Agathe and as a result helps break her brother’s heart. She feels herself condemned and pursued by Furies thereafter, for the crime of having destroyed Paul, after Agathe and Gerards marriage, Gerard meets with Dargelos, now a collector of poisons, who sends one of these poisons to Paul, also an enthusiast, as a gift. The poison is opium, to which Cocteau himself was addicted, Paul takes most of the opium in despair. As Paul lies dying he is attended by Agathe, who reviving Paul temporarily, confesses her love to him, and the plot is laid bare. At this moment, knowing that Paul is dying, Elisabeth senses that this is yet another twist in the game and she then shoots herself and by a matter of seconds beats Paul, leaving a frightened Agathe with two dead bodies
8.
The Blood of a Poet
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The Blood of a Poet is an avant-garde film directed by Jean Cocteau and financed by Charles de Noailles. Photographer Lee Miller made her film appearance in this movie. It is the first part of the Orphic Trilogy, which is continued in Orphée, the Blood of a Poet is divided into four sections. In section one, an artist sketches a face and is startled when its mouth starts moving and he rubs out the mouth, only to discover that it has transferred to the palm of his hand. After experimenting with the hand for a while and falling asleep, in section two, the statue speaks to the artist, cajoling him into passing through a mirror. The mirror links to a hotel and the artist peers through several keyholes, witnessing such people as an opium smoker, the artist is handed a gun and a disembodied voice instructs him how to shoot himself in the head. He shoots himself but does not die, the artist cries out that he has seen enough and returns through the mirror. He smashes the statue with a mallet, in the third section, some students are having a snowball fight. An older boy throws a snowball at a boy. The young boy dies from the impact, in the final section, a card shark plays a game with a woman on a table set up over the body of the dead boy. The card shark extracts an Ace of Hearts from the dead boys breast pocket, the boys guardian angel appears and absorbs the dead boy. He also removes the Ace of Hearts from the card sharks hand and retreats up a flight of stairs, realizing he has lost, the card shark commits suicide as the theatre party applauds. A female player transforms into the formerly smashed statue and walks off through the snow, in the films final moments the statue is shown with an ox, a globe, and a lyre. Intercut through the film, oneiric images appear, including spinning wire models of a human head, Cocteau invited the Vicomte and his wife Marie-Laure de Noailles, along with several of their friends, to appear in a scene as a theatre party. In the scene, they talked among themselves and, on cue, upon seeing the completed film, they were horrified to learn that they were applauding a game of cards that ended with a suicide, which had been filmed separately. They refused to let Cocteau release the film with their scene included, so Cocteau re-shot it with the female impersonator Barbette. Shortly after the completion, rumors began to circulate that it contained an anti-Christian message. The furore caused the release of The Blood of a Poet to be delayed for more than a year, the Blood of a Poet at the Internet Movie Database The Blood of a Poet at AllMovie Criterion Collection essay by Jean Cocteau Jean Cocteau, The Blood of a Poet
9.
Les Parents terribles (film)
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Les Parents terribles is a 1948 film adaptation directed by Jean Cocteau from his own stage play Les Parents terribles. Cocteau used the same cast who had appeared in a stage revival of the play in Paris in 1946. The film has sometimes been known by the English title The Storm Within, cocteaus stage play Les Parents terribles was first produced in Paris in 1938, but its run suffered from a number of disruptions, first from censorship and then the outbreak of war. In 1946 it was revived in a production which brought several of the actors for whom Cocteau had originally conceived their roles, notably Yvonne de Bray, Gabrielle Dorziat. Cocteau said that he wanted to film his play for three reasons, first, to record the performances of incomparable actors, second, mingle with them myself and look them full in the face instead of seeing them at a distance on the stage. I wanted to put my eye to the keyhole and surprise them with a telescopic lens, in a rambling apartment a middle-aged couple, Yvonne and Georges, live with their 22-year-old son Michel and Yvonnes spinster sister Léonie, who has also been in love with Georges. The family visit Madeleine in her apartment where they are impressed by her modest, michels initial joy at this apparent reconciliation turns to despair as Madeleine is blackmailed into rejecting him by Georgess secret threats. Yvonne consoles her son with satisfaction as they return home, Léo however is appalled by the cruelty and selfishness of what has been done and decides to support Madeleine. The next day Léo persuades Georges, and then the more reluctant Yvonne, Michel and Madeleine are joyfully reunited, but Yvonne is unnoticed as she slips away and poisons herself. When the others realise what she has done, it is too late to save her, a new order is established in the roulotte. He wrote no additional dialogue for the film, but substantially pruned the stage text, the translation from theatre to screen was a challenge which Cocteau relished, he wrote, What is exciting about the cinema is that there is no syntax. You have to invent it as and when problems arise, what freedom for the artist and what results one can obtain. Filming took place between 28 April and 3 July 1948 at the Studio Francœur, cocteaus assistant director was Raymond Leboursier, who was joined by Claude Pinoteau. At the time of shooting the final shot, some tracks for the camera produced a shaky image on the film. The correspondence between image and text has never been so complete, so convincing, Bazin highlights three features which assist this transition. Thirdly, Bazin notes the psychological subtlety with which Cocteau chooses his camera positions to match the responses of his ideal spectator, in all of these aspects, the theatricality of the play is preserved but intensified through the medium of film. Cocteau himself came to regard Les Parents terribles as his best film and this opinion has frequently been endorsed by later critics and historians of cinema. Les Parents terribles Les Parents terribles at the Internet Movie Database
10.
