Odessa
Odessa is the third most populous city of Ukraine and a major tourism center and transportation hub located on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. It is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast and a multiethnic cultural center. Odessa is sometimes called the "pearl of the Black Sea", the "South Capital", "Southern Palmyra". Before the Tsarist establishment of Odessa, an ancient Greek settlement existed at its location as elsewhere along the northwestern Black Sea coast. A more recent Tatar settlement was founded at the location by Hacı I Giray, the Khan of Crimea in 1440, named after him as "Hacıbey". After a period of Lithuanian Grand Duchy control and surroundings became part of the domain of the Ottomans in 1529 and remained there until the empire's defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1792. In 1794, the city of Odessa was founded by a decree of the Russian empress Catherine the Great. From 1819 to 1858, Odessa was a free port. During the Soviet period it was the most important port of trade in the Soviet Union and a Soviet naval base.
On 1 January 2000, the Quarantine Pier at Odessa Commercial Sea Port was declared a free port and free economic zone for a period of 25 years. During the 19th century, Odessa was the fourth largest city of Imperial Russia, after Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Warsaw, its historical architecture has a style more Mediterranean than Russian, having been influenced by French and Italian styles. Some buildings are built in a mixture of different styles, including Art Nouveau and Classicist. Odessa is a warm-water port; the city of Odessa hosts both the Port of Odessa and Port Yuzhne, a significant oil terminal situated in the city's suburbs. Another notable port, Chornomorsk, is located to the south-west of Odessa. Together they represent a major transport hub integrating with railways. Odessa's oil and chemical processing facilities are connected to Russian and European networks by strategic pipelines; the city was named in compliance with the Greek Plan of Catherine the Great. It was named after the ancient Greek city of Odessos, mistakenly believed to have been located here.
Odessa is located in between the ancient Greek cities of Tyras and Olbia, different from the ancient Odessos's location further west along the coast, at present day Varna, Bulgaria. Catherine's secretary of state Adrian Gribovsky claimed in his memoirs that the name was his suggestion; some expressed doubts about this claim, while others noted the reputation of Gribovsky as an honest and modest man. Odessa was the site of a large Greek settlement no than the middle of the 6th century BC; some scholars believe it to have been a trade settlement established by the Greek city of Histria. Whether the Bay of Odessa is the ancient "Port of the Histrians" cannot yet be considered a settled question based on the available evidence. Archaeological artifacts confirm extensive links between the Odessa area and the eastern Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages successive rulers of the Odessa region included various nomadic tribes, the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire.
Yedisan Crimean Tatars traded there in the 14th century. During the reign of Khan Hacı I Giray of Crimea, the Khanate was endangered by the Golden Horde and the Ottoman Turks and, in search of allies, the khan agreed to cede the area to Lithuania; the site of present-day Odessa was a fortress known as Khadjibey. It was part of the Dykra region. However, most of the rest of the area remained uninhabited in this period. Khadjibey came under direct control of the Ottoman Empire after 1529 as part of a region known as Yedisan, was administered in the Ottoman Silistra Province. In the mid-18th century, the Ottomans rebuilt the fortress at Khadjibey, named Yeni Dünya. Hocabey was a sanjak centre of Silistre Province; the sleepy fishing village that Odessa had been saw a step-change in its fortunes when the wealthy magnate and future Voivode of Kiev, Antoni Protazy Potocki, set up trade routes through the port for the Polish Black Sea Trading Company and set up the infrastructure in the 1780s. During the Russian-Turkish War of 1787–1792, on 25 September 1789, a detachment of the Russian forces including Zaporozhian Cossacks under Alexander Suvorov and Ivan Gudovich took Khadjibey and Yeni Dünya for the Russian Empire.
