1.
Self-portrait
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A self-portrait is a representation of an artist that is drawn, painted, photographed, or sculpted by that artist. With better and cheaper mirrors, and the advent of the panel portrait, Portrait of a Man in a Turban by Jan van Eyck of 1433 may well be the earliest known panel self-portrait. He painted a portrait of his wife, and he belonged to the social group that had begun to commission portraits. The genre is venerable, but not until the Renaissance, with increased wealth and interest in the individual as a subject, a self-portrait may be a portrait of the artist, or a portrait included in a larger work, including a group portrait. Many painters are said to have included depictions of specific individuals, including themselves, in these works, the artist usually appears as a face in the crowd or group, often towards the edges or corner of the work and behind the main participants. Rubenss The Four Philosophers is a good example and this culminated in the 17th century with the work of Jan de Bray. Many artistic media have used, apart from paintings, drawings. In the famous Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck is probably one of two figures glimpsed in a mirror – a surprisingly modern conceit. The Van Eyck painting may have inspired Diego Velázquez to depict himself in view as the painter creating Las Meninas, as the Van Eyck hung in the palace in Madrid where he worked. This was another modern flourish, given that he appears as the painter, in what may be one of the earliest childhood self-portraits now surviving, Albrecht Dürer depicts himself as in naturalistic style as a 13-year-old boy in 1484. In later years he appears variously as a merchant in the background of Biblical scenes, leonardo da Vinci may have drawn a picture of himself at the age of 60, in around 1512. The picture is often reproduced as Da Vincis appearance, although this is not certain. In the 17th century, Rembrandt painted a range of self-portraits, family and professional group paintings, including the artists depiction, became increasingly common from the 17th century on. From the later 20th century on, video plays a part in self-portraiture. Vigée-Lebrun painted a total of 37 self-portraits, many of which were copies of earlier ones, Women artists have historically embodied a number of roles within their self-portraiture. Most common is the artist at work, showing themselves in the act of painting, or at least holding a brush and palette. Often, the viewer if the clothes worn were those they normally painted in. Images of artists at work are encountered in Ancient Egyptian painting, one of the first self-portraits was made by the Pharaoh Akhenatens chief sculptor Bak in 1365 BC
2.
Russian Museum
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The State Russian Museum, formerly the Russian Museum of His Imperial Majesty Alexander III is the largest depository of Russian fine art in Saint Petersburg. It is also one of the largest museums in the country, the museum was established on April 13,1895, upon enthronement of Nicholas II to commemorate his father, Alexander III. Its original collection was composed of artworks taken from the Hermitage Museum, Alexander Palace, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, many private collections were nationalized and relocated to the Russian Museum. These included Kazimir Malevichs Black Square, upon the death of the Grand Duke the residence was named after his wife as the Palace of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, and became famous for its many theatrical presentations and balls. Some of the halls of the palace retain the Italianate opulent interiors of the imperial residence. The Ethnographic Department was originally set up in a specially designed by Vladimir Svinyin in 1902. The museum soon housed gifts received by Emperors family from representatives of peoples inhabiting various regions of the Russian Empire, further exhibits were purchased by Nicholas II and other members of his family as State financing was not enough to purchase new exhibits. In 1934, the Ethnographic Department was given the status of an independent museum, the city of Málaga, home to thousands of Russian expats, has signed an agreement to host the first overseas branch of the State Russian Museum. Works displayed in Malaga will range from Byzantine-inspired icons to social realism of the Soviet era and they will be on display in 2,300 square metres of exhibition space in La Tabacalera, a 1920s tobacco factory. The new museum is scheduled to open in early 2015
3.
Saint Petersburg
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Saint Petersburg is Russias second-largest city after Moscow, with five million inhabitants in 2012, and an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea. It is politically incorporated as a federal subject, situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 271703. In 1914, the name was changed from Saint Petersburg to Petrograd, in 1924 to Leningrad, between 1713 and 1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia. In 1918, the government bodies moved to Moscow. Saint Petersburg is one of the cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Saint Petersburg is home to The Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. A large number of consulates, international corporations, banks. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress, at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in a then called Ingermanland. A small town called Nyen grew up around it, Peter the Great was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, and he intended to have Russia gain a seaport in order to be able to trade with other maritime nations. He needed a better seaport than Arkhangelsk, which was on the White Sea to the north, on May 1703121703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans, and soon replaced the fortress. On May 271703, closer to the estuary 5 km inland from the gulf), on Zayachy Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city. The city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia, tens of thousands of serfs died building the city. Later, the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate, Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712,9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war, he referred to Saint Petersburg as the capital as early as 1704. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the bank of the Neva, near the Peter. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan, by 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals. The project was not completed, but is evident in the layout of the streets, in 1716, Peter the Great appointed French Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences, University and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great, in 1725, Peter died at the age of fifty-two. His endeavours to modernize Russia had met opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life
4.
Grodno
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Grodno or Hrodna is a city in western Belarus. It is located on the Neman close to the borders of Poland and it is the capital of Grodno Region and Grodno District. In Belarusian, the city is referred to as Го́радня or Гаро́дня. In Latin it was known as Grodna, in Polish as Grodno, the Lithuanian name of the city is Gardinas. The modern city of Grodno originated as a fortress and a fortified trading outpost maintained by the Rurikid princes on the border with the lands of the Baltic tribal union of the Yotvingians. The first reference to Grodno dates to 1005, the official foundation year is 1127. Along with Navahrudak, Grodno was regarded as the city on the western borderlands of Black Ruthenia. The border region neighboured the original Lithuania and it was often attacked by various invaders, especially the Teutonic Knights. In the 1240–1250s the Grodno area, as well as the most of Black Ruthenia, was controlled by princes of Lithuanian origin to form the Baltic state—Grand Duchy of Lithuania—on these territories, after the Prussian uprisings a large population of Old Prussians moved to the region. The famous Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas was the prince of Grodno from 1376 to 1392, since 1413, Grodno had been the administrative center of a powiat in Trakai Voivodeship. To aid the reconstruction of trade and commerce, the grand dukes allowed the creation of a Jewish commune in 1389 and it was one of the first Jewish communities in the grand duchy. In 1441 the city received its charter, based on the Magdeburg Law, the city was the site of two battles, Battle of Grodno and Battle of Grodno during the Great Northern War. After the First Partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Grodno became the capital of the short-lived Grodno Voivodeship in 1793, as an important centre of trade, commerce, and culture, Grodno remained one of the places where the Sejms were held. Also, the Old and New Castles were often visited by the Commonwealth monarchs including famous Stephen Báthory of Poland who made a royal residence here, in 1793 the last Sejm in the history of the Commonwealth occurred at Grodno. Two years afterwards, in 1795, Russia obtained the city in the Third Partition of Poland and it was in the New Castle on November 25 of that year that the last Polish king and Lithuanian grand duke Stanisław August Poniatowski abdicated. In the Russian Empire, the city continued to serve its role as a seat of Grodno Governorate since 1801, the industrial activities, started in the late 18th century by Antoni Tyzenhaus, continued to develop. Count Aleksander Bisping was arrested and imprisoned here during the January Uprising before his exile to Ufa, after the outbreak of World War I, Grodno was occupied by Germany and ceded by Bolshevist Russia under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. After the war the German government permitted a state to be set up there
5.
Belarus
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Its capital and most populous city is Minsk. Over 40% of its 207,600 square kilometres is forested and its strongest economic sectors are service industries and manufacturing. In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Belarus declared independence as the Belarusian Peoples Republic, the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia became a founding constituent republic of the Soviet Union in 1922 and was renamed as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Belarus lost almost half of its territory to Poland after the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921, during WWII, military operations devastated Belarus, which lost about a third of its population and more than half of its economic resources. The republic was redeveloped in the post-war years, in 1945 the Byelorussian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations, along with the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR. The parliament of the declared the sovereignty of Belarus on 27 July 1990. Alexander Lukashenko has served as the president since 1994. Belarus has been labeled Europes last dictatorship by some Western journalists, Lukashenko continued a number of Soviet-era policies, such as state ownership of large sections of the economy. Though not directly espousing communism like the five remaining communist countries of China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea, in 2000 Belarus and Russia signed a treaty for greater cooperation, with some hints of forming a Union State. Over 70% of Belaruss population of 9.49 million resides in urban areas, more than 80% of the population is ethnic Belarusian, with sizable minorities of Russians, Poles and Ukrainians. Since a referendum in 1995, the country has had two official languages, Belarusian and Russian, the Constitution of Belarus does not declare any official religion, although the primary religion in the country is Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Belarus is the only European country to retain capital punishment in both law and practice, the name Belarus is closely related with the term Belaya Rus, i. e. White Rus. There are several claims to the origin of the name White Rus, an alternate explanation for the name comments on the white clothing worn by the local Slavic population. A third theory suggests that the old Rus lands that were not conquered by the Tatars had been referred to as white, other sources claim that, before 1267, the land not conquered by the Mongols was considered White Rus. The name Rus is often conflated with its Latin forms Russia and Ruthenia, in some languages, including German and Dutch, the country is generally called White Russia to this day. The Latin term Alba Russia was used again by Pope Pius VI in 1783 to recognize the Society of Jesus there, exclaiming Approbo Societatem Jesu in Alba Russia degentem, approbo, approbo. The first known use of White Russia to refer to Belarus was in the century by Englishman Sir Jerome Horsey. During the 17th century, the Russian tsars used White Rus to describe the lands added from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
6.
