ISSUE#4 by Ali Saadat

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

M A G A Z I N E -

J U N E

Stone World

Nietzche's

ionism: Express Critical Theoty

Of Sience As Art

Its Spritual & Social Voice

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NEA ARTS number 2 2010

Arts Capital Art in the DC MetropolitAn AreA

National Endowment for the Arts

We are lords of diamonds Give us some food

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

M A G A Z I N E -

Stone World

J U N E

2 0 1 0

Nietzche's

ionism: Express Critical Theoty

Of Sience As Art

Its Spritual & Social Voice

c.o.b.a.c. international art magazine by ali saadat JUNE 2010 cobac.a.c@gmail.com cobac.blog.com cobacac.blogspot.com Publishing texts and photos of this magazine can not be reproduced without permission of the owners 速

Editorial Art History Expressionism Expressionism: Its Spritual & Social Voice Michelangelo Rondanini Pieta Donatello A Bronze Lover's Feast History Of Classical Music Traditions What's Going On Inside A Piano? Monet And Pissarro In London The Troubled Life Of Vincent Van Gogh Van Gough Expressionism In Neue Gallery Pottery Is It Antique Or Not? We Are Not Yet Really Modern Jacques Derrida, Lack Of Philosophical Clarity Nietzche's Critical Theoty Of Sience As Art Whitman's Complete Works History Of Film Blue(Trois Couleurs) Theater Of Absurd Taming Of A Shrew Professor Nasser D.Khalili And The Khalili Collections Works

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Special thanks to: SIMA SHAHIDPOOR-babak ghanaat- mahdi derafshi- omid saadat- mohammad mostafaALIreza mortazavi -ADIB SABZEVAR

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

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The time went by and I delayed 3 month for magazine publication. Certainly I know it’s the darkest point in its history. Those days, I was thinking about changing the style of magazine, writing about sports (when England was beating the rivals … he… he), transforming it to a car magazine which I love or shutting it off. But as time went by and when Mohammad returned back from Italy & America and was online he told me” what’s up man? Everything is OK in magazine?” I thought” I have to do it”. Many of friends are waiting for the new volume; many others such as me see it as a business task for the future. It’s a great idea that hasn’t gone far. I think that the ultimate dream will come true. Again I should thank Mohammad for his simulation, Giovanni, Babak, Randolph and specially Alireza. I hope your ideas will help EVERLASTING so we can reach to the ideal point and pinnacle of this project.

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Editorial

Art

history S

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emiotic art history seeks to uncover the codified meaning or meanings in an aesthetic object by examining its connectedness to a collective consciousness. Art historians do not commonly commit to any one particular brand of semiotics but rather construct an amalgamated version which they incorporate into their collection of analytical tools. For example, Meyer Shapiro borrowed Saussure’s differential meaning in effort to read signs as they exist within a system. According to Schapiro, to understand the meaning of frontality in a specific pictorial context, 6it must be differentiated from, or viewed in relation to, alternate possibilities such as a profile, or a three-quarter view. Schapiro combined this method with the work of Charles Sanders Peircewhose object, sign, and interpretant provided a structure for his approach. Alex Potts demonstrates the application of Peirce’s concepts to visual representation by examining them in relation to the Mona Lisa. By seeing the Mona Lisa, for example, as something beyond its materiality is to identify it as a sign. It is then recognized as referring to an object outside of itself, a woman, or Mona Lisa. The image does not seem to denote religious meaning and can therefore be assumed to be a portrait. This interpretation leads to a chain of

Part IV

possible interpretations: who was the sitter in relation to Leonardo? What significance did she have to him? Or, maybe she is an icon for all of womankind. This chain of interpretation or “unlimited semiosis” is endless; the art historian’s job is to place boundaries on possible interpretations as much as it is to reveal new possibilities. Semiotics operates under the theory that an image can only be understood from the viewer’s perspective. The artist is supplanted by the viewer as the purveyor of meaning, even to the extent that an interpretation is still valid regardless of whether the creator had intended it. Rosalind Krauss espoused this concept in her essay “In the Name of Picasso.” She denounced the artist’s monopoly on meaning and insisted that meaning can only be derived after the work has been removed from its historical and social context. Mieke Bal argued similarly that meaning does not even exist until the image is observed by the viewer. It is only after acknowledging this that meaning can become opened up to other possibilities such as feminism or psychoanalysis.

