2008年11月27日 星期四

Christ In The House Of His Parents

1128 2008

今天懷恩堂開始架聖誕節的萬燈
或許(就我)已是十幾年的歷史

今年因緣用一張十九世紀英國富爭議的畫來紀念

Wikipedia能這這樣寫已難能可貴

Christ in the House of His Parents

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Christ in the House of His Parents, 1850

Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-50) is a painting by John Everett Millais depicting the Holy Family in Saint Joseph's carpentry workshop. The painting was extremely controversial when first exhibited, prompting many negative reviews, most notably one written by Charles Dickens. It catapulted the previously obscure Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to notoriety and was a major contributor to the debate about Realism in the arts.

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[edit] Subject

The painting depicts the young Jesus assisting Joseph in his workshop. Joseph is making a door, which is laid on his carpentry work-table. Jesus has cut his hand on an exposed nail, leading to a sign of the stigmata, prefiguring the crucifixion. As Saint Anne removes the nail with a pair of pincers, his concerned mother Mary offers her cheek for a kiss while Joseph examines his wounded hand. The young John the Baptist brings in water to wash the wound, prefiguring his later baptism of Christ. An assistant of Joseph's, representing potential future Apostles watches these events. In the background various objects are used to further point up the theological significance of the subject. A ladder, referring to Jacob's ladder is visible leaning against the back wall; a dove standing for the Holy spirit rests on it. Other carpentry implements refer to the Holy Trinity. Millais probably used Albrecht Dürer's print Melancholia I as a source for this imagery, along with quattrocento works. The sheep in the fold in the background represent the future Christian flock.[1]

It has been suggested that Millais was influenced by John Rogers Herbert's painting "Our Saviour Subject to His Parents at Nazareth".[2]

[edit] Critical response

The painting was immensely controversial when first exhibited because of its realistic depiction of a carpentry workshop, especially the dirt and detritus on the floor. This was in dramatic contrast to the familiar portrayal of Jesus, his family and his apostles, in costumes reminiscent of Roman togas. Charles Dickens accused Millais of portraying Mary as an alcoholic who looks

...so hideous in her ugliness that ... she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.

Critics also objected to the portrayal of Jesus, one complaining that it was "painful" to see "the youthful Saviour" depicted as "a red-headed Jew boy"[3]. Dickens described him as a "wry-necked boy in a nightgown who seems to have received a poke playing in an adjacent gutter."[4] Other critics suggested that the characters displayed signs of rickets and other disease associated with slum conditions. Because of the controversy Queen Victoria asked for the painting to be taken to Buckingham palace so that she could view it in private.[5]

At the RA the painting was exhibited with a companion piece by Millais's colleague William Holman Hunt, which also portrayed a scene from early Christian history in which a family help a wounded individual. This was entitled A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary from the persecution of the Druids.

[edit] Consequences

The effect of the critical comments was to make the Pre-Raphaelite movement famous and to create a debate about the relationship between modernity, realism and medievalism in the arts. The critic John Ruskin supported Millais in letter to the press and in his lecture "Pre-Raphaelitsm"[6] despite his personal dislike of the painting. Its use of Symbolic Realism led to a wider movement in which typology was combined with detailed observation.

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

2008年11月25日 星期二

Augustus John & Gwen John

Augustus John & Gwen John 兄妹差兩歲 妹早二十年過世(熟悉詩人 Rilke 1906-08 和 哲學家Jacques Maritain) 兄生前更有名 不過生前說過 他會以
"Gwen John之兄"而為後人所知

Augustus John

(b Tenby, 4 Jan 1878; d Fordingbridge, Hants, 31 Oct 1961). Brother of (1) Gwen John. He was educated locally and at Clifton, but in 1894 he left Wales for London and studied for four years at the Slade School of Fine Art under Henry Tonks and Frederick Brown. Here he soon emerged as a bohemian figure as well as a highly gifted artist. The need to support Ida Nettleship (1877-1907), whom he married in 1901, led him to accept a post teaching art at the University of Liverpool. John Sampson, then University Librarian and an acknowledged expert on gypsies, became a friend and a major influence on him, introducing him to the Romany language and way of life. This led him to spend periods travelling with his growing family in gypsy caravans through Wales and England and inspired much of his work before World War I, including a series of etchings depicting gypsy life.

Wikipedia article "Augustus John".

Wikipedia article "Gwen John".

External links

2008年11月24日 星期一

A Berkeley Museum

Architecture
伊東豐雄(Toyo Ito)

A Berkeley Museum Wrapped in Honeycomb

Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects

A model of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.


Published: November 24, 2008

BERKELEY, Calif. — I have no idea whether, in this dismal economic climate, the University of California will find the money to build its new art museum here. But if it fails, it will be a blow to those of us who champion provocative architecture in the United States.

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Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects

A digital rendering of the exterior and a pedestrian walkway of the Berkeley Art Museum.

University of California, Berkeley

A photograph enhanced to show the area to be occupied by the new museum.

Designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the three-story structure suggests an intoxicating architectural dance in which the push and pull between solitude and intimacy, stillness and motion, art and viewer never ends. Its contoured galleries, whose honeycomb pattern seems to be straining to contain an untamed world, would make it a magical place to view art.

Beyond its aesthetic appeal, however, Mr. Ito’s design underscores just what is at stake as so many building projects hang in the balance. On a local level, the museum could help break down the divide between the ivory tower at the top of the hill and the gritty neighborhood at the bottom. More broadly, it could introduce an American audience to one of the world’s greatest and most underrated talents, sending out creative ripples that can only be imagined.

The museum would replace the existing Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, a bunkerlike building completed in 1970 that was badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Standing on a rough commercial strip at the campus’s southern edge, the old building is still marred by the big steel columns that were installed after the quake to support its cantilevered floors. Its rough, angular concrete forms and oddly shaped galleries are awkward settings for art.

The new museum would rise several blocks away, at the seam between the main entrance to the university’s leafy hillside campus and Berkeley’s downtown area. Mr. Ito conceived the design as part of a drawn-out public promenade, and he has packed the bookstore, a cafe, a gallery, a 256-seat theater and a flexible “black box” onto the ground floor. The more contemplative galleries, which include spaces for temporary exhibitions and the museum’s permanent collections of Western and Asian art, are on the second and third floors.

In the renderings the building’s creamy white exterior vaguely resembles a stack of egg cartons that has been sliced off at one end to expose the matrix of contoured chambers inside. The forms peel away at various points to create doorways and open up tantalizing, carefully controlled views into the interiors, as if the building’s facade had been slowly eroding over the millenniums.

Teasingly voyeuristic, the effect brings to mind partly demolished buildings and the aura of intimate secrets about to be revealed. But Mr. Ito is not interested in simply obliterating boundaries, as you would with a conventional glass box. His aim is to create a relaxed relationship between private and public life: while acknowledging that contemporary museums are often hives of social activity, he understands that they can also be places where we want to hide from one another and lose ourselves in the art.