Rueil-Malmaison
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Rueil-Malmaison is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, in the Hauts-de-Seine department of France. It is located 12.6 kilometres from the centre of Paris and it is one of the wealthiest suburbs of Paris. Rueil-Malmaison was originally called simply Rueil, in medieval times the name Rueil was spelled either Roialum, Riogilum, Rotoialum, Ruolium, or Ruellium. This name is made of the Celtic word ialo suffixed to a radical meaning brook, stream, in 1928, the name of the commune officially became Rueil-Malmaison in reference to its most famous tourist attraction, the Château de Malmaison, home of Napoléons first wife Joséphine de Beauharnais. The name Malmaison comes from Medieval Latin mala mansio, meaning ill-fated domain, in the Early Middle Ages Malmaison was the site of a royal residence which was destroyed by the Vikings in 846. Rueil is famous for the Château de Malmaison where Napoleon and his first wife Joséphine de Beauharnais lived, upon her death in 1814, she was buried at the nearby Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul church, which stands at the centre of the city. The Rueil barracks of the Swiss Guard were constructed in 1756 under Louis XV by the architect Axel Guillaumot, the Guard was formed by Louis XIII in 1616 and massacred at the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 during the French Revolution. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Rueil was located on the front line, at the end of the 19th century, Impressionist painters like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet came to paint the Seine River which crosses the town. Rueil is the location of the novel Loin de Rueil by the French novelist Raymond Queneau. The town is twinned with Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in the United Kingdom, the Château de Malmaison, the residence of Napoléons first wife Joséphine de Beauharnais, is located in Rueil-Malmaison. It is home to a Napoleonic museum, the main campus of the French Institute of Petroleum research organisation is in Rueil. The city has become home to many large companies moving out of La Défense business district, located only 5 km from Rueil. There are about 850 service sector companies located in Rueil,70 of which more than 100 people. A business district called Rueil-sur-Seine was created near the RER A Rueil-Malmaison station to accommodate these companies, the business district is equipped with a fiber-optic network. Several major French companies have their headquarters in Rueil-Malmaison, such as Schneider Electric. Schneider had its office in Rueil-Malmaison since 2000, previously the building Schneider occupies housed the Schneider subsidiary Télémécanique. Several large international companies have located their French headquarters in Rueil-Malmaison, such as ExxonMobil, AstraZeneca, American Express. Rueil-Malmaison is served by Rueil-Malmaison station on Paris RER line A. Jean-Marie Le Pen and his wife, Jany Le Pen, live in a two-story house on the rue Hortense
7.
Moscow
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Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits and 17.8 million within the urban area. Moscow has the status of a Russian federal city, Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city entirely on the European continent. Moscow is the northernmost and coldest megacity and metropolis on Earth and it is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe, the Federation Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and the Moscow International Business Center. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, the city is well known for its architecture, particularly its historic buildings such as Saint Basils Cathedral with its brightly colored domes. Moscow is the seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are also one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament also sit in the city and it is recognized as one of the citys landmarks due to the rich architecture of its 200 stations. In old Russian the word also meant a church administrative district. The demonym for a Moscow resident is москвич for male or москвичка for female, the name of the city is thought to be derived from the name of the Moskva River. There have been proposed several theories of the origin of the name of the river and its cognates include Russian, музга, muzga pool, puddle, Lithuanian, mazgoti and Latvian, mazgāt to wash, Sanskrit, majjati to drown, Latin, mergō to dip, immerse. There exist as well similar place names in Poland like Mozgawa, the original Old Russian form of the name is reconstructed as *Москы, *Mosky, hence it was one of a few Slavic ū-stem nouns. From the latter forms came the modern Russian name Москва, Moskva, in a similar manner the Latin name Moscovia has been formed, later it became a colloquial name for Russia used in Western Europe in the 16th–17th centuries. From it as well came English Muscovy, various other theories, having little or no scientific ground, are now largely rejected by contemporary linguists. The surface similarity of the name Russia with Rosh, an obscure biblical tribe or country, the oldest evidence of humans on the territory of Moscow dates from the Neolithic. Within the modern bounds of the city other late evidence was discovered, on the territory of the Kremlin, Sparrow Hills, Setun River and Kuntsevskiy forest park, etc. The earliest East Slavic tribes recorded as having expanded to the upper Volga in the 9th to 10th centuries are the Vyatichi and Krivichi, the Moskva River was incorporated as part of Rostov-Suzdal into the Kievan Rus in the 11th century. By AD1100, a settlement had appeared on the mouth of the Neglinnaya River. The first known reference to Moscow dates from 1147 as a place of Yuri Dolgoruky. At the time it was a town on the western border of Vladimir-Suzdal Principality
8.
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
9.
Imperial Academy of Arts
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The Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, informally known as the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, the academy promoted the neoclassical style and technique, and sent its promising students to European capitals for further study. Training at the academy was virtually required for artists to make successful careers, formally abolished in 1918 after the Russian Revolution, the academy was renamed several times. It established free tuition, students from across the country competed fiercely for its few places annually, in 1947 the national institution was moved to Moscow, and much of its art collection was moved to the Hermitage. The building in Leningrad was devoted to the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, since 1991 it has been called the St. Petersburg Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The academy was located in the Shuvalov Palace on Sadovaya Street, in 1764, Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned its first rector, Alexander Kokorinov, to design a new building. It took 25 years to complete the Neoclassical edifice, which opened in 1789, konstantin Thon was responsible for the sumptuous decoration of the interiors. He also designed a quayside in front of the building, with stairs down to the Neva River, Ivan Betskoy reorganized the academy into a de facto government department, it supervised matters concerning art throughout the country, distributing orders and awarding ranks to artists. The academy vigorously promoted the principles of Neoclassicism by sending the most notable Russian painters abroad, in order to learn the ancient and Renaissance styles of Italy and it also had its own sizable collection of choice artworks intended for study and copying. The adherents of this movement became known as peredvizhniki, led by Ivan Kramskoi, they publicly broke with the Academy and organized their own exhibitions, which traveled from town to town across Russia. Ilya Repin, Mikhail Vrubel and some other painters still regarded the academys training as indispensable for the development of professional and technical skills. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Imperial Academy passed through a series of transformations, after the Academys move to Moscow that year, the building in what was then called Leningrad was renamed Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The national academy has stayed in Moscow, in 1991 it was renamed the Russian Academy of Arts. The old academys art collection, which included works by Poussin, David. During the Soviet era, academies were free of tuition fees as they were financed by the government, many would-be students would apply to the Academy for as many as six or seven years in a row without success. With just twenty places available and thousands of applicants, the competition was brutal, well-known graduates of Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1930–1950s include, The Russian Academy of Arts has been headquartered in Moscow since 1947. Its current president is Zurab Tsereteli and its vice-president is Tair Salakhov and it is also called the St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Fine Arts, Sculpture and Architecture. - Saint Petersburg, NP-Print Edition,2007, the Leningrad School Russian Academy of Arts The St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Fine Arts Sergei V. Ivanov
10.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
11.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
12.
Painting
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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
13.
Scenic design
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Scenic design is the creation of theatrical, as well as film or television scenery. Scenic designers come from a variety of backgrounds, but in recent years, are mostly trained professionals. Scenic designers design sets and scenery that aim to fully immerse the viewer in the production, a designer looks at the details searching for evidence through research to produce conceptual ideas that’s best toward supporting the content and values with visual elements. The subject of, “How do we generate creative ideas. ”The most consuming part of expanding our horizons toward scenic concepts is more than witnessing creativity. It starts with us opening our mind to the possibilities, to have an attitude toward learning, seeking, and engaging in creativity and to be willing to be adventurous, inquisitive and curious. Whether outside or inside, colorful trees or concerts, star lit skies or the architecture of a great building, discovering what will best clarify and support the story being told. The scenic designer works with the director and other designers to establish a visual concept for the production. All of these required drawing elements can be created from one accurate 3-D CAD model of the set design. Scenic designers are responsible for creating models of the scenery, renderings, paint elevations. Prague, CZ What is Scenography Article illustrating the differences between US and European theatre design practices Special, WhatLinksHere/Julia Anastasopoulos
14.
Costume design
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Costume design is the envisioning of clothing and the overall appearance of a character or performer. Costume may refer to the style of particular to a nation. In many cases, it may contribute to the fullness of the artistic, the most basic designs are produced to denote status, provide protection or modesty, or provide visual interest to a character. Costumes may be for a theater, cinema, or musical performance, Costume design should not be confused with costume coordination which merely involves altering existing clothing, although both create stage clothes. Four types of costumes are used in design, historical, fantastical, dance. Village festivals and processions in honor of Dionysus amongst the ancient Greeks, are believed to be the origin of theatre, the sculpture and vase paintings provide the clearest evidence of this costume. Because of their style of theatre many masks were used giving each character a specific look. Some masks were constructed with a cheerful as well as a side on the same face in an attempt to indicate a change in emotion without a change of mask. The same is true for the Romans, who continued the mask tradition, stereotypical characterization was key when clothing performers for this style of theatre. In most instances actors had to supply their own costumes when playing a character found in daily life, later, in Elizabethan performance during the 1500-1600s in England, costume became the most important visual element. Garments were very expensive because only the finest fabrics were used, ordinarily, fashionable garments were used in both comedy and tragedy until 1727, when Adrienne Lecouvreur adopted the much more elaborate and formal court dress for tragedy. Her practice soon became standard for all tragic heroines Major actors began to compete with one another as to who would have the most lavish stage dress and this practice continued until around the 1750s when costumes became relevant to the character again. Art began to copy life and realistic characteristics were favored especially during the 19th century, for example, Georg the second, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen took personal interest in the theatre and began managing troupes. He advocated for authenticity and accuracy of the script and time period and he also made sure the materials were authentic and specific, using real chain mail, armor, swords, etc. No cheap substitutes would be allowed, in August 1823, in an issue of The Album, James Planché published an article saying that more attention should be paid to the time period of Shakespeares plays, especially when it comes to costumes. In the same year, a casual conversation led to one of Planchés more lasting effects on British theatre, Planché had little experience in this area and sought the help of antiquaries such as Francis Douce and Sir Samuel Meyrick. The research involved sparked Planchés latent antiquarian interests, these came to occupy an increasing amount of his later in life. Despite the actors reservations, King John was a success and led to a number of similarly-costumed Shakespeare productions by Kemble, Planché also wrote a number of plays or adaptations which were staged with historically accurate costumes
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Sergei Diaghilev
