Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world, its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, on the eastern edge of Central Park along Museum Mile in Manhattan's Upper East Side is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art and artifacts from Medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; the permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art.
The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries; the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 for the purposes of opening a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, was located at 681 Fifth Avenue; the Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art; the Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, antique weapons and armor from around the world.
A great number of period rooms, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. In addition to its permanent exhibitions, the Met organizes and hosts large traveling shows throughout the year; the current chairman of the board, Daniel Brodsky, was elected in 2011 and became chairman three years after director Philippe de Montebello retired at the end of 2008. On March 1, 2017, the BBC reported that Daniel Weiss, the Met's president and COO, would temporarily act as CEO for the museum. Following the departure of Thomas P. Campbell as the Met's director and CEO on June 30, 2017, the search for a new director of the museum was assigned to the human resources firm Phillips Oppenheim to present a new candidate for the position "by the end of the fiscal year in June" of 2018; the next director will report to Weiss as the current president of the museum. In April 2018, Max Hollein was named director. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the Near East.
From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the Met's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Sasanian, Assyrian and Elamite cultures, as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects; the highlights of the collection include a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum.
The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 15-foot-tall memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by Klaus Perls. The range of materials represented in the Africa and Americas collection is undoubtedly the widest of any department at the Met, including everything from precious metals to porcupine quills; the Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art, of more than 35,000 pieces, arguably the most comprehensive in the US. The collection dates back to the founding of the museum: many of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum included Asian art in their collections. Today, an entire wing of the museum is dedicated to the Asian collection, spans 4,000 years of Asian art; every Asian civilization is represented in the Met's Asian department, the pieces on display include every type of decorative art, from painting and printmaking to sculpture and metalworking.
The department is well known for its comprehensive collection of Chinese calligraphy and painting, as well as for its Indian sculptures and Tibetan works, the arts of Burma and Thailand. All three ancient religions of India – Hinduism and Jainism – are well represented in these s
Paris
Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an area of 105 square kilometres and an official estimated population of 2,140,526 residents as of 1 January 2019. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, commerce, fashion and the arts; the City of Paris is the centre and seat of government of the Île-de-France, or Paris Region, which has an estimated official 2019 population of 12,213,364, or about 18 percent of the population of France. The Paris Region had a GDP of €681 billion in 2016, accounting for 31 percent of the GDP of France, was the 5th largest region by GDP in the world. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Worldwide Cost of Living Survey in 2018, Paris was the second most expensive city in the world, after Singapore, ahead of Zurich, Hong Kong and Geneva. Another source ranked Paris as most expensive, on a par with Singapore and Hong-Kong, in 2018; the city is a major rail and air-transport hub served by two international airports: Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly.
Opened in 1900, the city's subway system, the Paris Métro, serves 5.23 million passengers daily, is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro. Gare du Nord is the 24th busiest railway station in the world, the first located outside Japan, with 262 million passengers in 2015. Paris is known for its museums and architectural landmarks: the Louvre was the most visited art museum in the world in 2018, with 10.2 million visitors. The Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l'Orangerie are noted for their collections of French Impressionist art, the Pompidou Centre Musée National d'Art Moderne has the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe; the historical district along the Seine in the city centre is classified as a UNESCO Heritage Site. Popular landmarks in the centre of the city include the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and the Gothic royal chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, both on the Île de la Cité. Paris received 23 million visitors in 2017, measured by hotel stays, with the largest numbers of foreign visitors coming from the United States, the UK, Germany and China.
It was ranked as the third most visited travel destination in the world in 2017, after Bangkok and London. The 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 will host the 2024 Summer Olympics; the 1938 and 1998 FIFA World Cups, the 2007 Rugby World Cup, the 1960, 1984, 2016 UEFA European Championships were held in the city and, every July, the Tour de France bicycle race finishes there. The name "Paris" is derived from the Celtic Parisii tribe; the city's name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. Paris is referred to as the City of Light, both because of its leading role during the Age of Enlightenment and more because Paris was one of the first large European cities to use gas street lighting on a grand scale on its boulevards and monuments.
