傅抱石Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)展

History Unfolding on a Hand Scroll

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  Nanjing Museum

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  Nanjing Museum

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  Nanjing Museum

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  Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

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  Nanjing Museum

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  Nanjing Museum

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  Nanjing Museum

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  Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

“Heaven and Earth Glow Red” (1964), on display in “Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)" at the Metropolitan Museum.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: January 26, 2012was born in China in 1904, seven years before the Chinese Revolution brought 2,100 years of dynastic rule to an end. He died in 1965, months before China’s Communist regime unleashed the Cultural Revolution, which aggressively persecuted the country’s writers, artists and other intelligentsia, sometimes unto death.

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Nanjing Museum

Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) “Drunken Monk” (1944), a hanging scroll, at the Metropolitan Museum.

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Nanjing Museum

“Goddess Crossing the Xiang River,” an undated hanging scroll.

Fu, a fervent devotee of the ancient tradition of Chinese brush-and-ink painting, as well as an art historian and exceptionally skilled seal carver, often walked a kind of tightrope through the tumultuous times that came in between: the internecine power struggles following the Chinese Revolution of 1911; the upheavals of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45; and the Communists’ final triumph, after a bloody civil war, in 1949.

His trajectory is the subject of an intriguing up-and-down survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It suggests that Fu, who came from very humble circumstances and was largely self-taught, was sustained by exceptional talent and a steely yet flexible dedication to his art. His skill and refinement, as well as his willingness to adapt, pervade this show, which is serene on the surface but less so beneath.

“Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)” contains nearly 90 paintings. Early examples depict Tang-style court ladies, scholars perusing paintings and a calligrapher monk imbibing wine before setting to work. In later works, a line of destroyers plows through waves, and steam shovels strip mine for coal. The most imposing works throughout are panoramic views of majestic mountains, rivers and forests, in which a range of robust textures and scratchy, dry-brush markings impart a vigorous, sometimes wild sense of modernity.

Organized by the Nanjing Museum in China and the Cleveland Museum of Art, this exhibition is a landmark: the first full-dress retrospective of a 20th-century Chinese artist to be seen at the Met. It occupies ground prepared by the excellent exhibitions of classic Chinese painting that Maxwell K. Hearn, a longtime curator at the Met and now head of its department of Asian art, has been staging there for more than three decades.

In some ways it might have made more sense for the Met’s first 20th-century Chinese artist to be a better-known figure, like Fu’s contemporary Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) or the elder Qi Baishi (1864-1957). (Their work has been in the news because, thanks to the enthusiasm and wealth of Chinese collectors, it ranked first and second in earnings at auction last year, above Warhol’s and Picasso’s). Zhang, a collector and brilliant forger of historical paintings, left China forever in 1948, and went on to develop an astute fusion of Chinese ink painting and Abstract Expressionism that can be quite dazzling. Qi, an immensely popular painter who specialized in bold, often whimsical calligraphic close-ups of vegetables, insects and water creatures, stayed on, protected by his fame, living and working in Beijing a bit like a hermit in his hut, and having little to do with Mao’s regime.

With Fu, we have something altogether different, an implicitly more austere, possibly academic artist, but one immersed in his moment. Not only did Fu not leave China, but he also participated actively in the Communist apparatus as an artist, teacher and writer. His work reflects its historical context with particular vividness, although it is also sometimes so completely reflective that it becomes a curiosity, a historical artifact, and we lose the sense of its art. All of this means that the show raises all sorts of interesting questions about the relationship between art and freedom, aesthetics and politics, and innovation and tradition.

The through line of Fu’s career is ink-and-brush painting, for which he was never less than an impassioned advocate even when, in the 1920s, he had little access to it. Sequestered in private collections in a country with few museums, this kind of painting was also frequently viewed as a fusty, if not decadent, relic of the imperialist elite. Fu would come into his own as an artist only in the 1930s, after two extended visits to Japan, where Chinese painting, treasured for centuries, was more accessible and avidly studied by artists and art historians alike. Also important to him were histories of Chinese painting by Japanese art historians, which he translated into Chinese and which influenced his own writings.

The show’s earliest works, on view on the left in the first gallery, are four hanging scrolls from 1925, in which Fu deftly but rather one-dimensionally demonstrates the ink-brush techniques — the soft dots, short dashes and calligraphic outlines — basic to the long literati tradition of Chinese landscape painting, which he was then studying mostly in woodblock reproductions.