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Sergei Diaghilev was born to a wealthy and cultured family in Selishchi, Russia, his father, Pavel Pavlovich, was a cavalry colonel, but the familys money came mainly from vodka distilleries. After the death of Sergeis mother, his father married Elena Valerianovna Panaeva, the family lived in Perm but had an apartment in Saint Petersburg and a country estate in Bikbarda. In 1890, Sergeis parents went bankrupt, having for a time lived beyond their means. After graduating in 1892 he abandoned his dreams of composition, during his years at University, Diaghilevs cousin Dmitry Filosofov introduced him to a circle of art-loving friends who called themselves The Nevsky Pickwickians. They included Alexandre Benois, Walter Nouvel, Konstantin Somov, although not instantly received into the group, Diaghilev was aided by Benois in developing his knowledge of Russian and Western art. In two years, he had voraciously absorbed this new obsession and came to be respected as one of the most learned of the group, with financial backing from Savva Mamontov and Princess Maria Tenisheva, the group founded the journal Mir iskusstva. In 1899, Diaghilev became special assistant to Prince Sergei Mikhaylovich Volkonsky, in 1900–1901 Volkonsky entrusted Diaghilev with the staging of Léo Delibes ballet Sylvia, a favorite of Benois. The two collaborators concocted an elaborate plan that startled the established personnel of the Imperial Theatres. At the same time, some of Diaghilevs researchers hinted at his homosexuality as the cause for this conflict. However, his homosexuality had been known long before he was invited into the Imperial Theatres. In the following year he took a major exhibition of Russian art to the Petit Palais in Paris and it was the beginning of a long involvement with France. In 1907 he presented five concerts of Russian music in Paris and this led to an invitation to return the following year with ballet as well as opera, and thus to the launching of his famous Ballets Russes. The company included the best young Russian dancers, among them Anna Pavlova, Adolph Bolm, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina and Vera Karalli, and their first night on 19 May 1909 was a sensation. During these years Diaghilevs stagings included several compositions by the late Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, such as the operas The Maid of Pskov, May Night and his choreographer Michel Fokine often adapted the music for ballet. Diaghilev also worked with dancer and ballet master Léonide Massine, the artistic director for the Ballets Russes was Léon Bakst. Together they developed a complicated form of ballet with show-elements intended to appeal to the general public. The exotic appeal of the Ballets Russes had an effect on Fauvist painters, coco Chanel is said to have stated that Diaghilev invented Russia for foreigners. Perhaps Diaghilevs most notable composer-collaborator, however, was Igor Stravinsky, Diaghilev heard Stravinskys early orchestral works Fireworks and Scherzo fantastique, and was impressed enough to ask Stravinsky to arrange some pieces by Chopin for the Ballets Russes
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Ballets Russes
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The Ballets Russes was an itinerant ballet company based in Paris that performed between 1909 and 1929 throughout Europe and on tours to North and South America. The company never performed in Russia, where the Revolution disrupted society, after its initial Paris season, the company had no formal ties there. It also introduced European and American audiences to tales, music, the influence of the Ballets Russes lasts to the present day. The French plural form of the name, “Ballets Russes, ” specifically refers to the company founded by Sergei Diaghilev and active during his lifetime. ”To add to the confusion, some publicity material spelt the name in the singular. The names “Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo” and “The Original Ballet Russe” refer to companies that formed after Diaghilevs death in 1929, Sergei Diaghilev, the companys impresario, was chiefly responsible for its success. He was uniquely prepared for the role, born into a wealthy Russian family of vodka distillers, he was accustomed to moving in the upper-class circles that provided the companys patrons and benefactors. In 1890 he enrolled at the Faculty of Law, St. Petersburg, from childhood, Diaghilev had been passionately interested in music. His ambition to become a composer was dashed when Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov told him he had no talent, in 1898, several members of The Pickwickians founded the journal Mir iskusstva under the editorship of Diaghilev. As early as 1902, Mir iskusstva included reviews of concerts, operas, the latter were chiefly written by Alexandre Benois, who exerted considerable influence on Diaghilevs thinking. Mir iskusstva also sponsored exhibitions of Russian art in St. Petersburg and its enormous success created a Parisian fascination with all things Russian. Diaghilev organized a 1907 season of Russian music at the Paris Opéra, in 1908, Diaghilev returned to the Paris Opéra with six performances of Mussorgskys opera Boris Godunov, starring basso Fyodor Chaliapin. The performances were a sensation, though the costs of producing grand opera were crippling, in 1909, Diaghilev presented his first Paris Saison Russe devoted exclusively to ballet. Most of this company were resident performers at the Imperial Ballet of Saint Petersburg. The first seasons featured a variety of works chiefly choreographed by Michel Fokine, including Le Pavillon dArmide, the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, Les Sylphides. The season also included Le Festin, a set by several choreographers to music by several Russian composers. The Ballets Russes was noted for the standard of its dancers, most of whom had been classically trained at the great Imperial schools in Moscow. Their high technical standards contributed a great deal to the success in Paris. The Ballets Russes was even more remarkable for raising the status of the dancer, largely ignored by choreographers
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Set construction
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The set designer produces a scale model, scale drawings, paint elevations, and research about props, textures, and so on. In theater, the director or production manager is the person responsible for evaluating the finished designs and considering budget. He or she engineers the scenery, has it redrafted for building, budgets time, crew and materials, technical directors often have assistant technical directors whose duties can range from drafting to actually building scenery. A scene shop, in production is often overseen by a shop foreman or master carpenter. This person assigns tasks, does direct supervision of carpenters, and deals with matters such as absences, breaks, tool repair. The staff of a shop is usually referred to as scenic carpenters, but within that there are many specialities such as plasterers, welders. Scenic painting is an aspect of scenic construction, although the scenic painter usually answers to the technical director. In major film production in England, a Supervising Art Director is responsible for a team of Art Directors, Construction supervisors interpret the drawings and allocate labor and resources, with the Production Designer giving approval of the finished set on the Directors behalf. Film construction is rigidly compartmentalized on major motion pictures, a prop making workshop is set up in a similar stage and may be paid for out of a Construction or Art Department budget depending on the nature and size of the props in question. The construction department is led by a construction coordinator, the coordinator reports to the art director and production designer and is in charge of budgeting and implementing designs. The construction coordinator has a general foreman to assist, next there are other foremen, lead carpenters called gang bosses, and then all of the carpenters and craftsmen. In the United States, set construction workers are members of the entertainment union, IATSE. Sound stage Stagecraft Staging Theatrical scenery Film sculptor
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Costume
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Costume is the distinctive style of dress of an individual or group that reflects their class, gender, profession, ethnicity, nationality, activity or epoch. The term also was used to describe typical appropriate clothing for certain activities, such as riding costume, swimming costume, dance costume. Appropriate and acceptable costume is subject to changes in fashion and local cultural norms, before the advent of ready-to-wear apparel, clothing was made by hand. Costume comes from the same Italian word, inherited via French, National costume or regional costume expresses local identity and emphasizes a cultures unique attributes. They are often a source of national pride, examples include the Scottish kilt or Japanese kimono. In Bhutan there is a national dress prescribed for men and women. These have been in vogue for thousands of years and have developed into a dress style. The dress worn by men is known as Gho which is a robe worn up to knee-length and is fastened at the waist by a called the Kera. The front part of the dress which is formed like a pouch, in olden days was used to hold baskets of food and short dagger, but now it is used to keep cell phone, purse and the betel nut called Doma. The dress worn by women consist of three known as Kira, Tego and Wonju. The long dress which extends up to the ankle is Kira, the jacket worn above this is Tego which is provided with Wonju, the inner jacket. However, while visiting the Dzong or monastery a long scarf or stoll, called Kabney is worn by men across the shoulder, women also wear scarfs or stolls called Rachus, made of raw silk with embroidery, over their shoulder but not indicative of their rank. Some stylized theatrical costumes, such as Harlequin and Pantaloon in the Commedia dellarte, exaggerate an aspect of a character, the wearing of costumes is an important part of holidays developed from religious festivals such as Mardi Gras, and Halloween. Christmas costumes typically portray characters such as Santa Claus, in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States the American version of a Santa suit and beard is popular, in the Netherlands, the costume of Zwarte Piet is customary. Easter costumes are associated with the Easter Bunny or other animal costumes, in Judaism, a common practice is to dress up on Purim. During this holiday, Jews celebrate the change of their destiny and they were delivered from being the victims of an evil decree against them and were instead allowed by the King to destroy their enemies. A quote from the Book of Esther, which says, On the contrary is the reason that wearing a costume has become customary for this holiday. Buddhist religious festivals in Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia and Lhasa and Sikkim in India perform the Cham dance, parades and processions provide opportunities for people to dress up in historical or imaginative costumes
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Gymnasium (school)
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In its current meaning, it usually refers to secondary schools focused on preparing students to enter a university for advanced academic study. In the US, the German Gymnasium curriculum was used at a number of universities such as the University of Michigan as a model for their undergraduate college programs. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual education of young men, in the Polish educational system the gimnazjum is a middle school for pupils aged 13 to 16. The same applies in the Greek educational system, with the option of Εσπερινό Γυμνάσιο for adults. The gymnasium is a school which prepares the student for higher education at a university. They are thus meant for the more academically minded students, who are sifted out at about the age of 10–13, in addition to the usual curriculum, students of a gymnasium often study Latin and Ancient Greek. Some gymnasiums provide general education, others have a specific focus, today, a number of other areas of specialization exist, such as gymnasiums specializing in economics, technology or domestic sciences. In some countries, there is a notion of progymnasium, which is equivalent to beginning classes of the full gymnasium, here, the prefix pro indicates that this curriculum precedes normal gymnasium studies. The term was derived from the classical Greek word gymnasion, which was applied to an exercising ground in ancient Athens. Here teachers gathered and gave instruction between the hours devoted to exercises and sports, and thus the term became associated with. This use of the term did not prevail among the Romans, but was revived during the Renaissance in Italy, in 1538, Johannes Sturm founded at Strasbourg the school which became the model of the modern German gymnasium. In 1812, a Prussian regulation ordered that all schools which had the right to send their students to the university should bear the name of gymnasia, by the 20th century, this practice was followed in almost the entire Austrian-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empires. In the modern era, many countries which have gymnasiums were once part of three empires. In Albania a gymnasium education takes three years following a compulsory nine-year elementary education and ending with an aptitude test called Matura Shtetërore. The final test is standardized at the level and serves as an entrance qualification for universities. There are both public and private schools in these countries. Therefore, gymnasiums often base their admittance criteria on an entrance exam, in Austria the Gymnasium has two stages, from the age of 11 to 14, and from 15 to 18, concluding with Matura. The Humanistisches Gymnasium focuses on Ancient Greek and Latin, the Neusprachliches Gymnasium puts its focus on actively spoken languages
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Watercolor painting