Beauty and the Beast (1946 film)
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Beauty and the Beast is a 1946 French romantic fantasy film directed by French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. The plot of Cocteaus film revolves around Belles father who is sentenced to death for picking a rose from Beasts garden, Belle offers to go back to the Beast in her fathers place. Beast falls in love with her and proposes marriage on a basis which she refuses. Belle eventually becomes more drawn to Beast, who tests her by letting her return home to her family and telling her if she doesnt return to him within a week. Beauty and the Beast is now recognized as a classic of French cinema, while scrubbing the floor at home, Belle is interrupted by her brothers friend Avenant who tells her she deserves better and suggests they get married. Belle rejects Avenant, as she wishes to stay home and take care of her father, who has suffered much since his ships were lost at sea and the family fortune along with them. Belles father arrives home announcing he has come into a fortune that he will pick up the next day, along with gifts for his daughters, Belles shrewish sisters Adelaide. Belles roguish brother Ludovic signs a contract from a moneylender allowing him the ability to sue Ludovics father if he cant pay. Later, Belles father finds on his arrival that his fortune has been seized to clear his debts, Belles father gets lost in the forest and finds himself at a large castle whose gates and doors magically open themselves. On entering the castle, he is guided by an enchanted candelabra that leads him to a dinner table where he falls asleep. Awakened by a roar, he wanders the castles grounds. Remembering that Belle asked for a rose, he plucks a rose from a tree which makes the Beast appear, the Beast threatens to kill him for theft but then suggests that one of his daughters can take his place. The Beast offers his horse Magnificent to guide him through the forest home, Belles father explains the situation to his family and Avenant. Belle agrees to go and take her fathers place and she rides Magnificent to the castle, finding the Beast. Belle faints at the sight of him and is carried to her room in the castle, Belle awakens to find a magic mirror which allows her to see anything. The Beast invites Belle to dinner, where he tells her shes in equal command to him. Days pass as Belle grows more accustomed to and fond of the Beast, using the magic mirror, Belle finds her father deathly ill. The Beast grants her permission to leave for a week and he gives Belle two magical items, a glove that can transport her wherever she wishes and a golden key that unlocks Dianas Pavilion, the source of the Beasts true riches
11.
Orpheus (film)
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Orpheus is a 1950 French film directed by Jean Cocteau and starring Jean Marais. This film is the part of Cocteaus Orphic Trilogy, which consists of The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus. Set in contemporary Paris, the story of the film is a variation of the classic Greek myth of Orpheus, the picture begins with Orpheus, a famous poet, visiting the Café des Poètes. At the same time, a Princess and Cègeste, a handsome, the drunken Cègeste starts a brawl. When the police arrive and attempt to take Cègeste into custody, he breaks free and flees, the Princess has the police place Cègeste into her car in order to transport him to the hospital. She also orders Orpheus into the car in order to act as a witness, once in the car, Orpheus discovers Cègeste is dead and that the Princess is not going to the hospital. Instead, they drive to a chateau accompanied by the two motorcycle riders as abstract poetry plays on the radio and this takes the form of seemingly meaningless messages, like those broadcast to the French Resistance from London during the Occupation. At the ruined chateau, the Princess reanimates Cègeste into a state, and she, Cègeste. He wakes in a landscape, where he stumbles on the Princess chauffeur, Heurtebise. Heurtebise drives Orpheus home where Orpheus pregnant wife, Eurydice, a police inspector, when Orpheus comes home, he refuses to explain the details of the previous night despite the questions which linger over the fate of Cègeste, whose body cannot be found. Orpheus invites Heurtebise to live in his house and to store the Rolls in Orpheus garage, Eurydice attempts to tell Orpheus that she is with child, but is silenced when he rebuffs her. When Eurydice is killed by Deaths henchmen, Heurtebise proposes to lead Orpheus through the Zone into the Underworld in order to reclaim her, Orpheus reveals that he may have fallen in love with Death who has visited him in his dreams. Heurtebise asks Orpheus which woman he will betray, Death or Eurydice, Orpheus enters the afterlife by donning a pair of surgical gloves left behind by the Princess after Eurydices death. In the Underworld, Orpheus finds as a plaintiff before a tribunal which interrogates all parties involved in the death of Eurydice, Orpheus agrees and returns home with Eurydice. They are accompanied by Heurtebise, who has been assigned by the tribunal to assist the couple in adapting to their new, restrictive, Eurydice visits the garage where Orpheus constantly listens to the Rolls radio in search of the unknown poetry. When Orpheus glances at her in the mirror, Eurydice disappears, a mob from the Café des Poètes arrives in order to extract vengeance from Orpheus for what they suppose to be his part in the murder of Cègeste. Orpheus confronts them, armed with a given to him by Heurtebise. Orpheus dies and finds himself in the Underworld and this time, he declares his love to Death who has decided to herself die in order that he might become an immortal poet
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Kenneth Anger
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Kenneth Anger is an American underground experimental filmmaker, actor and author. Working exclusively in short films, he has produced almost forty works since 1937 and his films variously merge surrealism with homoeroticism and the occult, and have been described as containing elements of erotica, documentary, psychodrama, and spectacle. He has also focused upon occult themes in many of his films, being fascinated by the English poet and mystic Aleister Crowley, and is an adherent of Thelema, the religion Crowley founded. He began making films when he was ten years old, although his first film to gain any recognition. The controversial nature of the led to him being put on trial on obscenity charges. A friendship and working relationship began subsequently with pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey, moving to Europe, Anger produced a number of other shorts inspired by the artistic avant-garde scene on the continent, such as Rabbits Moon and Eaux dArtifice. The latter would become infamous for its many dubious and sensationalist claims, many of which were later disproven, following his failure to produce a sequel to Lucifer Rising, Anger retired from filmmaking in the early 1980s, instead publishing the book Hollywood Babylon II. At the dawn of the 21st century he once more returned to filmmaking, producing shorts for various film festivals, Anger was born in Santa Monica, California, as Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer on February 3,1927. His father, Wilbur Anglemyer, was of German ancestry, and had been born in Troy, Ohio, while his mother, Lillian Coler. The pair had met at Ohio State College and after marrying had their first child, Jean Anglemyer, in 1918, followed by a second, Robert Bob Anglemyer, in 1921. That year they moved to Santa Monica to be near Lillians mother, Bertha Coler and it was here that Wilbur got a job working as an electrical engineer at Douglas Aircraft, bringing in enough money so that they could live comfortably as a middle-class family. Kenneth, their third and final child, was born in 1927 and his brother Bob later claimed that being the youngest child, Kenneth had been spoilt by his mother and grandmother, and as such had become somewhat bratty. His grandmother, Bertha, was a big influence on the young Kenneth and it was she who first took Kenneth to the cinema, to see a double bill of The Singing Fool and Thunder Over Mexico and also encouraged his artistic interests. She herself later moved into a house in Hollywood with another woman, Miss Diggy and he developed an early interest in film, and enjoyed reading the movie tie-in Big Little books. He would later relate that I was a prodigy who never got smarter. He retrospected his attendance at the Santa Monica Cotillon where child stars were encouraged to mix with non-famous children and through this met Shirley Temple, with whom he danced on one occasion. It was in 1935, he would claim, that he had the chance to appear in a Hollywood film. Set photographs and studio production reports in fact contradict Angers claims, Angers unofficial biographer, Bill Landis, remarked in 1995 that the Changeling Prince was definitely Anger as a child, visually, hes immediately recognizable
13.