The ground floor is conceived as an intense, compressed version of the surrounding street grid. Once inside, visitors will have to pay to enter a formal temporary gallery just to the right of the main entry. Or they can slip around it and follow the procession through the more informal interstitial spaces, which will be used for video art and site-specific installations. The theater and black box space are tucked away in the back.

Mr. Ito once said that he would like to create spaces that are like “eddies in a current of water.” The interstitial spaces seem to swell open and close up to regulate the movement of people through the building; the self-contained, honeycomblike spaces, by contrast, produce a sense of suspension rather than enclosure, as if you were hovering momentarily before stepping back into the stream.

As you ascend through the museum, this effect intensifies, and the spaces become more contemplative. The main staircase is enclosed in one of the contoured volumes, giving you psychological distance from the activity below. Once you reach the main gallery floors, the experience becomes more focused: the rhythm through the rooms is broken only occasionally, when a wall peels back to allow glimpses of the city.

Mr. Ito has positioned most of the doorways in the galleries’ contoured corners, which allows for a maximum of uninterrupted wall space for the art while emphasizing the rooms’ sensual curves. Most of the galleries have a single opening; others are contained in interstitial spaces, part of the general flow through the building. The contrast, which creates unexpected perspectives, has more to do with Tiepolo’s heavens than with Mondrian’s grids.

As with all of Mr. Ito’s work, the building’s structural system is not an afterthought but a critical element of the ideas that drive the design. The honeycomb pattern gives the building a remarkable structural firmness, allowing for walls only a few inches thick. Made of steel plates sandwiched around concrete, they will have a smooth, unbroken surface that should underscore the museum’s fluid forms. The tautness of the bent steel should also heighten the sense of tension.

Of course, Mr. Ito is still fine-tuning his design, and critical decisions have yet to be made. Museum officials plan to eliminate two 30-foot-high galleries that were part of the original proposal to add wall space and cut costs. This is unfortunate: the soaring spaces would tie the building together vertically and create voids on the upper floors that would add to the sense of mystery.

The museum is also pushing to make the curved corners in the galleries more compact to add still more wall space, which could create an impression that the art is crammed in.

For decades now, Mr. Ito has ranked among the leading architects who have reshaped the field by infusing their designs with the psychological, emotional and social dimensions that late Modernists and Post-Modernists ignored. They have replaced an architecture of purity with one of emotional extremes. The underlying aim is less an aesthetic one than a mission to create a more elastic, and therefore tolerant, environment.

These ideas have found their firmest footing in Europe and Japan and are now filtering into the mainstream here. It would be a shame to leave Mr. Ito out of that cultural breakthrough. The museum would not only be an architectural tour de force but would also introduce him to a broad American audience, stirring an imaginative reawakening in a country that sorely needs it.

2008年11月23日 星期日

Nature on a Tabletop, Perfect in Its Imperfection

可惜這篇紐約時報的評論 提出的有趣問題 當年沒討論
為什麼西方的奇石或玩石 東方人沒興趣

ART REVIEW; Nature on a Tabletop, Perfect in Its Imperfection


Published: June 23, 2000

The oddly shaped tabletop objects known as Chinese scholars' rocks rate barely a mention in most art history books, and then only as decorative accessories. But when the Asia Society presented an exhibition of them four years ago they caused a minor sensation and quickly became the pet rocks of the 1990's.

The show, drawn from the collection of Richard Rosenblum, who died last February, was pretty strange. It displayed dozens of rocks in a neutral setting like Western-style sculptures but it also ganged them together, large and small, like sale items in a boutique. The effect was freakish and theatrical, perhaps calculatedly so: it certainly gave a viewer unfamiliar with the big picture of Chinese art a dramatic point of entry.

A very different show, ''The World of Scholars' Rocks: Gardens, Studios and Paintings,'' now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is also built around Rosenblum stones, several of which are promised gifts to the museum. But as the title suggests, it places them within the larger Chinese cultural context, to which they belong, and offers a lot more art to look at.

The installation, organized by Maxwell K. Hearn, a curator in the Asian art department, follows chronological lines, beginning with the Northern Song dynasty (A.D. 960-1127). Although stones of various kinds had been revered in China from an early date, it was during the Song that scholars' rocks were widely collected.

The Song was the classical age of mountain-and-water landscape painting, in which a Daoist concept of nature as an organic play of interactive forces took definitive visual form. And rocks, harvested from riverbeds and caves, shaped by tides and rain, embodied this dynamic in miniature.

The rocks were first domesticated for use in gardens, their natural contours manually altered and exaggerated to imitate the mountains that appeared in paintings. Eventually smaller rocks, set in basins or on trays and wooden stands, were adopted as indoor objects, to be placed on desks or shelves for contemplation, like little nuggets of the cosmos.

Few ornamental stones can be securely dated to an early period. (Many incised inscriptions were rubbed out during the Cultural Revolution to prevent rocks from being destroyed as elitist artifacts.) But the styles favored during the Northern Song dynasty -- monumental shapes, ink-black color -- set a standard for what followed.

So it makes sense for the Met, near the front of the exhibition, to mix early paintings with rocks of a later date. The handscroll titled ''Summer Mountains'' and attributed to the 11th-century artist Qu Ding, for example, appears beside a stone from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) that neatly echoes its gnarly, toothlike peaks.

(The limestone Qing piece, incidentally, has been carefully hollowed out to function as an incense burner. Smoke emerging through perforations in its surface would have provided an illusion of rising and dissipating mist similar to that seen in painted images.)

In some paintings, ornamental rocks themselves are depicted. In ''Palace Banquet,'' thought to date from the 10th or 11th century, the entrance to a royal harem is flanked by dark stones that rear like guardian lions. And in Li Gonglin's renowned 11th-century illustrations for the ''Classic of Filial Piety,'' rocks and people seem to interact choreographically, as if to confirm a correspondence between nature and culture.

Color takes a central role in a section devoted to the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), where the succulent blue-green tints of a landscape scroll are picked up in a magnificent Qing-period stone. Titled ''Soaring Jade Peak,'' it looks like a cresting wave of gray-green ocean water.

With the rise of the highly stylized literati art in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), based on calligraphic rather than naturalistic principles, paintings and stones assumed a new relationship. Sometimes the connection was stylistic: a slinky tree trunk in an ink-and-brush hanging scroll by Wu Boli and a hip-slung stone on view nearby are equally Bob Fosse-eque in posture.

Elsewhere the link was more abstract and metaphorical. In his seminal painting ''Twin Pines, Level Distance,'' the calligrapher Zhao Mengfu transformed a landscape into a measured dance of solids and voids, rhythmic stops and starts, a new, conceptual, contradictory version of nature. A rock on display in the same gallery, riddled with perforations, looking as weighty as a cliff and as light as a sponge, might be read the same way.