Across the room are examples of the carved seals that he began making in high school to help support his family, displayed beside red impressions of their spare, nested characters. And straight ahead, a monumental landscape, painted in 1933, probably during his first trip to Japan, pays homage to the Yuan master Wang Meng (1301-1385) with a dense surface richness that also testifies to Fu’s consummate synthesis of techniques.

The show’s strongest works are a series of images of mist-shrouded or rain-swept mountains from the 1940s. Here he pushes the traditional ink medium to new levels of atmospheric abstraction with a range of innovative, sometimes crazed brush textures and pale washes.

The show is never quite so visually exciting again, although Fu’s faith that his medium can serve the needs of the Communists, who favored Soviet-style Social Realism and were heartily suspicious of ink painting, provides its own drama. In both his writing and his art, Fu mounted a nationalistic argument for the medium as an important symbol of China’s illustrious culture and an appropriate means by which to celebrate its amazing natural wonders (or their exploitation), and for a while created a window of opportunity for himself. Basically, Fu opened ink painting to a new kind of reality, both in terms of the visible landscape and historic events.

In the works from the 1950s on, the clouds often come from smokestacks that signify industrial progress, and pine trees are joined by telephone poles. A river view shows Mao in a boat full of soldiers making a famous escape during the Long March, much like Washington crossing the Delaware. Some landscapes have an almost photographic, wide-angle precision, like the 1961 hand scroll “Sea of Trees by the Heavenly Lake,” which resembles a barren earth-work until you grasp its vastness.

Others, like “Oh, Changbai Mountain!” and “Snow Over an Expanse of Forests,” build on the rich markings of the 1940s works. In the final gallery, in images at once beautiful and a bit chilling, tints of red — the Communist Chinese color, par excellence — creep into skies, spread across water and inflame a national monument.

It is hard not to feel in the second half of the show that Fu was often painting for his life, working in a torturous situation as he tried to meet the shifting imperatives of the party, while also attempting works of a more personal, expressive nature.

Like the Ming painter Shitao, whose free brush Fu especially revered, Fu believed that liquor stirred the creative juices. “Often After Being Drunk” is the phrase on a personal seal that he frequently stamped on his paintings. More than one art historian believes that Fu drank himself to death. If so, it may have been just in time. He navigated more than his share of ideological challenges, but it seems unlikely that he would have survived those of the Cultural Revolution.

“Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 15; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

pass for, orb, cape, arachnophobe, harness,bananas...

Arachnophobe creates cape woven from spider silk

By Bryony Jones, CNN

January 26, 2012 -- Updated 1127 GMT (1927 HKT)

Millions of spiders create silk cape

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Cape and scarf made of spider silk on display at London's V&A Museum
• Dozens of specially-trained handlers spent seven years collecting more than 1.2 million golden orb spiders
• Bright yellow, extremely strong silk was harvested from the spiders, which were later released back into the wild
• Cape is embroidered with spiders, brocade scarf is woven in traditional Malagasy style

London (CNN) -- A golden cape woven from the silk of 1.2 million Golden Orb spiders has gone on display at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

The richly-embroidered garment -- its bright yellow hue is the natural color of the spider silk -- is the result of a seven-year project on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar.

Using long poles, a team of 80 people worked to collect the spiders from their webs each day and harvest their silk before returning them to the wild.

The project was the brainchild of American fashion designer Nicholas Godley and British art historian and textile expert Simon Peers, who have both lived in Madagascar for many years.

"The idea of using spider silk to create garments goes back 300 years," Godley told CNN. "The last significant attempt to succeed was at the turn of the century, when a French Jesuit priest based in Madagascar, Jacob Paul Camboue, experimented with 'milking' spiders for their silk."

Peers had long been intrigued by the idea, and on a visit to his office, Godley's imagination was sparked when he spotted an unusual-looking tool which Peers explained was for collecting silk from spiders.

The cape has a mystical, ephemeral quality - just like a spider's web - but also a permanence
Nicholas Godley

"The idea never died, we kept revisiting it over the years, and eventually I shut my handbag factory so we could build a proper 'spidery' and experiment with harnessing spiders and harvesting their silk. We found that it worked.

"We were amazed -- you stand there watching it happen and you start to question your sanity. Is this really happening, or have I lost my bananas?

"We had 24 spiders harnessed up, the spindle was going, and silk was coming out. That was our eureka moment. We were over the moon, but it was just the beginning."

Scaling the project up proved a huge challenge -- only female Golden Orb spiders make silk. Hundreds of thousands of them were needed, and their cannibalistic nature meant the creatures had to be separated to prevent them from eating their neighbors.