Pablo Picasso
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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, Picassos work is often categorized into periods. Much of Picassos work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style and his later work often combines elements of his earlier styles. Ruiz y Picasso were included for his father and mother, respectively, born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His mother was of one quarter Italian descent, from the territory of Genoa, though baptized a Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist. Picassos family was of middle-class background and his father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts, Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were piz, piz, a shortening of lápiz, from the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was an academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork, the family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his sketch of a pigeon. In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his sister, Conchita. After her death, the moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home, Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, the student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day. Picassos father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrids Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, at age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolment
14.
Gertrude Stein
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Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, in 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde, the book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. Her books include Q. E. D. about a romantic affair involving several of Steins female friends, Fernhurst, a fictional story about a romantic affair, Three Lives. In Tender Buttons, Stein commented on lesbian sexuality and her activities during World War II have been the subject of analysis and commentary. After the war ended, Stein expressed admiration for another Nazi collaborator, some have argued that certain accounts of Steins wartime activities have amounted to a witch hunt. Stein, the youngest of a family of five children, was born on February 3,1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania to upper-middle-class Jewish parents, Daniel and her father was a wealthy businessman with real estate holdings. German and English were spoken in their home, when Stein was three years old, she and her family moved to Vienna, and then Paris. Accompanied by governesses and tutors, the Steins endeavored to imbue their children with the sensibilities of European history. Stein attended First Hebrew Congregation of Oaklands Sabbath school, during their residence in Oakland, they lived for four years on a ten-acre lot, and Stein built many memories of California there. She would often go on excursions with her brother, Leo, Stein found formal schooling in Oakland unstimulating, but she read often, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott, Burns, Smollett, Fielding, and more. When Stein was 14 years old, her mother died, Three years later, her father died as well. Steins eldest brother, Michael Stein, then took over the family holdings and in 1892 arranged for Gertrude and another sister, Bertha. Here she lived with her uncle David Bachrach, who in 1877 had married Gertrudes maternal aunt, in Baltimore, Stein met Claribel and Etta Cone, who held Saturday evening salons that she would later emulate in Paris. The Cones shared an appreciation for art and conversation about it, Stein attended Radcliffe College, then an annex of Harvard University, from 1893 to 1897 and was a student of psychologist William James. In 1934, behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner interpreted Steins difficult poem Tender Buttons as an example of normal motor automatism. In a letter Stein wrote during the 1930s, she explained that she never accepted the theory of writing, here can be automatic movements
15.
Jean Hugo
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Jean Hugo was a painter, illustrator, theatre designer and author. He was born in Paris and died in his home at the Mas de Fourques, near Lunel, brought up in a lively artistic environment, he began teaching himself drawing and painting and wrote essays and poetry from a very early age. His artistic career spans the 20th century, from his sketches of the First World War, through the creative ferment of the Parisian interwar years. Jean Hugo was the great-grandson of the poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France, Victor Hugo. Jean Hugo was married twice, first in 1919 to Valentine Hugo and then in 1949 to Lauretta Hope-Nicholson, Jean Hugo and Lauretta had seven children, several of whom have gone on to establish successful careers in the arts. Jean Hugos half-brother François Hugo designed limited-edition jewellery interpretations for Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, pierre Hugo – son of François Hugo – is also a jewellery designer and has written a book about the artistic legacy of the Hugo family, Les Hugo – Un Temoignage. Hugo is predominantly known for his sketches and oil or gouache paintings and he also illustrated books, designed theatre sets and costumes and produced ceramics, murals, textile designs and stained glass windows. Hugo designed the sets and costumes for Carl Theodor Dreyers film The Passion of Joan of Arc and he showed an interest in forest scenes and religious themes. LImposteur and La Baie des Trépassés were produced in the same period and his painting were based on the sketchbooks that he had with him at all times. He used to say that Inspiration comes naturally but one has to arrange meetings with it. LImposteur concludes Hugos first artistic period, which coincides with his move from Paris to the property at the Mas de Fourques, Lunel, France. The subject of the painting evokes the discomfort of the catechumen in the midst of the faithful, the painting is set in the countryside around Lunel, with its vineyards and low scrubland. The tense and complex composition of the work is well executed. No element, line, motif, nuance of colour or object is secondary, each element contributes to the pictorial vision. The delicate volumes are bathed in an intense luminosity and stand out from the background, the figures are fixed in the space by superimposed connections, in the Florentine manner. In the middle of the 1930s, he began using oil paints to create his larger compositions while continuing to paint with tempera, Le Mangeur au chandail rayé shows the artist in his home at the Mas de Fourques. The motif of the contrasts with the neat contours of the table, the chimney. In this homely setting, the figure seems surrounded by mystery, although Hugo does not draw greatly on De Chirico, this work evokes the feeling of isolation and mystery that characterises the production of the latter
16.
Yul Brynner
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Yul Brynner was a Russian-born Swiss film and stage actor. Brynner was best known for his portrayal of King Mongkut of Siam in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I and he played the role 4,625 times on stage. He also starred as Ramesses II in the 1956 Cecil B, deMille blockbuster The Ten Commandments, and played General Bounine in the 1956 film Anastasia, and the gunman Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven. Brynner was noted for his voice and for his shaved head. Earlier, he was a model and television director, and later a photographer, Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Briner July 11,1920 in Vladivostok, Far Eastern Republic. He enjoyed telling tall tales and exaggerating his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born Taidje Khan of part-Mongol parentage, in reality of Swiss-German and Russian ancestry, he was born at home in a four-story residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok. He had a sister, Vera. He occasionally referred to himself as Julius Briner, Jules Bryner or Youl Bryner, the 1989 biography by his son, Rock Brynner, clarified some of these issues. Brynners paternal grandmother, Natalya Yosifovna Kurkutova, was a native of Irkutsk, Brynners mother, Marousia Dimitrievna, came from the Russian intelligentsia and studied to be an actress and singer. Brynner felt a personal connection to the Romani people, in 1977, Brynner was named honorary president of the International Romani Union. Boris Briners work required extensive travel, and in 1923, he fell in love with an actress, Katya Kornukova, at the Moscow Art Theatre, and soon after abandoned his family. Yuls mother took his sister, Vera, and him to Harbin, China. In 1932, fearing a war between China and Japan, she took them to Paris, Brynner played his guitar in Russian nightclubs in Paris, sometimes accompanying his sister, playing Russian and Roma songs. He trained as an acrobat and worked in a French circus troupe for five years. In 1938, his mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and they moved back to Harbin. In 1940, speaking little English, he and his mother immigrated to the United States aboard the President Cleveland, arriving in New York City on October 25,1940, where his sister already lived. Vera, a singer, starred in The Consul on Broadway in 1950 and appeared at The Metropolitan Opera as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and she later taught voice in New York. During World War II, Brynner worked as a French-speaking radio announcer and commentator for the US Office of War Information, at the same time, he studied acting in Connecticut with the Russian teacher Michael Chekhov
17.