The Ming period (1368-1644), the heyday of rock mania, was an avariciously consumerist age like our own. People were just mad for things: great things, pretty things, silly things, exotic things. Scholars' rocks qualified for all four categories, and appeared in every style and shape in paintings.

Some were actually celebrated as personalities and sat for their portraits, as in the case of a pink-washed painting by Lan Ying titled ''Red Friend.'' And sometimes attention paid to them took bizarrely intense forms. In a handscroll titled ''10 Views of a Fantastic Rock,'' by Wu Bin, the artist scrutinizes a single stone voyeuristically from every possible angle, pushing connoisseurship into the realm of erotic fetishism.

The succeeding Qing dynasty was forever looking over its shoulder to the past. It valued both rocks and an ancient mountain myth attached to them, including the idea that certain mountain caves were wellsprings of rejuvenating energy and even entrances to paradise.

A vivid handscroll titled ''Outing to Zhang Gong's Grotto,'' by the painter Shitao, done around 1700, depicts one such cave, which, with its fabulous stalactites and rainbow colors, might have come straight from William Blake's visionary illustrations for Dante. It is no wonder that even the humblest desktop rock provided rich terrain for imaginative journeying.

Travel takes a more prosaic form in an outsize 18th-century Qing handscroll documenting the progress of an imperial inspection tour of southern cities. Tucked among the shops and palaces in its minutely detailed aerial view of the city of Suzhou are pocket-parks filled with ornamental stones of exactly the kind seen in the Met's permanent Ming-style Astor Court garden, around which the Chinese galleries wrap.

''The World of Scholars' Rocks'' concludes, logically enough, in the late 20th century with a handsome 1964 hanging scroll titled ''Pine Cliff and Foggy Waterfall,'' by Liu Haisu (1896-1994). But the story could be extended to an even more contemporary work.

In the summer of 1997, the Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang, whose work appeared with great success in this year's Whitney Biennial, created an installation at the Queens Museum of Art titled ''Cultural Melting Bath.'' It included a set of traditional garden rocks from China surrounding a Western-style hot tub whose waters has been treated with medicinal herbs.

Was the piece a gentle burlesque of the West's blinkered view of Asian traditions, which become comprehensible only when turned into cartoons? Or was it an acknowledgment that there is no ''right'' way of approaching culture in a melting-pot world, leaving all kinds of treasures ripe for discovery? The recent enthusiasm for scholars' rocks in the West -- at a time when they appear to generate little interest in China itself -- poses similar questions. And the Met show provides a solid basis for arguing the case both ways.

''The World of Scholars' Rocks: Gardens, Studios and Paintings'' remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212) 835-7710, through Aug. 20.

2008年11月20日 星期四

Miquel Barcelo

Miquel Barcelo is a Spanish painter, born in 1957, in Felanitx, Mallorca, Spain. He studied in Barcelona. His work is realist and abstract. In paintings such as Biblioteca, his brushstrokes are violent and the image is stern. He recently was commissioned to design a church, El Retablo, to resemble the underside of a ship after years of sailing.

External links


Art | 15.11.2008

Value of Art Questioned as UN Unveils Masterpiece

Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo is preparing to unveil one of his most important works so far at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva while still at the height of his artistic glory.

Only a political squabble over the cost of the art work has been able to cast a shadow over the significance of Barcelo's piece, the opening ceremony for which will be attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Spain's King Juan Carlos and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Tuesday, Nov. 18.

Barcelo, who is being compared with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Joan Miro (1893-1983), worked for 13 months on redecorating a negotiating room which will now be known as the Chamber for Human Rights and the Alliance of Civilizations.

The Alliance of Civilizations project was launched by Zapatero and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to improve dialogue between the West and the Muslim world in 2006.

A new masterpiece

The ceiling created by Barcelo has been compared with Michelangelo's work at the Sistine Chapel. It turns the room into a cave dripping with thousands of multicoloured stalactites and is swept over by a stormy sea.

"The cave is a metaphor for the agora, the first meeting place of humans, the big African tree under which to sit to talk, and the only possible future: dialogue, human rights," Barcelo explains.

Interior of the Sistine ChapelBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Bercelo's work at the UN headquarters has been likened to the Sistine Chapel

"The sea is the past, the origin of the species, and the promise of a new future: emigration, travel," he adds.

The 51-year-old artist describes his new work as "reaching towards the infinite, bringing a multiplicity of points of view," like "El Libro de Arena" ("The Book of Sand," 1975) by the late Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose grave Barcelo visited during his stay in Geneva.

Is art truly priceless?

Few question the artistic value of the ceiling created by Barcelo, but its cost has sparked controversy.

The renovation of the room cost nearly 20 million euros ($25 million), 60 percent of which was covered by Spanish sponsors.

The rest was paid for by the government, including 500,000 euros that were taken from a development aid fund.

"Art has no price," Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said, alluding to criticism from the conservative opposition which said the money should have been used for vaccinating children or opening water holes in developing countries.

But the government countered the comments, insisting the money did not come from funds which would have been used for such projects.

Talk of the money having been "stolen from the poor" was not a reflection of reality, said Barcelo.

Barcelo's art an "act of resistance"

The Spaniard's team included 20 specialists ranging from a speleologist and a cook to architects and engineers. Special machinery was designed to create the artificial stalactites some of which weigh more than 50 kilograms (110 pounds).

Thirty-five tons of paint was used on the work, which measures 1,400 square meters (15,000 square feet).

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel MoratinosBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Spanish Foreign Minister Moratinos has defended the pricetag on Barcelo's piece

Barcelo, who has mastered nearly all artistic techniques -- ranging from painting and sculpture to performance art -- soared to fame early in his career and is now regarded as one of the world's top contemporary artists.

Dividing his time between his native Majorca, Paris and Mali in West Africa, Barcelo has absorbed a wide range of influences such as European baroque and other African styles.

"To think that art has made a lot of progress between (the cave paintings of) Altamira and (Paul) Cezanne is a vain and Western attempt," says the artist, who has described painting as "mud that I stir with a stick."

Fascinated by processes of transformation on land and in the sea, Barcelo sees his art as an "organized chaos" and as an "act of resistance."

Among his other projects is a collection of modern terracotta murals created for a Gothic chapel in the cathedral of Palma de Majorca, which was finished in 2007.

But with such venerated work behind him, the award-winning artist has vowed not to become an "official dinosaur."

"I don't want to spend my life doing mega-projects or big pharaonic works," he insists.

DPA news agency (dfm)

2008年11月19日 星期三

Jean-Baptiste Greuze

中文

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (21 August 17254 March 1805) was a French painter.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze L'accordee de Village
p.276 《鄉村訂婚儀式》 vs 《訂親的姑娘》鄉村儀式

2008年11月18日 星期二

Venice Biennale

Spectrum | 18.11.2008 | 10:30

The Venice Biennale and Architecture

Every two years, various nations gather at the world’s most prestigious international architecture event, the Venice biennale, to showcase their most innovating designs and projects.

