Manhattan
Manhattan referred to locally as the City, is the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City and its economic and administrative center, cultural identifier, historical birthplace. The borough is coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U. S. state of New York. The borough consists of Manhattan Island, bounded by the Hudson and Harlem rivers. S. mainland, physically connected to the Bronx and separated from the rest of Manhattan by the Harlem River. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each aligned with the borough's long axis: Lower and Upper Manhattan. Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial and entertainment capital of the world, the borough hosts the United Nations Headquarters. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, Manhattan is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization: the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, the borough has been the setting for numerous books and television shows. Manhattan real estate has since become among the most expensive in the world, with the value of Manhattan Island, including real estate, estimated to exceed US$3 trillion in 2013. Manhattan traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan. Manhattan is documented to have been purchased by Dutch colonists from Native Americans in 1626 for 60 guilders, which equals $1038 in current terms; the territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York, based in present-day Manhattan, served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790; the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals of liberty and peace.
Manhattan became a borough during the consolidation of New York City in 1898. New York County is the United States' second-smallest county by land area, is the most densely populated U. S. county. It is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with a census-estimated 2017 population of 1,664,727 living in a land area of 22.83 square miles, or 72,918 residents per square mile, higher than the density of any individual U. S. city. On business days, the influx of commuters increases this number to over 3.9 million, or more than 170,000 people per square mile. Manhattan has the third-largest population of New York City's five boroughs, after Brooklyn and Queens, is the smallest borough in terms of land area. Manhattan Island is informally divided into three areas, each aligned with its long axis: Lower and Upper Manhattan. Many districts and landmarks in Manhattan are well known, as New York City received a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017, Manhattan hosts three of the world's 10 most-visited tourist attractions in 2013: Times Square, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal.
The borough hosts many prominent bridges, such as the Brooklyn Bridge. Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, part of the Stonewall National Monument, is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement; the City of New York was founded at the southern tip of Manhattan, the borough houses New York City Hall, the seat of the city's government. Numerous colleges and universities are located in Manhattan, including Columbia University, New York University, Cornell Tech, Weill Cornell Medical College, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top 40 in the world; the name Manhattan derives from the Munsee dialect of the Lenape language'manaháhtaan'. The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at the lower end, considered ideal for the making of bows.
It was first recorded in writing as Manna-hata, in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson's yacht Halve Maen. A 1610 map depicts the name as Manna-hata, twice, on both the west and east sides of the Mauritius River. Alternative folk etymologies include "island of many hills", "the island where we all became intoxicated" and "island", as well as a phrase descriptive of the whirlpool at Hell Gate; the area, now Manhattan was long inhabited by the Lenape Native Americans. In 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano – sailing in service of King Francis I of France – became the first documented European to visit the area that would become New York City, he entered the tidal strait now known as The Narrows and named the land around Upper New York
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex and plastics. She is one of the artists. Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany, on January 11, 1936; when Hesse was two years old in December 1938, her parents, hoping to flee from Nazi Germany, sent Hesse and her older sister, Helen Hesse Charash, to the Netherlands to escape Nazi Germany, aboard one of the last Kindertransport trains. After six months of separation, the reunited family moved to England and in 1939, emigrated to New York City, where they settled into Manhattan's Washington Heights. In 1944, Hesse's parents separated. In 1962, she married sculptor Tom Doyle. In October 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, she died on Friday, May 29, 1970, after three failed operations within a year, her death at the age of 34 ended a career that would become influential, despite spanning only a decade. Hesse graduated from New York's School of Industrial Art at the age of 16, in 1952 she enrolled in the Pratt Institute of Design.
She dropped out only a year later. When Hesse was 18, she interned at Seventeen magazine. During this time she took classes at the Art Students League. From 1954–57 she studied at Cooper Union and in 1959 she received her BA from Yale University. While at Yale, Hesse studied under Josef Albers and was influenced by Abstract Expressionism. After Yale, Hesse returned to New York, where she became friends with many other young minimalist artists, including Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, others, her close friendship with Sol LeWitt continued until the end of her life. The two wrote to one another, in 1965 LeWitt famously counseled a young doubting Eva to "Stop and just DO!" Both Hesse and LeWitt went on to become influential artists, their friendship aided in the artistic development of each of their works. In 1962, Eva Hesse married fellow sculptor Tom Doyle, in 1965, the two moved to Germany so that Doyle could pursue an artist residency from German industrialist and collector Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt.