Godley admits that the properties of spider silk -- and the practicalities and costs involved -- mean that industrial-scale production for use in textiles is unlikely ever to succeed.

"From a fashion perspective, it's impractical," he told CNN. "It's a natural fiber, and it shrinks, so you can't wash or dry clean it, and obviously it is hugely expensive to produce, so how would you begin to price it?"

Instead, they simply wanted to prove that it could be done, and to create two items which could help revive traditional Malagasy weaving techniques and embroidery skills, and to showcase the talents of people working on the island.

The four-meter-long brocade scarf, which was first shown at New York's Natural History Museum in 2009, was created using old Malagasy patterns, but as Godley explained, the inspiration for the cape, which made its debut at London's V&A Museum today, came from the spiders themselves.

A spiderweb is here today and gone tomorrow, but we have found a way to harness that and turn it into something lasting
Nicholas Godley

"After we finished the scarf, we wondered what to make next, and I really liked the idea of a cape, because of the fact that spiders cocoon their prey, wrapping them up, and I was intrigued by the thought of being cocooned in spider silk."

The cape is covered in images of spiders, plants and flowers, which took 6,000 hours to embroider, and those lucky enough to get up close have discovered that it is virtually weightless.

"We do a party trick where we get people to close their eyes and we put the tassels from the cape in one of their hands and ask them to guess which hand it is in. Half of them have no clue, and the other half get it wrong -- only a few guess, but only because of the warmth.

"The cape itself is like an invisibility cloak, you almost wouldn't know you were wearing it, and it has this mystical, ephemeral quality, just like a spider's web, but also a permanence.

"A spiderweb is here today and gone tomorrow, but we have found a way to harness that and turn it into something lasting."

But despite working so closely with them for so many years, Godley admits he is still afraid of spiders.

"I am fascinated by them, but still frightened of them: Spiders are poisonous, and they bite people," he said. "I am slowly trying to overcome it, but it hasn't stopped."

Weegee Made Blood and Guts Familiar and Fabulous

Weegee (Arthur Fellig), 1899-1968, American photojournalist, b. Zolochiv, Ukraine (then in Austria-Hungary) as Asher Fellig. His family immigrated (1910) to New York City, where he soon quit school, held various photography-related jobs, and worked for Acme Newspictures (later part of United Press International) until 1935. For the next decade he freelanced, selling photos mainly to New York tabloids. About 1938 he adopted the name Weegee, supposedly a phonetic version of the name of the Ouija board, in tribute to his seemingly clairvoyant ability to arrive where and when news was breaking (he monitored the police radio). With his big flash-popping Speed Graphic, the cigar-chomping photographer became a fixture of the New York night. Drawn to the grotesque and illicit, he created contrasty black-and-white shots of grisly crime scenes, fires, and car crashes and of New Yorkers at pleasure spots and grim scenes. He became known to a larger audience with his 1945 bestseller Naked City. Weegee later worked as a Hollywood movie consultant (1947-52), experimented with portraits shot with distorting lenses, and made three short films (1948, c.1950, and 1965).

Bibliography

See his autobiography, Weegee on Weegee (1961); his other collections, Weegee's People (1946, repr. 1985), Naked Hollywood (1953, repr. 1975), Weegee's New York Photographs, 1935-1960 (1984, repr. 2000), and The Village (1989); J. Coplans, ed., Weegee: Naked New York (1997); A. Talmey, ed., Weegee (1997); M. Barth et al., Weegee's World (1997), and K. W. Purcell, Weegee: Arthur Fellig (2004).

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/weegee#ixzz1kCynuavV

He Made Blood and Guts Familiar and Fabulous

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: January 19, 2012

The International Center of Photography has been Weegee Central since the end of 1993. That’s when it was bequeathed 16,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives by Wilma Wilcox, the longtime companion of Arthur Fellig (1899-1968). Fellig, the Austrian-born son of Jewish immigrants, grew up poor on the Lower East Side, fell in love with photography as a darkroom assistant, and in 1935 set out as a freelance news photographer.

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Weegee/International Center of Photography

Weegee's images of his 1941 Photo League exhibition, “Murder Is My Business,” are in the photography center show. More Photos »

Multimedia

Slide Show

‘Weegee: Murder Is My Business’

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Weegee/International Center of Photography, Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Weegee's more quotidian fare like “Rent Party” (1950) typify how the photographer was, as one curator said, “not a reporter but a fabulist.” More Photos »

He was just in time to convert the emerging genre of tabloid photojournalism, with its surfeit of murder and mayhem, into an earthy and memorable art form. Within a very few years he was a kind local personality and folk hero known for reaching crime scenes ahead of the competition, if not the police. He called himself Weegee the Famous.