Gas lights were installed on the Place du Carousel, Rue de Rivoli and Place Vendome in 1829. By 1857, the Grand boulevards were lit. By the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps. Since the late 19th century, Paris has been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in French as Parisiens, they are 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 area's major north–south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité; the Parisii minted their own coins for that purpose. The Romans began their settlement on Paris' Left Bank; the Roman town was called Lutetia. It became a prosperous city with a forum, temples, an amphitheatre. By the end of the Western Roman Empire, the town was known as Parisius, a Latin name that would become Paris in French. Christianity was introduced in the middle of the 3rd century AD by Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris: according to legend, when he refused to renounce his faith before the Roman occupiers, he was beheaded on the hill which became known as Mons Martyrum "Montmartre", from where he walked headless to the north of the city.
Clovis the Frank, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made the city his capital from 508. As the Frankish domination of Gaul began, there was a gradual immigration by the Franks to Paris and the Parisian Francien dialects were born. Fortification of the Île-de-la-Citie failed to avert sacking by Vikings in 845, but Paris' strategic importance—with its bridges prevent
Impressionism
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by small, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s; the Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, soleil levant, which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari; the development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music and impressionist literature. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting.
They constructed their pictures from brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner, they painted realistic scenes of modern life, painted outdoors. Still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were painted in a studio; the Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting outdoors or en plein air. They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour—not blended smoothly or shaded, as was customary—to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration. Impressionism emerged in France at the same time that a number of other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, Winslow Homer in the United States, were exploring plein-air painting; the Impressionists, developed new techniques specific to the style. Encompassing what its adherents argued was a different way of seeing, it is an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour.
The public, at first hostile came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style. By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than delineating the details of the subject, by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism is a precursor of various painting styles, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism. In the middle of the 19th century—a time of change, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris and waged war—the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French art; the Académie was the preserver of traditional French painting standards of style. Historical subjects, religious themes, portraits were valued; the Académie preferred finished images that looked realistic when examined closely. Paintings in this style were made up of precise brush strokes blended to hide the artist's hand in the work. Colour was restrained and toned down further by the application of a golden varnish.
The Académie had an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, artists whose work was displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries represented the values of the Académie, represented by the works of such artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. In the early 1860s, four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille—met while studying under the academic artist Charles Gleyre, they discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life rather than historical or mythological scenes. Following a practice that had become popular by mid-century, they ventured into the countryside together to paint in the open air, but not for the purpose of making sketches to be developed into finished works in the studio, as was the usual custom. By painting in sunlight directly from nature, making bold use of the vivid synthetic pigments that had become available since the beginning of the century, they began to develop a lighter and brighter manner of painting that extended further the Realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school.
A favourite meeting place for the artists was the Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy in Paris, where the discussions were led by Édouard Manet, whom the younger artists admired. They were soon joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin. During the 1860s, the Salon jury rejected about half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends in favour of works by artists faithful to the approved style. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While the Salon jury accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, they condemned Manet for placing a realistic nude in a contemporary setting; the jury's worded rejection of Manet's painting appalled his admirers, the unusually large number of rejected works that year perturbed many French artists. After Emperor Napoleon III saw the rejected works of 1863, he decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, the Salon des Refusés was organized.