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Watercolor or watercolour, also aquarelle, a diminutive of the Latin for water, is a painting method in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-based solution. Watercolor refers to both the medium and the resulting artwork, the traditional and most common support—material to which the paint is applied—for watercolor paintings is paper. Other supports include papyrus, bark papers, plastics, vellum, or leather, fabric, wood, Watercolor paper is often made entirely or partially with cotton, which gives a good texture and minimizes distortion when wet. Watercolors are usually translucent, and appear luminous because the pigments are laid down in a form with few fillers obscuring the pigment colors. Watercolors can also be made opaque by adding Chinese white, in East Asia, watercolor painting with inks is referred to as brush painting or scroll painting. In Chinese, Korean, and Japanese painting it has been the dominant medium, india, Ethiopia, and other countries have long watercolor painting traditions as well. Fingerpainting with watercolor paints originated in mainland China, however, its continuous history as an art medium begins with the Renaissance. The German Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, who painted several fine botanical, wildlife, an important school of watercolor painting in Germany was led by Hans Bol as part of the Dürer Renaissance. Despite this early start, watercolors were used by Baroque easel painters only for sketches, copies or cartoons. Notable early practitioners of watercolor painting were Van Dyck, Claude Lorrain, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, however, botanical illustration and wildlife illustration perhaps form the oldest and most important traditions in watercolor painting. Botanical illustrations became popular during the Renaissance, both as hand-tinted woodblock illustrations in books or broadsheets and as tinted ink drawings on vellum or paper. Wildlife illustration reached its peak in the 19th century with such as John James Audubon. Several factors contributed to the spread of watercolor painting during the 18th century, Watercolor artists were commonly brought with the geological or archaeological expeditions, funded by the Society of Dilettanti, to document discoveries in the Mediterranean, Asia, and the New World. This example popularized watercolors as a form of personal tourist journal, the confluence of these cultural, engineering, scientific, tourist, and amateur interests culminated in the celebration and promotion of watercolor as a distinctly English national art. William Blake published several books of hand-tinted engraved poetry, provided illustrations to Dantes Inferno, from the late 18th century through the 19th century, the market for printed books and domestic art contributed substantially to the growth of the medium. Satirical broadsides by Thomas Rowlandson, many published by Rudolph Ackermann, were extremely popular. Among the important and highly talented contemporaries of Turner and Girtin, were John Varley, John Sell Cotman, Anthony Copley Fielding, Samuel Palmer, William Havell, the Swiss painter Louis Ducros was also widely known for his large format, romantic paintings in watercolor. These societies provided annual exhibitions and buyer referrals for many artists, in particular, the graceful, lapidary, and atmospheric watercolors by Richard Parkes Bonington created an international fad for watercolor painting, especially in England and France in the 1820s
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Alexandre Benois
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Alexandre Nikolayevich Benois was an influential Russian artist, art critic, historian, preservationist, and founding member of Mir iskusstva, an art movement and magazine. As a designer for the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev, Benois exerted what is considered an influence on the modern ballet. Alexandre was born into the artistic and intellectual Benois family, prominent members of the 19th- and his mother Camilla was the granddaughter of Catterino Cavos. His father was Nicholas Benois, a noted Russian architect and his brothers included Albert, a painter, and Leon, also a notable architect. His sister, Maria, married the composer and conductor Nikolai Tcherepnin, not planning a career in the arts, Alexandre graduated from the Faculty of Law, Saint Petersburg Imperial University, in 1894. Three years later while in Versailles, Benois painted a series of watercolors depicting Last Promenades of Louis XIV, when exhibited by Pavel Tretyakov in 1897, they brought him to attention of Sergei Diaghilev and the artist Léon Bakst. Together the three men founded the art magazine and movement Mir iskusstva, which promoted the Aesthetic Movement, during the first decade of the new century, Benois continued to edit Mir iskusstva, but also pursued his scholarly and artistic interests. He wrote and published several monographs on 19th-century Russian art and Tsarskoye Selo, in 1903, Benois printed his illustrations to Pushkins poem The Bronze Horseman, a work since recognized as one of the landmarks in the genre. In 1904, he published his “Alphabet in Pictures, ” at once a children’s primer an elaborate art book, copies of which fetch as much as $10, 000US at auction. Illustrations from this volume were featured at a presentation during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014. In 1901, Benois was appointed director of the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. He moved to Paris in 1905 and thereafter devoted most of his time to stage design, during these years, his work with Diaghilevs Ballets Russes was groundbreaking. His sets and costumes for the productions of Les Sylphides, Giselle, although Benois worked primarily with the Ballets Russes, he also collaborated with the Moscow Art Theatre and other notable theatres of Europe. During this time he secured his brothers heirloom Leonardo da Vinci painting of the Madonna for the museum and it became known as the Madonna Benois. Benois published his Memoirs in two volumes in 1955, in 1927 he left Russia and settled in Paris. He worked primarily as a set designer after settling in France, benoiss son, Nicola Alexandrovich Benois, was born in 1901, and went on to become a celebrated opera designer, creating costumes and sets for opera companies all over the world. Benoiss nephew, Nikolai Albertovich Benois, married the opera singer Maria Nikolaevna Kuznetsova, Benois was also the uncle of Eugene Lanceray and Zinaida Serebriakova, who became recognized Russian artists, and one of the great-uncles of the British actor Sir Peter Ustinov. Benois family Anna Pavlova, film by Emil Loteanu, portrayed by Anatoli Romashin, list of Russian artists Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of the Cultural Revolution
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Mir iskusstva
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In fact, few Europeans outside Russia actually saw issues of the magazine itself. From 1909, several of the miriskusniki also participated in productions of Sergei Diaghilevs Ballets Russes company based in Paris, the artistic group was founded in November 1898 by a group of students that included Alexandre Benois, Konstantin Somov, Dmitry Filosofov, Léon Bakst, and Eugene Lansere. The starting moments for the new group was organization of the Exhibition of Russian. The magazine was co-founded in 1899 in St. Petersburg by Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and they aimed at assailing low artistic standards of the obsolescent Peredvizhniki school and promoting artistic individualism and other principles of Art Nouveau. Apart from three founding fathers, active members of the World of Art included Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Eugene Lansere, exhibitions organized by the World of Art attracted many illustrious painters from Russia and abroad, notably Mikhail Vrubel, Mikhail Nesterov, and Isaac Levitan. Representative works In its classical period the art group organized six exhibitions,1899,1900,1901,1902,1903,1906, in 1904-1910, Mir iskusstva did not exist as a separate artistic group. Its place was inherited by the Union of Russian Artists which continued officially until 1910, the Union included painters, illustrators, restorators, and scenic designers. In 1910 Benois published an article in the magazine Rech about the Union of Russian Artists. Nicholas Roerich became the new chairman, the group admitted new members including Nathan Altman, Vladimir Tatlin, and Martiros Saryan. Some said that the inclusion of Russian avant-garde painters demonstrated that the group had become an organization rather than an art movement. In 1917 the chairman of the group became Ivan Bilibin, the same year most members of the Jack of Diamonds entered the group. The group organized numerous exhibitions,1911,1912,1913,1915,1916,1917,1918,1921,1922 Saint-Petersburg, the last exhibition of Mir iskusstva was organized in Paris in 1927. Some members of the group entered the Zhar-Tsvet and Four Arts artistic movements, like the Romantics before them, the miriskusniki promoted understanding and conservation of the art of previous epochs, particularly traditional folk art and the 18th-century rococo. Antoine Watteau was probably the single artist whom they admired the most, such Revivalist projects were treated by the miriskusniki humorously, in a spirit of self-parody. They were fascinated with masks and marionettes, with carnaval and puppet theater, with dreams, everything grotesque and playful appealed to them more than the serious and emotional. Their favorite city was Venice, so much so that Diaghilev, as for media, the miriskusniki preferred the light, airy effects of watercolor and gouache to full-scale oil paintings. Seeking to bring art into every house, they designed interiors. Bakst and Benois revolutionized theatrical design with their ground-breaking decor for Cléopâtre, Carnaval, Petrushka, potter, Michelle, ‘Mir iskusstva, Serge Diaghilev’s Art Journal’, in NLA News, July 2005, Volume XV, Number 10 Mir iskusstva Artists at the Russian Art Gallery
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Filipp Malyavin
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Filipp Andreevich Malyavin was a Russian painter and draftsman. Trained in icon-painting as well as having studied under the great Russian realist painter Ilya Repin, Malyavin is unusual among the Russian artists of the time for having a peasant background. It is possibly due to this that his paintings often depict peasant life, filipp Malyavin was born in the large village of Kazanki, into a poor peasant family with many children. Even as a child, he was drawn towards art, drawing and creating clay figurines of birds, the village was visited by traveling monks, who would bring with them icons from Mount Athos, in Greece. Fascinated by the icons, Malyavin convinced his parents to him to go to Athos to study icon-painting. At the age of sixteen, he traveled to Greece with a monk from Athos, although the monasteries at Athos were famed for their vast collections of Greek manuscripts and books, the art of icon painting was not actually practiced there. Malyavin was disappointed to learn that only made copies of Russian icons. Having used up his money and thus unable to return to Russia, Malyavin entered the monastery as a novice and this continued until 1891, when Malyavin met Vladimir Beklemishev, a Russian sculptor and professor at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts who was on a visit to Athos. Beklemishev was greatly impressed by Malyavins work and invited him to Petersburg, in March 1892, Malyavin arrived in St. Petersburg and, with Beklemishevs help, was enrolled in the Academy of Arts. Due to the Academy reforms of 1894, Malyavin was able to choose his own teacher after completing the Academy curriculum and his options included such great artists as Vladimir Makovsky and Arkhip Kuindzhi. Three of these works, all depicting peasant women, were exhibited at the Moscow Art Lovers Society Salon. Two of these were bought by Pavel Tretyakov for the Tretyakov Gallery, Malyavin also began to perfect his style of portraiture, creating another series of paintings depicting his fellow-artists from Repins studio. Among the best of these is that of Konstantin Somov, who would found the World of Art group. Malyavins fame spread quickly, and it was not long before society grandees such as Baroness Wolf, popova began coming to him to have their portraits painted. From 1895 to 1899, Malyavin painted frenetically and his work was too different, too bright, and it had no plot - it did not fit the contemporary art scene at the time. Thus, in 1900, Malyavin traveled to Paris, and took France by storm, french newspapers hailed him as a credit to Russian painting, and Laughter was awarded a gold medal and bought by the Museo darte moderno in Venice. His work was suddenly in demand, with the Luxembourg Museum in Paris buying Three Women, on returning to Russia, Malyavin married Natalia Novaak-Sarich, the daughter of a rich industrialist from Odessa and a private student at the Higher Art School. They settled in a village near Ryazan, and Malyavin devoted himself entirely to his art and his work began appearing in the salons of the World of Art group, and the Union of Russian Artists
24.
Vasily Rozanov
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Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov was one of the most controversial Russian writers and philosophers of the pre-revolutionary epoch. Because of references to the phallus in Rozanovs writings, Klaus von Beyme called him the Rasputin of the Russian intelligentsia, Rozanovs mature works are personal diaries containing intimate thoughts, impromptu lines, unfinished maxims, vivid aphorisms, reminiscences, and short essays. These works, in which he attempted to recreate the intonations of speech, form a loosely connected trilogy, comprising Solitaria. Rozanov frequently referred to himself as Fyodor Dostoyevskys Underground Man and proclaimed his right to espouse contrary opinions at the same time and he first attracted attention in the 1890s when he published political sketches in the conservative newspaper Novoye Vremya, owned and run by Aleksey Suvorin. Rozanovs comments, always paradoxical and sparking controversy, led him into clashes with the Tsarist government, Rozanov starved to death in a monastery in the hungry years following the Revolution. Recently, however, his writings have once again become available to Russian readers. Rozanov remains little known outside Russia, though some scholars have become increasingly fascinated by his work
25.
