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Art in America

The Enlightenment by Paul Brians

History of painting in America by Mohammad Mustafa

Beyond the infinity with Tom Till


number 4 2009

Connecting Artists and Audiences

NEA ARTS

presenting and jazz

National Endowment for the Arts


What did we do for them? Remamber children of Haiti


C.O.B.A.C. E V E R L A S T I N G M O U N T H LY

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Art in America

The Enlightenment by Paul Brians

History of painting in America by Mohammad Mustafa

Beyond the infinity with Tom Till c.o.b.a.c. international art magazine by ali saadat MARCH 2010 cobac.a.c@gmail.com cobacac.blogspot.com Publishing texts and photos of this magazine can not be reproduced without permission of the owners

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Editorial Art history American Music History History of classical music traditions Beyond the infinity with Tom Till Architecture The Rise of Modern Architecture in Postwar America Patience Wright History of Painting in America American Mercury History of film Taming of the shrew Edwin Forrest North Shore Arts Association Betty Friedan(Feminine Mistique) The Enlightenment What is the age of enlightenment The Enlightenment in America Interview with American Photographer Paul Corcell

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Special thanks to: mahdi derafshi- TOM TILL- EBRAHIM GOLABBAKHSH- PAUL CORCELL- omid saadatbabak ghanaat- mohammad mostafa-ALIreza mortazavi- Randolph Lautsch

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Best wishes Ali Saadat cobac.a.c@gmail.com

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What do you think about a magazine when can have an interview with one of the best photographers in the world? Did that magazine reach to the place of excellence and dream situation? When Tom Till accepted my request for an interview, I traced to his majesty. Thanks Tom. When I saw the most readers of magazine are in America, I knew that how this society grow itself in culture. Of course it doesn’t mean that the other societies haven’t grown their culture or they are week in culture. I mean America is energetic and active with no limitation in capacities and freedom. Everyone knows America has not art history and Antiquity Compared Europe and maybe even Latin America or old Asia but I think it goes with a high speed ahead and could influent the entire world however its sight is futuristic but they converge very much to art and its history. America is active and goes ahead just because of one reason. The masters of America in all of the history of this land from the far past to now and the next rounds had not spare the “personality freedom” of their one by one of their citizens and this is the prerequisite for having a free and vanguard society. I chose Art in America in this Issue because of thank my friends and fans that live in America shows their interest to have a community of peace and art. Finally I want to excuse the men who forgot them and appreciate my dear friend Mr. golabbakhsh for his time to interview with Tom Till and also Mr. Mohammed Mustafa.

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Editorial

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Freud and psychoanalysis

einrich Wรถlfflin was not the only scholar to invoke psychological theories in the study of art. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote a book on the artist Leonardo da Vinci, in which he used Leonardo's paintings to interrogate the artist's psyche and sexual orientation. Freud inferred from his analysis that Leonardo was probably homosexual. The use of posthumous material to perform psychoanalysis is controversial among art historians, especially since the sexual mores of Leonardo's time and Freud's are different, it is often attempted. One of the best-known psychoanalytic scholars is Laurie Schneider Adams, who wrote a popular textbook, Art across Time, and a book Art and Psychoanalysis.

Jung and archetypes

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Carl Jung also applied psychoanalytic theory to art. C.G. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker, and founder of analytical psychology. Jung's approach to psychology emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Much of his life's work was spent exploring Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable contributions include his concept of the psychological archetype, the col8lective unconscious, and his theory of synchronicity. Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were not merely due to chance but, instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic. He argued that a collective unconscious and archetypal imagery were detectable in art. His ideas were particularly popular among American Abstract expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s. His work inspired the surrealist concept of drawing imagery from dreams and the unconscious. Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern humans rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of the unconscious realm. His work not only triggered analytical work by art historians, but it became integrated an integral part of art-mak-

ing. Jackson Pollock, for example, famously created a series of drawings to accompany his psychoanalytic sessions with his Jungian psychoanalyst, Dr. Joseph Henderson. Henderson who later published the drawings in a text devoted to Pollock's sessions realized how powerful the drawings were as a therapeutic tool. The legacy psychoanalysis in art history has been profound, and extends beyone Freud and Jung. The prominent feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, for example, draws upon psychoanalysis both in her reading into contemporary art and in her rereading of modernist art. With Griselda Pollock's reading of French feminist psychoanalysis and in particular the writings of Julia Kristeva

and Bracha L. Ettinger, as with Rosalind Krauss readings of Jacques Lacan and Jean-Franรงois Lyotard and Catherine de Zegher's curatorial rereading of art, Feminist theory written in the fields of French feminism and Psychoanalysis has strongly informed the reframing of both men and women artists in art history.

`During the mid-20th century art historians embraced social history by using critical approaches. The goal is to show how art interacts with power structures in society. One critical approach that art historians used was Marxism. Marxist art history attempted to show how art was tied to specific classes, how images contain information about the economy, and

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how images can make the status quo seem natural (ideology). Perhaps the best-known Marxist was Clement Greenberg, who came to prominence during the late 1930s with his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch". In the essay Greenberg claimed that the avant-garde arose in order to defend aesthetic standards from the decline of taste involved in consumer society, and seeing kitsch and art as opposites. Greenberg further claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. Greenberg appropriated the German word 'kitsch' to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed to a more affirmative notion of left-over materials of capital-

ist culture. Greenberg later became well-known for examining the formal properties of modern art. Meyer Schapiro is one of the bestremembered Marxist art historians of the mid-20th century. Although he wrote about numerous time periods and themes in art, he is best remembered for his commentary on sculpture from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, at which time he saw evidence of capitalism emerging and feudalism declining. Arnold Hauser wrote the first Marxist survey of Western Art, titled The Social History of Art. In this book he attempted to show how class consciousness was reflected in major art periods. His book was controversial when published during the 1950s because it makes gener-

which referred specifically to the experience of women.

Barthes and semiotics

As opposed to iconography which seeks to identify meaning, semiotics is concerned with how meaning is created. Roland Barthes’s connoted and denoted meanings are paramount to this examination. In any particular work of art, an interpretation depends on the identification of denoted meaning -the recognition of a visual sign, and the connoted meaning-the instant cultural associations that come with recognition. The main concern of the semiotic art historian is to come up with ways to navigate and interpret connoted meaning. wikipedia

history Nochlin and feminism

Linda Nochlin's essay "Why have there been no great women artists?" kick-started feminist art history during the 1970s and remains one of the most widely-read essays about female artists. In it she applies a feminist critical framework to show systematic exclusion of women from art training. Griselda Pollock is another prominent feminist art historian, whose use of psychoanalytic theory is described above. While feminist art history can focus on any time period and location, much attention has been given to the Modern era. Some of this scholarship centers on the feminist art movement,

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alizations about entire eras, a strategy now called "vulgar Marxism". T.J. Clark was the first art historian writing from a Marxist perspective to abandon vulgar Marxism. He wrote Marxist art histories of several impressionist and realist artists, including Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. These books focused closely on the political and economic climates in which the art was created.

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Part III

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American music

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he music history of the United States includes many styles of folk, popular and classical music. Some of the most well-known genres of American music are blues, rock and roll, country, hip hop, jazz and gospel. American music history began with the Native Americans, the first people to populate North America. The music of these people was highly varied in form, and was mostly religious in purpose. In the 20th century, American popular music has achieved great international acclaim. Even since the ragtime and minstrel songs of the 19th century, African American music has remained at the heart of American popular music. The rural blues of poor black Southerners and the jazz of black urbanites were among the earliest styles of American popular music. At the time, black performers typically did not perform their own material, instead using songs produced by the music publishing companies of Tin Pan Alley. African American blues evolved during the 20th century, mixing with Appalachian folk music and other styles to create genres like country music and rhythm and blues. During this time, jazz diversified into steadily more experimental fields. By the end of the 1940s, jazz had grown into such varied fields as bebop and jazz.

Popular music

The first field of American music that could be viewed as popular, rather than classical or folk, was the singing of the colonial New England choirs, and travelling singing masters like William Billings. It was here that techniques and traditions like shape note, lined-out hymnody and Sacred Harp were created, gradually spreading south and becoming an integral part of the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening was a period of religious fervor, among whites and blacks (both slave and free), that saw passionate, evangelical "Negro spirituals" grow in popularity (Ferris, 98). During the 19th century, it was not spirituals that gained truly widespread acclaim, but rather peppy comic songs performed by minstrels in blackface, and written by legendary songwriters like Stephen Foster and Daniel Emmett. During the Civil War, popular ballads were common, some used liberally by both the North and the South as patriotic songs. Finally, late in the century, the African American cakewalk evolved into ragtime, which became a North American and European sensation, while mainstream America was enthralled by the brass band


marches of John Philips Sousa. Tin Pan Alley was the biggest source of popular music early in the 20th century (Garofolo, 17). Tin Pan Alley was a place in New York City which published sheet music for dance songs like "After the Ball Is Over". The first few decades of the 20th century also saw the rise of popular, comic musical theater, such as the vaudeville tradition and composers and writers like Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin. At the same time, jazz and blues, two distinct but related genres, began flourishing in cities like Chicago and New Orleans and began to attract some mainstream audiences. Blues and jazz were the foundation of what became American popular music. The ability to sell recorded music through phonographs changed the music industry into one that relied on the charisma of star performers rather than songwriters. There was increased pressure to record bigger hits, meaning that even minor trends and fads like Hawaiian steel guitar left a permanent influence (the steel guitar is still very common in country music). Dominican merengue and Argentinean tango also left their mark, especially on jazz, which has long been a part of the music scene in Latin America. During the 1920s, classic female blues singers like Ma

mie Smith became the first musical celebrities of national renown. Gospel, blues and jazz were also diversifying during this period, with new subgenres evolving in different cities like New York, New Orleans and Chicago. Jazz quickly replaced the blues as American popular music, in the form of big band swing, a kind of dance music from the early 1930s. Swing used large ensembles, and was not generally improvised, in contrast with the free-flowing form of other kinds of jazz. With swing spreading across the nation, other genres continued to evolve towards popular traditions. In Louisiana, Cajun and Creole music was adding influences from blues and generating some regional hit records, while Appalachian folk music was spawning jug bands, honky tonk bars and close harmony duets, which were to evolve into the pop-folk of the 1940s, bluegrass and country.

Early 1960s

The first few years of the 1960s saw major innovation in popular music. Girl groups, surf and hot rod, and the Nashville Sound were popular, while an Appalachian folk and African American blues roots revival became dominant among a smaller portion of the listening audience. An even larger population of young audiences in the United Kingdom listened to American

1970s

The early 1970s saw popular music being dominated by folk-based singer-songwriters like John Denver, Carole King and James Taylor, followed by the rise of heavy metal subgenres, glam, country rock and later, disco. Philly soul and pop-funk was also popular, while world music fusions became more commonplace and a major klezmer revival occurred among the Jewish community. Beginning in the early 70s, hip hop arose in New York City, drawing on diverse 11 influences from both white and black folk music, Jamaican toasting and the performance poetry of Gil Scott-Heron

1980s and 90s

The 1980s began with New Wave dominating the charts, and continued through a new form of silky smooth soul, and ended with a popular glam metal trend dominating mainstream America. Meanwhile, the first glimmer of punk rock's popularity began, and new alternative rock and hardcore found niche markets. Hip hop diversified as a few artists gained mainstream success, finally breaking through in the last few months of the decade.

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by mohammad mustafa

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blues. By the middle of the decade, British blues and R&B bands like The Beatles, The Who and the Rolling Stones were topping the charts in what became known as the British Invasion, alongside newly-secularized soul music and the mainstreaming of the Bakersfield Sound. Folk-based singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan also added new innovations to popular music, expanding its possibilities, such as by making singles more than the standard three minutes in length.