While many viewers came only to laugh, the Salon des Refusés drew attention to the existence of a new tendency in art and attracted more visi
Marie Bashkirtseff
Marie Bashkirtseff was a Russian diarist and sculptor. Bashkirtseff was born Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva in Gavrontsi near Poltava to a wealthy noble family, but her parents separated when she was quite young; as a result, she grew up abroad, traveling with her mother throughout most of Europe, with longer spells in Germany and on the Riviera, until the family settled in Paris. Educated and with early musical talent, she lost her chance at a career as a singer when illness destroyed her voice, she determined to become an artist, she studied painting in France at the Robert-Fleury studio and at the Académie Julian. The Académie, as one of the few establishments that accepted female students, attracted young women from all over Europe and the United States. Fellow students at the Académie included Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa and Louise Breslau, whom Bashkirtseff viewed as her only real rival. Bashkirtseff would go on to produce a remarkable, if conventional, body of work in her short lifetime, exhibiting at the Paris Salon as early as 1880 and every year thereafter until her death.
In 1884, she exhibited a portrait of Paris slum children entitled The Meeting and a pastel portrait of her cousin, for which she received an honorable mention. Bashkirtseff's best-known works are The Meeting and In the Studio, a portrait of her fellow artists at work. Although a large number of Bashkirtseff's works were destroyed by the Nazis during World War II, at least 60 survive. In 2000, a U. S. touring exhibition entitled "Overcoming All the Obstacles: The Women of Academy Julian" featured works by Bashkirtseff and her schoolmates. As a painter, Bashkirtseff took her cue from her friend Jules Bastien-Lepage's admiration for realism and naturalism. Where Bastien-Lepage had found his inspiration in nature, Bashkirtseff turned to the urban scene, writing, "I say nothing of the fields because Bastien-Lepage reigns over them as a sovereign. Bastien." By unlucky chance, both artists succumbed prematurely to chronic illness in the same year, the pages of Bashkirtseff's journal record her visits to the dying painter.
Dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25, Bashkirtseff lived just long enough to emerge as an intellectual in Paris in the 1880s. She wrote several articles for Hubertine Auclert's feminist newspaper La Citoyenne in 1881 under the nom de plume "Pauline Orrel." One of her most-quoted sayings is "Let us love dogs, let us love only dogs! Men and cats are unworthy creatures." Bashkirtseff died in Paris in 1884, she is buried in Cimetière de Passy, Paris. Her great friend Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch was present at her deathbed, her monument is a full-sized artist's studio, declared a historic monument by the government of France. Marie Bashkirtseff was included in the 2018 exhibit Women in Paris 1850-1900” From the age of 13, Bashkirtseff kept a journal, it is for this that she is most famous today, it has been called "a strikingly modern psychological self-portrait of a young, gifted mind," and her urgent prose, which breaks out into dialogue, remains readable. She was multilingual and despite her self-involvement, was a keen observer with an acute ear for hypocrisy, so that her journal offers a near-novelistic account of the late nineteenth century European bourgeoisie.
A consistent theme throughout her journal is her deep desire to achieve fame, inflected by her increasing fear that her intermittent illnesses might turn out to be tuberculosis. In a prefatory section written toward the end of her life, in which she recounts her family history, she writes, "If I do not die young I hope to live as great artist. Similarly: "When I am dead, my life, which appears to me a remarkable one, will be read.." In effect, the first half of Bashkirtseff's journal is a coming-of-age story while the second is an account of heroic suffering. Bashkirtseff's journal was first published in 1887, was only the second diary by a woman published in France to that date, it was an immediate success, not least because its cosmopolitan confessional style was a marked departure from the contemplative, mystical diaries of the writer Eugénie de Guérin, published in 1862. An English translation appeared two years under the title Marie Bashkirtseff: The Journal of a Young Artist 1860–1884.
Translated by Mary J. Serrano, it was abridged and bowdlerized, her relatives seeing to it that a good deal of material they considered unflattering to the family was removed. British Prime Minister William Gladstone referred to her journal as "a book without a parallel", another early admirer was George Bernard Shaw; the late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing read the original French version over eight days in June 1890. It remained popular spinning off both plays and movies based on her life story, including The Affairs of Maupassant, directed by Henry Koster and released in the United States in 1938, her diary was cited as an inspiration by the American writer Mary MacLane, whose own shockingly confessional diary was written a bare generation and it was mentioned as a model by writers who became known for their diaries, including Pierre Louÿs, Katherine Mansfield, Anais Nin. Her letters, consisting of her correspondence with the writer Guy de Maupassant were first published in 1891.