One part of the troops came under command of a Spaniard in Russian service, Major General José de Ribas, the main street in Odessa today, Deribasivska Street, is named after him. Russia formally gained possession of the area as a result of the Treaty of Jassy in 1792 and it became a part of Novorossiya; the city of Odessa, founded by Catherine the Great, Russian Empress, centers on the site of the Turkish fortress Khadzhibei, occupied by Russian Army in 1789. Flemish engineer working for the empress, Franz de Volan recommended the area of Khadzhibei fortress as the site for the region's basic port: it had an ice-free harbor, breakwaters could be cheaply constructed and would render the harbor safe and it would have the capacity to accommodate large fleets; the Governor General of Novorossiya, Platon Zubov supported this proposal, in 1794 Catherine approved the foundi
Pogrom
A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at the massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group one aimed at Jews. The Russian term entered the English language in order to describe 19th and 20th century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Similar attacks against Jews at other times and places became retrospectively known as pogroms; the word is now sometimes used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish ethnic or religious groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary depending on the specific incidents, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres. Significant pogroms in the Russian Empire included the Odessa pogroms, Warsaw pogrom, Kishinev pogrom, Kiev Pogrom, Białystok pogrom, after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Lwów pogrom and Kiev Pogroms; the most significant pogrom in Nazi Germany was the Kristallnacht of 1938 in which 91 Jews were killed, a further 30,000 arrested and subsequently incarcerated in concentration camps, 1,000 synagogues burned, over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged.
Notorious pogroms of World War II included the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the July 1941 Iaşi pogrom in Romania – in which over 13,200 Jews were killed – as well as the Jedwabne pogrom in Poland. Post-World War II pogroms included the 1945 Tripoli pogrom, the 1946 Kielce pogrom and the 1947 Aleppo pogrom. First recorded in 1882, the Russian word pogrom is derived from the common prefix po- and the verb gromit' meaning "to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently", its literal translation is "to harm". The noun "pogrom", which has a short history, is used in English and many other languages as a loanword borrowed from Yiddish, its widespread circulation in today's world began with the antisemitic excesses in the Russian Empire in 1881–1883. Anti-Jewish riots had taken place in Europe during the Middle Ages. Jewish communities were targeted in the Black Death Jewish persecutions of 1348–1350, in Toulon in 1348, in Barcelona as well as in other Catalan cities, during the Erfurt massacre, the Basel massacre, massacres in Aragon and in Flanders, as well as the "Valentine's Day" Strasbourg pogrom of 1349.
Some 510 Jewish communities were destroyed during this period, extending further to the Brussels massacre of 1370. On Holy Saturday of 1389, a pogrom began in Prague that led to the burning of the Jewish quarter, the killing of many Jews, the suicide of many Jews trapped in the main synagogue; the brutal murders of the Jews together with the Poles occurred during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–1657 in present-day Ukraine. Modern historians give estimates of the scale of the murders by Khmelnytsky's Cossacks ranging between 40,000 and 100,000 men and children, or many more; the outbreak of violence against Jews occurred at the beginning of the 19th century as a reaction to Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation. The Russian Empire, which had few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations during the military partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. In conquered territories, a new political entity called the Pale of Settlement was formed in 1791 by Catherine the Great.
Most Jews from the former Commonwealth were allowed to reside only within the Pale, including families expelled by royal decree from St. Petersburg and other large Russian cities; the 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the beginning of the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia. Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by Narodnaya Volya – blamed on the Jews by the Russian government, anti-Jewish events turned into a wave of over 200 pogroms by their modern definition, which lasted for several years. Jewish self-governing Kehillah were abolished by Tsar Nicholas I in 1844; the first in 20th-century Russia was the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in which 47 Jews were killed, hundreds wounded, 700 homes destroyed and 600 businesses pillaged. In the same year, pogroms took place in Gomel, Smela and Melitopol. Extreme savagery was typified by mutilations of the wounded, they were followed by the Zhitomir pogrom, the Kiev pogrom of October 1905 resulting in a massacre of 100 Jews. In three years between 1903 and 1906, about 660 pogroms were recorded in Bessarabia.
At about that time, the Jewish Labor Bund began organizing armed self-defense units ready to shoot back, the pogroms subsided for a number of years. According to professor Colin Tatz, between 1881 and 1920 there were 1,326 pogroms in Ukraine which took the lives of 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews, leaving half a million homeless. Large-scale pogroms, which began in the Russian Empire several decades earlier, intensified during the period of the Russian Civil War and the Revolution of 1917. Professor Zvi Gitelman estimated that only in 1918–1919 over 1,200 pogroms took place in Ukraine, thus amounting to the greatest slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe since 1648. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book Two Hundred Years Together provided additional statistics from research conducted by Nahum Gergel. Gergel counted 1,236 incidents of anti-Jewish violence and estimated that 887 mass pogroms occurred, the remainder being classified as "excesses" not assuming
Provence
Provence is a geographical region and historical province of southeastern France, which extends from the left bank of the lower Rhône River to the west to the Italian border to the east, is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the south. It corresponds with the modern administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, includes the départements of Var, Bouches-du-Rhône, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and parts of Alpes-Maritimes and Vaucluse; the largest city of the region is Marseille. The Romans made the region the first Roman province beyond the Alps and called it Provincia Romana, which evolved into the present name; until 1481 it was ruled by the Counts of Provence from their capital in Aix-en-Provence became a province of the Kings of France. While it has been part of France for more than five hundred years, it still retains a distinct cultural and linguistic identity in the interior of the region; the coast of Provence has some of the earliest known sites of human habitation in Europe. Primitive stone tools dating back 1 to 1.05 million years BC have been found in the Grotte du Vallonnet near Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, between Monaco and Menton.