Divisions by period

The field of Art History is traditionally divided into specializations or concentrations based on eras and regions, with further sub-division based on media. Thus, someone might specialize

in "19th century German architecture" or in "16th century Tuscan sculpture." Sub-fields are often included under a specialization. For example, the Ancient Near East, Greece, Rome, and Egypt are all typically considered special concentrations of Ancient art. In some cases, these specializations may be closely allied (as Greece and Rome, for example), while in others such alliances are far less natural (Indian art versus Korean art, for example). Non-Western art is a relative newcomer to the Art Historical canon. Recent revisions of the semantic division between art and artifact have recast objects created in non-Western cultures in more aesthetic terms. Relative to those studying Ancient Rome or the Italian Renaissance, scholars specializing in Africa, the Ancient Americas and Asia are a growing minority.

Professional Organization

In the United States the most important art history organization is the College Art Association. It organizes an annual conference and publishes the Art Bulletin and Art Journal. Similar organizations exist in other parts of the world, as well as for specializations, such as architectural history and Renaissance art history. In the UK, for example, the Association of Art Historians is the premiere organization, and it publishes a journal titled Art History.

Expressionism

by: Mohammad Mustafa

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xpressionism was a cultural movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the start of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world under an utterly subjective perspective, violently distorting it to obtain an emotional effect and vividly transmit personal moods and ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of "being alive" and emotional experience rather than physical reality. Expressionism emerged as an 'avant-garde movement' in poetry and painting before the First World War; in the Weimar years was being appreciated by a mass audience, having its popularity peak in Berlin, during the 1920s. Expressionism is exhibited in many art forms, including: painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music. The term often implies emotional angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco can be called expressionist, though in practice, 8 the term is applied mainly to 20th century works. The Expressionist stress on the individual perspective was also a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism.

Origin of the term

Although it is used as a term of reference, there has never been a distinct movement that called itself "expressionism", apart from the use of the term by Herwarth Walden in his polemic magazine Der Sturm in 1912. The term is usually linked to paintings and graphic work in Germany at the turn of the century which challenged the academic traditions, particularly through the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter groups. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche played a key role in originating modern expressionism by clarifying and serving as a conduit for previously neglected currents in ancient art. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche presented his theory of the ancient dualism between two types of aesthetic experience, namely the Apol-

lonian and the Dionysian; a dualism between the plastic "art of sculpture", of lyrical dream-inspiration, identity (the principium individuationis), order, regularity, and calm repose, and, on the other hand, the non-plastic "art of music", of intoxication, forgetfulness, chaos, and the ecstatic dissolution of identity in the collective. The analogy with the world of the Greek gods typifies the relationship between these extremes: two godsons, incompatible and yet inseparable. According to Nietzsche, both elements are present in any work of art. The basic characteristics of expressionism are Dionysian: bold colours, distorted forms-in-dissolution, two-dimensional, without perspective. More generally the term refers to art that expresses intense emotion. It is arguable that all artists are expressive but there is a long line of art production in which heavy emphasis is placed on communication through emotion. Such art often occurs during time of social upheaval, and through the tradition of graphic art there is a powerful and moving record of chaos in Europe from the 15th century on the Protestant Reformation, Peasants' War, Eight Years' War, Spanish Occupation of the Netherlands, the rape, pillage and disaster associated with countless periods of chaos and oppression are presented in the documents of the printmaker. Often the work is unimpressive aesthetically, but almost without exception has the capacity to move the viewer to strong emotions with the drama and often horror of the scenes depicted. The term was also coined by Czech art historian Antonín Matějček in 1910 as the opposite of impressionism: "An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself... (An Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures... Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through