This year many of the architects on display took their inspiration from traditional buildings, looking to the past in designing a sustainable future. The exhibition – which runs until the end of November -- has been one of the most appreciated events in Italy since its opening in September. Megan Williams reports from Venice.

Venice Biennale website

2008年11月16日 星期日

Peace brought Romanticism to 19th-century Holland

Skating to nirvana

Nov 15th 2008
From Economist.com

Peace brought Romanticism to 19th-century Holland


THE stolid, clog-wearing, cheese-making Dutch are not your obvious Romantics. But when Holland gained independence in 1813, after decades spent fighting the French, a resolute high-mindedness that was thrifty, intimate, idealistic and in its way peculiarly Dutch, finally settled on the Low Countries.

These good people had no time for the high Romanticism of the Germans, who hankered after the lances and legends of the Middle Ages, or the leafy ideals of the English with their love of daffodils and the bucolic greenery of the Lake District.

For their Romantic inspiration the Dutch turned back to their own golden age, the 17th century, with its enduring characteristics of domesticity and diligence. Nineteenth-century Dutch pastorals show windmills and waterways, red-cheeked boys and little yellow hatchlings. Spring, summer and autumn are sometimes the backdrop. But one after the other, artists such as Jan Jacob Spohler, Nicolaas Johannes Roosenboom, Francs Breuhaus de Groot and Andreas Schelfhout, turn their attention to the icy landscape of winter.

Christie's

Nothing epitomises the ideal of Dutch 19th-century life so much as ice-skating on winter’s frozen waterways. Market days and jolly parties bathed in a pinkish winter light all happen on ice, where dogs and children cavort among men in tall hats and women in fur muffs enjoying the small pleasures of daily life. That these canals might be transformed in summer into stagnant ditches rank with mosquitoes and malaria, or even altogether overwhelmed by the ever-present sea nearby, is a reality that never intrudes.

Dutch cityscapes show a similar moderation. Tall buildings gather, hugger-mugger, along the edges of canals. Ruined gateways and cracked roofs radiate timelessness. The human figures on the pavements are small and rarely give expression to extreme emotions. They call their dogs, tie their shoelaces, shush their teething babies and look for reassurance to the striking of the town clock. Within, Hubertus Van Hove’s Amsterdam orphan girl, in her characteristic red and black uniform, with white cap and white apron, prepares a simple meal. The Bible has the last word and the clock stipulates a life of domestic continuity.

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, a modest citizen of Cleves, father of five daughters, was a master at portraying the contrast between humble humanity and the greatness of creation. Regarded as the father of Dutch Romantic landscape painting, he counted among his clients King Willem II of the Netherlands, King Friedrich-Wilhelm IV of Prussia and Tsar Alexander II, which goes some way to explaining why there is a fine example of his work in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

In 1846 Koekkoek began working from a new atelier in Cleves, heralding the start of his most important period. “Le vieux manoir” (pictured above) was the first picture he painted there. Against a massive sky is a filigree of trees and branches. A woman pushes a laden toboggan and small children carry bundles of kindling, indicating that in a fulfilled life everyone must play their part. But it is to the far left of the painting that the viewer’s eye is drawn: a woman, well bundled against the cold, is trudging along the snowy road. Holding her hand is a child who, given her height, cannot be more than five or six. They have far to go, and you can almost see how their even breaths mark the passing of the miles.

In a buoyant market the finest Koekkeoks have almost always exceeded their estimate. An 1843 work, “Late Afternoon with Numerous Skaters by a Town”, sold in April 2006 for €1.25m ($1.56m) against a top estimate of €350,000, whereas another winter landscape sold the following October for €1.15m against an estimate of €500,000.

Collectors who were happy to sell during the boom are now being leaned on by the auction houses to reduce their expectations. If so, this is the moment to buy. Koekkoek’s “Le vieux manoir” may be smaller than the two pictures that sold in 2006, but even if it fetches only its top estimate, it will be a bargain.

“Romantic Affair: Paintings from a Dutch Private Collection” will be sold at Christie’s, Amsterdam, on November 18th. Lot 116, “An Amsterdam Orphan Girl Preparing Supper” by Hubertus van Hove is estimated at €10,000-15,000. Lot 421, “Le vieux manoir” by B.C. Koekkoek, is estimated at €200,000-300,000.

壁紙wall papers的新機

讀者從"牛津大學的裝飾藝術辭典"可了解壁紙wall papers的發展史

EuroVox | 17.11.2008 | 05:30

Unravelling the Future Trends of Wallpaper

Designers and architects are shunning minimal white walls to give them a new lease of life with wallpaper.

Stroll through any cosmopolitan European city, take a peek through the windows, and you can’t help but notice that nearly every second bar, hotel lobby or shop has great gone to great pains to personalise their spaces with wallpaper. EuroVox meets the hottest designers who are giving these old patterns a new twist.

Living the vida arte


Arte ≠ Vida expands standard descriptions of “performance art,” revealing how work created by Caribbean, Latino and Latin American artists

CULTURE & MORE: Living the vida arte

BY LOUIS TEMPLADO, STAFF WRITER

2008/11/14


PhotoThe view from below Ernesto Neto's "Leviathan Thot"(LOUIS TEMPLADO)

Most art shows will ask you to ponder deep things: The measure between form and metaphor, say, and their relationship to history, culture and the artistic self. Neo Tropicalia asks you to samba.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), where it's currently on show, has even provided capes to prance around in and music on headphones to get visitors in the mood. But on a recent visit there was nary a dancing art savant in sight. This is a shame, since the show, organized in-house by chief curator Yuko Hasegawa, is very much worth the shlepp.

The MOT is out of the way in more than one sense (Tokyo Governer Shintaro Ishihara has called it a public financial albatross), but there's a reason for bringing a touch of Brazil to Tokyo's Koto Ward. This is the Japan-Brazil Year of Exchange, and also the centennial year of Japanese immigration to Brazil.

Yet the show is no empty diplomatic exercise. "When Lives Become Form--Contemporary Brazilian Art: 1960-Present," as the show is officially called, runs the gamut from fashion, design and architecture to found art and graffiti, surveyed through the works of 27 artists working in the southern hemisphere's liveliest melting pot. Instead of marking an anniversary, it asks implicitly why Japan, with its material wealth, is in a funk, while Brazil--often working and living with less and until the mid-1980s a military dictatorship--can party.

The answer, according to Hasegawa, has something to do with digestion.

"Antropofagia, that is, cannibalism, was the first declaration of a culture unique to Brazil and continues to be a major influence on present generations," Hasegawa explains, referring to a concept put forward by Oswald de Andrade back in the 1920s. Receive those words in the symbolic sense. For Brazilian artists and musicians in particular, she says. "The aim was not to emulate the strengths of others so much as ingest, digest and otherwise absorb them to make themselves stronger."