History of classical music traditions Western Art Music Medieval music

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While musical life was undoubtedly rich in the early Medieval era, as attested by artistic depictions of instruments, writings about music, and other records, the only repertory of music which has survived from before 800 to the present day is the plainsong liturgical music of the Roman Catholic Church, the largest part 12 of which is called Gregorian chant. Pope Gregory I, who gave his name to the musical repertory and may himself have been a composer, is usually claimed to be the originator of the musical portion of the liturgy in its present form, though the sources giving details on his contribution date from more than a hundred years after his death. Many scholars believe that his reputation has been exaggerated by legend. Most of the chant repertory was composed anonymously in the centuries between the time of Gregory and Charlemagne. During the 9th century several important developments took place. First, there was a major effort by the Church to unify the many chant traditions, and suppress many of them in favor of the Gregorian liturgy. Second, the earliest polyphonic music was sung, a form of parallel singing known as organum. Third, and of greatest

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significance for music history, notation was reinvented after a lapse of about five hundred years, though it would be several more centuries before a system of pitch and rhythm notation evolved having the precision and flexibility that modern musicians take for granted. Several schools of polyphony flourished in the period after 1100: the St. Martial school of organum, the music of which was often characterized by a swiftly moving part over a single sustained line; the Notre Dame school of polyphony, which included the composers Léonin and Pérotin, and which produced the first music for more than two parts around 1200; the musical melting-pot of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, a pilgrimage destination and site where musicians from many traditions came together in the late Middle Ages, the music of whom survives in the Codex Calixtinus; and the English school, the music of which survives in the Worcester Fragments and the Old Hall Manuscript. Alongside these schools of sacred music a vibrant tradition of secular song developed, as exemplified in the music of the troubadours, trouvères and Minnesänger. Much of the later secular music of the early Renaissance evolved from the forms, ideas, and the musical aesthetic of the troubadours, courtly poets and itinerant musicians,

whose culture was largely exterminated during the Albigensian Crusade in the early 13th century. Forms of sacred music which developed during the late 13th century included the motet, conductus, discant, and clausulae. One unusual development was the Geisslerlieder, the music of wandering bands of flagellants during two periods: the middle of the 13th century (until they were suppressed by the Church); and the period during and immediately following the Black Death, around 1350, when their activities were vividly recorded and well-documented with notated music. Their music mixed folk song styles with penitential or apocalyptic texts. The 14th century in European music history is dominated by the style of the ars nova, which by convention is grouped with the medieval era in music, even though it had much in common with early Renaissance ideals and aesthetics. Much of the surviving music of the time is secular, and tends to use the formes fixes: the ballade, the virelai, the lai, the rondeau, which correspond to poetic forms of the same names. Most pieces in these forms are for one to three voices, likely with instrumental accompaniment: famous composers include Guillaume de Machaut and Francesco Landini. wikipedia


Bob Dylan American singer, songwriter & musician May 24, 1941


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om Till is one of Americ since 1977. In 1998, T history, and travel subj Till's stock photograph Outside Magazine, Canon Copie Eastman Kodak, Reader's Digest Using mainly a large format (4 x him to Qatar, Australia, France, States. A 35-year resident of Mo region. Profiles about Till have appeare Magazine, and other publications galvanize support and illustrate 1996, the NANPA/Guilfoyle awar photographers by Nature's Best 2006, Till was awarded the prest one of only a few landscape pho into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall Till is also the sole photographer Mikenna Clokey, Tom's daughter, Tom's son Bryce is a junior at We Till's other interests are movies, b "I have a great job, and I feel very biggest thrill, is being in the field a photography is really about sharin selves. It's also about noticing thin I have yearly when my film come


with Tom Till

published American Photographer

ed in Backpacker Magazine, Outdoor Photographer Magazine, Camera & Darkroom s. Also numerous conservation and environmental groups have used Till's photos to their publications. Till was awarded Arizona Highways Photographer of the Year in rd for landscape photography in 1994, and was named one of the ten best landscape Magazine. Till received a special award from The Nature Conservancy in 1998. In tigious NANPA Fellow Award for 20 years of excellence in nature photography. Till is otographers to receive the honor, and the only Utahan. Also in 2006, Till was inducted of Fame. Featured in the book World's Best Landscape Photographers: Landscape, for over 30 books. r, is a journalist and professional river guide in the Grand Canyon and on other rivers. estminster College in Salt Lake City, and a member of the Westminster golf team. baseball, the Beach Boys, cosmology, rock and roll, and the television series Lost. y lucky and blessed to spend my life in the world's most beautiful places. The first, and all the time. Although I get a great deal of personal satisfaction and fun from my work, ng what you are experiencing with others not lucky or patient enough to be there themngs everyone else passes by. The other great moments are the 25 or so "Christmases" es back from the lab, and the thrill I still get from seeing my work in print," says Till.

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ca's most published photographers. Over 150,000 of his images have appeared in print Till opened the Tom Till Gallery in Moab, Utah. Till's images depict landscape, nature, jects worldwide, including all fifty states and nearly sixty countries overseas. hy images have been featured by National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, ers, Delta Airlines, The New Yorker Magazine, Life Magazine, Browntrout Calendars, t, Rand McNally, MGM, Arizona Highways, Lonely Planet, and thousands of others. x 5) camera, Till travels extensively to create new material. Recent trips have taken Mexico, the Caribbean, China, South Africa, Brazil, and numerous sites in the United oab, Utah, Till has one of the largest photo libraries in existence of the Four Corners

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Interviewer: Ebrahim Golabbakhsh

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efore we start I have to thank You for the time You are giving us for This interview,

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yeah sure no problem, Q: what made you think about establishing the Park gallery? A: Actually I don't own that Gallery anymore but I wanted to get direct feedback from my fans and hear what they really think about my work. Q: You have a lot of pictures from Utah. Do you have any . . . anything . . . as I think you already answered that question? You live in Utah? A: Yes. Q: That's why you have a lot of pictures from there? A: Yeah, uh huh, and what we call the Four Corners . . . Area . . .although, uh it's probably mostly images come, well, a lot of my images come from there, which would be Colorado; Utah; New Mexico and Arizona . . . and then a . . .but I've photographed in all 50 states here and then about 70 , over 70 countries overseas . . .so I 16 do a lot of traveling in the US on out of the US, so there is pretty a broad geographic range of the one I mentioned. Q: Everybody has a turning point in their career or in their jump, what was yours? When did yours happen? A: Wow a turning point? The turning points for me came at the beginning of my career. The first time that I ever saw a 4 x 5 transparency and how beautiful it was, that was when a friend of mine had shown me some that he had taken, and when I saw those I knew then that I wanted to do that, make 4 x 5 transparencies. Another turning point, I guess, was when I became a full time photographer. I was a teacher and I photographed as much as I could when I was teacher in my vacations, and so on and then I went full time in 1985, that was a big turning point, when I could spend all my energy and time on photography,

although I had been spending a great deal before that And then the another the lastest turning point I've had I had to give up the4 x5's because of the effect it was having on me my body and carrying around 40 lbs of equipment for 30 years on my knees were starting to go bad and two years ago I went completely digital and that has been a major turning point too and I really enjoy digital a great deal. I shot 35mm many, many, many years ago. So it was fun to get back into that I am having as much fun now and I did in the beginning. Those are the major points Q: If someone like a young artist wants to become someone like you or have a revolutionary move or success in his work? What does he need? A: I think he'd need a couple things. One would be, you know it's a very competitive field, and things are really different now than they were then when I started. You’ve got so many different ways to get your photos seen now. I don't know is a lot of them pay a lot of money so it's a lot harder to make a living now than when I started. But, I think you have to have an obsession with it, first of all and absolutely be determined that you will not fail and every time you get knocked down or something doesn't work you back up and try it again and you just have to have the complete and absolute determination that you are going to succeed. And actually I think only a handful of people have that drive and I guess that is good because then everyone would have my job and I wouldn't have it if everyone had the drive but I think most people are not willing to do what it takes to be in a position I am in. So, it's not any great talent any great personality or character trait except for absolute obsession and determination to make a living at this. Q: Have you ever get to a point that you think you don't have enough subjects or ideas? A: No, because I’m shooting nature and landscape and I'm lucky enough that I get to go to neat places all the time all over the world and every place is new to me a new revelation so I never have problem with ideas and even where I live here, where I have been photographing for over 35 years, that’s always something new here such a beautiful place mostly desert and there is always some kind


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of new light, there is always some kind of new subject to find here and no others no problem with finding new ideas and there' too many ideas frankly, too many possibilities, it’s not the other way round Q: You've lightly answered this question but, analog or digital? A: Yeah, digital now. I had to do that. I've been quite happy with digital. I'm committed to digital now, so it's great but I have one hundred thousand (100,000) 4 x 5 transparencies here in my office and every day I look at some of the old ones and we scan them up, so I have a little bit of nostalgia, well, I have a lot of nostalgia for home and 4 x 5 (Did you say you had 100,000 pictures) Yeah, 4x5's (God bless America, that's a huge number) Well, it's a long, long career I have had, and that was spending well, last year I was out almost 275 days So it ends up being a lot of images. So, I'm committed to digital but I love film and I love 4x5 and I'm sad sometimes that I can't still do that but the digital is fantastic. Q: where were you teaching before you became a full time photographer? A: I was an English teacher actually at high school level and I taught English at the high school level. I don't have a degree in photography or take photography at the university. Even though my university has a good photography department I just, I kinda decided after college I was a musician, a professional musician. During that period I decided I wanted to become a photographer. I moved17 from Mid-West USA, where it is very flat, as you probably know, although beautiful but flat and came out here to the deserts and the mountains to the high plateaus. Q: Do you miss teaching? Do you still like it? A: No. . . . Well I still teach a lot, actually. I think I did eight weeks with a workshop, about two months with a workshop last year and I'll probably do about the same this year, so and that's all teaching. It's mostly adults of course and I do a lot of speaking engagements where I show my


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images and talk and travel around the country and give programs at different events for photographers. I am still teaching and enjoying it, actually, quite a lot. Q: What’s the difference between landscape, portrait or industrial photography? A: I'm not really qualified to say because I have only done the one genre. Just landscape and nature and well I have done some history. I've got a lot of archeological stuff and historical stuff and some travel stuff. So basically everything I have shot has been self assigned and stuff that I am interested in and I love, so, I'm a little bit shy so working with people who is not fun for me. So I’ve never done any portraiture and I don’t have any desire to do industrial photography this doesn’t appeal to me at all. So I think the key thing is, when you are photographing you have to photograph something you love, subjects you love, that comes through in your imagery and you love the subject you are on. I'm just in the one area and I don't know about the other two really. Q: You as someone that mostly did landscapes, I think you’re mostly engaged with the land and stuff, there is danger also like some, rain or stuff like that, and did they make you tired? A: a lot of people think they would like my job, you know, because you get to travel all over the world and to the most beautiful places and take of them and a lot of traveling 18pictures overseas is stressful and you know everybody that doesn’t us and it's not always easy and then when you’re out doors yeah there have been times when I have been in danger from weather and , I've been in volcano's and I have been at lava flows and I have been in countries that have been a little unsafe like South Africa and Brazil and even the United States is in danger sometimes. From other people I don't necessarily mean from the environment, always, but from other people. Yeah, so there is heat, cold, bugs and all that sort of stuff. You know, if you really love what you are doing, you can spend some of your budget on making sure you have clothing, so when it is cold, for example, you are well dressed you can stay outdoors in the cold for hours and wait. I think sometimes, the clothing is the most important equipment that I have or I have a really good mosquito



repellent suit that I use in the Amazon. Those things are almost as important as the camera to be able to withstand some of these places. Q: Are there any relative to each other the pictures you’re taking? Do you have any goals like, for example, saving the environment. A: Definitely, my nature pictures and even the non-nature pictures are, well the idea behind them is trying to preserve what's there I think it’s very difficult and I can't understand how you can be a nature photographer and landscape photographer and not be a strong environmentalist. It just wouldn't make any sense. I'm proud to say that out of a lot of environmental groups that use my images to help save places, especially here in Utah where I live, my images have been used a lot in campaigns to help preserve national parks and create wilderness and help preserve open space and all sorts of things. It's been a big part of my motivation. We spend

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a lot of time in my office doing pro bono work for environmental groups. Q: You’re traveling 275 days a year and there’s no doubt that you love this but how do you manage your time? Like publishing the work and the teaching that you mentioned? A: I count the teaching as part of the teaching and my kids are grown and I don't have a wife so I am free to do what I want and what I want to do is photograph. A lot of the time I have a good office staff here to handle things when I am gone, so I just go. Q: How did you do it when the kids were small? A: When my kids were little I actually did a lot of days in the fields because we would go out as a family and we would go out for 70 or 80 days at a time traveling across the United States, mostly, and to foreign countries too. They would go with me and my wife would go with me and we would all go together and travel

all over and I would photograph everyday and they would be with me. As they got older the number of days in the fields went down some from the time they were in high school sometimes I would only drive 150 days but since they are gone now I'm kinda back to a lot of time in the field again. Q: Have you ever thought about your Proliferation? A: I had a quite few none of them really become a copy of me though, But I never hesitated to give my knowledge and in fact all I have right now is experiences book The book Success with landscape has almost all my secrets in them I have about 30 book and I had one for almost every year and sometimes I was working on 3 or 4 of them at the same time but this one is educational book I have it was published in England but you can get it here in the United states and Europe.

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Architecture

Part III

Modernism and reaction

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he dissatisfaction with such a general situation at the turn of the twentieth century gave rise to many new lines of thought that served as precursors to Modern Architecture. Notable among these is the Deutscher Werkbund, formed in 1907 to produce better quality machine made objects. The rise of the profession of industrial design is usually placed here. Following this lead, the Bauhaus school, founded in Germany in 1919, 50consciously rejected history and looked at architecture as a synthesis of art, craft, and technology. When Modern architecture was first practiced, it was an avant-garde movement with moral, philosophical, and aesthetic underpinnings. Immediately after World War I, pioneering modernist architects sought to develop a completely new style appropriate for a new post-war social and economic order, focused on meeting the needs of the middle and working classes. They rejected the architectural practice of the academic refinement of historical styles which served the rapidly declining aristocratic order. The approach of the Modernist architects was to reduce buildings to pure forms, removing historical references and ornament in favor of functionalist details. Buildings that displayed their construction and structure, exposing steel beams and concrete surfaces instead of hiding them

behind traditional forms, were seen as beautiful in their own right. Architects such as Mies van der Rohe worked to create beauty based on the inherent qualities of building materials and modern construction techniques, trading traditional historic forms for simplified geometric forms, celebrating the new means and methods made possible by the Industrial Revolution. Many architects resisted Modernism, finding it devoid of the decorative richness of ornamented styles. As the founders of the International Style lost influence in the late 1970s, Postmodernism developed as a reaction against the austerity of Modernism. Robert Venturi's contention that a "decorated shed" (an ordinary building which is functionally designed inside and embellished on the outside) was better than a "duck" (a building in which the whole form and its function are tied together) gives an idea of this approach.