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simple short-hand formulae and symbols." (Gordon, 1987) Expressionism was a cultural movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the start of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world under an utterly subjective perspective, violently distorting it to obtain an emotional effect and vividly transmit personal moods and ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of "being alive" and emotional experience rather than physical reality. Expressionism emerged as an 'avant-garde movement' in poetry and painting before the First World War; in the Weimar years was being appreciated by a mass audience, having its popularity peak in Berlin, during the 1920s. Expressionism is exhibited in many art forms, including: painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture and music. The term often implies emotional angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco can be called expressionist, though in practice, the term is applied mainly to 20th century works. The Expressionist stress on the individual perspective was also a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism. Although it is used as a term of reference, there has never been a distinct movement that called itself "expressionism", apart from the use of the term by Herwarth Walden in his polemic magazine Der Sturm in 1912. The term is usually linked to paintings and graphic work in Germany at the turn of the century which challenged the academic traditions, particularly through the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter groups. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche played a key role in originating modern expressionism by clarifying and serving as a conduit for previously neglected currents in ancient art. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche presented his theory of the ancient dualism between two types of aesthetic experience, namely the Apollonian and the Dionysian; a dualism between the plastic "art of sculpture", of lyrical dream-inspiration, identity (the principium individuationis), order, regularity, and calm repose, and, on the other hand, the non-plastic "art of music", of intoxication, forgetfulness, chaos, and the ecstatic dissolution of identity in the collective. The analogy with the world of the Greek gods typifies the relationship between these extremes: two godsons, incompatible and yet inseparable. According to Nietzsche, both elements are present in any work of art. The basic characteristics of expressionism are Dionysian: bold colours, distorted forms-in-dissolution, two-dimensional, without perspective. More generally the term refers to art that expresses intense emotion. It is arguable that all artists are expressive but there is a long line of art production in which heavy emphasis is placed on communication through emotion. Such art often occurs during time of social upheaval, and through the tradition of graphic art there is a powerful and moving record of chaos in Europe from11 the 15th century on the Protestant Reformation, Peasants' War, Eight Years' War, Spanish Occupation of the Netherlands, the rape, pillage and disaster associated with countless periods of chaos and oppression are presented in the documents of the printmaker. Often the work is unimpressive aesthetically, but almost without exception has the capacity to move the viewer to strong emotions with the drama and often horror of the scenes depicted. The term was also coined by Czech art historian Antonín Matějček in 1910 as the opposite of impressionism: "An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself... (An Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures... Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols." (Gordon, 1987)

Expression

Its Spiritual and Socia

Introduction

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xpressionism gained significance between the years 1905 and 1918 dur12 ing a turbulent, cultural climate, a "revelation of the profoundly problematic conditions of Europe at the turn-of-the century" (qtd. in Whitford 18). The Expressionists believed that art and society were interwoven. Through art, literature, cinema, and music they disclosed social injustices, rejected materialistic prosperity, and wanted to weaken the privileged leisure-class system. They felt this could only be achieved through "artistic awareness" and a proletarian revolution to dismantle laissez-faire capitalism. Many had visions of an apocalyptic catastrophe (neurosis of external surroundings) that would alter the face of traditional Europe as forewarned by Nietzsche. Sentimen-

tal humanism was quickly being absorbed by nationalistic ideology. The majority of the artists abhorred the enthusiasm of war and its aftermath. Through their media, realistic portraits of the horrors, spiritual annulment, and social upheaval they witnessed were communicated. The need to express a modern voice against an outmoded way of life led the Expressionists to break with the Old Order. In 1892 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (founder of the Brücke group) viewed the Munich Sezession Movement exhibition of Impressionist and Post Impressionist paintings. He felt that their content and execution were insignificant. It was then (1900) that he decided German art needed a different direction, modern visual communication. The artists in the Brücke group found their stimulus from life and experience. They strove for personal expression, an artistic oneness, and soul-search-