Compared to Japan, which tried to inhale postwar American culture whole, Brazilians chewed hard and spit out something new: the Tropicalia movement that this exhibition uses as its springboard.

The dance capes and headphones are actually a recreation of an early 1968 project by Helio Oiticica, who coined the name of the movement and who together with musician Caetano Veloso became its center.

Tropicalia was originally the title of another 1968 installation in Rio de Janeiro. In that piece, visitors walked down a trail of sand through a habitat of tropical trees and parrots, and then through a pair of grass huts to end jarringly at a blaring television set. It was all meant to wake up the visitor's inner barbarian.

That piece has not made it to Tokyo, but there is an angular equivalent: a maze that swallows up visitors, leading them through a succession translucent colored curtains and sound sources until they emerge, dazed, at the exit. There, a museum staffer waits, offering a cup of mango juice. The idea is that art is not a stand-still experience--you slither through it. It rubs against you, fills your ears and in the end, your insides get a shot of color, too. "Being alive is art itself," Hasegawa says, this time borrowing Oiticica's credo.

There is, however, economics to think about. Another thread running through Neo Tropicalia, from the smallest to largest pieces, is the prevalence--or necessity--of everyday objects and found junk on show.

"Acoustic Head," by the Bahia-based artist Marepe, for example, is a "whisper chamber" made from two large wash basins that have been hinged together, with a hole for the head of a listener at one end and a funnel for a speaker at the other. His glass jellyfish, for which an entire aquatically themed room has been created, also come from the marketplace: They're actually cheap vases that have been epoxied together at their bases.

Likewise Beatriz Milhazes' Pop-Art "Mega Box" painting, which isn't a painting on closer inspection, but actually a collage made from dozens of colorful candy wrappers. Could the rest of the artwork be hanging on the artist's body?

The piece-de-resistance is also put together from ready-mades. Hanging down more than 20 meters from the museum's rafters, Ernesto Neto's "Leviathan Thot" looks like immense white stockings, balled at the feet with a stuffing of Styrofoam beads and sand. Beneath them are amoeba-shaped cushions filled with soba husks where visitors can lie down, look and nod off into tropical dreams.

"Brazil is all about hybrids," Hasegawa says. "These artists are working with everyday things, but they're always able to make something new from them and there's always sense of refinement."

This is a show that you'll leave feeling full--and with more than just a gulp of mango juice.

* * *

"When Lives Become Form--Contemporary Brazilian Art: 1960-Present" is on view through Jan. 12 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo near Kiyosumi-Shirakawa subway station.

Open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed Mondays (except Nov. 24 and Jan. 12), Nov. 25 and Dec. 28-Jan. 1.

Visit <> or call 03-5245-4111.(IHT/Asahi: November 14,2008)

2008年11月15日 星期六

Saving Buffalo’s Untold Beauty

Architecture

Saving Buffalo’s Untold Beauty


Published: November 14, 2008

BUFFALO

ONE of the most cynical clichés in architecture is that poverty is good for preservation. The poor don’t bulldoze historic neighborhoods to make way for fancy new high-rises.

That assumption came to mind when I stepped off a plane here recently. Buffalo is home to some of the greatest American architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with major architects like Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright building marvels here. Together they shaped one of the grandest early visions of the democratic American city.

Yet Buffalo is more commonly identified with the crumbling infrastructure, abandoned homes and dwindling jobs that have defined the Rust Belt for the past 50 years. And for decades its architecture has seemed strangely frozen in time.

Now the city is reaching a crossroads. Just as local preservationists are completing restorations on some of the city’s most important landmarks, the federal government is considering a plan that could wipe out part of a historic neighborhood. Meanwhile Mayor Byron W. Brown is being pressed to revise a proposal that would have demolished hundreds of abandoned homes.

The outcome of these plans will go far in determining the city’s prospects for economic recovery, but it could also offer a rare opportunity to re-examine the relationship between preserving the past and building a future.

Buffalo was founded on a rich tradition of architectural experimentation. The architects who worked here were among the first to break with European traditions to create an aesthetic of their own, rooted in American ideals about individualism, commerce and social mobility. And today its grass-roots preservation movement is driven not by Disney-inspired developers but by a vibrant coalition of part-time preservationists, amateur historians and third-generation residents who have made reclaiming the city’s history a deeply personal mission.

At a time when oil prices and oil dependence are forcing us to rethink the wisdom of suburban and exurban living, Buffalo could eventually offer a blueprint for repairing America’s other shrinking postindustrial cities.

Touring Buffalo’s monuments is about as close as you can get to experiencing firsthand the earliest struggles to define what an American architecture would look like.

The city’s rise began in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal, which opened trade with the heartland. By the end of the 19th century the city’s grain silos and steel mills had become architectural pilgrimage sites for European Modernists like Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut, who saw them as the great cathedrals of Modernity. In their vast scale and technological efficiency, they reflected a triumphant America and sent a warning signal to Europe that it was fast becoming less relevant.

Yet it is the parade of celebrated architects who worked here as much as the city’s industrial achievements that makes Buffalo a living history lesson. Daniel Burnham’s 1896 Ellicott Square Building, with its mighty Italian Renaissance facade, towers over the corner of Main and Church Streets. Just a block away is Louis Sullivan’s 1895 Guarantee Building, a classic of early skyscraper design decorated in intricate floral terra-cotta tiles.

Across town, Henry Hobson Richardson built his largest commission: the 1870 Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, composed of a pair of soaring Romanesque towers flanked by low brick pavilions. Light and air poured in through tall windows; spacious 18-foot-wide corridors were designed to promote interaction among the inmates, an idea that would be refined by Modernists in their communal housing projects decades later.

But it was Wright who made the decisive leap from an architecture that drew mainly on European stylistic precedents to one that was rooted in a growing cultural self-confidence. Wright built two of those great pillars of American architecture here, the 1904 Larkin Building and the 1905 Darwin D. Martin House.

Although torn down in 1950, the Larkin Building, designed as the headquarters of the Larkin Soap Company, remains one of the most influential designs of the 20th century. Wright invented floor-to-ceiling glass doors, double-pane windows and toilets affixed to the walls for this monument to American business. Massive, forbidding brick piers anchoring the exterior signaled a break with classical historical styles. The light-filled atrium piercing its five floors, with managers visible at their desks at the bottom, turned the traditional office hierarchy on its head.

The Martin House, a Prairie House complex of five buildings on a vast suburban lot, is the domestic counterpart to this vision. No European architect had come close to imagining such a fluid world. A composition of low brick structures, terraces, pergolas and gardens in which man and landscape were in tune, the design celebrated a democratic ideal of family life in which traditional social barriers, and the walls that reinforce them, were finally torn down.