Hesse and Doyle, whose marriage was falling apart and worked in an abandoned textile mill in the Ruhr region of Germany for about a year. Hesse was not happy to be back in Germany, but began working with materials, left behind in the abandoned factory, their studio was set up in a disused part of Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt's textile factory in Kettwig-on-the-Ruhr near Essen. The building still contained machine parts and materials from its previous use and the angular forms of these disused machines and tools served as inspiration for Hesse’s mechanical drawings and paintings, her first sculpture was a relief titled Ringaround Arosie, which featured cloth-covered cord, electrical wire, masonite. This year in Germany marked a turning point in Hesse's career. From this point on she would continue to make sculptures, which became the primary focus of her work. Returning to New York City in 1965, she began working and experimenting with the unconventional materials that would become characteristic of her work: latex and plastic.
Hesse's early work consisted of abstract drawings and paintings. She is better known for her sculptures and because of this, her drawings are regarded as preliminary steps to her work, she created most of her drawings, however, as a separate body of work. She states, "They were related because they were mine but they weren’t related in one completing the other."Hesse’s interest in latex as a medium for sculptural forms had to do with immediacy. Keats states, "immediacy may be one of the prime reasons Hesse was attracted to latex". Hesse’s first two works using latex and Sequel, use latex in a way never imagined by the manufacturer. In her artwork Untitled, Hesse used industrial latex and once it was hardened, she hung it on the wall and ceiling using wire."Industrial latex was meant for casting. Hesse handled it like house paint, brushing layer upon layer to build up a surface, smooth yet irregular, ragged at the edges like deckled paper." Hesse's work employs multiple forms of similar shape organized together in grid structures or clusters.
Retaining some of the defining forms of minimalism and unconventional materials, she created eccentric work, repetitive and labor-intensive. Her work Contingent from 1968 is an ideal example of this concept. In a statement of her work, Hesse describes her piece titled Hang-Up as "...the first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through... The whole thing is rigid, neat cord around the entire thing... It is extreme and, why I like it and don't like it... It is the most ridiculous structure that I made and, why it is good", her work represented her childhood, having to escape from the Nazis in Germany after her mother committed suicide. Eva Hesse is associated with the Postminimal art movement. Arthur Danto distinguished post-minimalism from minimalism by its "mirth and jokiness," its "unmistakable whiff of eroticism," and its "nonmechanical repetition."She worked and sometimes competed with her male counterparts in post-minimalist art, a male-dominated movement. Many feminist art historians have noted her work illuminates women’s issues while refraining from any obvious political agenda.
She revealed, in a letter to Ethelyn Honig, that a woman is "at disadvantage from the beginning… She lacks conviction that she has the ‘right’ to achievement. She als
Illustration
An illustration is a decoration, interpretation or visual explanation of a text, concept or process, designed for integration in published media, such as posters, magazines, teaching materials, video games and films. Illustration means providing an example; the origin of the word “illustration” is late Middle English: via Old French from Latin illustratio, from the verb illustrate. Contemporary illustration uses a wide range of styles and techniques, including drawing, printmaking, montage, digital design, multimedia, 3D modelling. Most illustrators work on a freelance basis. Depending on the purpose, illustration may be expressive, realistic or technical. Specialist areas include: Architectural illustration Archaeological illustration Botanical illustration Concept art Fashion illustration Information graphics Technical illustration Medical illustration Narrative illustration Picture books Scientific illustration Technical and scientific illustration communicates information of a technical or scientific nature.
This may include exploded views, fly-throughs, instructional images, component designs, diagrams. The aim is "to generate expressive images that convey certain information via the visual channel to the human observer"Technical and scientific illustration is designed to describe or explain subjects to a nontechnical audience, so must provide "an overall impression of what an object is or does, to enhance the viewer's interest and understanding". In contemporary illustration practice, 2D and 3D software is used to create accurate representations that can be updated and reused in a variety of contexts. In the art world, illustration has at times been considered of less importance than graphic design and fine art. Today, due in part to the growth of graphic novel and video game industries, as well as increased use of illustration in magazines and other publications, illustration is now becoming a valued art form, capable of engaging a global market. Original illustration art has been known to attract high prices at auction.