Marlene Dietrich
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Marie Magdalene Marlene Dietrich was a German actress and singer who held both German and American citizenship. Throughout her unusually long career, which spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s, in the 1920s in Berlin, Dietrich acted on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel brought her international fame, Dietrich starred in Hollywood films such as Morocco, Shanghai Express, and Desire. She successfully traded on her glamorous persona and exotic looks, throughout World War II, she was a high-profile entertainer in the United States. Although she still made occasional films after the war, Dietrich spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a marquee live-show performer. Dietrich was noted for her efforts during the war, housing German and French exiles, providing financial support. For her work on improving morale on the front lines during the war, she received honors from the United States, France, Belgium. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema, Dietrich was born on 27 December 1901 on Leberstraße 65 in the neighborhood of Rote Insel in Schöneberg, now a district of Berlin. She was the younger of two daughters of Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine and Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, who married in December 1898, Dietrichs mother was from an affluent Berlin family who owned a jewelry and clock making firm. Her father was a lieutenant who died in 1907. Von Losch never officially adopted the Dietrich girls, so Dietrichs surname was never von Losch, Dietrichs family nicknamed her Lena and Lene. Around age 11, she contracted her two first names to form the name Marlene, Dietrich attended the Auguste-Viktoria Girls School from 1907 to 1917 and graduated from the Victoria-Luise-Schule in 1918. She studied the violin and became interested in theater and poetry as a teenager. Her dreams of becoming a concert violinist were curtailed by a wrist injury and she was fired after only four weeks. Her earliest professional stage appearances were as a girl on tour with Guido Thielschers Girl-Kabarett vaudeville-style entertainments. She did not attract any attention at first. She made her film debut playing a bit part in the film The Little Napoleon and she met her future husband, Rudolf Sieber, on the set of Tragödie der Liebe in 1923. Dietrich and Sieber were married in a ceremony in Berlin on 17 May 1923
18.
Coco Chanel
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Gabrielle Bonheur Coco Chanel was a French fashion designer and businesswoman. She was the founder and namesake of the Chanel brand, a prolific fashion creator, Chanel extended her influence beyond couture clothing, realising her design aesthetic in jewellery, handbags, and fragrance. 5, has become an iconic product and she is the only fashion designer listed on TIME magazines list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Chanel designed her iconic interlocked-CC monograph, meaning Coco Chanel, using it since the 1920s, Chanel was known for her lifelong determination, ambition, and energy which she applied to her professional and social life. She achieved both financial success as a businesswoman and catapulted to prominence in French high society, thanks to the connections she made through her work. These included many artists and craftspeople to whom she became a patron and her social connections appeared to encourage a highly conservative personal outlook. One of Chanels lovers was a German military officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, after the war ended, Chanel was interrogated about her relationship with von Dincklage, but she was not charged as a collaborator. After several years in Switzerland after the war, she returned to Paris, in 2011, Hal Vaughan published a book on Chanel based on newly declassified documents of that era, revealing that she had collaborated with Germans in intelligence activities. One plan in late 1943 was for her to carry an SS separate peace overture to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to end the war and she was Jeannes second child with Albert Chanel, the first, Julia, was born less than a year earlier. Albert Chanel was an itinerant street vendor who peddled work clothes and undergarments, living a life, traveling to. The family resided in rundown lodgings, in 1884, he married Jeanne Devolle, persuaded to do so by her family who had united, effectively, to pay Albert to marry her. At birth, Chanels name was entered into the registry as Chasnel. Jeanne was too unwell to attend the registration, and Albert was registered as travelling, with both parents absent, the infants last name was misspelled, probably due to a clerical error. The couple had five children who survived—two boys and three girls—who lived crowded into a lodging in the town of Brive-la-Gaillarde. When Gabrielle was 12, her mother died of bronchitis at the age of 32 and her father sent his two sons out to work as farm laborers and sent his three daughters to the Corrèze, in central France, to the convent of Aubazine, which ran an orphanage. Its religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, was founded to care for the poor and rejected and it was a stark, frugal life, demanding strict discipline. Despite the tragedy of this, being placed in the orphanage may have been the best thing for Coco’s future because it is where she learned to sew. At age eighteen, Chanel, too old to remain at Aubazine, later in her life, Chanel would retell the story of her childhood somewhat differently, she would often include more glamorous accounts, which were generally untrue
19.
Erik Satie
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Éric Alfred Leslie Satie, who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a figure in the early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, Surrealism, repetitive music, an eccentric, Satie was introduced as a gymnopedist in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Satie was the son of Alfred Satie and his wife Jane Leslie, Erik was born at Honfleur in Normandy, his home there is open to the public. When Satie was four years old, his family moved to Paris, his father having been offered a job in the capital. After his mothers death in 1872, he was sent, together with his brother, Conrad. There he received his first music lessons from a local organist, in 1878, when he was 12 years old, his grandmother died, and the two brothers were reunited in Paris with their father, who remarried shortly afterwards. From the early 1880s onwards, Satie started publishing salon compositions by his step-mother and himself, in 1879, Satie entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was soon labelled untalented by his teachers. Georges Mathias, his professor of piano at the Conservatoire, described his pupils piano technique in flatly negative terms, insignificant and laborious, Émile Decombes called him the laziest student in the Conservatoire. Years later, Satie related that Mathias, with great insistence, however, Saties military career did not last very long, within a few months he was discharged after deliberately infecting himself with bronchitis. Satie moved from his fathers residence to lodgings in Montmartre in 1887, by this time he had started what was to be an enduring friendship with the romantic poet Patrice Contamine, and had his first compositions published by his father. He soon integrated with the clientele of the Le Chat Noir Café-cabaret. Publication of compositions in the same vein followed, in the same period he befriended Claude Debussy. He moved to a room, still in Montmartre, in 1890. Le Fils des étoiles, and the Sonneries de la Rose+Croix, Satie gave performances at the Salon de la Rose + Croix, organized by Péladan. While the comrades from both the Chat Noir and Miguel Utrillos Auberge du Clou sympathised, a brochure was produced for the project. In 1893, Satie met the young Maurice Ravel for the first time, one of Saties own compositions of that period, Vexations, was to remain undisclosed until after his death. By the end of the year he had founded the Église Métropolitaine dArt de Jésus Conducteur
20.