More sophisticated tools, worked on both sides of the stone and dating to 600,000 BC, were found in the Cave of Escale at Saint Estėve-Janson, tools from 400,000 BC and some of the first fireplaces in Europe were found at Terra Amata in Nice. Tools dating to the Middle Paleolithic and Upper Paleolithic were discovered in the Observatory Cave, in the Jardin Exotique of Monaco; the Paleolithic period in Provence saw great changes in the climate. Two ice ages came and went, the sea level changed dramatically. At the beginning of the Paleolithic, the sea level in western Provence was 150 meters higher than today. By the end of the Paleolithic, it had dropped to 100 to 150 metres below the sea level today; the cave dwellings of the early inhabitants of Provence were flooded by the rising sea or left far from the sea and swept away by erosion. The changes in the sea level led to one of the most remarkable discoveries of signs of early man in Provence. In 1985, a diver named Henri Cosquer discovered the mouth of a submarine cave 37 metres below the surface of the Calanque de Morgiou near Marseille.
The entrance led to a cave above sea level. Inside, the walls of the Cosquer Cave are decorated with drawings of bison, auks and outlines of human hands, dating to between 27,000 and 19,000 BC; the end of the Paleolithic and beginning of the Neolithic period saw the sea settle at its present level, a warming of the climate and the retreat of the forests. The disappearance of the forests and the deer and other hunted game meant that the inhabitants of Provence had to survive on rabbits and wild sheep. In about 6000 BC, the Castelnovian people, living around Châteauneuf-les-Martigues, were among the first people in Europe to domesticate wild sheep, to cease moving from place to place. Once they settled in one place they were able to develop new industries. Inspired by pottery from the eastern Mediterranean, in about 6000 BC they created the first pottery made in France. Around 6000 BC, a wave of new settlers from the east, the Chasséens, arrived in Provence, they were farmers and warriors, displaced the earlier pastoral people from their lands.
They were followed about 2500 BC by another wave of people farmers, known as the Courronniens, who arrived by sea and settled along the coast of what is now the Bouches-du-Rhône. Traces of these early civilisations can be found in many parts of Provence. A Neolithic site dating to about 6,000 BC was discovered in Marseille near the Saint-Charles railway station, and a dolmen from the Bronze Age can be found near Draguignan. Between the 10th and 4th century BC, the Ligures were found in Provence from Massilia as far as modern Liguria, they were of uncertain origin. Strabo distinctly states they were not of a different race from the Gauls, they did not have their own alphabet, but their language remains in place names in Provence ending in the suffixes -asc, -osc. -inc, -ates, -auni. The ancient geographer Posidonios wrote of them: "Their country is dry; the soil is so rocky. The men compensate for the lack of wheat by hunting... They climb the mountains like goats." They were warlike. Traces of the Ligures remain today in the dolmens and other megaliths found in eastern Provence, in the primitive stone shelters called'Bories' found in the Luberon and Comtat, in the rock carvings in the Valley of Marvels near Mont Bégo in the Alpes-Maritimes, at an altitude of 2,000 meters.
Between the 8th and 5th centuries BC, tribes of Celtic peoples coming from Central Europe began moving into Provence. They had weapons made of iron, which allowed them to defeat the local tribes, who were still armed with bronze weapons. One tribe, called the Segobriga, settled near modern-day Marseille; the Caturiges and Cavares settled to the west of the Durance river. Celts and Ligurians spread throughout the area and the Celto-Ligures shared the territory of Provence, each tribe in its own alpine valley or settlement along a river, each with its own king and dynasty, they built hilltop forts and settlements given the Latin name oppida. Today the traces 165 oppida are found in the Var, as many as 285 in the Alp
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA plays a major role in developing and collecting modernist art, is identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world. MoMA's collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, painting, photography, illustrated books and artist's books and electronic media; the MoMA Library includes 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, over 1,000 periodical titles, over 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups. The archives holds primary source material related to the history of contemporary art; the idea for the Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, they became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash.
Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became treasurer. At the time, it was America's premier museum devoted to modern art, the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism. One of Abby's early recruits for the museum staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami, who served the museum as its official documentary photographer from 1930 until 1968. Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr, Jr. a promising young protege. Under Barr's guidance, the museum's holdings expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing, its first successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat.
First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Abby's husband was adamantly opposed to the museum and refused to release funds for the venture, which had to be obtained from other sources and resulted in the frequent shifts of location, he donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time, thus became in effect one of its greatest benefactors. During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented sixty-six oils and fifty drawings from the Netherlands, as well as poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success due to Barr's arrangement of the exhibit, became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination"; the museum gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago.
In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars and historians. This was wholly masterminded by Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, the exhibition lionized Picasso as the greatest artist of the time, setting the model for all the museum's retrospectives that were to follow. Boy Leading a Horse was contested over ownership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1941, MoMA hosted the ground-breaking exhibition, Indian Art of the United States, that changed the way American Indian arts were viewed by the public and exhibited in art museums; when Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he became the prime instigator and funder of its publicity and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His brother, David Rockefeller joined the museum's board of trustees in 1948 and took over the presidency when Nelson was elected Governor of New York in 1958.
David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He and the Rockefeller family in general have retained a close association with the museum throughout its history, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding the institution since 1947. Both David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller sit on the board of trustees. In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center, its permanent and current home, now renovated, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000 people, with an opening address via radio from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On April 15, 1958, a fire on the second floor destroyed an 18 foot long Monet Water Lilies painting (the current Mone
Hôtel de Ville, Paris
The Hôtel de Ville in Paris, France, is the building housing the city's local administration, standing on the place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville in the 4th arrondissement. The south wing was constructed by François I beginning in 1535 until 1551; the north wing was built by Henry IV and Louis XIII between 1605 and 1628. It was burned by the Paris Commune, along with all the city archives that it contained, during the Commune's final days in May 1871; the outside was rebuilt following the original design, but larger, between 1874 and 1882, while the inside was modified. It has been the headquarters of the municipality of Paris since 1357, it serves multiple functions, housing the local administration, the Mayor of Paris, serves as a venue for large receptions. In July 1357, Étienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris, bought the so-called maison aux piliers in the name of the municipality on the sloping shingle beach which served as a river port for unloading wheat and wood and merged into a square, the Place de Grève, a place where Parisians gathered for public executions.
Since 1357, the City of Paris's administration has been located on the same location where the Hôtel de Ville stands today. Before 1357, the city administration was located in the so-called parloir aux bourgeois near the Châtelet. In 1533, King Francis I decided to endow the city with a city hall which would be worthy of Paris the largest city of Europe and Christendom, he appointed two architects: Italian Dominique de Cortone, nicknamed Boccador because of his red beard, Frenchman Pierre Chambiges. The House of Pillars was torn down and Boccador, steeped in the spirit of the Renaissance, drew up the plans of a building, at the same time tall, full of light and refined. Building work was not finished until 1628 during the reign of Louis XIII. During the next two centuries, no changes were made to the edifice, the stage for several famous events during the French Revolution. In 1835, on the initiative of Rambuteau, préfet of the Seine département, two wings were added to the main building and were linked to the facade by a gallery, to provide more space for the expanded city government.
The architects were Jean-Baptiste Lesueur. During the Franco-Prussian War, the building played a key role in several political events. On 30 October 1870, revolutionaries broke into the building and captured the some of the members of the Government of National Defence, while making repeated demands for the establishment of a communard government; the existing government escaped via an underground tunnel built in 1807, which still connects the Hôtel de Ville with a nearby barracks. On 18 January 1871, crowds gathered outside the building to protest against speculated surrender to the Prussians, were dispersed by soldiers firing from the building, who inflicted several casualties; the Hôtel de Ville had been the headquarters of the French Revolution, it was the headquarters of the Paris Commune. When defeat became imminent and the French army approached the building, the Communards set fire to the Hôtel de Ville, along with other government buildings, destroying the building and all of the city archives.