Andrei Bely
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Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, better known by the pen name Andrei Bely, was a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century, Boris Bugaev was born in Moscow, into a prominent intellectual family. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a mathematician who is regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His mother was not only highly intelligent but a society beauty. Young Boris was a polymath whose interests included mathematics, biology, chemistry, music, philosophy and he would go on to take part in both the Symbolist movement and the Russian school of neo-Kantianism. Bugaev became friendly with Alexander Blok and his wife, he fell in love with her, Nikolai Bugaev was well known for his influential philosophical essays, in which he decried geometry and probability and trumpeted the virtues of hard analysis. Despite—or because of—his fathers mathematical tastes, Boris Bugaev was fascinated by probability and particularly by entropy and it was Mikhail Solovyov who gave Bugaev his pseudonym Andrei Bely. Belys symbolist novel Petersburg is generally considered to be his masterpiece, the book employs a striking prose method in which sounds often evoke colors. The novel is set in the hysterical atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Petersburg. At one point, Nikolai is pursued through the Petersburg mists by the hooves of the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great. In his later years Bely was influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and he spent time between Switzerland, Germany, and Russia, during its revolution. He supported the Bolshevik rise to power and later dedicated his efforts to Soviet culture and he died, aged 53, in Moscow. Bely was one of the influences on the theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold. The Andrei Bely Prize, one of the most important prizes in Russian literature, was named after him, fyodor, poet and main character, praises the system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the half-stresses in the iambs. Bely found that the diagrams plotted over the compositions of the great poets frequently had the shapes of rectangles, nabokovs essay Notes on Prosody follows for the large part Belys essay Description of the Russian iambic tetrameter. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, Indiana University Press,1978, the Silver Dove George Reavey, Grove Press,1974. John Elsworth, Northwestern University Press,2001, Kotik Letaev Gerald Janecek, Ardis,1971. The Complete Short Stories Ronald E. Peterson, Ardis,1979, selected Essays of Andrey Bely Steven Cassedy, University of California Press,1985
26.
Zinaida Gippius
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Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius was a Russian poet, playwright, novelist, editor and religious thinker, one of the major figures in Russian symbolism. The story of her marriage to Dmitry Merezhkovsky, which lasted 52 years, is described in her unfinished book Dmitry Merezhkovsky and she began writing at an early age, and by the time she met Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1888, she was already a published poet. The two were married in 1889, Gippius published her first book of poetry, Collection of Poems. 1889–1903, in 1903, and her collection, Collection of Poems. After the 1905 Revolution, The Merezhkovskys became critics of Tsarism, they spent several years abroad during this time and they denounced the 1917 October Revolution, seeing it as a cultural disaster, and in 1919 emigrated to Poland. After living in Poland they moved to France, and then to Italy, continuing to publish and take part in Russian émigré circles, the death of Merezhkovsky in 1941 was a major blow to Gippius, who died a few years later in 1945. Zinaida Gippius was born on 20 November 1869, in Belyov, Tula and her mother Anastasia Vasilyevna, was a daughter of the Yekaterinburg Chief of Police. Nikolai Gippiuss job entailed constant traveling, and because of this his daughters received little formal education, taking lessons from governesses and visiting tutors, they attended schools sporadically in whatever city the family happened to stay for a significant period of time. By this time, Zinaida had already studied for two years at a school in Kiev and for a year at the Moscow Fischer Gymnasium. Zinaida started writing poetry at the age of seven, by the time she met Dmitry Merezhkovsky in 1888, she was already a published poet. By the year 1880 I was writing verses, being a believer in inspiration. A good-looking girl, Zinaida attracted a lot of attention in Borzhomi, but Merezhkovsky, once he proposed, she accepted him without hesitation, and never came to regret what might have seemed a hasty decision. Gippius and Merezhkovsky were married on 8 January 1889, in Tiflis, Merezhkovsky and Gippius made a pact, each promising to concentrate on what he or she did best, the former on poetry, the latter on prose. The agreement collapsed as Zinaida translated Lord Byrons Manfred, and Dimitry started working on his debut novel Julian the Apostate and she became close to the group of authors associated with the renovated Severny Vestnik, where she herself made her major debut as a poet in 1888. In 1890–91 this magazine published her first short stories, The Ill-Fated One, then three of her novels, Without the Talisman, The Winner, and Small Waves, appeared in Mir Bozhy. Seeing the writing of mediocre, generic prose as an enterprise, Gippius treated her poetry differently, as something utterly intimate. Dealing with the side of the human soul and exploring sexual ambiguity and narcissism. Detractors called Gippius a demoness, the queen of duality, in 1901 all this transformed into the ideology of the New Church of which she was the instigator
27.
Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich of Russia
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Grand Duke Vladimir followed a military career and occupied important military positions during the reigns of the last three Russian Emperors. Interested in artistic and intellectual pursuits, he was appointed President of the Academy of Fine Arts and he functioned as a patron of many artists and as a sponsor of the Imperial ballet. During the reign of his father, Tsar Alexander II, he was made Adjutant-General, senator in 1868 and his brother, Alexander III, also promoted his career. He became a member of the Council of Ministers, Commander of the Imperial Guards Corps and Military Governor of Saint Petersburg. He tried to exert influence over his nephew Tsar Nicholas II. The events of Bloody Sunday in 1905, while he was Military Governor of St Petersburg, during the last years of his life, the rift between his family and that of Nicholas II widened. He died after a stroke in 1909, Vladimir Alexandrovichs great-granddaughter, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, is the current claimant to the headship of the House of Romanov. Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich was born on April 22,1847 at Tsarskoye Selo in Saint Petersburg and he was fourth among the eight children of Alexander II of Russia and his wife Maria Alexandrovna, born Princess Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt. He was eight years old when at the death of his grandfather Nicholas I, Grand Duke Vladimir was well educated and through his life he was interested in literature and the arts. However, as all members of the Romanov family he had to follow a military career. As only the son in a numerous family, he was far from the succession to the Russian throne. Nevertheless, in 1865, the death of his eldest brother. Unlike Alexander, the new heir, Vladimir was witty and ambitious, rumors circulated at the time, that Alexander II would have his eldest surviving son removed from the succession placing Vladimir as his heir. Alexander himself would have preferred to step aside from the succession hoping to marry morganatically, relations between the two brothers, although cordial, were never warm. In 1871 he visited the Caucasus region, Georgia, Chechnya and Dagestan with his father, in 1872 he accompanied his father to Vienna at the reunion of the three emperors, Russia, Germany and Austria. A member of the European jet set of his time, he made frequent trips to Paris and he became portly as a young man, although in later life he slimmed down. He was a painter and gathered an important book collection. He was a known gourmet, accumulating a collection of menus copied after meals
28.
Tsar
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Tsar /zɑːr/ or /tsɑːr/, also spelled tzar, csar, or czar, is a title used to designate certain Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, occasionally, the word could be used to designate other secular supreme rulers. Simeon II, the last Tsar of Bulgaria, is the last person to have borne the title Tsar, the title Tsar is derived from the Latin title for the Roman emperors, Caesar. In the history of the Greek language, basileus had originally meant something like potentate and it gradually approached the meaning of king in the Hellenistic Period, and it came to designate emperor after the inception in the Roman Empire. Thus, tsar was not only used as an equivalent of Latin imperator but was used to refer to Biblical rulers. From this ambiguity, the development has moved in different directions in the different Slavic languages, thus, the Bulgarian language and Russian language no longer use tsar as an equivalent of the term emperor/imperator as it exists in the West European tradition. Currently, the term refers to native sovereigns, ancient and Biblical rulers, as well as monarchs in fairy tales. The title of king is sometimes perceived as alien and is by some Russian-speakers reserved for European royalty, foreign monarchs of imperial status, both inside and outside of Europe, ancient as well as modern, are generally called imperator, rather than tsar. Biblical rulers in Serbian are called цар and in Croatian kralj, in the Polish language however tsar is always used as imperator, never as king. The term tsar is very used to refer to the Russian rulers after Peter the Great. In 705 Emperor Justinian II named Tervel of Bulgaria Caesar, the first foreigner to receive this title, the sainted Boris I is sometimes retrospectively referred to as tsar, because at his time Bulgaria was converted to Christianity. However, the tsar was actually adopted and used for the first time by his son Simeon I. Since in Byzantine political theory there was place for two emperors, Eastern and Western, the Bulgarian ruler was crowned basileus as a spiritual son of the Byzantian basileus. In Latin sources the Emperor of Bulgaria is sometimes designated Emperor of Zagora, various additional epithets and descriptions apart, the official style read Emperor and autocrat of all Bulgarians and Greeks. During the five-century period of Ottoman rule in Bulgaria, the sultan was referred to as tsar. This may be related to the fact that he had claimed the legacy of the Byzantine Empire or to the fact that the sultan was called Basileus in medieval Greek, after Bulgarias liberation from the Ottomans in 1878, its new monarchs were at first autonomous prince. With the declaration of independence, Ferdinand I of Bulgaria adopted the traditional title tsar in 1908. However, these titles were not generally perceived as equivalents of emperor any longer, in the Bulgarian as in the Greek vernacular, the meaning of the title had shifted
29.
Nicholas II of Russia
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Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia, ruling from 1 November 1894 until his forced abdication on 15 March 1917. His reign saw the fall of the Russian Empire from being one of the foremost great powers of the world to economic, Soviet historiography portrayed Nicholas as a weak and incompetent leader, whose decisions led to military defeats and the deaths of millions of his subjects. The Anglo-Russian Entente, designed to counter German attempts to influence in the Middle East. Nicholas approved the Russian mobilisation on 30 July 1914, which led to Germany declaring war on Russia on 1 August 1914 and it is estimated that around 3,300,000 Russians were killed in World War I. Following the February Revolution of 1917, Nicholas abdicated on behalf of himself and his son, Nicholas, the recovered remains of the Imperial Family were finally re-interred in St. Petersburg, eighty years to the day on 17 July 1998. In 1981, Nicholas, his wife and their children were canonized as martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, located in New York City. On 15 August 2000 Nicholas and his family were canonized as passion bearers, Nicholas was born in the Alexander Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, the eldest son of Emperor Alexander III and Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia. He had five siblings, Alexander, George, Xenia, Michael. Nicholas often referred to his father nostalgically in letters after Alexanders death in 1894 and he was also very close to his mother, as revealed in their published letters to each other. His paternal grandparents were Emperor Alexander II and Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia and his maternal grandparents were King Christian IX and Queen Louise of Denmark. Nicholas was of primarily German and Danish descent, his last ethnically Russian ancestor being Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna, Nicholas was related to several monarchs in Europe. His mothers siblings included Kings Frederik VIII of Denmark and George I of Greece, Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were all first cousins of King George V of the United Kingdom. Nicholas was also a first cousin of both King Haakon VII and Queen Maud of Norway, as well as King Constantine I of Greece, Tsar Nicholas II was the first cousin-once-removed of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. To distinguish between them the Grand Duke was often known within the Imperial family as Nikolasha and Nicholas the Tall, while the Tsar was Nicholas the Short. In his childhood, Nicholas, his parents and siblings made annual visits to the Danish royal palaces of Fredensborg and Bernstorff to visit his grandparents, the king and queen. The visits also served as family reunions, as his mothers siblings would come from the United Kingdom, Germany. It was there in 1883, that he had a flirtation with one of his English first cousins, in 1873, Nicholas also accompanied his parents and younger brother, two-year-old George, on a two-month, semi-official visit to England. In London, Nicholas and his family stayed at Marlborough House, as guests of his Uncle Bertie and Aunt Alix, the Prince and Princess of Wales, where he was spoiled by his uncle
30.