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
21.
Igor Stravinsky
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Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century, Stravinskys compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. His Russian phase which continued with such as Renard, The Soldiers Tale. The works from this tended to make use of traditional musical forms, drawing on earlier styles. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures, Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in Oranienbaum, a suburb of Saint Petersburg, the Russian imperial capital, and was brought up in Saint Petersburg. It is believed that Stravinsky’s ancestry is traceable back to the 17th and 18th centuries, to the bearers of the Soulima, ivan Sulima, was a famous Ukrainian hetman 1628–1635. Stravinskys family branch most likely came from Stravinskas, polonized Lithuanian land owners and it is still unclear to when exactly the Soulima part of the surname was dropped. Stravinsky recalled his schooldays as being lonely, later saying that I never came across anyone who had any attraction for me. Stravinsky began piano lessons as a boy, studying music theory. In 1890, he saw a performance of Tchaikovskys ballet The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre, despite his enthusiasm for music, his parents expected him to study law. Stravinsky enrolled at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1901, Stravinskys father died of cancer that year, by which time his son had already begun spending more time on his musical studies than on law. Thereafter, he concentrated on studying music, in 1905, he began to take twice-weekly private lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he came to regard as a second father. These lessons continued until Rimsky-Korsakovs death in 1908, in 1905 Stravinsky was betrothed to his cousin Katherine Gavrylivna Nosenko, whom he had known since early childhood. Diaghilev was sufficiently impressed by Fireworks to commission Stravinsky to carry out some orchestrations and then to compose a ballet score. The early period of Igor Stravinsky’s work would be incomplete without a research of his life while in Ukraine. From approximately 1890 till 1914 the composer was frequently visiting Ustyluh, town in Volyn Oblast and he spent most of his summers there and that’s where he met his cousin, Katherine Nosenko who he married in 1906. In 1907 Stravinsky designed and built his own house in Ustyluh where his own family stayed often during summer times until 1914 and his new Ukrainian home he called “My heavenly place”. In this house Igor Stravinsky worked on his seventeen early compositions, among which were orchestral fantasy Fireworks, ballets Firebird, Petrushka, currently, after its renovation this house is the only composers house-museum opened to the public
22.
Marie Laurencin
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Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. She became an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde as a member of the Cubists associated with the Section dOr, Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied painting in Sèvres. She then returned to Paris and continued her art education at the Académie Humbert, during the early years of the 20th century, Laurencin was an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde. She became romantically involved with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and has often been identified as his muse, in addition, Laurencin had important connections to the salon of the American expatriate and famed lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney. She had heterosexual and lesbian affairs, the couple subsequently lived together briefly in Düsseldorf. After they divorced in 1920, she returned to Paris, where she achieved success as an artist until the economic depression of the 1930s. During the 1930s she worked as an art instructor at a private school and she lived in Paris until her death. Laurencins works include paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints and she is known as one of the few female Cubist painters, with Sonia Delaunay, Marie Vorobieff, and Franciska Clausen. Her work lies outside the bounds of Cubist norms in her pursuit of a specifically feminine aesthetic by her use of pastel colors, Laurencin continued to explore themes of femininity and what she considered to be feminine modes of representation until her death. Her works include paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, in 1983, on the one hundredth anniversary of Laurencins birth, the Musée Marie Laurencin opened in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. The museum is home to more than 500 of her works, women Artists in Interwar France, Framing Femininities, Aldershot, Ashgate,2011. Marie Laurencin, London - Paris, Flammarion,1977 Groult, Marie Laurencin, Paris, Mercure de France,1987 Kahn, Elizabeth Louise. Marie Laurencin, Une Femme Inadaptée in Feminist Histories of Art Ashgate Publishing,2003, kyuryudo & Paris, Hazan,1981 Marchesseau, Daniel. Marie Laurencin, Catalogue raisonné de lœuvre gravé, Tokyo, éd, Marie Laurencin, Catalogue raisonné de lœuvre peint,2 vol. Musée Marie Laurencin,1985 &1999 Marchesseau, Daniel, Marie Laurencin, Cent Œuvres du musée Marie Laurencin, Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda,1993 Marchesseau, Daniel, Marie Laurencin, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet / Hazan,2013 Otto, Elizabeth. Memories of Bilitis, Marie Laurencin beyond the Cublist Context, Pierre, José. com Musée Marie Laurencin, Japan
23.