The US artist Norman Rockwell's painting "Breaking Home Ties" sold in a 2006 Sotheby's auction for USD15.4 million. Many other illustration genres are valued, with pinup artists such as Gil Elvgren and Alberto Vargas, for example attracting high prices; the art of illustration is linked to the industrial processes of printing and publishing. The illustrations of medieval codices were known as illuminations, were individually hand drawn and painted. With the invention of the printing press during the 15th century, books became more distributed illustrated with woodcuts. 1600s Japan saw the origination of Ukiyo-e, an influential illustration style characterised by expressive line, vivid colour and subtle tones, resulting from the ink-brushed wood block printing technique. Subjects included popular figures and every day life. Hokusai’s The Great Wave of Kanazawa is a famous image of the time. During the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, the main reproduction processes for illustration were engraving and etching.
In 18th Century England, a notable illustrator was William Blake. By the early 19th century, the introduction of lithography improved reproduction quality. In Europe, notable figures of the early 19th Century were John Leech, George Cruikshank, Dickens illustrator Hablot Knight Browne, and, in France, Honoré Daumier. All contributed to "serious" publications. At this time, there was a great demand for caricature drawings encapsulating social mores and classes; the British humorous magazine Punch built on the success of Cruikshank's Comic Almanac and employed many well-regarded illustrators, including Sir John Tenniel, the Dalziel Brothers, Georges du Maurier. Although all fine art trained, their reputations were gained as illustrators. Punch was most influential in the 1840s and 1850s; the magazine was the first to use the term "cartoon" to describe a humorous illustration and its widespread use led to John Leech being known as the world's first "cartoonist". In common with similar magazines such as the Parisian Le Voleur, Punch realised good illustration sold as well as good text.
With publication continuing into the 21st Century, Punch chronicles a gradual shift in popular illustration, from reliance on caricature to sophisticated topical observation. From the early 1800s newspapers, mass market magazines, illustrated books had become the dominant consumer media in Europe and the New World. By the 19th century, improvements in printing technology freed illustrators to experiment with color and rendering techniques; these developments in printing effected all areas of literature from cookbooks and traveling guides, as well as children's books. Due to advances in printing, it became more affordable to produce color photographs within books and other materials. By 1900 100 percent of paper was machine-made, while a person working by hand could produce 60-100lbs of paper per day, mechanization yielded around 1,000lbs per day. Additionally, in the 50 year period between 1846 and 1916, book production increased 400% and the price of books was cut in half. In America, this led to a "golden age of illustration" from before the 1880s until the early 20th century.
A small group of illustrators became successful, with the imagery they created considered a portrait of American aspirations of the time. Among the best known illustrators of that period were N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyl
Minimalism
In visual arts and other mediums, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II Western art, most with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, Frank Stella, it derives from the reductive aspects of modernism and is interpreted as a reaction against abstract expressionism and a bridge to postminimal art practices. Minimalism in music features repetition and gradual variation, such as the works of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Julius Eastman, John Adams; the term minimalist colloquially refers to anything, spare or stripped to its essentials. It has accordingly been used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, the automobile designs of Colin Chapman. Minimalism in visual art referred to as "minimal art", "literalist art" and "ABC Art" emerged in New York in the early 1960s as new and older artists moved toward geometric abstraction.
Judd's sculpture was showcased in 1964 at Green Gallery in Manhattan, as were Flavin's first fluorescent light works, while other leading Manhattan galleries like Leo Castelli Gallery and Pace Gallery began to showcase artists focused on geometric abstraction. In addition there were two seminal and influential museum exhibitions: Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture shown from April 27 – June 12, 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York, organized by the museum's Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Kynaston McShine and Systemic Painting, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curated by Lawrence Alloway in 1966 that showcased Geometric abstraction in the American art world via Shaped canvas, Color Field, Hard-edge painting. In the wake of those exhibitions and a few others the art movement called. In a more broad and general sense, one finds European roots of minimalism in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the De Stijl movement, the Russian Constructivist movement, in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.