Weegee’s achievement is multidimensional, reaching all the way to underground film, but its main base is photography and books of photographs, especially the foundational noir classic “Naked City,” a 1945 compilation of 229 images for which Weegee also wrote the text. Its success inspired him to give up tabloid photojournalism and move to Hollywood, where he worked as a photographer, actor and film consultant before shortly hightailing it back to New York to turn his attention to making what he considered art photography, mainly distorted images. In 1957, after developing diabetes, he moved in with Miss Wilcox, a Quaker social worker whom he had known since the 1940s, and who cared for him and then cared for his work.

The Weegee Archive, as it is now known, has resulted in a series of riveting exhibitions at the International Center of Photography. The first and largest was the 329-image “Weegee’s World: Life, Death and the Human Drama,” brought forth in 1997. It was followed in 2002 by “Weegee’s Trick Photography,” a show of woozy, distorted or otherwise caricatured images, many of them called “art” by their creator, and four years later by “Unknown Weegee,” a survey that emphasized his more benign, post-tabloid photographs.

On Friday comes “Weegee: Murder Is My Business,” a trim but multilayered exhibition that takes its title from popular back-to-back exhibitions of Weegee’s work that he staged at the Photo League on East 21st Street in 1941.

Organized by Brian Wallis, this latest foray into Weegee’s complex universe circles back with a new scrutinizing intensity to the core of his achievement: his frenetic, formative first decade as a full-time photographer. From 1935 to 1946, he lived by his wits and mostly at night, taking harsh, flash-lighted pictures of fast-moving, often violent breaking news that he sold to the city’s several dailies. Dead criminals — killed by one another or the police — fires, gruesome accidents and other catastrophes were his initial subjects. The show zeroes in on these early works, mixing in a raft of contextualizing materials, including photographs by others.

Tellingly, one of his first acts of genius was not to focus only the events themselves — although his images are certainly strewn with bodies, crushed automobiles and the like — but on the people hanging out of windows or peering over rooftops for a better look, who mirror and encourage our own undisguised interest. One of his most famous photographs, “The First Murder,” captures a group of unsettled school children, whose surging faces and torsos set the image aswirl; the motion is anchored by a distraught adult face toward the center of the scene that belongs to the aunt of the victim, a hoodlum named Pete Mancuso. The image perfectly typifies what Diane Arbus admiringly called Weegee’s “wild dynamics,” as well as the observation of John Szarkowski, the Museum of Modern Art’s prescient photography curator, that Weegee was “not a reporter but a fabulist.”

This exhibition affirms that Weegee brought to street photography a new, often shocking vitality. The combination of grit, humanity, intensity, merciless opportunism and spatial precariousness, coupled with an eye for uncanny details, regularly resulted in pictures that you can’t stop looking at — even when your finer instincts suggest that you should — and don’t soon forget. And you need to see only a few of his images to understand how he paved the way for Robert Frank, Arbus and Andy Warhol and others who have explored America’s dark side through photographic images.

But arguing for Weegee’s greatness is not the show’s main goal, even if it ultimately can’t help doing so. Instead it conveys a weird and very tangible sense of Weegee himself, both as a driven hustler in pursuit of humankind in extremis and as the creator of a tough-guy, crime-fighter persona, as evidenced by examples of his many self-portraits that dominate the show’s first gallery. (One shows him flopped down on his stomach on the floor of a paddy wagon, camera cocked, like a hunter, waiting for the first arrest of the night.)

We also get a more intense view than usual (even by Weegee standards) of the harsh, turbulent world of post-Prohibition New York that was both the subject of, and the audience for, his images, a pressure cooker teeming with immigrants, inequity, crime, tawdriness and possibility. And because the show focuses on the different ways Weegee’s work reached this audience, it reveals a great deal about how this world was covered by the press.

For all the gritty reality of its subject’s work, the show is a rather delicately orchestrated series of framing, echoing, mutually elaborating contexts. There are labels to read and a series of brilliantly deployed touch screens that can take you deep into different aspects of Weegee’s world.

On these you can leaf through the first edition of “Naked City,” read news articles about the murders that Weegee photographed or study the crime scenes, then and now. You can listen to Weegee on the set of “Dr. Strangelove” as he talks briefly with Peter Sellers, who based the accent of the film’s title character at least partly on Weegee’s nasal New Yawkese. Or you can peruse whole issues of PM, the short-lived daily that deftly combined sensational photographs and social concern, for which Weegee worked in the early 1940s.