Panama Al Brown
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Alfonso Teofilo Brown, better known as Panama Al Brown, was a bantamweight boxer from Panama who made history by becoming boxings first Hispanic world champion. Brown was a native of the city of Colón, Brown fought during the early 20th century, a period in which boxing records were not well kept. He is said to have fought professionally 164 times and he stood about six feet tall, an extraordinary height for a bantamweight/featherweight. His long arms contributed greatly to his success in the ring, alfonso Teofilo Brown born in the City of Colón, in the Caribbean coast of Panama. His first real exposure to boxing came when he saw American soldiers boxing when he was a young adult clerk for the United States Shipping Board at the Panama Canal Zone, Brown turned pro in 1922 under the guidance of manager Dave Lumiansky. His first fight took place on March 19,1922, when he beat Jose Moreno by a decision in six at Colon. By his seventh fight, December 13 of that year, he beat Sailor Patchett by a fifteen round decision. On September 22,1923, he had his first fight abroad, drawing in four rounds with Johnny Breslin and he very quickly established a presence upon relocating to New York in 1923. His rise was rapid, a year after his move to New York, The Ring magazine rated him the third best flyweight in the world, two years later, the sixth best bantamweight. Brown began campaigning extensively across the United States before he suffered his first loss, at the hands of Jimmy Russo on December 6,1924, by decision in twelve. He would later avenge that defeat, and he beat Davey Abad, despite that setback, he kept on campaigning successfully and, on November 10 of that year, he knocked out Antoine Merlo in his Paris debut. He enjoyed Paris so much that he decided to stay there for the rest of his life and he became a hugely popular boxer in France, and fought on the European continent 40 times between 1929 and 1934. Over the next three years, he beat several fighters there, including world champion Eugene Criqui. During his time in France, he joined Josephine Bakers La Revue Nègre as a tap-dancer and his lover Jean Cocteau helped him. An interesting case happened when he fought Gustav Humery, on January 29,1929, with the referees count of ten seconds, the fight lasted a total of fifteen seconds, one of the quickest knockouts in boxing history. Brown made history on June 18 of the year by becoming the first Hispanic world champion in history. He beat Gregorio Vidal by a fifteen round decision to win the vacant worlds Bantamweight title back at New York, Brown became a national idol in Panama, and an instant celebrity almost everywhere else in Latin America after his win. Magazines such as Ring En Español were talking about his achievement sixty years after Brown made history, soon after winning the title, he lost a ten round, non-title fight to Battling Battalino, another legendary boxer
24.
Colette
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Colette was a French novelist nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Her best known work, the novella Gigi, was the basis for the film and Lerner and she was also a mime, an actress and a journalist. They chart the coming of age of their heroine, Claudine, the story they tell is semi-autobiographical, but not entirely—most strikingly, Claudine, unlike Colette, is motherless. It was he who chose the titillating subject-matter of the Claudine novels, Colette later said that she would never have become a writer if not for Willy. Colette and Willy separated in 1906, although it was not until 1910 that the divorce became final and this period of her life is recalled in La Vagabonde, which deals with womens independence in a male society, a theme to which she would regularly return in future works. During these years she embarked on a series of relationships with women, notably with Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf. In 1912 she married Henry de Jouvenel, the editor of Le Matin, a daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, nicknamed Bel-Gazou, was born in 1913. During the war she devoted herself to journalism, but marriage allowed her to devote her time to writing, in 1920 Colette published Chéri, portraying love between an older woman and a much younger man. The marriage to Jouvenel ended in divorce in 1924, partly due to Jouvenels infidelities and partly to Colettes own affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson, in 1925 she met Maurice Goudeket, who became her final husband. Already an established writer, the decades of the 1920s and 1930s were Colettes most productive and innovative period, set mostly in Burgundy or Paris during the Belle Époque, her work treated married life, sexuality, and the problems of a womans struggle for independence. La Naissance du Jour is her explicit criticism of the lives of women, expressed in a meditation on age. By this period Colette was frequently acclaimed as Frances greatest woman writer and it. has no plot, and yet tells of three lives all that should be known, wrote Janet Flanner of Sido. Once again, and at greater length than usual, she has been hailed for her genius, humanities, lifted nothing at all in her direction except the finger of scorn. Colette was 67 years old at the fall of France, and remained in Paris, during the Occupation she produced two volumes of memoirs, Journal à rebours and De ma fenêtre. In 1944 she published what became perhaps her most famous work, Gigi, born into a family of demimondaines, Gigi is being trained as a courtesan to captivate a wealthy lover, but breaks with tradition by marrying him instead. In the postwar years, she became a public figure, crippled by arthritis and cared for by Goudeket who supervised the preparation of her collected works. She continued to write during these years, bringing out LEtoile vesper and Le fanal bleu, Colette was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy, the Académie Goncourt, and a Chevalier and Grand Officer of the Légion dhonneur. Initially considered a limited if talented novelist, she has been recognised as an important voice in womens writing
25.
Jean Genet
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Jean Genet was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal and his major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thiefs Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens. Genets mother was a governess or maid who raised him for the first seven months of his life before putting him up for adoption, thereafter Genet was raised in the provincial town of Alligny-en-Morvan, in the Nièvre department of central France. His foster family was headed by a carpenter and, according to Edmund Whites biography, was loving, while he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft. After the death of his mother, Genet was placed with an elderly couple. According to the wife, he was going out nights and also seemed to be wearing makeup, on one occasion he squandered a considerable sum of money, which they had entrusted him for delivery elsewhere, on a visit to a local fair. For this and other misdemeanors, including repeated acts of vagrancy, in The Miracle of the Rose, he gives an account of this period of detention, which ended at the age of 18 when he joined the Foreign Legion. He was eventually given a discharge on grounds of indecency and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief. After returning to Paris, France in 1937, Genet was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of papers, vagabondage, lewd acts. In prison, Genet wrote his first poem, Le condamné à mort, which he had printed at his own cost, in Paris, Genet sought out and introduced himself to Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. Genet would never return to prison, by 1949, Genet had completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems, many controversial for their explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality. Sartre wrote an analysis of Genets existential development, entitled Saint Genet. Genet was strongly affected by Sartres analysis and did not write for the five years. During this time, Genet became emotionally attached to Abdallah Bentaga, however, following a number of accidents and his suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression, and even attempted suicide himself. From the late 1960s, starting with an homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968 and he participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. In 1970, the Black Panthers invited him to the USA, later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in the USA and Jordan, Genet wrote a lengthy memoir about his experiences, Prisoner of Love. Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault, Genet expresses his solidarity with the Red Army Faction of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in the article Violence et brutalité, published in Le Monde,1977
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Raymond Radiguet
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Raymond Radiguet was a French novelist and poet whose two novels were noted for their explicit themes, and unique style and tone. Radiguet was born in Saint-Maur, Val-de-Marne, close to Paris, in 1917, he moved to the city. Soon he would out of the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied, in order to pursue his interests in journalism. In early 1923, Radiguet published his first and most famous novel, the story of a young married woman who has an affair with a sixteen-year-old boy while her husband is away fighting at the front provoked scandal in a country that had just been through World War I. Though Radiguet denied it, it was established later that the story was in large part autobiographical and his second novel, Le bal du Comte dOrgel, also dealing with adultery, was only published posthumously in 1924. In addition to his two novels, Radiguets works include a few poetry volumes and a play and he associated himself with the Modernist set, befriending Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris and especially Jean Cocteau, who became his mentor. Radiguet also had several well-documented relationships with women, an anecdote told by Ernest Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet with decadence for his tryst with a model, Bébé est vicieuse. Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer who knew how to make his career not only with his pen, in 1945, Steadman and Blake write that admirers of his first novel include the most discriminating of critics. Aldous Huxley is quoted as declaring that Radiguet had attained the literary control that others required a long career to reach, françois Mauriac said that Le Diable au corps is unretouched and seems shocking, but nothing so resembles cynicism as clairvoyance. No adolescent before Radiguet has delivered to us the secret of that age, on 12 December 1923, Radiguet died at age 20 in Paris of typhoid fever, which he contracted after a trip he took with Cocteau. Cocteau, in an interview with The Paris Review stated that Radiguet had told him three days prior to his death that, In three days, I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God. In reaction to this death Francis Poulenc wrote, For two days I was unable to do anything, I was so stunned, in her 1932 memoir, Laughing Torso, British artist Nina Hamnett describes Radiguets funeral, The church was crowded with people. In the pew in front of us was the band from the Boeuf sur le Toit. Picasso was there, Brâncuși and so many celebrated people that I cannot remember their names, Radiguets death was a terrible shock to everyone. Coco Chanel, the dressmaker, arranged the funeral. Cocteau was too ill to come, Cocteau was terribly upset and could not see anyone for weeks afterwards. I wrote to him in February and asked him if I could come and he wrote me a charming letter,25 fevrier 1924 CHERE NINA Je suis toujours malade et sans courage. Coming just after World War II, the movie caused controversy in its turn, ISBN 0-7148-3503-X Steadman, Christina and Blake, William, Modern Women in Love, Garden City Publishing Co
27.