ing that liberated content from its constrictive mode. They enforced a revolutionary idealism and sought "a new culture of man as the basis of true art" (Roethel 77). Many in the Brücke group used a primitive style influenced by Gauguin's South Sea Island paintings. Most painted in an abstract manner in reaction to traditional Realism, voicing their discontentment with the spiritlessness found in contemporary society. The Verein Berliner Künstler (Berlin Artists Association), because of public reaction, withdrew an exhibition by Edvard Munch whose influence over the Brückegroup was tremendous. Artists responded by establishing a foundation known as the Freie Künstler Vereinigung (The Union of Free Artists) to promote and endorse artistic creativity. Censorship over the artistic imagination would not be tolerated. Between the years 1913 and

nism:

al Voice

a classical approach or portrayed national-Nordic spirit like those of Franz von Defregger's (one of Hitler's favorite artists) sentimental scenes from Tirolese peasant life. All other "modern" art works were considered entartete Kunst (degenerate art). The Brücke andBlauer Reiter groups were labeled un-German in character, disordered, and depicted cultural (ra-13 cial) suicide. This paper will concentrate on many of the artists who refused to be suppressed. Though many of their paintings were destroyed under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, they left visual, historical, eyewitness accounts--a testament for the world. Finally, this paper will relate how the Expressionists sought to reinforce the spirituality and moral fiber--once prominent in humankind--against flourishing hedonism.

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(b. 1893) imparted the Zeitgeist of their time through their graphics and paintings. Although their art works were censored or banned by Joseph Goebbels' Reichministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda[RMVAP, Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda], those that survived expressed a need for change against the Nazis' apolitical and anti-art (especially German Expressionism) movements. Goebbels as Reich Minister defined and imposed cultural standards on the public in accordance with "acceptable" German (Nazi) ideals. Hitler felt that "modern art" was destruction of form and content, relating decadent insensibility, everything that opposed the Völkisch spirit [3]." He thought there was an underlying conspiracy by cultural Bolshevist and Jewish sympathizers to destroy German identity. The Nazis permitted only paintings to be exhibited that expressed

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1929, Germany and Austria experienced economic, political, and social upheaval [1]. Societal discontentment encouraged and subscribed to radical political organizations like Hitler's Nationalist Social Party. Many Expressionist artists had to flee persecution because they refused to become a restrained, silent minority. Instead, with coy discretion through their art works, they exposed the dissention, poverty, and intellectual-cultural decay that transpired in Austrian-German society after World War I. German Expressionism defied the silencing oppression of Nazism by surviving the Thousand Year Reich. William Barrett, in his book Irrational Man explains: "Art is the collective dream of a period, a dream in which, if we have eyes, we can trace the physiognomy of the time most clearly" (41). German artists like Kathe Kollwitz [2], Max Beckmann, Otto Dix (b. 1891), and George Grosz

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Michelangelo

ichelangelo (full name Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) (March 6, 1475 - February 18, 1564) was a Renaissance sculptor, architect, painter, and poet. He is famous for creating the fresco ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as well as the Last Judgment over the altar, and "The Martyrdom of St. Peter" and "The Conversion of St. Paul" in the Vatican'sCappella Paolina; among his many sculptures are those of David and the Pieta, as well as the Virgin, Bacchus, Moses, Rachel, Leah, and members of the Medici family; he also designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica.

Michelangelo the man

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Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others and constantly unsatisfied with himself, thought that art originated from inner inspiration and from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures that he created are therefore in forceful movement; each is in its own space apart from the outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the sculptor is to free the forms that, he believed, were already inside the stone. This can most vividly be seen in his15 unfinished statuary figures, which to many appear to be struggling to free themselves from the stone. He also instilled into his figures a sense of moral cause for action. A good example of this can be seen in the facial expression of his most famous work, the marble statue David. Arguably his second most famous work is the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel which is a synthesis of architecture, sculpture & painting. His Last Judgment, also in the Sistine Chapel, is a depiction of extreme crisis. Several anecdotes reveal that Michelangelo's skill, especially in sculpture, was deeply appreciated in his own time. It is said that when still a young apprentice, he had made a pastiche of a Roman statue (Il Putto Dormiente, the sleeping child) of such beauty and perfection, that it was later sold in Rome as an ancient Roman original. Another better-known anecdote claims that when finishing the Moses (San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome), Michelangelo violently hit the knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting, "Why don't you speak to me?"