Yet Wright’s genius lay in his ability to accomplish this feat while conveying a profound serenity. The low roof and broad cantilevered eaves both beckoned to the horizon and provided shelter. The grid of wood beams in the living room, set just below ceiling level, visually broke down the space into discrete rooms while maintaining a sense of openness. Above all this architecture represented freedom both from Europe’s suffocating traditions and from the feelings of cultural inferiority that had defined American architecture since the earliest days of the republic.

This departure from recycled European precedents is reflected in the city’s late-19th-century urban planning as well. Buffalo’s original plan from the early 19th century was loosely based on Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington, an Americanized version of Paris’s system of radiating boulevards. Its civic core, dominated by a mountainous City Hall, reads as an isolated fragment of a City Beautiful plan that was never fully realized.

Olmsted, as much social reformer as landscape architect, had visited John Paxson’s Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, a pioneering project designed to better the lives of the city’s working class. When he returned to New York, he expanded on that vision in his designs for Central and Prospect Parks, which he conceived as realms of psychological healing that could also break down class boundaries.

In Buffalo he realized an even grander ambition, creating a vast network of parks and parkways that he hoped would have “a civilizing effect” on the “dangerous classes” populating the American city. Flanked by rows of elm trees, the parkways were broken up by a series of gorgeous landscaped roundabouts, slowing the city’s rhythms of movement into something more majestic yet distinctly democratic.

It didn’t last of course. By the 1950s Buffalo’s economy had already embarked on its long path to disintegration. The completion in 1959 of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which created a more direct route to the Atlantic Ocean, made the Erie Canal obsolete and deprived the city of its commercial lifeline. Economic decline was exacerbated by race riots in 1967 and white flight to the suburbs. By the mid-1970s the inner city was being abandoned.

Even so, many of the city’s most revered monuments survived. Despite the destruction of some surrounding structures, the main house at the Martin complex remained intact. Richardson’s asylum closed in the mid-1970s, and though one of its wings was demolished to make room for a new hospital next door, the bulk of the building still towers over Olmsted’s park.

Today Buffalo is a collection of fragile museum pieces with a covey of local stewards struggling to preserve them as a means to help save the city.

It would not be the first place to see its history as a means of attracting tourist dollars. (Boston and New Orleans are among the obvious precedents.) What makes this historic revival so heartwarming, however, is that it is driven by genuine civic pride in the face of daunting odds.

When a group of private citizens took control of the Martin House in 1992, for example, their ambitions were relatively modest: to restore the main house, one of three structures that had not yet been demolished. As time wore on, the group began to see the entire complex as a singular vision that could not be understood unless it was fully brought back to life .

In the early 1960s its conservatory and pergola had been ripped out to make way for an unsightly apartment complex; in 1994 the group raised the money to purchase the structure, tear it down and rebuild the elements of Wright’s complex that had been destroyed. A few years ago they bought the small gardener’s cottage that anchored the northwest corner of the site as well.

The project’s overall cost soared to more than $50 million from $10 million. But most of the structural and exterior work is now complete, and now, for the first time in decades, you can fully glean the genius of Wright’s work.

Other projects have been less high profile but equally exemplary. On the October day I arrived, I met with Monica Pellegrino Faix, a representative of the Richardson Center Corporation, a local nonprofit group trying to save the asylum. The state has committed $76 million to help restore the complex, and the group is now trying to come up with potential uses for its vacant buildings, including using one for an architecture museum.

Later that day I met with a group of local activists who have been rebuilding single-family houses in some of the city’s most run-down historic neighborhoods. On Richmond Avenue, one of Olmsted’s grand decaying parkways, Harvey Garrett, a strategic planning consultant, spent several years renovating a 19th-century Victorian house before an arsonist set fire to it in 2006. He rebuilt it, and he is now one of the city’s busiest community organizers and strongest preservation voices. Dozens of houses are now being renovated along the avenue, and an entire neighborhood that was once considered crime ridden is now livable again.

In a mostly abandoned factory area not far from downtown, Douglas Swift, a developer whose family has lived in Buffalo for generations, recently completed the restoration of a former Larkin warehouse, an early example of concrete frame construction; the project, which is now an office complex, has spurred a range of new development in the area.

What we see is a more egalitarian, diverse and socially tolerant vision of the city. It is both pro-density and pro-history. These residents have come to recognize through firsthand experience that social, economic and preservation issues are all deeply intertwined.

Sadly, not everyone has been so enlightened on this issue. Preservationists raised an outcry this year when Mayor Brown unveiled his plan to demolish 5,000 houses over the next five years as part of an effort to clean up some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the mayor’s office are now trying to hammer out a compromise.

And as the preservation movement has grown, it has inevitably gotten involved in bigger, more complex urban issues. The federal Homeland Security Department has proposed an expansion of the entrance to the Peace Bridge, the city’s main border crossing into Canada. Preservationists balked. The project, which includes a vast new parking plaza for commercial trucks, would require razing five blocks of Columbus Park, a neighborhood of historic houses mostly built from 1860 through the late 1920s. A 20-foot-high berm would also be built alongside Olmsted’s Front Park, which flanks one side of the neighborhood, blocking out sublime views of Lake Erie and the Niagara River.

The National Trust, which opposes the plan, has suggested moving the new parking plaza to the Canadian side of the border — a possibility that the Canadian government says it will consider — or rerouting traffic to one of four other bridges. But those prospects appear doubtful.

Meanwhile the city has begun to take a few cautious steps into the present. Toshiko Mori, a New York architect and the former chairwoman of the architecture department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, is putting the finishing touches on a gorgeous new visitors’ center at the Martin House. Gwathmey Siegel & Associates of New York has designed a sleek new zinc- and cast-stone-clad home for the Burchfield-Penney Art Center near the historic district of Elmwood Village, which opens next Saturday.

But how these projects will be forged into a cohesive vision for the city’s future is less certain. The best-intentioned preservationists, however determined, can accomplish only so much. Often developers co-opt the achievements of these trailblazing individuals and nonprofit groups by dolling up historic neighborhoods for private gain. The city’s rough edges are smoothed over to satisfy the hunger for more tourist dollars. Shiny new convention centers and generic boutiques follow. Yet schools, roads, bridges and electrical and power lines continue to crumble.

Buffalo is an ideal testing ground for rethinking that depressing model. Its architectural heritage embodies an America that thought boldly about the future, but believed deeply in the city as a democratic forum. What’s needed now is to revive that experimental tradition.

Hume and the Heroic Portrait

Hume and the heroic portrait. studies in eighteenth-century imagery. by Edgar Wind Published in 1986, Clarendon Press (Oxford)

Product Description
This is the second volume of Edgar Wind's selected papers, a companion to The Elegance of Symbols. Of all the scholars associated with the early development of the Warbur Institute Edgar Wind was the first to apply different theoretical principles to the study of English Art, above all in his early study of English portraiture, now a classic art history text. As the seminal essay, it gives title to the present volume, and is here translated into English for the first time. In this essay, which marked a change of direction in Wind's own development, he argues that two opposing styles of portraiture, exemplified in the art of Gainsborough and Reynolds, can be related to the different notions of humanity subscribed to by the philosophers David Hume and James Beattie. Other important studies, also reprinted here, make this volume an excellent resource to Wind's tremendous contributions to art history.