Architecture today

Part of the architectural profession, and also some non-architects, responded to Modernism and Postmodernism by going to what they considered the root of the problem. They felt that architecture was not a personal philosophical or aesthetic pursuit by individualists; rather it had to consider everyday needs of people and use technology to give a livable environment. The Design Methodology Movement involving people such as Christopher Alexander started searching

for more people-oriented designs. Extensive studies on areas such as behavioral, environmental, and social sciences were done and started informing the design process. As the complexity of buildings began to increase (in terms of structural systems, services, energy and technologies), architecture started becoming more multi-disciplinary. Architecture today usually requires a team of specialist professionals, with the architect being one of many, although usually the team leader. During the last two decades of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, the field of architecture saw the rise of specializations by project type, technological expertise or project delivery methods. In addition, there has been an increased separation of the 'design' architect from the 'project' architect. Moving the issues of environmental sustainability into the mainstream is a significant development in the architecture profession. Sustainability in architecture was pioneered in the 1970s by architects such as Ian McHarg in the US and Brenda and Robert Vale in the UK and New Zealand. There has been acceleration in the number of buildings which seek to meet green building sustainable design principles. It is now expected that architects will integrate sustainable principles into their projects. An example of an architecturally innovative green building is the Dynamic Tower which will be powered by wind turbines and solar panels. wikipedia


The Rise of Modern Architecture in Postwar America Class and Spatial Roots of Aesthetic Change W. David Gartman, Ph.D. allacademic research

unlike the European modernists, felt compelled to disguise these under historical or entertaining decoration. What factors explain the initial reluctance of America to adopt a style based on its own system of Fordist mass production? How and why did these factors suddenly change in the decade following World War II? No direct determination of aesthetics by the economic systemof production is plausible in this case, as some simplistic Marxists might assert. Europeans who had yet to achieve mass production pioneered the aesthetic that idealized it, while Americans who pioneered mass production did not adopt its aesthetic. I will argue that the different class structures and alliances in Europe and America were major factors in the timing of their adoption of modern architecture. But this influence of class on aesthetics was not direct but mediated by the important category of space. America’s postwar embrace of modern architecture was facilitated not merely by a change in class structure but also by a redistribution of these classes in the landscape. Class and space interacted in complex ways to first prevent and then facilitate51 aesthetic change. A useful way of formulating the relation between class and aesthetic form is offered by Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson (1971, 1981). He argues that art is not a passive reflection of dominant class interests but an active, though unconscious, intervention in the class struggles of a society. For Jameson, art is shaped by the contradictions of a society, which artists seek to resolve in forms. The nature and type of these formal resolutions depend on the class position of the producer and the relation of her class to others in history. The artist’s class and its struggles provide the conceptual limits to her forms, rendering impossible imaginary resolutions that contradict its interests. All artistic productions thus intervene symbolically in the social struggles of the day, but these political interventions are most often unintentional and unconscious.

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he Rise of Modern Architecture in Postwar America: The Class and Spatial Roots of Aesthetic Change A walk in the downtown business district of any major American city in the late 1950s would have convinced anyone knowledgeable about architecture that even though America and its allies had won the previous decade’s military hostilities, German architects had won the war of architectural aesthetics. Most of the new office skyscrapers built after World War II by American corporations and government agencies were in the modern style pioneered in Europe, especially Germany. And many were designed by European architects themselves, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after Hitler’s rise to power. Although American cities like Chicago and New York still contained many older buildings in the historical styles that prevailed in the first half of the century, the postwar renewal of cities was dominated by a distinctly European vision of urban aesthetics. Modern architecture came late to the United States. This aesthetic revolution emerged mainly in central European countries, especially Germany, during the interwar period. There architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe introduced an antihistorical aesthetic that used industrial materials to create buildings in sparse, undecorated, functional forms that celebrated the machine age. They idealized mass production and argued that houses should be built like Henry Ford built his Model T car, which these architects saw as a thing of beauty. Yet, in America, the land that pioneered mass production in the first two decades of the twentieth century, modern architecture did not take hold until the post-World-War-II period. In the intervening thirty years or so most American architects continued to design buildings in historical styles or a more decorative modern style called “modernistic” or Art Deco. Even though Americans architects pioneered the use of industrial building methods and materials, they,


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sing this conceptual framework, I have argued elsewhere (Gartman 1998; 2000) that the modern style in architecture expressed the interests and ideology of the intellectual bourgeoisie. As defined by Pierre Bourdieu (1984), this is the fraction of the dominant class that makes its living through its cultural capital (education, skills, knowledge) rather than its economic capital (money). The simple machine forms, smooth surfaces, exposed structural supports, and indus52trial materials used in modern architecture testified to the importance of the technical knowledge and skills of the engeneers, managers, and technicians who were central to the new process of mass production that arose in the early twentieth-century capitalist societies. Modern architecture arose mainly in central Europe, not America, because of the different positions of the intellectual bourgeoisie in each region. In both regions there arose early in the century among this class fraction a technocratic movement, which sought to change the basis for distributing power and wealth in capitalist society from economic capital to education and knowledge. In the United States, however, the independent technocratic movement was relatively weak, for in the first years of the twentieth century modernizing capitalists incorporated these technical professions

into the new production process in order to overcome conflicts with workers and increase profitability (Wiebe 1967; Weinstein 1968; Noble 1977). Consequently, the knowledge-based professions had no need for a separate ideological justification of their ambitions but adopted the capitalists’ ideology of the market, in which power and wealth are seen as rewards for the useful products people produce and sell to others. Further, because most knowledge-based professionals in America were now employed by the mass-production corporations catering to the working masses, they were forced to abandon their aesthetic preference for functionalism and yield to the masses’ demand for hedonistic decoration and entertainment. (On the aesthetic preferences of the different classes and class fractions, see Bourdieu, 1984). As a result of this weakening of the technocratic movement in America, the modern architecture that was its aesthetic expression was attenuated and stillborn. Before the turn of the century, a functionalist aesthetic was developed by Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. But their protomodernism was defeated by a renewal of historical and modernistic architecture after the turn of the century, as the technocratic movement was weakened by the incorporation of professionals into large corporations (Giedion 1967: 381-96). This change was also the result of the

demand of working-class Americans in the emerging culture of massconsumption. As the Frankfurt School has argued (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972), the working class demanded in its consumer goods escape from and compensation for the loss of power and individuality in the increasingly rationalized mass-production process. They could not find these in the functionalist and mechanical forms preferred by the technocratic professionals, which were constructed to reflect the efficient, rationalized work process that workers were trying to escape. Workers demanded instead goods with surfeits of decoration, often in historical styles, to cover over the brutal efficiency of the machines to which they were subjected (Cohen 1982; Forty 1986: 101). This demand impacted architecture, even though most working-class families did not purchase but rented housing in urban neighborhoods near their factories. They nevertheless “consumed” the architecture of the entertainment venues they patronized, such as amusement parks and movie theaters. Further, during the early part of the century mass-production corporations advertised themselves and their wares by building attention-grabbing office buildings, such as the Chrysler Building in New York. Both types of buildings of mass consumption avoided the sober and rational modern style and resorted to a more ex-


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modernists stripped their buildings of extraneous, nonfunctional decoration in the belief that this slowed down production and raised costs. Modern architecture was thus an ideological testament to the efficient, functional knowledge and techniques of educated professionals, who cast themselves as the saviors of society. This class found no takers for their programs or designs among industrialists, who believed them to be too expensive and disruptive. But they were embraced by the governments of many central European countries, many of which were dominated by social democrats seeking to quell the divisive class conflicts of the period. In Germany in particular, the Weimar state launched numerous programs to encourage industrial rationalization, one of which was a program to mass53 produce housing for workers in large estates (Nolan 1994; Lane 1985). Modernist architects like Ernst May and Bruno Taut designed these housing estates. There is evidence that European workers, like their American comrades, did not really care for the stark, efficient forms of this housing, for it reminded them of the economic rationalization that threatened their jobs (Boudon 1972). But unlike America workers, they could not register their tastes in the market, for this housing was provided by the state. Workers had little choice but to accept the modern aesthetic of the architects hired by the state.

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The modernists’ architectural designs reflected their attempts to reconcile the social contradictions of this era in favor of the intellectual bourgeoisie, of which they were a part. Architects like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in Germany and Le Corbusier in France argued that the only way to avoid revolution in the tumultuous period immediately after World War I was to better the lives of common workers through mass-producing consumer goods, including housing. The job of architects and designers was to cooperate with engineers and further mass production by designing products and housing that were efficient and compatible with the machines and methods of mass production (Le Corbusier 1986; Gropius 1938). Thus, the modern architecture that emerged in central Europe was part of a strategy of the intellectual bourgeoisie to practically and ideologically advance economic rationalization, or Fordism, as they called it, and further its class interests. In their designs for buildings, the modernists idealized the technical rationality of these professions by purifying and beautifying the forms of mass-production machinery and its products. They used the simple, elementary shapes that resulted from the standardization of products demanded by mass production. They also preferred the straight line to the curve because of its predominance in mass-produced machines like the automobile. And

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pressive, decorative aesthetic known as modernistic or Art Deco, which covered over the reminders of machine rationality as demanded by working-class consumers who lived in urban areas and “consumed” them (Koolhaas 1994). Thus, both workers’ aesthetic demands and their location at the heart of the urban landscape of mass consumption were crucial factors in delaying modern architecture in America. In interwar central Europe, however, the technocratic movement of the intellectual bourgeoisie was stronger and more independent, and ultimately produced modern architecture as its aesthetic expression. The employment and ambitions of the technical professions here were blocked by an industrial class reluctant to modernize industry due to its economic, political, and cultural alliance with the old regime (Mayer 1981). This left the intellectual bourgeoisie of managers, scientists, and artists with little demand for their services and subordinated in power and prestige. This class fraction consequently developed an autonomous technocratic movement with its own ideology that pushed for the economic “rationalization” of industry based on the U.S. model, which, it argued, would reconcile the interests of workers and capitalists and further material progress for all (Maier 1970; Nolan 1994). Modern architecture was the aesthetic wing of this technocratic movement in interwar Europe.


PatienceWright American-born sculptor

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atience Lovell Wright (1725, Bordentown, New Jersey – March 54 23, 1786, London) was the first recognized American-born sculptor. She chiefly created wax figures of people. She loved to write poetry and was also a painter. Patience Lovell was born into a Quaker farm family with a vegetarian diet. She married Joseph Wright in 1748. For years, she had amused herself and her five children by molding faces out of putty, bread dough, and wax. After her husband died in 1769, her pastime became a full-time occupation as she began earning a living from molding portraits in tinted wax. Making wax sculptures of people was popular art form in colonial America. Patience Wright was particularly good at it. She had a "energetic wildness" when she worked for she loved the work she did. When her wax figures couldn't take the heat (due to a fire), Patience took a boat to England.

She kept her fondness for her "dear America". In 1772, Wright traveled to England and opened a successful wax museum. Benjamin Franklin introduced her to London society. Wright became known as the "Promethean modeler," for her New World egalitarianism and often coarse speech as well as her artwork. She was patronized by George III, and sculpted him and other members of British royalty and nobility, but fell from royal favor because of her open support for the colonial cause during the American Revolution. Never forgetting her Patriot loyalties, she became a spy for the cause, often sending messages to America inside her wax figures. When Patience was constructing these sculptors she didn't want anyone, who may inform the King, to know, so if Patience ever had any visitors while constructing the sculptors she would hide the bust (the head of a sculptor) underneath her apron, and try to distract her visitor by engaging in a conversa-

tion... Wright's sculpture of friend William Pitt still stands in Westminster. She passed on information on how the British were preparing for the war. Some of Wrights other friends include Benjamin Franklin, the King and Queen of England, and William Pitt. She sculpts wax figures of some of the people on both sides (loyalist and patriots). The reason why she did this is because she wanted to make as many positive images as she could of both of the sides. Patience was also a spy in the revolution. Patience Wright's son Joseph Wright (1756-1793) was a well-known portrait painter. Her daughter Phoebe married British painter John Hoppner; their son, Henry Parkyns Hoppner, went on to become a Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. She died after a bad fall in 1786 in London. Her home at 100 Farnsworth Avenue in Bordentown, New Jersey still stands. wikipedia


Wax model portrait of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, by Patience Lovell Wright (1725-1786), 1779


History of Visual arts of the United States refers to the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. A parallel development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement, which began as a reaction to the industrial revolution. Developments in modern art in Europe came to America from exhibitions in New York City such as the Armory Show in 1913. Previously American Artists had based the majority of their work on Western Painting and European Arts. After World War II, New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. Since then many American Movements have shaped Modern and Post Modern art. Art in the United States today covers a huge range of styles.