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Rondanini

Pieta

Resurrection." Michelangelo who could no longer sleep, got up at night to work with his chisel. As he used to do in the past, he had made himself a cardboard helmet upon which he fixed a candle to light up his work and keep his hands free. As he grew old, he wished more and more to be alone. He needed solitude, and when Rome was fast asleep, he sought refuge in nightly labor. Silence was a blessing to him and night was his friend. "I live alone and miserable, trapped as marrow under the bark of the tree. My voice is like a wasp caught in a bag of skin and bones. My teeth shake and rattle like the17 keys of a musical instrument. My face is a scarecrow. My ears never cease to buzz. In one of them, a spider weaves its web, in the other one, a cricket sings all night long. My rattling catarrh won't let me sleep. This is the state where art has led me, after granting me glory. Poor, old, beaten, I will be reduced to nothing, if death does not come swiftly to my rescue. Pains have quartered me, torn me, broken me and death is the only inn awaiting me."

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also because his self-criticism was so ruthless that he was never satisfied with what he had done. Indeed, to tell the truth, he rarely completed the works of his old age when he had reached the peak of maturity in his creative power. The only completely finished sculptures date back to the early period of his career." Here are Michelangelo's last words concerning his final masterpiece:"the course of my life has finally reached In its fragile boat, over stormy seas The common port where we must account For all our past actions. No painting or sculpture can quiet my soul, Now turned to the Divine Love that opens To embrace me in His arms." "For ten years of sleepless nights, I've been designing a Pieta. The body of our Lord was too heavy with death to be held up by his old Mother. His head... too earthy with matter, too real... so I cut away the Lord's head and shoulders, leaving only his arm as a model for a new one, and carved a new head from the Virgin's shoulder. He backs inward to fuse with his Mother's body, as she bends forward to raise him up. Mother and Son, the Living and the Dead, become One - Death becomes a

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entioned by Vasari in his first edition in 1550, it was therefore begun before that date. According to Blaise de Vigenre, a French traveler, who saw Michelangelo work on this statue that very year, the sculptor (who was in his seventies and not very robust) chipped off more splinters from a very hard lump of marble, than three young stonecutters in triple the time. He attacked the stone with such fiery energy that one expected to see the block shattered to pieces. With one blow he sent chips three to four fingers thick flying into the air, and penetrated to a point indicated by a drilling with such precision that he might have destroyed the whole stone, had he cut slightly deeper into it. Thanks to Condivi, we know for sure that he was still working on this group in 1553. In his second edition, Vasari reports: "At this time (1556), Michelangelo was working at it almost every day: it was like a hobby for him. He ended up breaking the block, probably because the latter was full of impurities and so hard that sparks flew from under his chisel; perhaps

Donatello Text from Bernard Ceysson and Genevieve Bresc-Bautier, "Sculpture: From the Renaissance to the Present Day"

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onatello left behind him so much work through the world that it may rightly be asserted that no artist worked so hard as he." He set his hand, adds Vasari, to everything, and an epitaph praises him for having done "alone today all that with a skilful hand numbers had once done for sculpture." And it is true that Donatello was an all-round sculptor; he was equally at home in low relief and figures in the round, in wood as well as marble and bronze. With him, in Florence, the art of sculpture was born anew. His figures ranged from the 18martial St. George to Mary Magdalene "consumed by fastings and abstinence," the arresting expressiveness of the latter being due in part at least, writes Vasari, "to his thorough knowledge of anatomy." "With the David in the Bargello and the group of Judith and Holofernes, he created the first free-standing statues of the Renaissance, independent of architecture or decoration. And from his first carvings for Florence Cathedral and San Michele he defined a type of monumental statuary whose concepts remained unquestioned till the appearance of "deconstructed" sculpture at the beginning of the twentieth century. The five statues of Prophets done between 1418 and 1435 fixed these concepts for good. The energy emanating from these grim and powerful figures is obtained by the contrast between the continuous modelling of the head and the visible parts of the body, and the shadow-