Reconstruction of City Hall lasted from 1873 through 1892 and was directed by architects Théodore Ballu and Édouard Deperthes, who had won the public competition for the building's reconstruction. Ballu designed the Church of La Trinité in the 9th arrondissement and the belfry of the town hall of the 1st arrondissement, opposite the Louvre's east facade, he restored the Saint-Jacques Tower, a Gothic church tower in a square 150 metres to the west of the Hôtel de Ville. The architects rebuilt the interior of the Hôtel de Ville within the stone shell that had survived the fire. While the rebuilt Hôtel de Ville from the outside appeared to be a copy of the 16th-century French Renaissance building that stood before 1871, the new interior was based on an new design, with ceremonial rooms lavishly decorated in the 1880s style; the central ceremonial doors under the clock are flanked by allegorical figures of Art, by Laurent Marqueste, Science, by Jules Blanchard. Some 230 other sculptors were commissioned to produce 338 individual figures of famous Parisians on each facade, along with lions and other sculptural features.
The sculptors included prominent academicians like Ernest-Eugène Hiolle and Henri Chapu, but the most famous was Auguste Rodin. Rodin produced the figure of the 18th-century mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert, finished in 1882; the statue on the garden wall on the south side is of Étienne Marcel, the most famous holder of the post of prévôt des marchands which predated the office of mayor. Marcel was lynched in 1358 by an angry mob after trying to assert the city's powers too energetically; the decor featured murals by the leading painters of the day, including Raphaël Collin, Jean-Paul Laurens, Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Gervex, Aimé Morot and Alfred Roll. Most can still be seen as part of a guided tour of the building. Since the French Revolution, the building has been the scene of a number of historical events, notably the proclamation of the French Third Republic in 1870 and the speech by Charles de Gaulle on 25 August 1944 during the Liberation of Paris when he greeted the crowd from a front window
Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. In the 1930s he made photographs on the streets of Paris, he was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism. Doisneau is renowned for his 1950 image Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville, a photograph of a couple kissing on a busy Parisian street. Doisneau was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1984 by French president, François Mitterrand. Doisneau was known for his modest and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Influenced by the work of André Kertész, Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, in more than twenty books he presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments; the marvels of daily life are so exciting. Doisneau's work gives unusual dignity to children's street culture, his work treats their play with respect. Doisneau's father, a plumber, died in active service in World War I.
His mother died. He was raised by an unloving aunt. At thirteen he enrolled at the École Estienne, a craft school from which he graduated in 1929 with diplomas in engraving and lithography. There he had his first contact with the arts; when he was 16 he took up amateur photography, but was so shy that he started by photographing cobble-stones before progressing to children and adults. At the end of the 1920s Doisneau found work as a draughtsman in the advertising industry at Atelier Ullmann, a creative graphics studio that specialised in the pharmaceutical industry. Here he took an opportunity to change career by acting as camera assistant in the studio and becoming a staff photographer. In 1931 he left both the studio and advertising, taking a job as an assistant with the modernist photographer André Vigneau. In 1932 he sold his first photographic story to Excelsior magazine. In 1934 he began working as an industrial advertising photographer for the Renault car factory at Boulogne-Billancourt.
Working at Renault increased Doisneau's interest in working with photography and people. Five years in 1939, he was dismissed because he was late, he was forced to try freelance advertising and postcard photography to earn his living. At that time the French postcard industry was the largest in Europe, postcards served as greetings cards as well as vacation souvenirs. In 1991 he said that the years at the Renault car factory marked "the beginning of his career as a photographer and the end of his youth." In 1939 he was hired by Charles Rado of the Rapho photographic agency and travelled throughout France in search of picture stories. This is. Doisneau worked at the Rapho agency until the outbreak of World War II, whereupon he was drafted into the French army as both a soldier and photographer, he was in the army until 1940 and from until the end of the war in 1945 used his draughtsmanship, lettering artistry, engraving skills to forge passports and identification papers for the French Resistance.
Some of Doisneau's most memorable photographs were taken after the war. He sold photographs to Life and other international magazines, he joined the Alliance Photo Agency but rejoined the Rapho agency in 1946 and remained with them throughout his working life, despite receiving an invitation from Henri Cartier-Bresson to join Magnum Photos. His photographs never ridiculed the subjects. I don't photograph life as it is. In 1948 he was contracted by Vogue to work as a fashion photographer; the editors believed he would bring a fresh and more casual look the magazine but Doisneau didn’t enjoy photographing beautiful women in elegant surroundings. When he could escape from the studio, he photographed more in the streets of Paris. Le Groupe des XV was established in 1946 in Paris to promote photography as art and drawing attention to the preservation of French photographic heritage. Doisneau joined the Group in 1950 and participated alongside Rene-Jacques, Willy Ronis, Pierre Jahan; the 1950s were Doisneau's peak.