Munich
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Munich is the capital and largest city of the German state of Bavaria, on the banks of River Isar north of the Bavarian Alps. Munich is the third largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg, the Munich Metropolitan Region is home to 5.8 million people. According to the Globalization and World Rankings Research Institute Munich is considered an alpha-world city, the name of the city is derived from the Old/Middle High German term Munichen, meaning by the monks. It derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who ran a monastery at the place that was later to become the Old Town of Munich, Munich was first mentioned in 1158. From 1255 the city was seat of the Bavarian Dukes, black and gold—the colours of the Holy Roman Empire—have been the citys official colours since the time of Ludwig the Bavarian, when it was an imperial residence. Following a final reunification of the Wittelsbachian Duchy of Bavaria, previously divided and sub-divided for more than 200 years, like wide parts of the Holy Roman Empire, the area recovered slowly economically. In 1918, during the German Revolution, the house of Wittelsbach, which governed Bavaria since 1180, was forced to abdicate in Munich. In the 1920s, Munich became home to political factions, among them the NSDAP. During World War II, Munich was heavily bombed and more than 50% of the entire city, the postwar period was characterised by American occupation until 1949 and a strong increase of population and economic power during the years of the Wirtschaftswunder after 1949. The city is home to corporations like BMW, Siemens, MAN, Linde, Allianz and MunichRE as well as many small. Munich is home to national and international authorities, major universities, major museums. Its numerous architectural attractions, international events, exhibitions and conferences. Munich is one of the most prosperous and fastest growing cities in Germany and it is a top-ranked destination for migration and expatriate location, despite being the municipality with the highest density of population in Germany. Munich nowadays hosts more than 530,000 people of foreign background, the year 1158 is assumed to be the foundation date, which is the earliest date the city is mentioned in a document. The document was signed in Augsburg, by that time the Guelph Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, had built a bridge over the river Isar next to a settlement of Benedictine monks—this was on the Old Salt Route and a toll bridge. In 1175, Munich was officially granted city status and received fortification, in 1180, with the trial of Henry the Lion, Otto I Wittelsbach became Duke of Bavaria and Munich was handed over to the Bishop of Freising. In 1240, Munich was transferred to Otto II Wittelsbach and in 1255, Duke Louis IV, a native of Munich, was elected German king in 1314 and crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in 1328. He strengthened the position by granting it the salt monopoly
31.
Secession (art)
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Secession refers to a number of modernist artist groups that separated from the support of official academic art and its administrations in the late 19th and early 20th century. The first secession from the official politics occurred in France, when, in 1890, the first secession outside France formed in Munich in 1892, followed by the Vienna Secession formed 5 years later in 1897. The best-known secession movement was the Vienna Secession formed in 1897, and included Gustav Klimt, the style of these artists, as practiced in Austria is known as Sezessionstil, or Secession style. Georg Hirth, the editor and publisher of Jugend from 1896 until his death in 1916, coined the term Secession to represent the spirit of the various modern, kunstgewerbe in literarischer und bildender Kunst, J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1976 ISBN 3-476-00289-6
32.
1905 Russian Revolution
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The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire, some of which was directed at the government. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies and it led to Constitutional Reform including the establishment of the State Duma, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906. According to Sidney Harcave, author of The Russian Revolution of 1905, newly emancipated peasants earned too little, and were not allowed to sell or mortgage their allotted land. A nascent industrial working class resented the government for doing too little to them, banning strikes. Finally, the educated class fomented and spread radical ideas after a relaxing of discipline in universities allowed a new consciousness to grow among students, vladimir Lenin was a political theorist who also contributed his own ideology of how a revolution would be caused. In his book Imperialism he claimed that driven imperialism and the dependence on overseas markets would be a factor to revolution. This would cause a rivalry between the powers, leading to war. Taken individually, these issues might not have affected the course of Russian history, the government finally recognized these problems, albeit in a shortsighted and narrow-minded way. The minister of interior Plehve stated in 1903 that, after the problem, the most serious ones plaguing the country were those of the Jews, the schools. This setback aggravated social unrest during the five years preceding the revolution of 1905, every year, thousands of nobles in debt mortgaged their estates to the noble land bank or sold them to municipalities, merchants, or peasants. By the time of the revolution, the nobility had sold off one-third of its land and this plan was meant to prevent proletarianisation of the peasants. However, the peasants were not given land to provide for their needs. Their earnings were often so small that they could buy the food they needed nor keep up the payment of taxes. By the tenth year of Nicholas IIs reign, their total arrears in payments of taxes and dues was 118 million rubles, masses of hungry peasants roamed the countryside looking for work and sometimes walked hundreds of kilometres to find it. Desperate peasants proved capable of violence and these violent outbreaks caught the attention of the government, so it created many committees to investigate their causes. The committees concluded that no part of the countryside was prosperous, some parts, although cultivated acreage had increased in the last half century, the increase had not been proportionate to the growth of peasant populations, which had doubled. The investigations revealed many difficulties but could not find solution that were both sensible and acceptable to the government, nineteenth-century Russians saw cultures and religions in a clear hierarchy. Non-Russian cultures were tolerated in the empire but were not necessarily respected, European civilization was valued over Asian culture, and Christianity was on the whole considered more progressive and true than other religions
33.
Greek tragedy
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Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Asia Minor. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, Greek tragedy is widely believed to be an extension of the ancient rites carried out in honor of Dionysus, and it heavily influenced the theatre of Ancient Rome and the Renaissance. Tragic plots were most often based upon myths from the traditions of archaic epics. In tragic theatre, however, these narratives were presented by actors, the most acclaimed Greek tragedians are Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The origin of the tragedy has been a matter of discussion from ancient times. The primary source of knowledge on the question is the Poetics of Aristotle, Aristotle was able to gather first-hand documentation from theater performance in Attica, which is inaccessible to scholars today. His work is invaluable for the study of ancient tragedy. According to Aristotle, tragedy evolved from the dithyramb, an Ancient Greek hymn. The term τραγῳδία, derived from goat and ᾠδή song, means song of the goats. Others suggest that the term came into being when the legendary Thespis competed in the first tragic competition for the prize of a goat, there are other suggested etymologies for the word tragedy. The Oxford English Dictionary adds to the reference to goat song. J. DAmico, on the hand, suggests that tragoidía does not mean simply song of the goats. Other hypotheses have included an etymology that would define the tragedy as an ode to beer, jane Ellen Harrison pointed out that Dionysus, god of wine was actually preceded by Dionysus, god of beer. Athenian beer was obtained from the fermentation of barley, which is tragos in Greek, thus, it is likely that the term was originally meant to be odes to spelt, and later on, it was extended to other meanings of the same name. She writes, Tragedy I believe to be not the goat-song, but the harvest-song of the cereal tragos, the origin of Greek tragedy is one of the unsolved problems of classical scholarship. Ruth Scodel notes that, due to lack of evidence and doubtful reliability of sources, still, R. P. Winnington-Ingram points out that we can easily trace various influences from other genres. How these have come to be associated with one another remains a mystery however, speculating on the problem, Scodel writes that, Three innovations must have taken place for tragedy as we know it to exist. First, somebody created a new kind of performance by combining a speaker with a chorus, second, this performance was made part of the City Dionysia at Athens
34.
Scheherazade (Rimsky-Korsakov)
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Scheherazade, also commonly Sheherazade, Op.35, is a symphonic suite composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888 and based on One Thousand and One Nights, sometimes known as The Arabian Nights. The name Scheherazade refers to the main character Shahrazad of the One Thousand and it is considered Rimsky-Korsakovs most popular work. After formulating musical sketches of his work, he moved with his family to the Glinki-Mavriny dacha. During the summer there he finished Scheherazade and the Russian Easter Festival Overture, notes in his autograph orchestral score show that the former was completed between June 4 and August 7,1888. Scheherazade consisted of a suite of four related movements that form a unified theme. It was written to produce a sensation of fantasy narratives from the Orient, initially, Rimsky-Korsakov intended to name the respective movements in Scheherazade Prelude, Ballade, Adagio and Finale. The composer deliberately made the vague, so that they are not associated with specific tales or voyages of Sinbad. However, in the epigraph to the finale, he does make reference to the adventure of Prince Ajib. ”Rimsky-Korsakov went on to say that he kept the name Scheherazade because it brought to mind the fairy-tale wonders of Arabian Nights. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by entertaining her lord with fascinating tales, told seriatim, for a thousand, the Sultan, consumed with curiosity, postponed from day to day the execution of his wife, and finally repudiated his bloody vow entirely. The grim bass motif that opens the first movement represents the domineering Sultan and this theme emphasizes four notes of a descending whole tone scale, E-D-C-B♭. This theme, the second below, is a tender, sensuous winding melody for violin solo, Rimsky-Korsakov had a tendency to juxtapose keys a major third apart, which can be seen in the strong relationship between E and C major in the first movement. This, along with his distinctive orchestration of melodies which are easily comprehensible, assembled rhythms, the movements are unified by the short introductions in the first, second and fourth movements, and an intermezzo in movement three. The last is a violin solo representing Scheherazade, and a similar theme is represented in the conclusion of the fourth movements. Writers have suggested that Rimsky-Korsakovs earlier career as an officer may have been responsible for beginning and ending the suite with themes of the sea. The peaceful coda at the end of the movement is representative of Scheherazade finally winning over the heart of the Sultan. The music premiered in Saint Petersburg on October 28,1888 conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov, a ballet adaptation of Scheherazade premiered on June 4,1910, at the Opéra Garnier in Paris by the Ballets Russes. The choreography for the ballet was by Michel Fokine and the libretto was from Fokine and this ballet provoked exoticism by showing a masculine Golden Slave, danced by Vaslav Nijinsky, seducing Zobeide, danced by Ida Rubinstein, who is one of the many wives of the Shah. Nijinsky was painted gold and is said to have represented a phallus, controversially, this was one of the first instances of a stage full of people simulating sexual activity
35.