For a more unbridled sense of Weegee, I recommend “Weegee: Naked City,” at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea, a kind of greatest-hits presentation of 125 images that roams across most of his career, divided into sections loosely inspired by the chapter headings of his first book. It is in many ways the perfect, sprawling, uncouth antidote to the rather more surgical approach of Mr. Wallis’s museum show.

The museum presentation often sharpens appreciation of Weegee by comparing his images with those by other photographers. Juxtaposition of his work with that of his newshound competitors and police photographers reveals his innate sophistication. Juxtaposition of his work with pictures taken by members of the Photo League, like Helen Levitt and Aaron Siskind, emphasize his relative lack of compassion.

With the help of the touch screens, it is possible to see the same image move among different formats, from the cramped front page of The New York Post to the more generous proportions of PM, which had superb print quality and often treated Weegee himself as part of the news, to the relatively text-free spreads of “Naked City.”

“Their First Murder” appears several times, including in a 1944 issue of U.S. Camera accompanied by an admiring text. We are informed that it is one of the most popular photographs in “Action Photo,” an exhibition then on view at the Museum of Modern Art, and that an “over-enthusiastic museum official calls it the greatest news photo of the last 10 years.” Today that assessment doesn’t sound over-enthusiastic at all.

Mr. Wallis’s exhibition recreates the “Murder” portion of Weegee’s Photo League show, “Murder Is My Business.” As in the original “Murder” section, the wounds of the victims in these black-and-white photos have been touched up with red nail polish, and in case you doubt that this really happened, a picture by an unidentified photographer shows Weegee doing the touching up at the Photo League.

Nearby are his photographs of other sections of the Photo League show, including “Faces,” “Society” and “Coney Island.” As Weegee proceeded, murder and other mayhem actually became less and less his business. His view of the living rarely seems genuinely sympathetic, but that is part of the enduring strength of his images. Their often cold-blooded toughness is, in its way, a tribute to human resilience.

“Weegee: Murder Is My Business” runs through Sept. 2 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street; (212) 857-0000, icp.org. “Weegee: Naked City” continues through Feb. 25 at the Steven Kasher Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, Chelsea; (212) 966 -3978, stevenkasher.com.

正欲清言聞客至。偶思小飲報花開

598 大篆對聯 吳平 書法 墨、紙本 177.4 × 47.8cm × 2 1992 A Pair of Scrolls in Majuscule Seal Script Wu Ping Ink on paper

作 品 賞 析

墨色厚重而不嚴肅，結體自然帶有拙趣，在筆 勢部分起筆謹慎圓實，而收筆自由放鬆，飛白的部分蒼勁瀟灑；非線性的排列順序呈現出閒散的氣息。作者在款識部分使用澀筆書寫，行書字體在虛實交錯之間展現 蒼勁剛硬的質感。內文墨色濃重有光澤，上下款文字墨色乾而輕澀，加上線條篤實厚重與纖細流暢的分別，在整體畫幅空間中形成明確的賓主關係。(文/李幸潔) 作者款識(落款簽名年款)：堪白吳平書陸放翁句 作者鈐印(朱文白文)：吳平(白文)。堪白(朱文)。 簽名位置：下聯左 釋文：正欲清言聞客至。偶思小飲報花開。

藝 術 家 小 傳

其尊君克剛公，工詩文書畫、尤精於山水，為 弘一大師李叔同門人。堪白先生為學為藝，皆淵源家傳，箕裘克紹。其作品書畫篆刻皆精。書法擅四體。初淑糞翁鄧散木。行草以宋明人韻緻為尚。來台後久任公 職，曾任故宮博物院書畫處處長。並從雁高軒高氏游，遂棄其早歲所事山水。 專功花鳥一科。先後加入「七修畫會」、「海嶠印集」、「六六畫會」等，個展多次，有書畫集刊行。 堪白先生不論書畫或篆刻藝術，莫不自成風格；其人則澹泊不爭，矜而不趨，故其藝雖出入古人，然自具面貌，不以狂怪邀譽，唯傳清響於後世也。 ***** 已將原聯更正: 大篆對聯 - 高雄市立美術館--典藏品資料查詢 collection.kmfa.gov.tw/kmfa/artsdisplay.asp?... - 頁庫存檔 (文/李幸潔) 作者款識(落款簽名年款)：堪白吳平書陸放翁句 作者鈐印(朱文白文)：吳平(白文)。堪白(朱文)。 簽名位置：下聯左 釋文：正欲清言聞客至。偶思小飲報花開。 *****原址: 寫給台灣的情書 http://blog.roodo.com/michaelcarolina/archives/18812216.html 阿諒哥送我們春聯 書法家官大欽先生的字，陸游的詩： 正欲清言聞客至 偶思小飲報花開

Architectural Geometry

Architectural Geometry (The Bentley Institute Pre...