Allan Ramsay's Enlightenment: or, Hume and the patronizing ...

(1) Wind eventually settled on the more concise and agonistic title "Hume and the Heroic Portrait" for the projected English translation, ...

Allan Ramsay's Enlightenment: or, Hume and the patronizing portrait

Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2006 by Douglas Fordham


In 1932 Edgar Wind published "Humanitatsidee und heroisiertes Portrat in der englischen Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts" while still a privatdozent at Hamburg University within the orbit of Aby Warburg's library and method. (1) Wind eventually settled on the more concise and agonistic title "Hume and the Heroic Portrait" for the projected English translation, which is now considered a foundational text in the critical history of British art. (2) Wind proposed that eighteenth-century British portraiture, at its best, shared a common cultural field with philosophical writing--a field on which differing conceptions of human nature could challenge and interrogate each other. In the second half of the eighteenth century especially, according to Wind, this contest was vigorous and revealing. Lined up on one side were the "heroic" moralists, including Samuel Johnson, James Beattie, and the theatrically grand portraits of Joshua Reynolds. The skeptics, particularly regarding a heroic view of human endeavor, faced them on the other side, led by David Hume and the portraits of Thomas Gainsborough.

With the exponential increase in British art historical writing that has taken place in the interim, Wind's polemical distinction between two philosophical viewpoints and their respective champions, Reynolds and Gainsborough, now appears overdrawn and historically reductive. Some of Wind's insights, however, remain as compelling as ever, with their anticipation of interdisciplinarity and their place within a Warburgian school of thought. (3) Historians of British art have greatly extended Wind's methodology by examining Georgian portraiture in terms of the class tensions, gender constructions, political ideologies, and ethnic prejudices that it reveals. (4) As Marcia Pointon has argued, these new lines of inquiry "open onto a politics of representation in which the historical human subject is not a separate entity from the portrait depiction of him or her, but part of a process through which knowledge is claimed and the social and physical environment is shaped." (5) It is in the light of this more expansive and socially constructed notion of representation, and the knowledge claimed through it, that I would like to return to one of the most provocative questions asked by Wind in "Hume and the Heroic Portrait": Was portraiture capable of engaging in serious philosophical debate?

In a crucial early passage in "Hume and the Heroic Portrait," Wind argued:

  Portraiture shows this give and take between artists and philosophers
especially clearly. Attached to the painting of a portrait is a social
situation, in which the artist has to come to terms with an attitude,
that of his sitter, an attitude that will often be supported by
philosophical views, and which, should the sitter happen to be a
professional philosopher, will result in the artist producing--or
being obliged to produce--an argument in paint. (6)

The real focus of Wind's essay, however, turns out to be portraits of children and thespians, two subject categories particularly open to projection and manipulation--precisely the opposite of the philosophical sitter. When Wind does test his hypothesis, he pits Joshua Reynolds's heavily allegorized portrait of James Beattie (1773, University of Aberdeen) against Allan Ramsay's portrait of David Hume (Fig. 1). It is a stark contrast indeed, with even Wind admitting that "Reynolds's portrait of Beattie gives a very unfortunate idea of his style of heroic portraiture." (7) In such a comparison, Ramsay's portrait of Hume appears self-evidently restrained and transparently "humanistic."

I return to the beginning of Wind's argument, so to speak, to examine whether philosophers really could compel portraitists to construct "arguments in paint." Rather than Wind's hyperbolic dichotomy between Beattie and Hume, I will focus on two portraits initially conceived as a pair: Allan Ramsay originally painted the half-length portrait of Hume (Fig. 1) to serve as a companion piece to a slightly earlier portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Fig. 2). Significantly, Hume's "companion" piece was painted just as his friendship with Rousseau began to disintegrate and, worse, degenerate into a highly public "affair" in the English press. The "Hume-Rousseau affair" pivoted on the issue of royal patronage, a boon sought by Hume, desired yet ultimately declined by Rousseau, and monopolized by Ramsay (at least in the eyes of his fellow artists). (8) The quest for royal patronage effectively links the personal disagreement between Hume and Rousseau to a very real set of philosophical differences underlying their fight. Ramsay's paired portraits became active participants in this debate and material indices of the political and social capital necessary to play the patronage game. It was a game, I will argue, that contained a potent imperial dimension in the 1760s. For it was at the level of political philosophy, particularly as it related to the restive American colonies, that Rousseau, Hume, and Ramsay revealed some of their sharpest, most personally invested differences. By respecting just how profoundly Rousseau distrusted the patronizing structures around him and, conversely, how beneficent Hume and Ramsay deemed those political structures to be, we enable Ramsay's paired masterpieces to resume their debate.

2008年11月13日 星期四

Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism

Product Description
As a starting point, the author argues that formalist, contextual and post-structural approaches fail to provide an adequate account of all art, particularly art produced outside the Western tradition. He believes therefore that there are profound problems right at the heart of Western thinking about art, and his new framework is an attempt to resolve these problems. At the core of the argument is a proposal to replace the notion of the "visual arts" with that of the "spatial arts", comprising two fundamental categories: "real space" and "virtual space". Real space is the space we share with other people and things, and the fundamental arts of real space are sculpture, the art of personal space, and architecture, the art of social space. Virtual space, which always entails a format in real space (thus making real space the primary category), is space represented in two dimensions, as in paintings, drawings and prints. Adopting a wide definition of art that in principle embraces anything that is made, and underpinning his arguments with detailed examination of artifacts and architecture from all over the world, David Summers develops his thesis in a series of chapters that broadly trace the progress of human skill in many different traditions from the simple facture of the first tools to the sophisticated universal three-dimensional grid of modern technology, which he describes as "metaoptical" space. In wide-ranging and revealing discussions of facture, places, centres, three-dimensional and planar images, virtuality and perspective, and the centreless metaoptical world of Western modernism, he creates a conceptual framework that always relates art to human use, and enables us to treat all traditions on an equal footing within broad and universal categories. At the same time this framework can help to accommodate and understand opposition and conflict both within and between cultures.

About the Author
David Summers is the William R. Kenan Jr Professor of the History of Art at the University of Virginia. He is the author of two major, groundbreaking studies, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981) and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 1987). Since 1987 his chief scholarly preoccupation has been the project that has culminated in this book. Author's Residence: Charlottesville, VA, USA.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 704 pages
  • Publisher: Phaidon Press (July 1, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0714842443
  • ISBN-13: 978-0714842448
  • Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 8.6 x 2.1 inches

Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (Hardcover)

by David Summers (Author)
據方聞教授
這Real Space指的是社會文化脈絡


石濤

The marvelous 17th-century artist-poet Shitao, who has an album of small paintings in the show, was luckier. He too made the journey to town, hoping for advancement in the Buddhist church. But after years of striving and failing, he gave up and headed home to take sylvanwalks, think Daoist thoughts and peddle his paintings for what they would bring. Failure gave him some peace.