Carnaval (Schumann)
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Carnaval, Op.9, is a work by Robert Schumann for piano solo, written in 1834–1835, and subtitled Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes. It consists of 21 short pieces representing masked revelers at Carnival, Schumann gives musical expression to himself, his friends and colleagues, and characters from improvised Italian comedy. The four notes are encoded puzzles, and Schumann predicted that deciphering my masked ball will be a game for you. The 21 pieces are connected by a recurring motif, in each section of Carnaval there appears one or both of two series of musical notes. These are musical cryptograms, as follows, A, E-flat, C, B – signified in German as A-S-C-H A-flat, C, B – signified in German as As-C-H E-flat, C, B, A – signified in German as S-C-H-A. The first two spell the German name for the town of Asch, in which Schumanns then fiancée, the sequence of letters also appears in the German word Fasching, meaning carnival. In addition, Asch is German for Ash, as in Ash Wednesday, lastly, it encodes a version of the composers name, Robert Alexander Schumann. The third series, S-C-H-A, encodes the composers name again with the letters appearing in Schumann. Carnaval had its origin in a set of variations on a Sehnsuchtswalzer by Franz Schubert, the catalyst for writing the variations may have been a work for piano and orchestra by Schumanns close friend Ludwig Schuncke, a set of variations on the same Schubert theme. The work was never completed, however, and Schuncke died in December 1834, pianist Andreas Boyde has since reconstructed the original set of Variations from Schumanns manuscript, premiered this reconstruction in New York and recorded it for Athene Records. Romanian pianist Herbert Schuch has also recorded this reconstruction, with his own editorial emendations, in Carnaval, Schumann goes further musically than in Papillons, Op.2, for he himself conceives the story for which it serves as a musical illustration. Each piece has a title, and the work as a whole is a representation of an elaborate. Carnaval remains famous for its resplendent chordal passages and its use of rhythmic displacement, Schumann dedicated the work to the violinist Karol Lipiński. Both Schumann and his wife Clara considered his solo piano works too difficult for the general public, today, despite its immense technical and emotional difficulty, Carnaval is one of Schumanns most often performed works. Heinz Dill has mentioned Schumanns use of quotes and codes in this work. Eric Sams has discussed literary allusions in the work, such as to novels of Jean Paul, the work has 22 sections,20 of which are numbered. Schumann did not number Sphinxes or Intermezzo, Paganini, Préambule The Préambule is one of the few pieces in the set not explicitly organized around the A-S-C-H idea. It was taken from the incomplete Variations on a Theme of Schubert, the theme was Schuberts Sehnsuchtswalzer, Op. 9/2, D.365
36.
Le Spectre de la rose
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Le Spectre de la rose is a short ballet about a young girl who dreams of dancing with the spirit of a souvenir rose from her first ball. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer based the story on a verse by Théophile Gautier. Michel Fokine choreographed the ballet to the music of Carl Maria von Webers piano piece Aufforderung zum Tanz as orchestrated by Hector Berlioz in 1841, Léon Bakst designed the original Biedermeier sets and costumes. The ballet was first presented in Monte Carlo on 19 April 1911, Nijinsky danced The Rose and Tamara Karsavina danced The Young Girl. Spectre became internationally famous for the spectacular leap Nijinsky made through a window at the ballets end, in 1911, Ballet Russes producer Sergei Diaghilev hoped to present Nijinskys ballet LAprès-midi dun faune. It was not ready for the stage, so he needed another ballet to take its place and that ballet was the idea of writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. In 1910, he had sent an idea for a ballet to Ballets Russes set and his idea was based on Le Spectre de la rose, a verse by Théophile Gautier, and Afforderung zum Tanz, a work for piano by Carl Maria von Weber. He thought it could take the place of Faune. He put Vaudoyers idea into development at once, Diaghilev liked the idea of a ballet based on Gautiers Spectre because it could be tied to the centennial of Gautiers birth. In 1819, Carl Maria von Weber wrote a work for piano called Afforderung zum Tanz and he also wrote a program for this work about a young man and woman who meet, dance, and part at a ball. The quiet music at the opening of Afforderung leads to some beautiful waltz tunes before the ends with the opening music. In 1841, Hector Berlioz orchestrated Afforderung and this version of the music was used for a short ballet in Webers opera Der Freischütz at the Paris Opéra. It was the Berlioz version of the piano piece that was used for the ballet Le Spectre de la rose. Michel Fokine completed the dance in three or four rehearsals and he later wrote that the ballet was almost an improvisation. Grace Robert writes in The Borzoi Book of Ballets that Spectre is a pas de deux, instead, it is a forward-looking, modern dance of continuous movement and expressiveness. Fokine dropped the port de bras of classical ballet in designing the dances for Nijinsky and he used instead curving, tendril-like movements of the arms and fingers. Nijinsky became a character in this ballet, one showing masculine power in his legs. Some of his gestures, Ostwalt writes in Nijinsky, A Leap into Madness, Nijinskys silk elastic costume was designed by Léon Bakst
37.
Afternoon of a Faun (Nijinsky)
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The ballet The Afternoon of a Faun was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes and first performed in the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 29 May 1912. Nijinsky danced the part himself. As its score it used the Prélude à laprès-midi dun faune by Claude Debussy, both the music and the ballet were inspired by the poem LAprès-midi dun faune by Stéphane Mallarmé. The costumes and sets were designed by the painter Léon Bakst, the style of the ballet, in which a young faun meets several nymphs, flirts with them and chases them, was deliberately archaic. In the original designed by Léon Bakst, the dancers were presented as part of a large tableau. They often moved across the stage in profile as if on a bas relief, the ballet was presented in bare feet and rejected classical formalism. The work had an overtly erotic subtext beneath its façade of Greek antiquity, LAprès-midi dun Faune is considered one of the first modern ballets and proved to be as controversial as Nijinskys Jeux and Le Sacre du printemps. The ballet was developed as a new production for the Ballets Russes founded by Sergei Diaghilev. Initially the Ballet Russes took advantage of the 3 months summer break, Diaghilev was looking around for an alternative to the style which Fokine customarily delivered and decided to allow his senior male dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, to try his hand at choreography. The original idea was developed by Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Bakst and was inspired by the artwork on ancient Greek vases, such concepts appear transferred to ballet in Faun. Jean Cocteau helped to explain the Mallarmé poem and with developing a scenario for the ballet, the music by Debussy already existed in a fully orchestrated form. Nijinsky was much excited about the project, Nijinsky was an exceptional dancer, but he was not an exceptional teacher. Throughout the development of all his ballets he had difficulty explaining to others what he needed them to do and he had difficulty accepting the limitations of others, expecting them to be able to perform as well as he. Bronislava acted as his guinea-pig, trying out dances and positions, I am like a piece of clay that he is moulding, shaping into each pose and change of movement. Vaslav is unwilling to realize the tremendous distance separating his vision from the means that are at the disposal of the artist and his aim was to reproduce the stylised look of the ancient artworks on the stage. In his portrayal of the faun, Nijinsky managed to exactly the figure of a satyr shown on Greek vases in the Louvre. Nijinsky and his sister gave a first showing of the work so far to Diaghilev, however, its development was kept secret until Diaghilev was ready to stage it, for fear of offending Fokine. The régisseur, Grigoriev, was let into the secret in early 1912, the 12 minute ballet required 90 rehearsals, in one respect justifying Fokines complaints
38.
Pale of Settlement
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The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word palus, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary. The Pale of Settlement included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Poland and it extended from the eastern pale, or demarcation line, to the western Russian border with the Kingdom of Prussia and with Austria-Hungary. Furthermore, it comprised about 20% of the territory of European Russia and largely corresponded to historical borders of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire in the period of the existence of the Pale was predominantly Orthodox Christian. The area included in the Pale, with its large Jewish and Catholic populations, was acquired through a series of conquests and diplomatic maneuvers. While the religious nature of the creating the Pale are clear, historians argue that the motivations for its creation. From 1791 to 1835, and until 1917, there were differing reconfigurations of the boundaries of the Pale, such that certain areas were open or shut to Jewish residency. At times, Jews were forbidden to live in communities, or certain cities. During World War I, the Pale lost its hold on the Jewish population when large numbers of Jews fled into the Russian interior to escape the invading German army. On March 20,1917, the Pale was abolished by the Provisional Government decree, a large portion of the Pale, together with its Jewish population, became part of Poland. Subsequently, most of population would perish in The Holocaust one generation later. Jewish life in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement was hard, following the Jewish religious tradition of tzedakah, a sophisticated system of volunteer Jewish social welfare organizations developed to meet the needs of the population. These, along with the repressive May Laws, often devastated whole communities, one outgrowth of the concentration of Jews in a circumscribed area was the development of the modern yeshiva system. Until the beginning of the 19th century, each town supported its own advanced students who learned in the synagogue with the rabbinical head of the community. Each student would eat his meals in a different home each day, the quotas in the capitals, however, were increased slightly in 1908 and 1915. Amidst the difficult conditions in which the Jewish population lived and worked, because of the harsh conditions of day-to-day life in the Pale, some two million Jews emigrated from there between 1881 and 1914, mainly to the United States. However, this exodus did not affect the stability of the Jewish population of the Pale, the Pale of Settlement included the following areas
39.