2012年1月17日在臺大圖書館偶遇許多書，有幾本是印象比較深刻的。

第一次碰到贈書簽署者為「讀者」；某本1930年代《英國姓氏史考》……台灣的政府單位印刷品和私人印書等很精美：新式幸福風：時尚酩品美學 劉其偉傳奇百年……

碰到Architectural Geometry (The Bentley Institute Press)一書，有些感慨。這要從陳其寬老師說的，東海路思義教堂的設計故事說起：貝聿明先生到成大演講之後，回東海說，成大的師生建議，東海教堂的設計應該更有創新…..陳其寬當時知道雙曲面的牆面設計最先進……於是，有今天的這一「形」。它建成之後，50年過去了，西方這領域的進步更是神速，更拜電腦科技的進步，所謂後現代的「形形色色」，更是新境界紛陳。總之，他們的設計真的是邁向「真善美」的綜合，科學與藝術兼顧。

新式幸福風：時尚酩品美學

主辦單位:高雄市立美術館 展覽名稱:新式幸福風：時尚酩品美學 展覽日期: 100.10.22- 101.02.19 展覽地點:三樓301-304展覽室 酒的歷史與人類文明與時俱進，更是美術、舞蹈與文學的靈感泉源，充滿了 意義、魔法與魅力。這是一項全新觀念的展覽，結合動態影像影片、時尚服裝、酒瓶標籤設計的多元形式，從視覺的象徵到迷人的莊園故事，呈現設計與創意運用在 當代文化生活、飲食產業品牌行銷與視覺傳達的重要性。本館也藉此平台，特別推出台灣酒標籤的發展歷程，並邀請在地藝術家參與創意藝術酒標的創作。 瀏覽人數：6332 公告時間： 100.10.22- 101.02.19

圖片：Inspired by versace 圖片：Inspired by adidas

The arts in 2012: James Bond and Occupy/post-war sculpture

Art | 03.01.2012

Cologne exhibition examines role of the body in post-war sculpture

Thomas Schütte, "Vater Staat" (Father State), 2011

Human beings are fragile, and the law often isn't enough to protect them. The Cologne exhibition "Before the Law" brings post-war and contemporary sculptures together to show how art deals with those realities.

"Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter" (A gatekeeper stands before the law) is the world-famous first sentence of Franz Kafka's short story about a country doctor that comes to the city and requests entry into the law. In vain, the visitor waits for years to be let in. Just before his death, he asks the gatekeeper why he is the only one to have requested entry in so long. The answer: The gate was made just for him.

The man from the countryside learns that any given law is open to interpretation.

Artists, in particular, can attest to that fact, having often seen their right to expression trampled by hostile social movements and governments. In the wake of the Second World War, creative spirits in Germany took up questions like what it means to live in a world that has no respect for human life. The exhibition "Before the Law" in Cologne's Museum Ludwig examines how neglect for human rights shaped art from the post-war period through the present. The focus is on sculpture.

Diagnosis of the present

Untitled by Marko Lehanka, 1999 / Zoe Leonard, "Tree," 2011Painting can only illustrate suffering and can easily become kitschy, said exhibition curator Kasper König, one of Germany's most celebrated art experts. In 1977, he established the Sculpture Projects Münster, which has since taken place ever 10 years. Since 2000, König has been director of Museum Ludwig, a major exhibition hall for modern and contemporary art.

Before he completes his time in office at the end of this year, he's offering one more major show in Cologne that examines some of the fundamental elements of human life. For König, the show is both about reflecting on existential questions and offering a diagnosis of the present.

Broken bodies

Wilhelm Lehmbruck's "Sitting Youth" from 1916-1917 is among the earliest pieces in the exhibition. The figure sits with her limbs turned inward and her head hanging in sadness. The sculpture was first shown in the year 1955 at the inaugural edition of the famous documenta art show in Kassel, Germany.

Gerhard Marcks' "Chained Prometheus" from 1948 is another sculpture with suffering at its core. The figure's narrow, fragile features suggest a likeness with expressionist sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck. The bowed head and chained hands reflect the artist's own persecution during the Nazi era.