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Eighteenth century

fter the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which marked the official beginning of the American national identity, the new nation needed a history, and part of that history would be expressed visually. Most of early American art (from the late 18th century through the early 19th century) consists of history painting and portraits. Painters such as Gilbert Stuart made portraits of the newly elected government officials, while John Singleton Copley was painting emblematic portraits for the increasingly prosperous merchant class, and painters such as John Trumbull 56 were making large battle scenes of the Revolutionary War. E V E R L A S T I N G

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Nineteenth century

America's first well-known school of painting-the Hudson River School-appeared in 1820. As with music and literature, this development was delayed until artists perceived that the New World offered subjects unique to itself; in this case the westward expansion of settlement brought the transcendent beauty of frontier landscapes to painters' attention. The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced such later artists as Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who depicted rural America the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them. Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism. Henry Ossawa Tanner who studied with Thomas Eakins was one of the first important African American painters. Paintings of the Great West, particularly the act of conveying the sheer size of the land and the cultures of the native people living on it, were starting to emerge as well. Artists such as George Catlin broke from traditional styles of showing land, most often done to show how much a subject owned, to show the West and its people as honestly as possible. Many painters who are considered American spent some time in Europe and met other European artists in Paris and London,


f painting in United States by mohammad mustafa


such as Mary Cassatt and Whistler.

Twentieth Century

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Controversy soon became a way of life for American artists. In fact, much of American painting and sculpture since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. "To hell with the artistic values," announced Robert Henri (1865-1929). He was the leader of what critics called the Ashcan school of painting, after the group's portrayals of the squalid aspects of city life. American realism became the new direction for American visual artists at the turn of the century. In photography the PhotoSecession movement led by Alfred Steiglitz made pathways for photography as an emerging art form. Soon the Ashcan school artists gave way to modernists arriving from Europe the cubists and abstract painters promoted by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) at his 291 Gallery in New York City. John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Henry Maurer, Arthur Dove, Henrietta Shore, Stuart Davis, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Gerald Murphy were some important early American modernist painters. After World War I many American artists also rejected the modern trends emanating from the Armory Show and European influences such as those from the School of Paris. Instead they chose to adopt academic realism in depicting American urban and rural scenes. Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth were referred to as Precision58 ists and the artists from the Ashcan school or American realism: notably George Bellows, Everett Shinn, George Benjamin Luks, William Glackens, and John Sloan and others developed socially conscious imagery in their works.

The American Southwest

Following the First World War, the completion of the Santa Fe Railroad enabled American settlers to travel across the west, as far as the California coast. New artists’ colonies started growing up around Santa Fe and Taos, the artist’s primary subject matter being the native people and landscapes of the Southwest. Images of the Southwest became a popular form of advertising, used most significantly by the Santa Fe Railroad to entice settlers to come west and enjoy the “unsullied landscapes.” Walter Ufer, Bert Greer Phillips, E. Irving Couse, William Henry Jackson, and Georgia O'Keeffe are some of the more prolific artists of the Southwest.

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was another significant development in American art. In the 1920s and 30s a new generation of educated and politically astute African-American men and women emerged who sponsored literary societies and art and industrial exhibitions to combat racist stereotypes. The movement showcases the range of talents within African-American communities. Though the movement included artists from across America, it was centered in Harlem, and work from Harlem graphic artist Aaron Douglas and photographer James VanDerZee became emblematic of the movement. Some of the artists include Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, Archibald Motley, Lois Mailou Jones, Palmer Hayden and Sargent Johnson.

of abstract art to express feelings, emotions, what is within the artist, and not what stands without. The first generation of abstract expressionists was composed of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, Hans

New Deal Art

When the Great Depression hit, president Roosevelt’s New Deal created several public arts programs. The purpose of the programs was to give work to artists and decorate public buildings, usually with a national theme. The first of these projects, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), was created after successful lobbying by the unemployed artists of the Artists' Union. The PWAP lasted less than one year, and produced nearly 15,000 works of art. It was followed by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (FAP/WPA) in 1935, which funded some of the most well-known American artists. Several separate and related movements began and developed during the Great Depression including American scene painting, Regionalism, and Social Realism. Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, Ben Shahn, Joseph Stella, Reginald Marsh, Isaac Soyer, Raphael Soyer, and Jack Levine were some of the best known artists.

Abstract Expressionism

In the years after World War II, a group of New York artists formed the first American movement to exert major influence internationally: abstract expressionism. This term, which had first been used in 1919 in Berlin, was used again in 1946 by Robert Coates in The New York Times, and was taken up by the two major art critics of that time, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. It has always been criticized as too large and paradoxical, yet the common definition implies the use

Hofmann, James Brooks, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Mark Tobey, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov and others. Though the numerous artists encompassed by this label had widely different styles, contemporary critics found several common points between them. Many first generation abstract ex-


new understanding of process. The emphasis and intensification of color and large open expanses of surface were two of the principles applied to the movement called Color field Painting. Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman were categorized as such. Another movement was called Action Painting, characterized by spontane-

lem de Kooning famously said about Pollock "he broke the ice for the rest of us." Ironically Pollock's large repetitious expanses of linear fields are also characteristic of Color Field painting as well, and art critic Michael Fried pointed that out in his essay for the catalog of Three American painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella at the Fogg Art Museum in 1965. Despite the

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pressionists were influenced both by the Cubists' works (black & white copies in art reviews and the works themselves at the 291 Gallery or the Armory Show), and by the European Surrealists, most of them abandoned formal composition and representation of real objects; and by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Often the abstract expressionists decided to try instinctual, intuitive, spon-

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taneous arrangements of space, line, shape and color. Abstract Expressionism can be characterized by two major elements - the large size of the canvases used, (partially inspired by Mexican frescoes and the works they made for the WPA in the 1930s), and the strong and unusual use of brushstrokes and experimental paint application with a

ous reaction, powerful brushstrokes, dripped and splashed paint and the strong physical movements used in the production of a painting. Jackson Pollock is an example of an Action Painter: his creative process, incorporating thrown and dripped paint from a stick or poured directly from the can; he revolutionized painting methods. Wil-

disagreements between art critics, Abstract Expressionism marks a turningpoint in the history of American art: the 1940s and 1950s saw international attention shift from European -Parisianart, to American -New York- art. Color field painting went on as a movement: artists in the 1950s, such as Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert


Motherwell, and in the 1960s, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler, sought to make paintings which would eliminate superfluous rhetoric with large, flat areas of color.

After Abstract Expressionism

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During the 1950s abstract painting in America evolved into movements such as Neo-Dada, Post painterly abstraction, Op Art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, Shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction, and the continuation of Abstract expressionism. As a response to the tendency toward abstraction imagery emerged through various new movements like Pop Art, the Bay Area Figurative Movement and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism. Lyrical Abstraction along with the Fluxus movement and Postminimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of Artforum in 1969) sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Postminimalism often incorporating industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, and often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse. Lyrical Abstraction, Conceptual Art, Postminimalism, Earth Art, Video, Performance art, Installation art, along with the continuation of Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Hard-edge painting, Minimal Art, Op art, Pop Art, Photorealism and New Realism extended the boundaries of Contemporary Art in the mid-1960s through the 1970s. Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism especially in the freewheeling usage of paint - texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble the effects seen in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting. However the styles are markedly different. During the 1960s and 1970s painters as powerful and influential as Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Lee Krasner, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Josef Albers, Elmer Bischoff, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Gene Davis, 60Frank Stella, Joan Mitchell, Friedel Dzubas, and younger artists like Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, Sam Gilliam, Sean Scully, Elizabeth Murray, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, Susan Rothenberg, Ross Bleckner, Richard Tuttle, Julian Schnabel, and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.

Other Modern American Movements

Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and Jasper Johns (1930), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1930-1987), Larry Rivers (1923-2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips. Realism has also been popular in the United States, despite modernist tendencies, such as the city scenes by Edward Hopper and the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. In certain places, for example Chicago, Abstract Expressionism never caught on; in Chicago, the dominant art style was grotesque, symbolic realism, as exemplified by the Chicago Imagists Cosmo Campoli (1923-1997), Jim Nutt (1938), Ed Paschke (1939-2004), and Nancy Spero (1926).


Thomas Hart Benton painter and muralist April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975


The American Mercury Frank Luther Mott

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he American Mercury was an influential journal of opinion and literature that debuted in January 1924 and gained a wide audience under the editorial control of its cofounders, George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken. Known for the caustic satire of its editorial essays, the monthly review created a sensation among intellectual circles during the 1920s, with its debunking of such cultural icons as Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman and its mixture of fiction, literary criticism, political analysis, and cultural comment. Counting such authors as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Boyd, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill among its contributors, the American Mercury reached the height of its popularity in the mid to late 1920s, when its circulation numbered more than 75,000 per month. Among the most sensational episodes connected with the American Mercury was the 1926 "Hatrack affair," in which Mencken and the American Mercury became the targets of an obscenity charge by the Massachusetts Watch and Ward Society. Taking offense to "Hatrack," a profile of a smalltown prostitute which appeared in the April 1926 issue, Watch and Ward secretary Jason Frank Chase led the campaign to ban sales of the magazine in Boston. On the advice of attorney Arthur Garfield Hays of the American Civil Liberties Union, Menck-

en traveled to Boston and before a throng on onlookers personally sold a single copy of the issue to Chase. Mencken was promptly arrested and appeared in court the following morning, where the charge of distributing immoral literature was summarily dismissed. All related legal proceedings were subsequently decided in favor of the American Mercury, and the chief result of the affair was to heighten the scandalous reputation of the magazine and to augment its circulation. Following ongoing editorial disputes with Mencken, Nathan resigned his coeditor ship in July 1925 but remained a contributing editor and oversaw the "Theater" section and the "Clinical Notes" department until 1930. Circulation of the American Mercury began to decline in the early 1930s as Mencken's iconoclastic style lost its appeal under the altered national mood of the Great Depression. He resigned his editorship of the magazine in 1933. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf sold the American Mercury in 1935 to Paul Palmer and Lawrence E. Spivak, who instituted a number of format and editorial changes throughout the 1930s and 1940s in an effort to achieve profitability. A succession of owners and editors continued to publish the American Mercury as a journal of conservative opinion for several decades, although the magazine never regained the prominence and influence it had known during the Mencken era.

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Walt Whitman poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892


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Filmic effects

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nique amongst all the one minute long films made by the Edison Company, which recorded parts of the acts of variety performers for their Kinetoscope viewing machines, was The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. This showed a person dressed as the queen placing her head on the execution block in front of a small group of bystanders in Elizabethan dress. The executioner brings his axe down, and the queen's severed head drops onto the ground. This trick was worked by stopping the camera and 64replacing the actor with a dummy, then restarting the camera before the axe falls. The two pieces of film were then trimmed and cemented together so that the action appeared continuous when the film was shown. This film was among those exported to Europe with the first Kinetoscope machines in 1895, and was seen by Georges Méliès, who was putting on magic shows in his Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris at the time. He took up film-making in 1896, and after making imitations of other films from Edison, Lumière, and Robert Paul, he made Escamotage d’un dame chez Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady). This film shows a woman being made to vanish by using the same stop motion technique as the earlier Edison film. After this, Georges Méliès made many single shot films using this trick

over the next couple of years. The other basic set of techniques for trick cinematography involves double exposure of the film in the camera, which was first done by G.A. Smith in July 1898 in England. His The Corsican Brothers was described in the catalogue of the Warwick Trading Company, which took up the distribution of Smith's films in 1900, thus: “One of the twin brothers returns home from shooting in the Corsican Mountains, and is visited by the ghost of the other twin. By extremely careful photography the ghost appears *quite transparent*. After indicating that he has been killed by a sword-thrust, and appealing for vengeance, he disappears. A ‘vision’ then appears showing the fatal duel in the snow. To the Corsican's amazement, the duel and death of his brother are vividly depicted in the vision, and finally, overcome by his feelings, he falls to the floor just as his mother enters the room.” The ghost effect was simply done by draping the set in black velvet after the main action had been shot, and then re-exposing the negative with the actor playing the ghost going through the actions at the appropriate point. Likewise, the vision, which appeared within a circular vignette or matte, was similarly superimposed over a black area in the backdrop to the scene, rather than over a part of the set with detail in it, so that nothing appeared through the image, which seemed quite solid. Smith used this technique

again a year later in Santa Claus. Georges Méliès first used superimposition on a dark background in la Caverne maudite (The Cave of the Demons) made a couple of months later in 1898, and then elaborated it further with multiple superimpositions in the one shot in l’Homme de têtes (The Troublesome Heads). He then did it with further variations in numerous subsequent films.