In France between 1947 and 1948, Yves Klein conceived his Monotone Symphony that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence – a precedent to both La Monte Young's drone music and John Cage's 4′33″. Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950—but his first public showing was the publication of the Artist's book Yves: Peintures in November 1954. Minimal art is inspired in part by the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, others. Minimalism was a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism, dominant in the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s. Artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1981 Artforum essay Last Exit: Painting, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about modernist painting's reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally.
According to Lawson, minimalism was the result though the term "minimalism" was not embraced by the artists associated with it, many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such. Taking exception to this claim was Clement Greenberg himself; the philosopher or art historian who can envision me—or anyone at all—arriving at aesthetic judgments in this way reads shockingly more into himself or herself than into my article. In contrast to the previous decade's more subjective Abstract Expressionists, with the exceptions of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, they explicitly stated that their art was not about self-expression, unlike the previous decade's more subjective philosophy about art making theirs was'objective'. In general, minimalism's features included geometric cubic forms purged of much metaphor, equality of parts, neutral surfaces, industrial materials. Robert Morris, a theorist and artist, wrote a three part essay, "Notes on Sculpture 1–3" published across three issues of Artforum in 1966.
In these essays, Morris attempted to define a conceptual framework and formal elements for himself and one that would embrace the practices of his contemporaries. These essays paid great attention to the idea of the gestalt – "parts... bound together in such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual separation." Morris described an art represented by a "marked lateral spread and no regularized units or symmetrical intervals..." in "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond O
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asian continent and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea in the south; the kanji that make up Japan's name mean "sun origin", it is called the "Land of the Rising Sun". Japan is a stratovolcanic archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands; the four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido and Shikoku, which make up about ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area and are referred to as home islands. The country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions, with Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one; the population of 127 million is the world's tenth largest. 90.7 % of people live in cities. About 13.8 million people live in the capital of Japan. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world with over 38 million people. Archaeological research indicates; the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD.
Influence from other regions China, followed by periods of isolation from Western Europe, has characterized Japan's history. From the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shōguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a long period of isolation in the early 17th century, ended in 1853 when a United States fleet pressured Japan to open to the West. After nearly two decades of internal conflict and insurrection, the Imperial Court regained its political power in 1868 through the help of several clans from Chōshū and Satsuma – and the Empire of Japan was established. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victories in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism; the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the Japanese surrender. Since adopting its revised constitution on May 3, 1947, during the occupation led by SCAP, the sovereign state of Japan has maintained a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy with an Emperor and an elected legislature called the National Diet.
Japan is a member of the ASEAN Plus mechanism, UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the G20, is considered a great power. Its economy is the world's third-largest by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest by purchasing power parity, it is the world's fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer. Japan benefits from a skilled and educated workforce. Although it has renounced its right to declare war, Japan maintains a modern military with the world's eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a developed country with a high standard of living and Human Development Index, its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, but is experiencing issues due to an aging population and low birthrate. Japan is renowned for its historical and extensive cinema, influential music industry, video gaming, rich cuisine and its major contributions to science and modern technology; the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, pronounced Nihon or Nippon and means "the origin of the sun".
The character nichi means "sun" or "day". The compound therefore means "origin of the sun" and is the source of the popular Western epithet "Land of the Rising Sun"; the earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, the Old Book of Tang. At the end of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan requested that Nihon be used as the name of their country; this name may have its origin in a letter sent in 607 and recorded in the official history of the Sui dynasty. Prince Shōtoku, the Regent of Japan, sent a mission to China with a letter in which he called himself "the Emperor of the Land where the Sun rises"; the message said: "Here, I, the emperor of the country where the sun rises, send a letter to the emperor of the country where the sun sets. How are you". Prior to the adoption of Nihon, other terms such as Yamato and Wakoku were used; the term Wa is a homophone of Wo 倭, used by the Chinese as a designation for the Japanese as early as the third century Three Kingdoms period.