Yvelines
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Yvelines is a French department in the region of Île-de-France. It inherited Seine-et-Oises official number of 78 and it gained the communes of Châteaufort and Toussus-le-Noble from the adjacent department of Essonne in 1969. Yvelines is bordered by the departments of Val-dOise on the north, Hauts-de-Seine on the east, Essonne on the southeast, Eure-et-Loir on the southwest, and Eure on the west. Two regional parks can be found in Yvelines, the parc of the Haute Vallée de Chevreuse, Yvelines is home to one of Frances best known golf courses, La Tuilerie-Bignon, in the village of Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche. In French, a man from the Yvelines is called Yvelinois, a woman is Yvelinoise
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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
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Bohemianism
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Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic, literary or spiritual pursuits. In this context, Bohemians may or may not be wanderers, adventurers, Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social viewpoints, which often were expressed through free love, frugality, and—in some cases—voluntary poverty. A more economically privileged, wealthy, or even aristocratic bohemian circle is sometimes referred to as haute bohème, the term Bohemianism emerged in France in the early nineteenth century when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class, Romani neighborhoods. Literary Bohemians were associated in the French imagination with roving Romani people, outsiders apart from conventional society, the term carries a connotation of arcane enlightenment, and also carries a less frequently intended, pejorative connotation of carelessness about personal hygiene and marital fidelity. The title character in Carmen, a French opera set in the Spanish city of Seville, is referred to as a bohémienne in Meilhac and her signature aria declares love itself to be a gypsy child, going where it pleases and obeying no laws. Henri Murgers collection of short stories Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, published in 1845, was written to glorify, Murgers collection formed the basis of Giacomo Puccinis opera La bohème. In England, Bohemian in this sense initially was popularised in William Makepeace Thackerays novel, Vanity Fair, public perceptions of the alternative lifestyles supposedly led by artists were further molded by George du Mauriers highly romanticized best-selling novel of Bohemian culture Trilby. The novel outlines the fortunes of three expatriate English artists, their Irish model, and two very colorful Central European musicians, in the artist quarter of Paris. In Spanish literature, the Bohemian impulse can be seen in Ramón del Valle-Incláns play Luces de Bohemia, in his song La Bohème, Charles Aznavour described the Bohemian lifestyle in Montmartre. Also reflects the Bohemian lifestyle in Montmartre at the turn of the 20th century, in the 1850s, aesthetic bohemians began to arrive in the United States. In New York City in 1857, a group of some 15–20 young and this group gathered at a German bar on Broadway called Pffaffs beer cellar. Members included their leader Henry Clapp, Jr, walt Whitman, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and actress Adah Isaacs Menken. Similar groups in cities were broken up as well by the Civil War. During the war, correspondents began to assume the title bohemian, Bohemian became synonymous with newspaper writer. Mark Twain included himself and Charles Warren Stoddard in the category in 1867. Club member and poet George Sterling responded to this redefinition, Any good mixer of convivial habits considers he has a right to be called a bohemian, but that is not a valid claim. There are two elements, at least, that are essential to Bohemianism, the first is devotion or addiction to one or more of the Seven Arts, the other is poverty. Despite his views, Sterling associated very closely with the Bohemian Club, canadian composer Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann and poet George Frederick Cameron wrote the song The Bohemian in the 1889 opera Leo, the Royal Cadet
30.
Edith Wharton
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Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927,1928 and 1930, Wharton combined her insiders view of Americas privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her eras other literary and public figures, Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street in New York City. She had two older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander, who was sixteen, and Henry Edward, who was eleven. She was baptized April 20,1862, Easter Sunday, at Grace Church, to her friends and family she was known as Pussy Jones. The saying keeping up with the Joneses is said to refer to her fathers family and she was also related to the Rensselaer family, the most prestigious of the old patroon families. She had a lifelong friendship with her Rhinelander niece, landscape architect Beatrix Farrand of Reef Point in Bar Harbor. Edith was born during the Civil War, she was three years old when the South surrendered, after the war, the family traveled extensively in Europe. From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family visited France, Italy, Germany, during her travels, the young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. At the age of ten, she suffered from typhoid fever while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest, after the family returned to the United States in 1872, they spent their winters in New York and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island. While in Europe, she was educated by tutors and governesses and she rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time, intended to enable women to marry well and to be displayed at balls and parties. She thought these requirements were superficial and oppressive, Edith wanted more education than she received, so she read from her fathers library and from the libraries of her fathers friends. Her mother forbade her to read novels until she was married, Edith began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl. She attempted to write a novel at age eleven and her first publication was a translation of the German poem, Was die Steine Erzählen by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, which earned her $50. Her family did not wish her name to appear in print because the names of upper class women of the time appeared in print to announce birth, marriage. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friends father and he was a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson and supported womens education. He played a role in Ediths efforts to educate herself. In 1877, at the age of 15, she wrote a 30,000 word novella Fast
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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
32.