Other special techniques

The other special effect technique that G.A. Smith initiated was reverse motion and the quality of self-motivating images. He did this by repeating the action a second time, while filming it with an inverted camera, and then joining the tail of the second negative to that of the first. The first films made using this device were Tipsy, Topsy, Turvy and The Awkward Sign Painter. The Awkward Sign Painter showed a sign painter lettering a sign, and in the reverse printing of the same footage appended to the standard print, the painting on the sign vanished under the painter's brush. The earliest surviving example of this technique is Smith's The House That Jack Built, made before September 1900. Here, a small boy is shown knocking down a castle just constructed by a little girl out of children's building blocks. Then a title appears, saying “Reversed”, and the action is repeated in reverse, so that the castle re-erects itself under his blows. Cecil Hepworth took this technique


film

Part III

Animation

The most important development

Narrative film construction

The way forward to making films made up of more than one shot

was led by films of the life of Jesus Christ. The first of these was made in France in 1897, and it was followed in the same year by a film of the passion play staged yearly in the Czech town of Horitz. This was filmed by Americans for exhibition outside the German-speaking world and was presented in special venues, not as a continuous film, but with the separate scenes interspersed with lantern slides, a lecture, and lives choral numbers, to increase the running time of the spectacle to about 90 minutes. Films of acted reproductions of scenes from the Greco-Turkish war were made by Georges Méliès in 1897, and although sold separately, these were no doubt shown in continuous sequence by exhibitors. In 1898 a few films of similar kind were made, but still none had continuous action moving from one shot into the next. The multi-shot films that Georges Mé-65 liès made in 1899 were much longer than those made by anybody else, but l’Affaire Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Case) and Cendrillon (Cinderella) still contained no action moving from one shot to the next one. Also, from Cendrillon onwards, Méliès made a dissolve between every shot in his films, which reduced any appearance of action continuity even further. To understand what is going on in both these films, the audience had to know their stories beforehand, or be told them by a presenter. wikipedia

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in this area of special techniques did not happen until 1905, when Edwin Porter made How Jones Lost His Roll, and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog. Both of these films had intertitles which were formed by the letters moving into place from a random scattering to form the words of the titles. This was done by exposing the film one frame at a time, and moving the letters a little bit towards their final position between each exposure. This is what has come to be called “single frame animation” or “object animation”, and it needs a slightly adapted camera that exposes only one frame for each turn of the crank handle, rather than the usual eight frames per turn. In 1906, Albert Edward Smith and James Stuart Blackton at Vitagraph took the next step, and in their Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, what appear to be cartoon drawings of people move from one pose to another. This is done for most of the length of this film by moving jointed cut-outs of the figures frame by frame between the exposures, just as Porter moved his letters. However, there is a very short section of the film where things are made to appear to move by altering the drawings themselves from frame to frame, which is how standard animated cartoons have since been made up to today.

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further, by printing the negative of the forwards motion backwards frame by frame, so producing a print in which the original action was exactly reversed. To do this he built a special printer in which the negative running through a projector was projected into the gate of a camera through a special lens giving a same-size image. This arrangement came to be called a “projection printer”, and eventually an “optical printer”. With it Hepworth made The Bathers in 1900, in which bathers who have undressed and jumped into the water appear to spring backwards out of it, and has their clothes magically fly back onto their bodies. The use of different camera speeds also appeared around 1900. To make Robert Paul's On a Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus (1899), the camera was turned very slowly, so that when the film was projected at the usual 16 frames per second, the scenery appeared to be passing at great speed. Cecil Hepworth used the opposite effect in The Indian Chief and the Seidlitz Powder (1901), in which a naïve Red Indian eats a lot of the fizzy stomach medicine, causing his stomach to expand vastly. He leaps around in a way that is made balloon-like by cranking the camera much faster than 16 frames per second. This gives what we would call a “slow motion” effect.


Taming of the Cast and characters in The Taming of the Shrew play by William Shakespeare william-shakespeare.info

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Christopher Sly

poor vagrant who falls asleep drunk in front of a tavern at the beginning of the Induction. A Lord returning from hunting finds Sly asleep and plays a trick on him, carrying Sly to the Lord’s house and ordering the servants to treat Sly like a lord when he wakes up. A group of actors who visit the Lord’s house perform The Taming of the Shrew for Sly, which takes up the rest of the play. Sly is cantankerous and quarrelsome, more interested in drinking the beer and eating the beef jerky he is used to than in accepting the role of aristocrat. However, when he finds out that in his role as a lord he has a wife (actually the Page in disguise), he quickly changes his mind, anxious to get alone with her and take her to bed.

Lord

A very wealthy nobleman whose practical joke on Sly dominates the Induction and provides the set-up for the rest of the play. As the Lord carries out his joke, making Sly think that Sly is really a lord and doesn’t remember it, we get to see all of the luxuries that an aristocrat of Shakespeare’s day would enjoy—a pack of hunting dogs, numerous servants, a grand house, erotic artwork, imported wines and perfumes, preserved fruits, and so on.

Hostess

The proprietress of a tavern who gets in an argument with Sly in the first lines of the play.

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Page

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A boy servant to the Lord. The Lord has the Page dress as a lady and play the part of Sly’s wife.

Players

A troupe of traveling actors who arrive at the Lord’s house offering to perform, and who help the Lord carry out his joke on Sly. They perform The Taming of the Shrew.

Katherine

The shrew of the play’s title, and the oldest daughter of Baptista Minola and sister of Bianca. Katherine, who is also called Katherina or Kate, is extremely strong-willed. She insists upon saying whatever she thinks and expressing whatever she feels. Her words are abusive and angry, and her actions are often violent. In Shakespeare’s time, women like Katherine were called shrews, and they were strongly disapproved of as the worst possible kind of women. Petruchio undertakes the challenge of taming her, turning her into an obedient and pleasant wife.

Petruchio

A wealthy gentleman from Verona. Loud, boisterous, eccentric, and quick-witted, Petruchio comes to Padua to increase his fortune by marrying rich. All he wants is a bride with an enormous dowry, and Katherine fits the bill. Though everyone else warns him against trying to marry Katherine, he sets out to tame her by pitting his own vio-


e Shrew

Part I

lent temper against hers.

Baptista Minola

A wealthy citizen of Padua, and the father of Katherine and Bianca. Though many men want to marry Bianca, Baptista refuses to allow Bianca to marry before Katherine, whom no one wants to marry. Baptista is good-hearted and generous toward his two daughters, lavishing expensive books and lessons upon them, but he is completely at a loss for how to deal with the strong-willed Katherine.

Bianca

The younger daughter of Baptista. The opposite of her sister Katherine, Bianca is soft-spoken, sweet, and unassuming, as well as beautiful. Because of her large dowry and her mild behavior, several men compete for her hand.

Lucentio

A young nobleman from Pisa who comes to Padua to study at the city’s renowned university, but who is immediately sidetracked when he falls in love with Bianca at first sight. Good-natured and intrepid, Lucentio is the most sympathetic of Bianca’s suitors. He disguises himself as a classics instructor named Cambio so he can gain access to Bianca and win her love.

Tranio

Lucentio’s servant, who accompanies Lucentio from Pisa. Wily and comical, Tranio plays an important part in Lucentio’s charade by pretending to be Lucentio and bargaining with Baptista for Bianca’s hand.

Grumio

Petruchio’s servant and the fool of the play. He provides comic relief by pretending to misunderstand Petruchio and getting into ridiculous arguments with him.

Biondello

Lucentio’s second servant, who assists his master and Tranio in carrying out their plot.

Curtis, Nathaniel, Phillip, Joseph, Nicholas, Peter Servants in Petruchio’s household.

Tailor, Haberdasher

The dress-maker and hat-maker hired by Petruchio to dress Katherine. Petruchio criticizes their work and sends them away, as part of his scheme to tame Katherine.

Widow

A wealthy widow of Padua whom Hortensio marries after abandoning his attempt to marry Bianca.

Merchant

A merchant recently from Mantua, whom Lucentio tricks into pretending to be Lucentio’s father.

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Two older gentlemen of Padua who want to marry Bianca. Although they are rivals, they become allies because of their mutual frustration with and rejection by Bianca. Hortensio is an old friend of Petruchio’s, and he suggests Katherine as a possible wife for Petruchio. He then dresses up as a music instructor to court Bianca. Hortensio and Gremio are both thwarted by Lucentio in their efforts to win Bianca.

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Gremio and Hortensio

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Karita Mattila in the title role of the Metropolitan Opera's production of "Salome," Photo by Ken Howard | The Metropolitan Opera.


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Edwin Forrest

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ORREST, Edwin, actor, born in Philadelphia, 9 March 1806; died there, 12 December 1872. He 70 was descended from Scottish ancestry. His father died, leaving the support of the family to the mother, a German woman of humble birth but of fine mental endowments, who developed qualities of hardihood that were reproduced in her gifted son. Edwin was educated at the common schools in Philadelphia, and early evinced a taste for the theatre. Kean was at that time in the meridian of his fitful career; Conway, Cooper, and the elder Booth were playing under the management of Wood and Warren, both actors of great merit. Constant attendance at the performances of these artists fired Forrest's ambition and aroused his enthusiasm for the dramatic profession, to the deep grief of his pious mother. At an early age he had given pain to his parents by taking a humble part in a dramatic performance. Unable to withstand the attractions

famousamericans.net

of the mysterious calling, he, in 1820, made his first regular appearance on the stage as Douglas in John Home's tragedy of that name. His success was immediate. His youth, his robust and manly physique, his clear, resonant voice, his fair and handsome face, won the great audience at once. He then began the professional career that was as severe in its hardships as it was brilliant in its results. The theatres of New York and Philadelphia were already crowded with trained and successful actors; Forrest therefore set out at once for the south and west. His tour through a rough country, with the inconveniences of long distances, the necessity of presenting his plays in rude halls, an insufficient support, and poor scenery, was not altogether successful; but the discipline to mind and body was felt in his entire subsequent career. After a few years of this hard novitiate he emerged once more into the scenes where his later glories were to culminate. In November 1826, he made

his first metropolitan experiment as Othello at the old Bowery theatre, and gained an instant success. The management employed him at a salary far below his worth, and he was at once offered increased payment at another theatre; but he refused to break his word, and carried out the contract to his own detriment. This strict sense of honor was characteristic of him throughout his career. His New York success was repeated in every City he visited, and after a few years of profitable labor, during which he had encouraged native talent by liberal offers for new American plays, he went to Europe for rest and travel and larger observation, and was received with much courtesy by actors and scholars. He returned to Philadelphia in 1831, and played there and in New York and elsewhere with triumphant success until September 1836, when he sailed for England, this time professionally, and made his first appearance as Spartacus, in the tragedy of "The Gladiator," at Drury Lane theatre, London. The play proved unpop-


away, with the words, "If I die, I will still be my royal self." This was his last appearance as an actor. He recovered from the severe attack of pneumonia; but the craving for public applause, which was his only happiness, induced him to give readings from Shakespeare in several large cities. The scheme failed, and was abandoned, to his deep mortification. A stroke of paralysis ended his life suddenly and without pain. His servant found him dead, alone, and apparently asleep, in his home in Philadelphia. The large sums that he had earned on the stage were judiciously and fortunately invested, and resulted in his amassing a large fortune. He had purchased, about 1850, a site on the banks of the Hudson, on which he erected a castellated structure. This estate, which he named Fonthill, he afterward sold at a large advance for a convent. In 1855 he purchased a mansion in Philadelphia, to which he retired after his temporary abandonment of the stage. There he collected the largest dramatic library in the United States. By avoiding New York and by legal evasions he succeeded in escaping the payment of alimony to his wife, but left his estate heavily in her debt. His will, besides bequests to his friends, contained a plan by which his fortune, in the hands of trustees, was to be used in the erection and support of a home for aged actors, to which purpose he devoted his Philadelphia home; but the claims of his living wife crippled the legacy, and some awkward provisions of the will weakened the purpose of the testator. Edwin Forrest was what his own inherited nature and the bias of his life made him. He was turbulent, colossal, and aggressive, but allied to hu-71 manity by a great tenderness of soul. His greatest parts were Lear, Othello, and Coriolanus. The characters of Tell and Virginius were also suited to his powers. A favorite part with him was Anywhere in "Jack Cade," a tragedy written for him by Judge Robert T. Conrad, which he first played in New York soon after his marriage. The Roman died with him. With him properly begins the royal line of American dramatic monarchs. A «Life of Edwin Forrest» was published by J. Rees (Philadelphia, 1874), and one by William R. Alger (1875). See also his biography, by Lawrence Barrett, in "The American Actor Series» (Boston, 1883).