Another form of Wa, Wei in Chinese) was used for an early state in Japan called Nakoku during the Han dynasty. However, the Japanese disliked some connotation of Wa 倭, it was therefore replaced with the substitute character Wa, meaning "togetherness, harmony"; the English word Japan derives from the historical Chinese pronunciation of 日本. The Old Mandarin or early Wu Chinese pronunciation of Japan was recorded by Marco Polo as Cipangu. In modern Shanghainese, a Wu dialect, the pronunciation of characters 日本; the old Malay word for Japan, Japun or Japang, was borrowed from a southern coastal Chinese dialect Fukienese or Ningpo – and this Malay word was encountered by Portuguese traders in Southeast Asia in the 16th century. These Early Portuguese traders brought the word
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only; the term is used in the entertainment business in a business context, for musicians and other performers. "Artiste" is a variant used in English only in this context. Use of the term to describe writers, for example, is valid, but less common, restricted to contexts like criticism. Wiktionary defines the noun ` artist'. A person who makes and creates art as an occupation. A person, skilled at some activity. A person whose trade or profession requires a knowledge of design, painting, etc; the Oxford English Dictionary defines the older broad meanings of the term "artist": A learned person or Master of Arts One who pursues a practical science, traditionally medicine, alchemy, chemistry A follower of a pursuit in which skill comes by study or practice A follower of a manual art, such as a mechanic One who makes their craft a fine art One who cultivates one of the fine arts – traditionally the arts presided over by the muses The Greek word "techně" translated as "art," implies mastery of any sort of craft.
The adjectival Latin form of the word, "technicus", became the source of the English words technique, technical. In Greek culture each of the nine Muses oversaw a different field of human creation: Calliope: chief of the muses and muse of epic or heroic poetry Clio: muse of history Erato: muse of love or erotic poetry and marriage songs Euterpe: muse of music and lyric poetry Melpomene: muse of tragedy Polyhymnia or Polymnia: muse of sacred song, lyric and rhetoric Terpsichore: muse of choral song and dance Thalia: muse of comedy and bucolic poetry Urania: muse of astronomyNo muse was identified with the visual arts of painting and sculpture. In ancient Greece sculptors and painters were held in low regard, somewhere between freemen and slaves, their work regarded as mere manual labour; the word art derives from the Latin "ars", although defined means "skill method" or "technique" conveys a connotation of beauty. During the Middle Ages the word artist existed in some countries such as Italy, but the meaning was something resembling craftsman, while the word artesan was still unknown.
An artist was someone able to do a work better than others, so the skilled excellency was underlined, rather than the activity field. In this period some "artisanal" products were much more precious and expensive than paintings or sculptures; the first division into major and minor arts dates back at least to the works of Leon Battista Alberti: De re aedificatoria, De statua, De pictura, which focused on the importance of the intellectual skills of the artist rather than the manual skills. With the Academies in Europe the gap between fine and applied arts was set. Many contemporary definitions of "artist" and "art" are contingent on culture, resisting aesthetic prescription, in much the same way that the features constituting beauty and the beautiful cannot be standardized without corruption into kitsch. Artist is a descriptive term applied to a person. An artist may be defined unofficially as "a person who expresses him- or herself through a medium"; the word is used in a qualitative sense of, a person creative in, innovative in, or adept at, an artistic practice.
Most the term describes those who create within a context of the fine arts or'high culture', activities such as drawing, sculpture, dancing, filmmaking, new media and music—people who use imagination, talent, or skill to create works that may be judged to have an aesthetic value. Art historians and critics define artists as those who produce art within a recognized or recognizable discipline. Contrasting terms for skilled workers in media in the applied arts or decorative arts include artisan and specialized terms such as potter, goldsmith or glassblower. Fine arts artists such as painters succeeded in the Renaissance in raising their status similar to these workers, to a decisively higher level; the term may be used loosely or metaphorically to denote skilled people in any non-"art" activities, as well— law, mechanics, or mathematics, for example. Discussions on the subject focus on the differences among "artist" and "technician", "entertainer" and "artisan", "fine art" and "applied art", or what constitutes art and what does not.
The French word artiste has been imported into the English language. Use of the word "artiste" can be a pejorative term; the English word'artiste' has thus a narrower range of meaning than the word'artiste' in French. In Living with Art, Mark Getlein proposes six activities, services or functions of contemporary artists: Create places for some human purpose. Create extraordinary versions of ordinary objects. Record and commemorate. Give tangible form to the unknown. Give tangible form to feelings. Refresh our vision and help see the world in new ways. After looking at years of data on