The fragility of the human body is a central theme in early post-war art, evident also in a mutilated figure sculpted by Henry Moore, in a powerless Madonna sculpture by Fritz Cremer, and in Alberto Giacometti's "La Jambe," which consists of a leg fragment resembling a prosthesis joined to a base. Each piece exudes a sense of helplessness. The post-war works on display are proof of art's capacity to make pain perceptible.

Bruce Nauman, "Carousel," 1988

One question remains

Contemporary art doesn't restrict itself to a single point in the room or to a single base. Rather, the works often draw in entire rooms. Bruce Nauman's "Carousel" offers a good example. The lifeless remains of animals' bodies hang suspended from poles that turn on their own. Each corpse is covered with a dead grey material.

In the entryway to the exhibition, guests see American artist Jimmy Durham's "Building a Nation." Its theme is the appropriation of North America by European settlers, and the piece recalls an abandoned building. Pieces of a door and furniture allow the viewer to imagine an edifice. Racist statements hang on the few walls of the structure, many of which represent arrogant demands like, "Indians out!"

Jimmie Durham, "Building a nation," 2006Jimmy Durham is of Native American heritage and offers a personal take on the colonial slaughter of his ancestors.

The exhibition brings historical sculptures into dialogue with contemporary installations. But violations of human rights make up the thread that unifies the diverse works on display.

At least one question lingers after taking in the exhibition: Where are we today as people, artists and society?

Author: Sabine Oelze / gsw
Editor: Kate Bowen

Culture | 02.01.2012

The arts in 2012: James Bond and Occupy

Kassel prepares for the 13th edition of its prestigious art festival

From the latest James Bond film to the 13th documenta contemporary art exhibition and a fresh supply of new books, 2012 has something in store for everyone: moviegoers, art and music lovers, and book worms, too.

Frederick the Great, known as "Old Fritz," believed each person should be happy in his own way. He is known for his passion for politics and military drills, but also for playing the flute. In 2012, the former King of Prussia would have turned 300.

This year also marks one century since the death of German writer Karl May, best known for his "Winnetou" books. Fans will commemorate him by visiting the Karl May Museum near Dresden. With more than 100 million books sold, he is the most widely read German language author.

Contemporary art

Prussian history is in the foreground this yearDocumenta in Kassel will be opening its doors once again. The exhibition, which takes place every five years, is considered the most significant event for contemporary art, objects, installations and performances from artists around the world.

"Collapse and Reconstruction" is the theme of documenta 13, while the event maintains its tradition of keeping its list of artists under wraps ahead of time. Only three of the 100 participating artists are known: Italian Guiseppe Penone, American sculptor and city planner Theaster Gates, and Johannesburg-based artistWilliam Kentridge.

A growing interest in modern art is driving the prices up. Renowned German artist Gerhard Richter said the sums his paintings go for are "as absurd as the banking crisis." Its not uncommon for his works to sell for eight-digit sums.

Such amounts have more to do with speculation than with the value of a canvas, added the artist, who will celebrate this 80th birthday in February.

'Idee di Pietra' Giuseppe Penone was the first work from documenta 13 to be revealed"The works are no longer exhibited, but put in storage as a safe investment, like a Rolex or a Porsche," said Markus Eisenbeis, owner of Cologne-based auction house Van Ham.

Silver screen

The Berlin International Film Festival will kick off a series of cinematic events in 2012. After that, "The Hobbit," a film by Oscar-winner Peter Jackson, should draw a lot of attention. The movie is expected to be similar to his trilogy, "The Lord of the Rings," and include spectacular special effects.

George Clooney leads the cast in "The Descendants," while Hollywood newcomer Andrew Garfield stars in a sequel to "Spiderman," and Daniel Craig returns as 007 in the latest James Bond movie, "Skyfall."

German cinema also has its share of interesting movies on deck. Director Helmut Dietl is filming "Zettl," a sequel to the successful television series, "Kir Royal," with actor Michael Herbig.

One of Germany's best-known younger actors, Matthias Schweighofer, is the main character in a film adaptation of Vladimir Kaminer's novel, "Russian Disco." He plays a Russian who moves to Berlin to begin a new life shortly after the fall of the Wall in 1989.

George Clooney stars in 'The Descendants'

Relevant stories

The literary world is seeing a return to the banal this year, University of Duisburg literature expert Andreas Erb told Deutsche Welle. The more complex life becomes, the more people want to read books they can grasp.

Stories this year will focus on issues like the debt crisis, the Occupy movement and the protests against storage and transport or radioactive material.

"There is a tendency to capture the moment," said Tanja Postpischil from Suhrkamp publishing house. She expects books from celebrities and politicians to remain bestsellers.