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brought her suit for divorce, which her husband met with a cross suit. The trial occupied the courts for two years, and was finally decided in favor of the wife on all points and a decree for the payment of $3,000 alimony per annum. In this trial Charles O'Conor, the counsel for the defendant, won a national reputation by winning the case against John Vail Buren, and securing for the lady an honorable verdict and a liberal alimony. Forrest left the courtroom defeated and calumniated, but was lionized by the masses. On his appearance during the last period of the lawsuit at the Broadway theatre as Damon, the house was crowded to suffocation, and his success for sixty nights exceeded anything ever known in the history of the theatre. But the wealth that poured in upon him and the applause of his followers did not soften a temper soured by domestic sorrow, His quarrel with Macready and his part in the Astor place riot had added to his notoriety, while they weakened his fame, and still further embittered his temper. In 1853 he played Macbeth, with a strong cast and fine scenery, at the Broadway theatre for four weeks an unprecedented run at that date and at the end of this engagement he retired from the stage for several years. He became interested in politics, being spoken of as a candidate for congress, and did not return to professional life until 1860, when he appeared at Niblo's Garden, New York, as Hamlet, and played the most successful engagement of his life. Hereditary gout developed itself in a malignant form in 1865, during an engagement at the Holliday Street theatre, Baltimore, the sciatic nerve was paralyzed, and he never regained the use of his hand or his steady gait. His California tour in 1866 was a failure, he played his last New York engagement in February 1871, the plays being «Richelieu " and "Lear" ; the weather was cold, and the houses empty. On the night of 25 March 1871, he appeared in Boston at the Globe theatre, as Lear, played this part six times, and was announced for Richelieu and Virginius; but on the intervening Sunday caught cold. He struggled through the former ro1e on Monday night, and rare bursts of eloquence lighted the gloom, but he labored piteously against the disease that was fast conquering him. Being offered stimulants, he signed them

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ular, but his role was a distinguished success. During a season of ten months he performed in that historic theatre the parts of Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. His social triumphs were as great as were his professional; he was entertained by Macready and Charles Kemble, and at the end of the season was complimented by a dinner at the Garrick club, presided over by Talfourd. During this engagement he married, in June 1837, Bliss Catherine Norton Sinclair, daughter of John Sinclair, the popular singer. He returned to Philadelphia in November of the same year and began an engagement. His wife made a deep impression wherever she was presented, and it was argued that domestic happiness would be the fitting crown of his public career. But these predictions were disappointed. The marriage proved unhappy, and a divorce, followed by public scandal, ensued. He visited London a second time in 1845, accompanied by his wife, who was welcomed in the intellectual circles of English and Scotch society. He acted at the Princess's theatre in London. He met with great success in Virginius and other parts, but when he attempted to personate Macbeth, a character unsuited to his physique and style of acting, the audience hissed the performance. Forrest attributed the hissing to the professional jealousy and machinations of Macready, although that artist had been kind and helpful to him when he first came before London audiences. A few weeks later, when Macready was playing Hamlet in Edinburgh, Forrest stood up in a private box and hissed the English actor. This act of spiteful resentment evoked contemptuous reproaches from the British press and destroyed the respect in which the public had held him. An acrimonious letter that he printed in the «Times" aggravated, instead of justifying, his offence. A portion of the American public believed that national jealousy and professional intrigue had interfered with the success of their favorite tragedian in England. In May 1849, when Macready was acting Macbeth in the Astor place opera house, the friends of Forrest hissed and interrupted the performance. The Astor place riot ensued, which resulted in the death of twenty-two men and the wounding of thirty-six others. In the succeeding year Mrs. Forrest


North Shore Arts Association

F

rederick J. Mulhaupt (1871-1938) is the subject of a retrospective exhibition held at the North Shore Arts Association this summer. A highly respected and active member of the Cape Ann community of artists in the early 20th century, Mulhaupt's paintings of harbor scenes, landscapes and street scenes are remarkable for their lightfilled intensity. The exhibition will be the most comprehensive display of work by the artist, and includes rarely seen paintings from museums and private collections. Mulhaupt's paintings capture the views of Cape Ann that he so admired. At first simply a summer visitor, Mulhaupt settled permanently in Gloucester in 1922, eventually purchasing a home in the heart of the Rocky Neck area in 1932. Already justly famous for its artistic residents, this area of East Gloucester was a teaming artists’ colony when Mulhaupt relocated there. Although classically trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the ateliers of Paris where students would draw and paint the human figure, Mulhaupt's gifts lay in depicting landscapes. His harbor scenes show a remarkable tonal range, and his masterful handling of paint turn the working port of GIoucester into something extraordinary.

A fully illustrated color catalog accompanies the exhibition North Shore Arts Association

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Ted Tsyver, Historian, writes: "The artistic life of Cape Ann was first centered in Gloucester and Annisquam, and later, Rockport. The first local art exhibition was held in 1916 at the Gallery-on-the-Moors located on Ledge Road in East Gloucester. After seven years, the gallery proved to be too small for displaying the art of the hundreds of new 72 artists coming to the art colony. The artists discussed the situation at a meeting in the home of Mr. and Mrs. William Weiss on August 5, 1922. Among those attending were William E. Atwood, Paul Cornoyer, Cecilia Beaux, Hugh Breckenridge, Frederick J. Mulhaupt, George L. Noyes, Walter L. Palmer, L. Edmond Klotz, and other prominent artists and residents of Cape Ann. The North Shore Arts Association was formed. The new North Shore Arts Association of Gloucester held an open meeting on September 21st, to consider a proposition made by Thomas E. Reed to sell his property and building off East Main Street to the association. The offer was so generous that the members unanimously voted to accept it at once. The property overlooked Gloucester's inner harbor and the art colony at Rocky Neck. The artists immediately planned a large exhibition to be held in the summer of 1923, the year of Gloucester's tercentenary celebration. The artists on Cape Ann readily welcomed the new and larger Association in East Gloucester, particularly since the purpose and aim of the association was to bring together each year a comprehensive and representative exhibition of painting and sculpture, and to persuade other artists to come to the North Shore and

help in the effort to further American art. On December 2, 1922, the Association was officially incorporated as a nonprofit institution under the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The North Shore Arts Association of Gloucester opened its doors to the public on July 14, 1923 in the refurbished Thomas E. Reed building...There had never been a larger collection of art shown at one time in Gloucester. There were 230 paintings, drawings and etchings, and fifteen pieces of sculpture by more than 140 artists. In addition to the exhibitions, each summer for the past 77 years the galleries have been the center for a varied program of entertainment: lectures, cabarets, parties, memorials and concerts. Talented musicians as the Boston Sinfonietta conducted by Arthur Fiedler, the famous pianists Jesus Sanroma and George Copeland, and the Gruppe trio from New York have been heard and enjoyed. Throughout the seventy-seven years of the North Shore Arts Association's existence, each summer has brought large exhibitions of painting and sculpture. These exhibitions have attracted a great many visitors, have won the praise of critics and museum authorities, and by purchases from them, have enriched many private collections." The North Shore Arts Association is located at 197 East Main Street, Pirates Lane, Gloucester, MA, 01930. For hours please call the Association. wikipedia


feminine mystique

introduction

W

hen Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was first published in the United States in 1963, it exploded into American consciousness. Since its first publication, critics and popular readers have been sharply divided on their assessment of the work. However, one fact is certain: The Feminine Mystique sparked a national debate about women's roles and in time was recognized as one of the central works of the modern women's movement. Friedan began writing the work after she attended her fifteen-year college reunion at Smith, a women's college. At this reunion, she gave a questionnaire to two hundred of her fellow classmates, and the results confirmed what she had already suspected—many American women were unhappy and did not know why. After three women's magazines refused to publish Friedan's results, because they contradicted the conventional assumptions about femininity, Friedan spent five years researching and writing The Feminine Mystique. In the book, Friedan defines women's unhappiness as ‘‘the problem that has no name,’’ then she launches into a detailed exploration of what she believes causes this problem. Through her research— which includes many theories, statistics, and firstperson accounts—Friedan pins the blame on an idealized image of femininity that she calls the feminine mystique. According to Friedan, women have been encouraged to confine themselves to the narrow roles of housewife and mother, forsaking education and career aspirations in the process. Friedan attempts to prove that the feminine mystique denies women the opportunity to develop their own identities, which can ultimately lead to problems for women and their families. Friedan sees the feminine mystique as a failed social experiment that World War II and the War helped to create and which in turn contributed to postwar phenomena like the baby boom 73 and the growth of suburbs. Although Friedan has written several more controversial works, The Feminine Mystique is the book that made her a household name, and it is still her best-known work.

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etty Friedan was born in Peoria, Illinois, on February 4, 1921. Friedan showed early writing talent, which she developed throughout high school and college. After graduating from Smith College, where she earned a psychology degree, she completed her master's degree in psychology at Berkeley. Friedan moved to New York, where she married Carl Friedan in 1947. She continued to use her writing talent in freelance articles, but ultimately she adhered to society's expectations and became a housewife in 1949. During a fifteen-year reunion at Smith College, Friedan surveyed two hundred alumni and discovered that most were housewives who were unhappy with their lives. Friedan pursued the issue as her first book, which ultimately was published as The Feminine Mystique in 1963. The controversial book became an instant best-seller and inspired debates across the country. Following the success of the book, angry neighbors forced the Friedans to move out of their suburb and into the city. Friedan began writing and lecturing across the country on women's issues, then she realized that these separate acts were not enough to inspire change. In 1966, she helped to found the National Organization for Women (NOW), where she served as president until 1970. That year, discouraged by the radical feminists who were beginning to gain influence in NOW, Friedan stepped down as president. However, she remained active in the women's movement. In fact, during her resignation speech, Friedan advocated a march on August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of women's suffrage. The resulting Women's Strike for Equality, which took place in several U.S. cities, was one of the largest demonstrations for women's rights in American history. In the 1970s, Friedan helped to found other women's organizations, including the National Women's Political Caucus (1971), which encouraged women to run for political office. However, Friedan grew increasingly more disillusioned with the radical direction that the women's movement was taking. In 1976, she published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, a collection of her writings from the 1960s and 1970s. The book, which included retrospective commentary, examined her personal experiences with the women's movement and portrayed radical feminists in a negative way. Likewise, in 1981's The Second Stage, Friedan argued that the radical direction of the women's movement had established a new stereotype of women and their abilities. In 1993, Friedan shifted her focus with the publication of The Fountain of Age, which examined U.S. views and stereotypes of the elderly. Friedan's most recent works include a new examination of feminism, Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family (1997) and an autobiography, Life So Far (2000). She lives and works in New York.

enotes.com


The Enlightenment Paul Brians wsu.edu

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E V E R L A S T I N G

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lthough the intellectual movement called "The Enlightenment" is usually associated with the 18th century, its roots in fact go back much further. But before we explore those roots, we need to define the term. This is one of those rare historical movements which in fact named itself. Certain thinkers and writers, primarily in London and Paris, believed that they were more enlightened than their compatriots and set out to enlighten them. They believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Their principal targets were religion (embodied in France in the Catholic Church) and the domina74 tion of society by a hereditary aristocracy.

Background in Antiquity

To understand why this movement became so influential in the 18th century, it is important to go back in time. We could choose almost any starting point, but let us begin with the recovery of Aristotelian logic by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. In his hands the logical procedures so carefully laid out by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle were used to defend the dogmas of Christianity; and for the next couple of centuries, other thinkers pursued these goals to shore up every aspect of faith with logic. These thinkers were sometimes called "schoolmen" (more formally, "scholastics,") and Voltaire frequently refers to them as "doctors," by which he means "doctors of theology." Unfortunately for the Catholic Church, the tools of logic could not

be confined to the uses it preferred. After all, they had been developed in Athens, in a pagan culture which had turned them on its own traditional beliefs. It was only a matter of time before later Europeans would do the same.

The Renaissance Humanists

In the 14th and 15th century there emerged in Italy and France a group of thinkers known as the "humanists." The term did not then have the antireligious associations it has in contemporary political debate. Almost all of them were practicing Catholics. They argued that the proper worship of God involved admiration of his creation, and in particular of that crown of creation: humanity. By celebrating the human race and its capacities they argued they were worshipping God more appropriately than gloomy priests and monks who harped on original sin and continuously called upon people to confess and humble them before the Almighty. Indeed, some of them claimed that humans were like God, created not only in his image, but with a share of his creative power. The painter, the architect, the musician, and the scholar, by exercising their intellectual powers, were fulfilling divine purposes. This celebration of human capacity, though it was mixed in the Renaissance with elements of gloom and superstition (witchcraft trials flourished in this period as they never had during the middle Ages), was to bestow a powerful legacy on Europeans. The goal of Renaissance humanists was to recapture some of the pride, breadth of spirit, and creativity of the

ancient Greeks and Romans, to replicate their successes and go beyond them. Europeans developed the belief that tradition could and should be used to promote change. By cleaning and sharpening the tools of antiquity, they could reshape their own time. Galileo Galilei, for instance, was to use the same sort of logic the schoolmen had used--reinforced with observation--to argue in 1632 for the Copernican notion that the earth rotates on its axis beneath the unmoving sun. The Church, and most particularly the Holy Inquisition, objected that the Bible clearly stated that the sun moved through the sky and denounced Galileo's teachings, forcing him to recant (take back) what he had written and preventing him from teaching further. The Church's triumph was a pyrrhic victory, for though it could silence Galileo, it could not prevent the advance of science (though most of those advances would take place in Protestant northern Europe, out of the reach of the pope and his Inquisition). But before Galileo's time, in the 16th century, various humanists had begun to ask dangerous questions. Franรงois Rabelais, a French monk and physician influenced by Protestantism, but spurred on by his own rebelliousness, challenged the Church's authority in his Gargantua and Pantagruel, ridiculing many religious doctrines as absurd.

Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne, in a much more quiet and modest but ultimately more subversive way, asked a single question over and over again in his Essays: "What do I know?" By this he meant that we have no right to impose


The 17th Century

RenĂŠ Descartes, in the 17th cen-

banned. There had been plenty of intolerance and dogma to go around in the middle Ages, but the emergence of the modern state made its tyranny much more efficient and powerful. It was inevitable that sooner or later many Europeans would begin to weary of the repression and warfare carried out in the name of absolute truth. In addition, though Protestants had begun by making powerful critiques of Catholicism, they quickly turned their guns on each other, producing a bewildering array of churches each claiming the exclusive path to salvation. It was natural for people tossed from one demanding faith to another to wonder whether any of the churches deserved the authority they claimed, and to begin to prize the skepticism of Montaigne over the certainty of Luther or Calvin. Meanwhile, there were other powerful forces at work in Europe: economic ones which were to interact profoundly with these intellectual trends. The Political and Economic Background During the late middle Ages, peasants had begun to move from rural estates to the towns in search of increased freedom and prosperity. As trade and communication improved during the Renaissance, the ordinary town-dweller began to realize that things need not always go on as they had for centuries. New charters could be written, new governments formed, new laws passed, new businesses begun. Although each changed institution quickly tried to stabilize its power by claiming the support of tradition, the pressure for change continued to mount. It was not only contact with alien cultural patterns which influenced Europeans, it was the wealth brought back from Asia and75 the Americas which catapulted a new class of merchants into prominence, partially displacing the old aristocracy whose power had been rooted in the ownership of land. These merchants had their own ideas about the sort of world they wanted to inhabit, and they became major agents of change, in the arts, in government, and in the economy. They were naturally convinced that their earnings were the result of their individual merit and hard work, unlike the inherited wealth of traditional aristocrats. Whereas individualism had been chiefly emphasized in the Renaissance by artists, especially visual

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tury, attempted to use reason as the schoolmen had, to shore up his faith; but much more rigorously than had been attempted before. He tried to begin with a blank slate, with the bare minimum of knowledge: the knowledge of his own existence ("I think, therefore I am"). From there he attempted to reason his way to a complete defense of Christianity, but to do so he committed so many logical faults that his successors over the centuries were too slowly disintegrate his gains, even finally challenging the notion of selfhood with which he had begun. The history of philosophy from his time to the early 20th century is partly the story of more and more ingenious logic proving less and less, until Ludwig Wittgenstein succeeded in undermining the very bases of philosophy itself. But that is a story for a different course. Here we are concerned with early stages in the process in which it seemed that logic could be a powerful avenue to truth. To be sure, logic alone could be used to defend all sorts of absurd notions; and Enlightenment thinkers insisted on combining it with something they called "reason" which consisted of common sense, observation, and their own unacknowledged prejudices in favor of skepticism and freedom. We have been focusing closely on a thin trickle of thought which traveled through an era otherwise dominated by dogma and fanaticism. The 17th century was torn by witch-hunts and wars of religion and imperial conquest. Protestants and Catholics denounced each other as followers of Satan, and people could be imprisoned for attending the wrong church, or for not attending any. All publications, whether pamphlets or scholarly volumes, were subject to prior censorship by both church and state, often working hand in hand. Slavery was widely practiced, especially in the colonial plantations of the Western Hemisphere, and its cruelties frequently defended by leading religious figures. The despotism of monarchs exercising far greater powers than any medieval king was supported by the doctrine of the "divine right of kings," and scripture quoted to show that revolution was detested by God. Speakers of sedition or blasphemy quickly found themselves imprisoned, or even executed. Organizations which tried to challenge the twin authorities of church and state were

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on others dogmas which rest on cultural habit rather than absolute truth. Powerfully influenced by the discovery of thriving non-Christian cultures in places as far off as Brazil, he argued that morals may be to some degree relative. Who are Europeans to insist that Brazilian cannibals who merely consume dead human flesh instead of wasting it are morally inferior to Europeans who persecute and oppress those of whom they disapprove? This shift toward cultural relativism, though it was based on scant understanding of the newly discovered peoples, was to continue to have a profound effect on European thought to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. Just as their predecessors had used the tools of antiquity to gain unprecedented freedom of inquiry, the Enlightenment thinkers used the examples of other cultures to gain the freedom to reshape not only their philosophies, but their societies. It was becoming clear that there was nothing inevitable about the European patterns of thought and living: there were many possible ways of being human, and doubtless new ones could be invented. The other contribution of Montaigne to the Enlightenment stemmed from another aspect of his famous question: "What do I know?" If we cannot be certain that our values are God-given, then we have no right to impose them by force on others. Inquisitors, popes, and kings alike had no business enforcing adherence to particular religious or philosophical beliefs. It is one of the great paradoxes of history that radical doubt was necessary for the new sort of certainty called "scientific." The good scientist is the one is willing to test all assumptions, to challenge all traditional opinion, to get closer to the truth. If ultimate truth, such as was claimed by religious thinkers, was unattainable by scientists, so much the better. In a sense, the strength of science at its best is that it is always aware of its limits, aware that knowledge is always growing, always subject to change, never absolute. Because knowledge depends on evidence and reason, arbitrary authority can only be its enemy.


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artists, it now became a core value. The ability of individual effort to transform the world became a European dogma, lasting to this day. But the chief obstacles to the reshaping of Europe by the merchant 76class were the same as those faced by the rationalist philosophers: absolutist kings and dogmatic churches. The struggle was complex and manysided, with each participant absorbing many of the others' values; but the general trend is clear: individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority, and tradition as core European values. Religion survived, but weakened and often transformed almost beyond recognition; the monarchy was to dwindle over the course of the hundred years beginning in the mid-18th century to a pale shadow of its former self. This is the background of the 18thcentury Enlightenment. Europeans were changing, but Europe's institutions were not keeping pace with that change. The Church insisted that it was the only source of truth, that all who lived outside its bounds were damned, while it was apparent to any reasonably sophisticated person that

most human beings on earth were not and had never been Christians--yet they had built great and inspiring civilizations. Writers and speakers grew restive at the omnipresent censorship and sought whatever means they could to evade or even denounce it. Most important, the middle classes--the bourgeoisie--were painfully aware that they were paying taxes to support a fabulously expensive aristocracy which contributed nothing of value to society (beyond, perhaps, its patronage of the arts, which the burghers of Holland had shown could be equally well exercised by themselves), and that those useless aristocrats were unwilling to share power with those who actually managed and--to their way of thinking,--created the national wealth. They were to find ready allies in France among the impoverished masses who may have lived and thought much like their ancestors, but who were all too aware that with each passing year they were paying higher and higher taxes to support a few thousand at Versailles in idle dissipation.

The Role of the Aristocrats

Interestingly, it was among those

very idle aristocrats that the French Enlightenment philosophers were to find some of their earliest and most enthusiastic followers. Despite the fact that the Church and State were more often than not allied with each other, they were keenly aware of their differences. Even kings could on occasion be attracted by arguments which seemed to undermine the authority of the Church. The fact that the aristocrats were utterly unaware of the precariousness of their position also made them overconfident, interested in dabbling in the new ideas partly simply because they were new and exciting. Voltaire moved easily in these aristocratic circles, dining at their tables, taking a titled mistress, corresponding with monarchs. He opposed tyranny and dogma, but he had no notion of reinventing that discredited Athenian folly, democracy. He had far too little faith in the ordinary person for that. What he did think was that educated and sophisticated persons could be brought to see through the exercise of their reason that the world could and should be greatly improved. Rousseau vs. Voltaire


The Enlightenment in England

Meanwhile Great Britain had developed its own Enlightenment, fostered by thinkers like the English thinker John Locke, the Scot David Hume, and many others. England had anticipated the rest of Europe by deposing and decapitating its king back in the 17th century. Although the monarchy

The Enlightenment in America

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, many of the intellectual leaders of the American colonies were drawn to the Enlightenment. The colonies may have been founded by leaders of various dogmatic religious persuasions, but when it became necessary to unite against England, it was apparent that no one of them could prevail over the others, and that the most desirable course was to agree to disagree. Nothing more powerfully impelled the movement toward the separation of church and state than the realization that no one church could dominate this new state. Many of the most distinguished leaders of the American Revolution-Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and Paine--were powerfully influenced by English and--to a lesser extent-French Enlightenment thought. The God who underwrites the concept of equality in the Declaration of Independence is the same deist God Rousseau worshipped, not that venerated in the traditional churches which still supported and defended monarchies

all over Europe. Jefferson and Franklin both spent time in France--a natural ally because it was a traditional enemy of England--absorbing the influence of the French Enlightenment. The language of natural law, of inherent freedoms, of self-determination which seeped so deeply into the American grain was the language of the Enlightenment, though often coated with a light glaze of traditional religion, what has been called our "civil religion." This is one reason that Americans should study the Enlightenment. It is in their bones. It has defined part of what they have dreamed of, what they aim to become. Separated geographically from most of the aristocrats against whom they were rebelling, their revolution was to be far less corrosive--and at first less influential-than that in France.

The Struggle in Europe

But we need to return to the beginning of the story, to Voltaire and his allies in France, struggling to assert the values of freedom and tolerance in a culture where the twin fortresses of monarchy and Church opposed almost everything they stood for. To oppose the monarchy openly would be fatal; the Church was an easier target. Protestantism had made religious controversy familiar. Voltaire could skillfully cite one Christian against another to make his arguments. One way to undermine the power of the Church was to undermine its credibility, and thus Voltaire devoted a great deal of his time to attacking the fundamentals of Christian belief: the inspiration of the Bible, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, the damnation of unbelievers. No doubt he relished this battle partly for its own sake, but he 77 never lost sight of his central goal: the toppling of Church power to increase the freedom available to Europeans. Voltaire was joined by a band of rebellious thinkers known as the philosophes: Charles de Montesquieu, Pierre Bayle, Jean d'Alembert, and many lesser lights. Although "philosophe" literally means "philosopher" we use the French word in English to designate this particular group of French 18th-century thinkers. Because Denis Diderot commissioned many of them to write for his influential Encyclopedia, they are also known as "the Encyclopedists."

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had eventually been restored, this experience created certain openness toward change in many places that could not be entirely extinguished. English Protestantism struggled to express itself in ways that widened the limits of freedom of speech and press. Radical Quakers and Unitarians broke open old dogmas in ways that Voltaire was to find highly congenial when he found himself there in exile. The English and French Enlightenments exchanged influences through many channels, Voltaire not least among them. Because England had gotten its revolution out of the way early, it was able to proceed more smoothly and gradually down the road to democracy; but English liberty was dynamite when transported to France, where resistance by church and state was fierce to the last possible moment. The result was ironically that while Britain remained saturated with class privilege and relatively pious, France was to become after its own revolution the most egalitarian and anticlerical state in Europe--at least in its ideals. The power of religion and the aristocracy diminished gradually in England; in France they were violently uprooted.

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Not all Enlightenment thinkers were like Voltaire in this. His chief adversary was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who distrusted the aristocrats not out of a thirst for change but because he believed they were betraying decent traditional values. He opposed the theater which was Voltaire's lifeblood, shunned the aristocracy which Voltaire courted, and argued for something dangerously like democratic revolution. Whereas Voltaire argued that equality was impossible, Rousseau argued that inequality was not only unnatural, but that--when taken too far--it made decent government impossible. Whereas Voltaire charmed with his wit, Rousseau ponderously insisted on his correctness, even while contradicting himself. Whereas Voltaire insisted on the supremacy of the intellect, Rousseau emphasized the emotions, becoming a contributor to both the Enlightenment and its successor, romanticism. And whereas Voltaire endlessly repeated the same handful of core Enlightenment notions, Rousseau sparked off original thoughts in all directions: ideas about education, the family, government, the arts, and whatever else attracted his attention. For all their personal differences, the two shared more values than they liked to acknowledge. They viewed absolute monarchy as dangerous and evil and rejected orthodox Christianity. Though Rousseau often struggled to seem more devout, he was almost as much a skeptic as Voltaire: the minimalist faith both shared was called "deism," and it was eventually to transform European religion and have powerful influences on other aspects of society as well. Across the border in Holland, the merchants, who exercised most political power, there made a successful industry out of publishing books that could not be printed in countries like France. Dissenting religious groups mounted radical attacks on Christian orthodoxy.


The Heritage of the Enlightenment

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Today the Enlightenment is often viewed as a historical anomaly, a brief moment when a number of thinkers infatuated with reason vainly supposed that the perfect society could be built on common sense and tolerance, a fantasy which collapsed amid the Terror of the French Revolution and the triumphal sweep of Romanticism. Religious thinkers repeatedly proclaim the Enlightenment dead, Marxists denounce it for promoting the ideals and power of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the working classes, postcolonial critics reject its idealization of specifically European notions as universal truths, and postructuralists reject its entire concept of rational thought. Yet in many ways, the Enlightenment has never been more alive. The notions of human rights it developed are powerfully attractive to oppressed peoples everywhere, who appeal to the same notion of natural law that so inspired Voltaire and Jefferson. Wherever religious conflicts erupt, mutual religious tolerance is counseled as a solution. Rousseau's notions of selfrule are ideals so universal that the worst tyrant has to disguise his tyrannies by claiming to be acting on their behalf. European these ideas may be, but they have also become global. Whatever their limits, they have formed the consensus of international ideals by which modern states are judged. If our world seems little closer to 78perfection than that of 18th-century France, that is partly due to our failure to appreciate gains we take for granted. But it is also the case that many of the enemies of the Enlightenment are demolishing a straw man: it was never as simple-mindedly optimistic as it has often been portrayed. Certainly Voltaire was no facile optimist. He distrusted utopianism, instead trying to cajole Europeans out of their more harmful stupidities. Whether we acknowledge his influence or not, we still think today more like him than like his enemies. As we go through his most influential work, The Philosophical Dictionary, look for passages which helped lay the groundwork for modern patterns of thought. Look also for passages which still seem challenging, pieces of arguments that continue today.

What is the Age of Enlightenment?