In the 1970s Europe began to change and editors looked for new reportage that would show the sense of a new social era. All over Europe, the old-style picture magazines were closing as television received the public's attention. Doisneau continued to work, producing children's books, advertising photography, celebrity portraits including Alberto Giacometti, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso. Doisneau worked with writers and poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Jacques Prévert, he credited Prevert with giving him the confidence to photograph the everyday street scenes that most people ignored; the photography of Doisneau has had a revival since his death in 1994. Many of his portraits and photographs of Paris from the end of World War II through the 1950s have been turned into calendars and postcards, have become icons of French life. In 1950 Doisneau created his most recognizable work for Life – Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville, a photograph of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris, which became an in
Modern Art Oxford
Modern Art Oxford is an art gallery established in 1965 in Oxford, England. From 1965 to 2002, it was called The Museum of Oxford; the gallery presents exhibitions of contemporary art. It has a national and international reputation for quality of exhibitions and commissions, which are supported by a learning and engagement programme with audiences in excess of 100,000 each year. Funded by Arts Council England, all exhibitions and many events and workshops are free for visitors. Modern Art Oxford's premises at 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford were designed by the architect Harry Drinkwater and built in 1892 as a square room and stores for Hanley's City Brewery; the gallery was founded by architect Trevor Green in 1965. With funding from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the gallery survived as a venue for temporary exhibitions, it was known as MoMA Oxford, similar to other international modern art spaces such as MoMA in New York. It was renamed "Modern Art Oxford" in 2002. Adrian Searle of The Guardian commented, "Perhaps the museum bit was only there to confuse tourists and convince gowny academic Oxford that modern art was worth taking seriously."
Several transitory directors oversaw the gallery until Nicholas Serota became director in 1973, with Sandy Nairne as assistant director. David Elliott replaced Serota in 1976. Elliott's programme focused on media that were ignored by bigger public galleries at the time, such as photography and graphic design. Under Elliott's directorship, MoMA held photography exhibitions such as the Robert Doisneau Retrospective in 1992. Elliott introduced up-and-coming artists from Africa and the Soviet Union, at various times held major video art exhibitions, his contributions included multiple gallery renovations. He resigned his position in 1996 to become the director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, having served the longest term of any director in the history of the gallery. Elliott's replacement, an American from Los Angeles, Kerry Brougher, preferred larger shows of American and European art, like Elliott, exhibitions focusing on film and media. In 2000, Brougher left to join the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.
C. Brougher was replaced by Andrew Nairne, who renamed the gallery, coordinated additional enhancements to the building, donated the gallery's substantial library of art books and catalogues to Oxford Brookes University, he shifted the focus to exhibitions of contemporary artists, who have included Cecily Brown and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Daniel Buren, Stella Vine, Sol LeWitt and Kerry James Marshall. Nairne left the gallery in 2008 to take up a senior managerial position at the Arts Council. Michael Stanley assumed the directorship in January 2009. David Thorp assumed interim directorship in October 2012 following the death of Michael Stanley. Paul Hobson took up the post that September. Artists' exhibitions have included Richard Long. Since the renaming of the gallery, notable exhibitions have included: Tracey Emin This Is Another Place - marked the reopening of Modern Art Oxford by and was her first British solo exhibition since 1997; the exhibition contained drawings, film, neon works such as Fuck off and die, you slag and sculptures including a large scale wooden pier, called Knowing My Enemy.
Jake and Dinos Chapman The Rape of Creativity - the artists bought a mint collection of 80 Goya prints and systematically defaced them. The BBC and The Daily Telegraph reviewed the show. Stella Vine - a major solo show of by the Britart painter including more than 100 paintings and a catalogue essay by Germaine Greer. Other artists featured include Jim Lambie, Mike Nelson, Jannis Kounellis, Daniel Buren, Gary Hume, Howard Hodgkin, Thomas Houseago, Graham Sutherland and Jenny Saville. Modern Art Oxford official site Art Guide entry AboutBritain.com entry Review of Monica Bonvicini's MOMA Oxford Show by Greg Whitfield