Until the accepted date of
Montmédy
Montmédy is a commune in the Meuse department in Grand Est in north-eastern France. In 1221 the first castle of Montmédy was built on top of a hill by the Count of Chiny. Montmédy soon became the capital of his territory – it belonged to Luxembourg, Burgundy and Spain; the original castle was replaced with a fortress by Charles V in the 16th Century. After Marville and Stenay had been occupied by the French, 30,000 soldiers, including King Louis XIV, attacked Montmédy, whilst 756 were defending it in 1657, they surrendered only after the death of the governor Jean V of Allamont. The military engineer Vauban advanced the outer fortifications, the moats and the walls after the siege of 1657. During the French Revolution in 1791, the fortress was the anticipated destination of King Louis XVI and his family in their unsuccessful attempt to escape from the growing radical republicanism of Paris; the area at that time was overwhelmingly pro-monarchy. The royal party never arrived, because they were discovered en route at Varennes and escorted back to the capital city.
The King had hoped to establish a counter-revolutionary military base of operations in the citadel from which he could reclaim the country. The citadel has been used as a fortress during both World Wars. Buildings, including a church dating back to the 17th century, can be found inside the citadel itself. Most of the buildings are derelict or collapsed. An Office de Tourisme can be found in the citadel; the river Othain joins the Chiers in the eastern part of the commune. The village lies on the right bank of the Chiers. A museum is devoted to the painter Jules Bastien-Lepage; the eccentric harpist and composer Nicolas-Charles Bochsa was born in Montmédy where his father Karl Bochsa was an oboist belonging to the Army. Future President François Mitterrand was stationed as a soldier at Montmédy in 1939. Communes of the Meuse department Webpage about the citadel
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives and airbrushes, can be used; the final work is called a painting. Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing in elements such as drawing, composition, narration, or abstraction. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, abstract, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by religious art. Examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery, to Biblical scenes Sistine Chapel ceiling, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other images of Eastern religious origin. In art, the term painting describes the result of the action; the support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, canvas, glass, pottery, leaf and concrete, the painting may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, paper, gold leaf, as well as objects.
Color, made up of hue and value, dispersed over a surface is the essence of painting, just as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music. Color is subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West; some painters, theoreticians and scientists, including Goethe and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent; the word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as F or C♯. For a painter, color is not divided into basic and derived colors. Painters deal with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, Cobalt blue, so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not speaking, means of painting.
Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, because of this, the perception of a painting is subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to "light" in painting, "shades" to dynamics, "coloration" is to painting as the specific timbre of musical instruments is to music; these elements do not form a melody of themselves. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting to include, as one example, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense; some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Anselm Kiefer. There is a growing community of artists who use computers to "paint" color onto a digital "canvas" using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, many others; these images can be printed onto traditional canvas. Jean Metzinger's mosaic-like Divisionist technique had its parallel in literature. I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables I use strokes which, variable in quantity, cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature.
Rhythm, for artists such as Piet Mondrian, is important in painting as it is in music. If one defines rhythm as "a pause incorporated into a sequence" there can be rhythm in paintings; these pauses allow creative force to intervene and add new creations—form, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art, it directly affects the aesthetic value of that work; this is because the aesthetic value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the aesthetic value. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul. Wassily Kandinsky used musical terms to identify his works. Kandinsky theorized that "music is the ultimate teacher," and subsequently embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions.
Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, yellow is the color of middle C on a brassy trumpet. In 1871 the young Kandinsky learned to play the cello. Kandinsky's stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" illustrates his "synaesthetic" concept of a universal correspondence of forms and musical sounds. Music d
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bastien-Lepage, Jules". Encyclopædia Britannica. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 502.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the 