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essortment.com

he Enlightenment is a name given by historians to an intellectual movement that was predominant in the Western world during the 18th century. Free from feudal obligations that bound peasants and nobles to the land and to each other, members of the new urban middle class sought to develop their individual potentials. Also of significant influence were the scientific revolution and by the aftermath of the long religious conflict that followed the Reformation. The thinkers of the Enlightenment were committed to secular views based on reason or human understanding only, which they hoped would provide a basis for beneficial changes affecting every area of life and thought. The more extreme and radical philosophers advocated a philosophical rationalism deriving its methods from science and natural philosophy that would replace religion as the means of understanding nature and destiny of humanity. These individuals were materialists, pantheists, or atheists. Other enlightened thinkers supposed fanaticism, but were either agnostic or left room for some kind of religious faith. The Enlightenment came to an end in western Europe after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era revealed the costs of its political program and the lack of commitment in those whose rhetoric was often more liberal than their actions. Nationalism undercut its cosmopolitan values and assumptions about human nature, and the romantics attacked its belief that clear intelligible answers could be found to every question asked by people who sought to be free and happy. The skepticism of the philosophers was swept away in the religious revival of the 1790s and early 1800s, and the cultural leadership of the landed aristocracy and professional men who had supported the Enlightenment was eroded by the growth of a new wealthy educated class of businessmen, products of the industrial revolution. Only in North and South America, where industry came later and revolution had not led to reaction, did the Enlightenment linger into the 19th century. Its lasting heritage has been its contribution to the literature of human freedom and some institutions in which its values have been embodied.


The Enlightenment in America

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was the place where to people first revolted— in the American colonies. American political leaders like Jefferson, Franklin, James Otis, John Adams and others were heavily influenced by Enlightenment thinking. Indeed, it may be said that the most profound result of the European enlightenment was Jefferson's great Declaration, which he himself claimed was a synthesis of American thinking. From Paris to Berlin, St. Petersburg and Vienna, the rulers of that era became known as “enlightened despots.” While holding nearly absolute power over their citizens for the most, they considered themselves to be modern and progressive in the sense that they listened to the popular philosophers of the time, people like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau and others. Those “philosophers” were offering ideas for new ways to organize society, and the rulers tried to govern in a way that reflected those uplifting ideas. In practice, society probably changed very little during the Age of reason, but the ideas put forth were advanced for their time. The Enlightenment was important America because it provided the philosophical basis of the American Revolution. The Revolution was more than just a protest against English authority; as it turned out, the American Revolution provided a blueprint for the organization of a democratic society. And while imperfectly done, for it did not address the terrible problem of slavery, the American Revolution was an enlightened concept of government whose most profound documents may have been the American Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution. To feel the full impact of the Enlightenment on America one needs only to look at the first inaugural address of Thomas Jefferson, who, along with Benjamin Franklin, is considered to be the American most touched by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Jefferson wrote: If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. While the locus of the Enlightenment thinking is generally considered to have been the salons in Paris and Berlin, the practical application of those ideas was carried out most vividly in the American colonies.

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he period known as the European Enlightenment was also known as the Age of Reason, a time when the full scope of human existence was carefully examined, with an eye toward trying to perfect human society as much as possible. It was felt that the full application of man's intellect could rescue society from the forces of despotism. Encompassing the years 1715 to 1789, the enlightenment was probably as important in America as was in Europe. In that age of classical thinking the European philosophers studied with great zeal the institutions of modern government with the same intensity with which scientists such as Newton had probed the mysteries of the universe and the worlds of physics and mathematics. The German word for Enlightenment is “Aufklaerung” literally a “clearing up.” It is a useful word because it helps explain what the enlightenment tried to achieve. From the time of the scientific revolution that grew out of the Renaissance, human knowledge had been growing at an exponential rate, and the Enlightenment sought to draw on that knowledge in order to improve the human condition, among other things by improving man's institutions, including government. Thomas Paine, who authored Common Sense, a reasoned argument for American independence, later wrote: You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. ... The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. In Europe the Enlightenment centered on the salons of Paris and was famous for the “philosophers”—popular philosophers—such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau. Their political ideas spawned the age of the enlightened despots, people like Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia, both of whom were enlightened more in theory than in fact, it may be said. The greatest irony of the Enlightenment is that those political writers saw England as the most enlightened nation in Europe, and it

Henry J. Sage© academicamerican.com

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Interview with American photographer

Paul Cocrell

interviewer: mohammad mustafa First I want to have a discussion about the photography styles in America.

Q

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: Which styles of photography have the most fan and users or artists In America? A: That really will always be up to the individual photographer, as they develop their style. I think as we speak today, in 2010 with the economy the way it is, the general public wants photographic style of a basic 80and general nature. There will always be a place in commercial advertising for things that are new and edgy. But I notice I have more comments now on photos and art pieces that portray simpler times. The face of a child. A farm. A bridge on a rural road. A market or newsstand on a busy city street. Simple things that make people relate to their childhood perhaps. So relative to style, we see simpler compositions. In the commercial world such as magazines and the fashion industry, the edgier the better. But that will always be the case, I believe. Q: We watch many of photographers that take their photos LANDSCAPE, what do you think about it? A: This question makes me think of two things. First of all it makes me laugh because I notice people taking photographs in landscape mode. I have done workshops with up and coming photographers and I start the conversation something like this.

“Here is the secret to some of the best photographs you will ever make. Take your cameras in your hand and now and do what I do… turn it counter (or anti)-clockwise.” And that usually gets a good laugh out of them because they think I have a mysterious secret, when it’s such a simple thing to do. But so many photographers do take landscape photographs. I started out in commercial work, and did a lot of my work in landscape. But now that I have moved to more portrait work and model portfolios, I find that I have to force myself to do landscape shots. I now prefer portrait oriented photographs. But there is a place for landscape mode and is obviously very useful. The other part of the question is that many photographers use landscape photos as their subject because it is both easy to do and easy to work with. Of course lighting and timing can make it difficult. But landscapes provide an instant canvas for the artist or photographer alike. It’s always there. It does what you ask of it—just sitting there and providing a beautiful moment to capture. It does not complain, or talk back or is never in a bad mood. So landscapes provide an excellent source for a photographic project. Q: Does the geography of America help them to do it? A:The layout of the land or geography does help of course, with vast open areas. I have seen some photographs taken of forests or the beach or city scenes in America that make you think you can step right inside of them. When I have traveled to places like Southeast Asia, or in parts of Europe, there are vast spaces, but covered with humanity in an urban sprawl. Cities that have been there for centuries and have layers and layers of people and buildings. It’s hard to get a feel for the geography there. In America as you travel from east to west, the country unfolds in so many different ways: metropolitan ar-

eas, vast rivers, lush green land, the wide-open Midwest, the mountainous region and desert to the beaches of California and seacoast towns in Washington State. So the country lends itself to a diverse set of options when an artist is considering a project. Now that is not to say America is the best or saying that nowhere else in the world is better. That’s of course silly to even think. I have traveled to other parts of the world that America cannot even compare to at all. But the geography of America is helpful for an anxious photographer/artist because of what it can offer and the freedom to move about most areas without restriction. Q: What’s the role of geography? A: It sets the stage for your photographic canvas. It can determine your mood, the quality of the shoot and the message you are trying to convey. I feel connected more to certain types of geography than others. I love to see photos of rainforests and desert terrain and frozen tundra. But I don’t personally like shooting in these terrains. Therefore my photos would probably suffer. But if I am in an area of mountainous views or the soft flowing sounds of the ocean while on the beach or feel the energy of an urban area, these geographical places influence me to shoot a better photograph. I of course can shoot in any area. But those I personally feel connected with will probably show in my photos, making geography play a vital role. Q: What do you think about the affect of expert photographers on the photography of other countries? For example Europe or Latin America. Had been the affected by them or not? A: Photographers are notorious for duplicating. Maybe that’s too harsh. But I know when I see another photographer’s work; I sometimes try to incorporate what they have done in my own work. Seeing the flair of Europe-


experience?How did you start? What the photography style you were into before journalism? Why you chose the journalism style for your photography A. I was very fortunate to become friends with Rick Rose, who owns a studio in Michigan. He lived in Alabama with his wife, Michelle, who was a coworker of mine at the time. Rick had seen some of my very amateurish photographs at the time and commented that he thought I should pursue photography above the amateur level because he said I had an “eye for photography.” He was formally trained in New York City and I took his advice and he mentored me for a while. And that’s how I got my start. One of my first commercial gigs I landed was with W.P.Carey and Associates, a firm in NYC, who somehow got

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thing for America to jump into modernism in art. We are always looking for something new and trendy. One thing our government has done is to help fund many artistic projects and provide resources. I think of once city in the south USA, Chattanooga, Tennessee. The local government has set aside apartments and places to live for artists who would come into the city and subsidize the rent. They give tax breaks and incentives for artists to open shops and collaborate with others. So depending on the area, there is always an effort to bankroll many of the arts, historic and modern. The country has always made an effort to do so whether through private or government funding. Q: Can you tell us a little brief about your photography

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an and Latin American photographers does influence that in other countries. The passion of those comes through in their work and is oftentimes easily duplicated. So their influence on other parts of the world is noticeable. Q:What’s the role of America’s art and specially photography on “WORLD ART”? A:Photography has always been a very successful venue in the art world. Name any famous painter, and a specific image will come to mind, due to their style. The same could be said for many famous photographers. But for me the outstanding thing about still photography is that it captures that moment in time that can never be captured again. America’s photographers have really influenced that I believe throughout the world. Some countries of the world do not have the freedom that American’s take for granted. That freedom has allowed photographers to be in the middle of government affairs, private places, has allowed what some would describe as offensive to be protected as “free speech” or “freedom of expression.” That ability has influenced world art in a good way I think, to be more challenged in what is produced. Q: Had been America advance such as the huge capacities it has? A. No. America has seen some great days in the art world, in any number of categories. But I don’t think it has advanced to its capacity as yet. There are greater things to come. They may not be what some would consider art in the classic sense. But a new generation of artists are coming, who have the desire and passion that will surprise everyone. Q: What’s your idea about the jump of world to the modernism in art? Was America successful in this event? I mean had America the bankroll of historical arts? Did the American artists create the capacities in themselves for this jump? A: America is still young compared with the rest of the world. We really don’t know history here, with just a couple hundred years behind us. We don’t know what history is when compared with the thousands of years of history in China, Europe and others; we are still catching up to a degree in the art world. So while the rest of the world was working through its classical period and other periods of art, we were just finding our footing, so to speak. But I think it was a natural

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my name and hired me to shoot a building they were having constructed near where I live. I went to shoot the building and they paid me $300, which was a pretty big ego boost and career boost for me. I did other work for them and had a brief relationship with them, but it pushed me to pursue commercial work further, which I did in the form of magazines and etc. I avoided portrait work and model portfolio work like the plague. I didn’t like taking pictures of people. That changed for me when I started doing more work for newspaper industry. I am actually a journalist by trade, a news writer for radio and newspaper. As part of my newspaper work, it was a natural consequence to do some photographs which made it into the paper. The more people I took and more people I related too, the more interesting it became. So it helped me in two areas, It helped me learn that as a people person, I could relate to photograph subjects better and capture what I felt was a great shot of them. I had always hated, and still do, a static, basic-posed photograph. I would much rather capture the moment, capture someone doing something or in an emotional moment rather than asking them to pose. So in the second area, newspaper helped me to solidify my work—all my work—in a journalistic style. Which I still continues as much as possible. Sure in the modeling industry, or portraiture work there has to be those static shots (stand here—don’t move— turn here), but for the most part I like the subject doing something. 82 Today, I am working with a couple of small agencies and helping them grows their business, and do local contract work. I have actually gotten out of the travel bug and settled into a more quiet life, but only for the moment. Starting in May, I will make a trip to Italy on a mostly personal trip. But I am shopping out the trip to a couple of magazines and hopefully getting ready to land a couple of assignments about the trip. I’m also agreeing to shoot a model while in Verona while I am there. I have a feeling this is going to help propel my interest back into travel photography which I dearly love. We shall see. But whether I am at home or abroad, the photographic arts are something I dearly love and have a deep appreciation for those who take the effort to make that great, memorable shot. It is an art form and the fans of photography are among the best in the industry.


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MALAY HOTEL VIEW


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jeff gordon nascar driver in America


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"

Randolph Lautsch

Ecriture Automatique" was an essential element of the early 20th century surrealism. In other words, the surrealist engages his subconscious in spontaneous paintings that arise within him. In this way, Bernhard tries to emulate the great masters (Pollock and Dali) with his own unique approach. Without preconceived purpose, Bernhard begins drawing whatever the sacred moment inspires him to. It is an inscrutable process where thoughts are inexplicably living in shelter and where terrors disguise themselves as manyeyed twists of the mind. The drawings by Bernhard are creatures in their own right of which he himself claims: "I am not the owner of my creations; most probably they are my demons. If I am not drawing them, that means that they have not invoked in me yet. When it happens, I will feel it and start immediately". This was a short 'blurb' written about me at my last art show. I go by 'Bernhard' as my artist name, my middle name.


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Randolph Lautsch Artworks


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Audrey Hepburn actress and humanitarian 4 May 1929–20 January 1993 Design by Mohammad Mustafa



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