Marc Chagall
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Marc Zakharovich Chagall was a Russian-French artist. Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century, according to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists. For decades, he had also respected as the worlds preeminent Jewish artist. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and he also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris and Berlin, during this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis, as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernisms golden age in Paris, where he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism. Yet throughout these phases of his style he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, when Matisse dies, Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is. Marc Chagall was born Moishe Segal in a Lithuanian Jewish family in Liozna, at the time of his birth, Vitebsks population was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called Russian Toledo, as the city was built mostly of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II. Chagall was the eldest of nine children, the family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually borne by a Levitic family. His father, Khatskl Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant and his father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles each month. Chagall would later include fish motifs out of respect for his father, writes Chagall biographer, Chagall wrote of these early years, Day after day, winter and summer, at six oclock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea, hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. No word will ever ease my fathers lot, There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like a symbol, was never out of my childish hands. One of the sources of income of the Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia
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Baltimore
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Baltimore is the largest city in the U. S. state of Maryland, and the 29th-most populous city in the country. It was established by the Constitution of Maryland and is not part of any county, thus, it is the largest independent city in the United States, with a population of 621,849 as of 2015. As of 2010, the population of the Baltimore Metropolitan Area was 2.7 million, founded in 1729, Baltimore is the second largest seaport in the Mid-Atlantic. Baltimores Inner Harbor was once the leading port of entry for immigrants to the United States. With hundreds of identified districts, Baltimore has been dubbed a city of neighborhoods, in the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key wrote The Star-Spangled Banner, later the American national anthem, in Baltimore. More than 65,000 properties, or roughly one in three buildings in the city, are listed on the National Register, more than any city in the nation. The city has 289 properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the historical records of the government of Baltimore are located at the Baltimore City Archives. The city is named after Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, of the Irish House of Lords, Baltimore Manor was the name of the estate in County Longford on which the Calvert family lived in Ireland. Baltimore is an anglicization of the Irish name Baile an Tí Mhóir, in 1608, Captain John Smith traveled 210 miles from Jamestown to the uppermost Chesapeake Bay, leading the first European expedition to the Patapsco River. The name Patapsco is derived from pota-psk-ut, which translates to backwater or tide covered with froth in Algonquian dialect, a quarter century after John Smiths voyage, English colonists began to settle in Maryland. The area constituting the modern City of Baltimore and its area was first settled by David Jones in 1661. He claimed the area today as Harbor East on the east bank of the Jones Falls stream. In the early 1600s, the immediate Baltimore vicinity was populated, if at all. The Baltimore area had been inhabited by Native Americans since at least the 10th millennium BC, one Paleo-Indian site and several Archaic period and Woodland period archaeological sites have been identified in Baltimore, including four from the Late Woodland period. During the Late Woodland period, the culture that is called the Potomac Creek complex resided in the area from Baltimore to the Rappahannock River in Virginia. It was located on the Bush River on land that in 1773 became part of Harford County, in 1674, the General Assembly passed An Act for erecting a Court-house and Prison in each County within this Province. The site of the house and jail for Baltimore County was evidently Old Baltimore near the Bush River. In 1683, the General Assembly passed An Act for Advancement of Trade to establish towns, ports, one of the towns established by the act in Baltimore County was on Bush River, on Town Land, near the Court-House
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Evergreen Museum & Library
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Evergreen Museum & Library, also known as Evergreen House, is a historical museum of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It is located between the campuses of the College of Notre Dame and Loyola College and it, along with Homewood Museum, make up the Johns Hopkins University Museums. The mansion was built in the century and bought in 1878 by the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Railroads were then a key industry in the United States and, as Baltimores Garrett family owned and managed one of the biggest rail companies, the home grew and became both luxurious and famous. John Garretts son T. Harrison added a wing containing a billiard room, bowling alley, and a gymnasium, Evergreen House served as a home for the family until 1952, when it was donated to the university. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, the house, a magnificent example of Gilded Age architecture, sits on a 26 acres landscaped site in Northern Baltimore and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The exterior of the house was an influence for the exterior of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland in California, as noted in Haunted Mansion, today, the university manages the museum and offers guided tours. The John Work Garrett Library is under the aegis of the Department of Special Collections at the Johns Hopkins University, the collection totals over 30,000 volumes, the majority of which were collected by John Work Garrett and his father, T. Harrison Garrett. The collection is strong in literature of the English Renaissance, including the Shakespeare Folios of 1623,1632. It also has a small but choice collection of incunabula and books of hours, Evergreen House, Baltimore City, including undated photo, at Maryland Historical Trust Evergreen House website Evergreen House on Google Street View Historic American Buildings Survey No. MD-1167, Evergreen,146 photos,16 color transparencies,30 measured drawings,233 data pages,9 photo caption pages Evergreen House – Explore Baltimore Heritage
42.
Knoedler Gallery
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M Knoedler & Co was an art dealership in New York City founded in 1846. When it closed in 2011, amid lawsuits for fraud, it was one of the oldest commercial art galleries in the US, Knoedler dates its origin to 1846, when French dealers Goupil & Cie opened a branch in New York. Michel Knoedler, born in Kapf near Gaildorf in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, started to work for Goupil & Cie in Paris in 1844, and moved to New York in 1852 to take charge of the New York branch. He purchased the U. S. arm of the business in 1857, huntington, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry O. Havemeyer, William Rockefeller, Walter P. Chrysler Jr. John Jacob Astor, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick, and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, and the Tate Gallery. Knoedler & Co. became part of an group of art dealerships. Knoedler developed a relationship with London gallery Colnaghi, with Colnaghi finding suitable paintings in Europe for Knoedler to sell to wealthy collectors in the US. After Roland Knoedler retired in 1928, the management of the passed to his nephew Charles Henschel, with Carmen Mesmore, Charles Carstairs. Henschel died in 1956, and E. Coe Kerr and Roland Balay took over, the firm was sold to industrialist and collector Armand Hammer for $2.5 million in 1971. Five years later, the last member of the Knoedler family - Roland Balay - ceased his involvement in the management of the firm and it increasingly concentrated on contemporary art from the late 1970s. After Hammers death in 1990, the Hammer foundation continued to hold a controlling interest in the gallery until it closed in 2011, the art dealership occupied eight different locations, starting on Broadway. By the 1890s, it operated from a row house at Fifth Avenue, the firm incurred significant costs in refurbishing new premises in an Italian Renaissance-style town house at 19 East 70th Street in 1970. In February 2011, the gallery sold its premises at 19 East 70th Street for $31 million, in 2012, the gallery attempted to auction a portion of its remaining inventory of artworks. Both paintings were restituted after lawsuits were filed, the gallerys president Ann Freedman resigned in October 2009, amid rumours of problems with fakes involving paintings supplied to the gallery by Long Island art dealer Glafira Rosales. Freedman had purchased the paintings for Knoedler from Glafira Rosales, who had in turn obtained the paintings from the art forger Pei-Shen Quian. Quian had reportedly painted the forgeries in his Queens, New York Garage and he is reported to have received less than $9000 USD for each painting from Rozales, while Rosales sold the paintings for millions of dollars each to Knoedler. A statement issued on Wednesday 28 November 2011 by Knoedler stated simply that it was closing permanently for business reasons unrelated to the lawsuits it faced over the sale of forged paintings. By 2012, the FBI was investigating at least two paintings that were supplied to the gallery by Glafira Rozales
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Victoria and Albert Museum
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The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is the worlds largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and these include the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Royal Albert Hall. The museum is a public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media. Like other national British museums, entrance to the museum has been free since 2001, the V&A covers 12.5 acres and 145 galleries. Its collection spans 5,000 years of art, from ancient times to the present day, from the cultures of Europe, North America, Asia and North Africa. The museum owns the worlds largest collection of sculpture, with the holdings of Italian Renaissance items being the largest outside Italy. The departments of Asia include art from South Asia, China, Japan, Korea, the East Asian collections are among the best in Europe, with particular strengths in ceramics and metalwork, while the Islamic collection is amongst the largest in the Western world. Overall, it is one of the largest museums in the world, New 17th- and 18th-century European galleries were opened on 9 December 2015. These restored the original Aston Webb interiors and host the European collections 1600–1815, at this stage the collections covered both applied art and science. Several of the exhibits from the Exhibition were purchased to form the nucleus of the collection, by February 1854 discussions were underway to transfer the museum to the current site and it was renamed South Kensington Museum. In 1855 the German architect Gottfried Semper, at the request of Cole, produced a design for the museum, but it was rejected by the Board of Trade as too expensive. The site was occupied by Brompton Park House, this was extended including the first refreshment rooms opened in 1857, the official opening by Queen Victoria was on 22 June 1857. In the following year, late night openings were introduced, made possible by the use of gas lighting, in these early years the practical use of the collection was very much emphasised as opposed to that of High Art at the National Gallery and scholarship at the British Museum. George Wallis, the first Keeper of Fine Art Collection, passionately promoted the idea of art education through the museum collections. From the 1860s to the 1880s the scientific collections had been moved from the museum site to various improvised galleries to the west of Exhibition Road. In 1893 the Science Museum had effectively come into existence when a director was appointed. The laying of the stone of the Aston Webb building on 17 May 1899 was the last official public appearance by Queen Victoria. It was during this ceremony that the change of name from the South Kensington Museum to the Victoria, the exhibition which the museum organised to celebrate the centennial of the 1899 renaming, A Grand Design, first toured in North America from 1997, returning to London in 1999
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Emil Loteanu
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Emil Loteanu was a Soviet film director born in Clocuşna, Moldova. He moved to Moscow in his early life and his best known films are Lăutarii, Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven, A Hunting Accident and Anna Pavlova. Emil Vladimirovich Loteanu was born on November 6,1936 in the Bessarabian village Clocuşna, the Lotyanu ancestry has Ukrainian origin, the original name was Lototskii. His paternal ancestors were from Bukovina, after the annexation of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union, they moved to Bucharest. After the death of his father and losing contact with his mother, between 1953 and 1955, he studied at the actors faculty of the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1962, he graduated from VGIK, between 1952 and 1954, he worked as an actor at the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre. From 1962 to 1973 he worked as a director at the studio Moldova-Film where he made his feature film debut with the heroic. In 1966, Emil Loteanu directed a picture about the Moldavian shepherds titled Red Meadows. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union since the year 1968, in his cinematic poem Lăutarii the director depicted the life of folk musicians. The films music was scored by Eugene Doga and was the beginning for their long collaboration, the film won the Silver Shell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Since 1973 Loteanu worked at the studio Mosfilm, in 1976 the film Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven won the Grand Prix – the Golden Shell – at the International Film Festival in San Sebastian. A waltz by Eugene Doga from the 1978 film A Hunting Accident became world-famous, one of the producers of his 1983 film Anna Pavlova was Michael Powell. The film was a co-production between Britain and the Soviet Union and featured American director Martin Scorsese in a cameo role, in 1979, Emil Loteanu married actress Galina Belyayeva who starred in his films A Hunting Accident and Anna Pavlova. Their marriage was a one and lasted five years. In the late 1980s, he returned to Moldova-Film and worked on Moldovan television, between 1987 and 1992, he was President of the Union of Cinematographers of Moldova. He taught courses for actors at the Chisinau Institute of Arts. In 1998, he staged the play Unconditionally Yours, Antosha Chekhonte based on Chekhovs The Bear and he is an author of several collections of poems and short stories, scripts of his films. He is also an author of poetry for the film The Eighth Wonder of the World, for twelve years he was trying to get funding to make films
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