One highly anticipated book will be related to Germany's "trial of the year" in 2011. Former weatherman Jörg Kachelmann, who was acquitted on charges of raping his girlfriend, is set to release the novel "Mannheim," which recounts his experiences in prison.

German Family Minister Kristina Schroeder is expected to tackle the ongoing issue of quotas for women in boardrooms in a book entitled, "Danke, emanzipiert sind wir selber" (Thank you; we are emancipated on our own).

But literature won't be limited to current affairs. Biographies on Frederick the Great should be a hit, as well as new editions of works by Charles Dickens, who would be turning 200 in 2012.

The Leipzig Book Fair in March will present a new section on education. Others are eyeing the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, which will coincidentally feature another country with volcanoes after Iceland took center stage in 2011. New Zealand will step into the spotlight with the slogan, "While you were sleeping."

Clouds over Bayreuth

Tension on Bayreuth's Green Hill is nothing new - but trouble with the German Court of Auditors is. The festival has come under fire for its system of allocating tickets, with accusations that too many tickets are given to sponsors and celebrities.

The timing of the investigation is especially unpleasant because it comes just a year ahead of the 200th anniversary of composer Richard Wagner's birth. A revival of Wagner's "Ring" tetralogy is in the works, but has come up against a few hurdles. Well-known filmmaker Wim Wenders turned down the high-profile directing job, which was then given to Frank Castorf, the controversial director of the Berliner Volksbühne theater. Critics bemoan his complete lack of opera experience.

Bayreuth is no stranger to stressWhat's more, the Bayreuth Festival's main sponsor, Siemens, has pulled out, and it remains unclear whether the event will the open-air broadcasts will continue.

Nevertheless, a bit further south, things are looking up. The Salzburg Festival is expected to focus on religious music and become longer and more exclusive under the new director, Alexander Pereira.

On the other hand, the new director of the Ruhr Triennale, composer and theatre director Heiner Goebbels, promises to make the international festival for music, theater, literature, and dance, more unconventional and innovative. Productions will take place in unusual locations, like former machine halls and coking plants.

Author: Gudrun Stegen / cc
Editor: Kate Bowen

Saint-Sulpice

"人們從聖-敘爾皮斯過渡到色情畫"
觀看 書寫 --建築與文學對話 桂林:廣西師範大學 頁147

Wikipedia article Église Saint-Sulpice, Paris.

http://www.sacred-destinations.com/france/paris-st-sulpice
Saint-Sulpice is a huge, Late Baroque parish church located in the fashionable neighborhood of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. It recently became even more popular with tourists than usual thanks to its prominent role in the novel The Da Vinci Code, which is dicussed below.

History

Saint Sulpicius, the patron of the church, was a 7th-century bishop of Bourges noted for his piety and his resistance to the tyranny of the Merovingian kings.
The Church of St-Sulpice was founded by the Society of St-Sulpice to replace a small Gothic church. It was built over a century in several phases, with the various architects contributing different designs.
Construction began in 1646, was expanded on a larger scale in 1670, stalled from 1678 to 1719, then resumed under Gilles-Marie Oppenordt and was mostly complete by 1745.
The west front was designed by the Florentine architect Giovanni Servandoni until 1766. The north tower was built by Chalgrin in 1778-80, but construction was abandoned before the south tower was completed.
A wealthy and fashionable church on the Left Bank, Saint-Sulpice went on to host the christenings of none-too-devout Marquis de Sade and Charles Baudelaire as well as the wedding of author Victor Hugo.
During the Revolution, the Church of St-Sulpice was damaged and turned into a Temple of Victory. It was restored and redecorated in the 19th century with the help of Eugène Delacroix.

St-Sulpice under restoration in July 2008. Photo © Sacred Destinations.
Closer look at the facade and south tower. Photo Steve Roe.
Historic photo of St Sulpice. Photo Notre Dame Architecture Library.
Interior of St-Sulpice, looking west to the organ. Photo Te-Min Ong.


The grand organ of Saint-Sulpice. Photo Robert Catalano.


The "Rose Line" gnomon. Photo Emilio del Prado.


Obelisk inscription explaining the gnomon. Photo Andy Hay.


Stained glass window with "PS" initials that stand for Peter and Sulpice, not the Priory of Sion. Photo Sathish J.


Delacroix fresco of Jacob wrestling with the angel. Photo Lutetia.


Chapels and dome. Photo gogoninja.


Chapel of the Virgin in St-Sulpice. Photo Franck Rondot.