方聞教授2008-11-13 NTU

「為禹老道兄作山水冊」(ニューヨーク,王季遷家コレクション)

石濤(せきとう、Shitao、崇禎15年(1642年)年[1] - 康煕46年(1707年))は、初に活躍した遺民画人である。靖江王府(今の広西チワン族自治区桂林市)に靖江王家の末裔として生まれる。俗称を朱若極、石濤はであり後に道号とした。僧となってから法諱を原済(元済)・済とし、清湘陳人・大滌子・苦瓜和尚・小乗客・瞎尊者などと号した。

明王室の末裔にあたり、八大山人とも縁戚があった。髡残弘仁とで三高僧、八大山人を加えて四画僧と呼ばれる。また髡残の号が石谿であることから二石とも称された。黄山派の巨匠とされ、その絵画芸術の豊かな創造性と独特の個性の表現により清朝きっての傑出した画家に挙げられる。



略伝

父の朱亨嘉[2]は、明太祖の兄である朱興隆の孫で、桂林の靖江王となった守謙から十代目にあたる。明朝が滅亡すると監国と称して空位となった明の帝位を得ようとした。しかし、亡命王朝である福建唐王から反逆者として扱われ、明の官憲に捉えられて獄死する。そのときまだ4歳の石濤は臣下の者に背負われて靖江王府から逃れ、湖北省武昌において明の官憲や清軍から身を隠す為に出家し僧となった。

武昌では古典を学び、に興じた。暇さえあれば古法帖臨模に明け暮れていたという。特に顔真卿に傾倒し、古代の書風に啓発された。当時一世を風靡していた董其昌の書を嫌った。山水画人物画花鳥画などの筆法もこの頃に学んでいる。また荊州湖南省長沙洞庭湖など各地を遊歴している。

16歳のとき廬山に移り、ついで杭州の雲隠寺の具徳弘礼に参じた。その後、具徳の紹介で江蘇省昆山旅菴本月を知り、21歳で旅菴の法嗣となる。旅菴は木陳道忞とともに当時の臨済宗の指導的立場で、清朝から厚遇を受けていた。旅菴らは八大山人ら明の遺民が支持する霊厳継起とライバル関係にあり、石濤の姿勢は遺民として節操がないと批判された。

29歳のとき法兄にあたる喝濤とともに安徽省宣城の敬亭山広教寺に移った。この地の文人・名士たちと文雅な交わりを持ったがとりわけ18歳年上の梅清とは親しく交友した。この頃、黄山に幾度か登り、その景勝に芸術的な啓発を受けている。新安派の祖である弘仁の画蹟に触れ、を書き、自らも黄山図を多数画いた。

39歳で南京に赴き、長干寺の一枝閣に住持した。戴本考と知己となり山水画の影響を受けた。康煕帝が南巡したとき2度までも謁見がかなった。このときの従者であった博尓都(ボルト)がパトロンとなり、生涯石濤を庇護することとなる。揚州で孔尚任のパーティーに出席したとき、晩年の龔賢に出会い、その画風に影響を受けている。

40代終りの頃に揚州を得て北京に在住。師の旅菴のように朝廷から寵遇を得ようと考えてのことだったが、康煕帝は仏教を冷遇した為に望みは果たされなかった。北京では北宋の郭煕の画蹟に影響を受け気韻生動を体得。この頃禅僧としての地位を捨て画家としての道を選んだ。

各地で絵画の制作を行ない、51歳のときに揚州や南京に戻り、晩年になって揚州に大滌草堂を建て終の住み処とした。揚州においては八大山人ら多くの文人と交友した。

著書に『苦瓜和尚画語録』・『石濤画譜』がある。石濤は生涯に亙って画禅一如を追究し、理論でも実践でもそれを実現したと評される。

晩年、腕を病んでも制作を続けた。享年66。石濤の生涯は晩年の友人李麟の著した「大滌子伝」(『虬峰文集』)によるところが大きい。その他に陳定九『瞎尊者伝』がある。

[編集] 代表作

  • 「山水図十二屏」1671年 福建積翠園芸術館
  • 「細雨虯松図軸」1687年 上海博物館
  • 「黄山八勝画冊」 京都,泉屋博古館
  • 「黄山図巻」1699年 京都,泉屋博古館
  • 「捜尽奇峰図巻」1691年 北京,故宮博物院
  • 「為禹老道兄作山水冊」ニューヨーク,王季遷家コレクション
  • 「廬山観瀑図軸」 京都,泉屋博古館、重文

2008年11月11日 星期二

‘The Avant-Garde and the Great War’

Arts on the Air | 12.11.2008 | 05:30

Kandinsky, Chagall and Klee featured in Madrid World War One Exhibition

November 11th is Remembrance Day and commemoration ceremonies have taken place all over the world to mark ninety-years since the end of World War One.

World War One cost millions of lives and sowed the seeds for World War Two. To coincide with the anniversary on 11th November, Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza gallery has opened an exhibition that runs until 11th January called ‘The Avant-Garde and the Great War’. The display brings together a range of works from before, during and after the war, by artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee. The paintings show the transformation in European culture that occurred as a result of what was then the world’s bloodiest conflict ever.

Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
The Iron Cross , 1915
Milred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Bixby Fund, 1952




Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
1 Darkness over the world
2 The second sight
3
The last days of humanity
4 The avant-garde on horseback
5 War song
6 The vortex of destruction
7 War of forms. An aesthetics of disappearance
8 Depth charge

Fundación Caja Madrid
9 Apocalypse of our time
10 Artist and soldier
11 Cubism in the trenches
12 The stigma of damnation
13
«C'est la guerre!»


1914! The Avant-garde and the Great War

Few historical events were of such crucial importance as the 1914 war to the development of the early avant-garde art movements. The years immediately prior to the outbreak of the conflict coincided with a period of outstanding creative vitality for these art movements in which the desire to rise up and overthrow what had gone before anticipated the militant aggression expressed by most of the protagonists of the new art. In addition, the experience of the war had a powerful influence on the work of artists, not only because it became a subject within their output, but particularly because it involved an undeniable reality that highlighted the internal contradictions within the discourse of modernity of which their works formed a part.

The exhibition looks at the development of the new international art in the time period from approximately 1913 to 1919 and offers an interpretation conditioned by the idea of war as the backdrop to culture. It deals among other matters with the prophetic role adopted by avant-garde art in relation to the events that would determine its own crisis, the capacity of the new artistic idioms to transform their representations into the visual currency of the militant spirit, the various forms of a type of apocalyptic mode of expression that arose and died out during this period, and the opposing position assumed by various artists in the face of the madness of the combat.