Henry Pearlman
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Henry Pearlman was a Brooklyn-born, self-made businessman who discovered in midlife a passion for impressionist and post-impressionist art. His eye for quality was “rarely matched in a private collection. He married Rose Fried in 1925, they raised two daughters in Croton-on-Hudson, eventually living there and in Manhattan and traveling frequently in pursuit of art. ”Pearlman was invigorated by the pursuit of quality as well as the challenges of finding, authenticating and negotiating the ownership of increasingly rare masterpieces. In the years after World War II, Pearlman began traveling to Europe, during an early trip to London he met Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. This would result in a friendship for Pearlman with one of the few living artists whose work he collected. In his hunt for new works, he looked first to Soutine’s close associates, ultimately the collection would include seven paintings by Soutine, and four works by Modigliani, including a rare limestone head and two oil portraits. Although successful in business, Pearlman was never able to match the resources of his contemporaries. ”In 1950 Pearlman learned from a dealer that Van Gogh’s Tarascon Diligence was available from the heirs of the artist Milo Beretta. He quickly offered a combination of paintings and cash to make what is perhaps his most fabled acquisition – the last time a “lost” Van Gogh will reappear for the next sixty-five years. As a reviewer described, this Van Gogh was “a typical Pearlman picture, assertive, pushing a characteristic manner to an extreme that is unusual in the artist’s oeuvre. ”Also in 1950, with the advice of noted Cézanne specialist John Rewald, Pearlman made his first purchase of a Cézanne watercolor. Over the following two decades, he would more than thirty works by Cézanne and assemble the most distinguished collection of watercolors by the artist. Pearlman continued to build his collection - buying, selling and trading works – for the three remaining decades of his life. His last two purchases were Cézanne watercolors, a masterpiece and Rocks at Bibémus, which he had come to know when it appeared alongside works from his collection in a number of exhibitions. Beginning in the 1950s, Henry and Rose Pearlman began lending individual works to museums, initially for retrospectives of Soutine. As their collection took shape, loans and exhibitions of the collection became important to them and eventually occupied as much of Henry’s time and attention as acquisitions did. Although he never tired of the hunt, works that met his eye for quality and expressiveness were soon only to those with the funds. Pearlman’s generosity extended beyond the loans of works from his collection and he lent financial and other support to artists, including Kokoschka and Jacques Lipchitz, whose studio was destroyed by fire in 1952. Later he allowed his collection to be exhibited as a fundraiser for an organization helping immigrant populations settle in New York, the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation was established in 1955 as a not-for-profit organization and is the current owner of the collection. The first exhibition of the collection took place in 1958, twenty-seven selected works, lent anonymously, the collection returned to the Princeton University Art Museum in 1976, when Rose Pearlman, as head of the foundation, initiated a series of longer-term loans that continue to this day
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Princeton University Art Museum
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The Princeton University Art Museum is the Princeton Universitys gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1882, it now houses over 92,000 works of art that range from antiquity to the contemporary period and its collections concentrate on the Mediterranean region, Western Europe, China, the United States, and Latin America. The Museum has a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, including ceramics, marbles, bronzes. Medieval Europe is represented by sculpture, metalwork, and stained glass, the collection of Western European paintings includes examples from the early Renaissance through the nineteenth century, and there is a growing collection of twentieth-century and contemporary art. Photographic holdings are a strength, numbering over 27,000 works from the invention of daguerreotype in 1839 to the present. The Museum is also noted for its Asian art gallery, which includes a collection of Chinese calligraphy, painting, ancient bronze works, jade carvings. In addition to its collections, the Museum mounts regular temporary exhibitions featuring works from its own holdings as well as made from public. Admission is free and the Museum is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday,10,00 am to 5,00 pm, Thursday,10,00 am to 10,00 pm, and Sunday 1,00 to 5,00 pm. The portrait was a donation from Belcher himself, given shortly before the College moved in 1756 to the newly built Nassau Hall and it was joined by a portrait of King George II, who had issued the letters patent establishing the College. The two portraits hung in the prayer hall, and were displayed alongside various antiquities and objects of natural history. The creation of the Art Museum in a formal sense took place under the leadership of James McCosh. The Scottish McCosh brought with him from Europe new progressive academic disciplines, by 1882, McCosh charged William Cowper Prime, a Princeton alumnus and founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and George B. McClellan, the Civil War general and then Governor of New Jersey and they argued, The foundation of any system of education in Historic Art must obviously be in object study. A museum of art objects is so necessary to the system that without it we are of opinion it would be of utility to introduce the proposed department. ”The intention was to go beyond the fields of art and classics to include, “many other branches of the collegiate course. ”They anticipated, “large future growth, ” as the College could “look with confidence to her sons, in all parts of the world. The collections of the Museum were initially held in Nassau Hall, along with the natural history collection of professor Arnold Henry Guyot. A new purpose-built fireproof Romanesque Revival Museum was designed by A, page Brown and completed in 1890 on the site of the current museum. On completion of the building the Museum received the Trumball-Prime collection of pottery and porcelain from William Prime, early additions included the purchase of a large collection of Cypriot pottery from the Metropolitan Museum in 1890, and purchases of Etruscan, Roman, and South Italian pottery. Marquand established an endowment from his own resources to further purchases
34.
Marcel Proust
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He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Proust was born in Auteuil at the home of his great-uncle on 10 July 1871 and he was born during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Prousts father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, studying cholera in Europe and he wrote numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Prousts mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace, literate and well-read, she demonstrated a well-developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of English was sufficient to help with her sons translations of John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his fathers Catholic faith and he was baptized and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith. He later became an atheist and was somewhat of a mystic, by the age of nine, Proust had had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers, in 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet, but his education was disrupted by his illness. Despite this he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year, thanks to his classmates, he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of self-discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his troubles with getting Swanns Way. It is through Mme Arman de Caillavet that he made the acquaintance of Anatole France, Proust had a close relationship with his mother. To appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, after exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents apartment until after both were dead and his life and family circle changed markedly between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Prousts brother, Robert Proust, married and his father died in November of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Prousts beloved mother died in September 1905 and she left him a considerable inheritance. His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate, Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died of pneumonia and an abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age