broken modelling of the heavy drapery, whose firm volumes convey so keen an impression of weight and poise. From the first, Donatello was responsive to physiognomy. He has the knack of expressing emotions aptly and tellingly by a scowl, a puckering of the brows, a stare, a wondering gaze, by the slightest gesture or working of the muscles. Already his contemporaries were struck by the communicative uneasiness of his Jeremiah, by the meditative self-possession of his Habakkuk, and he was one of the most admired and respected artists of his day. "With his St. George and the Dragon, by enveloping the figures in space, he shaped a new definition of the relief, one that brought atmospheric values into play. The tactile sense of depth and recession was one of the constant features of Donatello's art. Illuminating in this respect is the Pazzi Madonna, which most students regard as an early work, preceding the St. George. Here the technique of flattened relief (schiacciato) is sketched out. True, the perspective is still stiff and unworked out, and the foreshortcuing of the Virgin's left hand is too forthright and bold, but the softened contouring and formal simplicity of this charming and tender group (reminiscent of Giotto's sober and limpid art) announces the austere monumentality of Masaccio's Virgins. "In the later relief known as the Madonna delle Nuvole (Madonna of the Clouds) Donatello resorts, as in the St. George relief, to more pictorial effects. This image

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of the Virgin of Humility seated in a halo of clouds, surrounded by cherubs, has a grandiose sobriety duly noted by Michelangelo. The relief is not so much cut and carved as drawn and incised in order to give scope for the sequence of planes within a skilful gradation of shadings and light values. "The relief of Herod's Feast, at Siena, was executed in 1425-1427; it is one of two panels originally ordered from Jacopo della Quercia for the baptismal fonts of Siena Cathedral. Here the architectural setting acts as one of the principal motifs of the scene. Possibly this setting was designed by Michelozzo. At any event it stands out in the history of art as the first relief to be built up in accordance with the rules of perspective. "Space here is suggested not only by the accurate proportions of the 'hall' but also by its extension on either side of the visual field," writes John White. And he points out that the successive planes of the architecture weave a net which maintains the surface tension, while by its forms it creates the impression that a further sequence of airy spaces extend beyond the foreground. This strict perspective layout and the network of straight lines structuring it, heighten the dramatic effect of the scene. Starting from the Baptist's severed head presented on a salver to the horrified Herod, arises the crescendo of rhythmed gestures conveying the emotional response of the figures, expressed already by contorted or spirited movements, by the restless animation of the drapery. The upsweep of her dress shows us Salome still dancing. The memory of her slender, buoyant figure lingers on in Lippi and Botticelli. "In Florence the design and decoration of the Cantoria (Singing Gallery) was the work of Donatello. The combination of architecture, sculpture and polychronic mosaics went to create a total and expressive work of art. Here the dance of roguish and jubilant putti runs in a continuous frieze. Their full volumes are rendered by a sub-19 tle modelling of broad flat forms; and their figures, with incised hair, sinuous drapery and soft folds of flesh, are enveloped in color and light by the background polychromy, which heightens the sacred buoyancy of their dance. "The elevated presentation of the Sacra Conversazione carved in the round has something imposing and arresting about it. The more so because Donatello instilled these figures with an inner tension cunningly heightened by the contrast between the sharp-edged design of the draperies and the smooth, continuous modelling

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of the faces. The forthright frontality of the Virgin, its hieratic style, with an undertone of menace, evokes those archaic figures inspired by Etruscan art or more nearly the type of the Byzantine Nikopoia, such as Coppo di Marcovaldo's Madonna in Santa Maria Maggiore, Florence, with which Donatello was undoubtedly familiar. But he further introduced some unusual motifs which depart from the conventional iconography: the crenellated crown of cherubs, the sphinxes on the throne substituting for the traditional lions, perhaps in order to suggest the Divine Wisdom whose mysteries are not to be revealed. The strange "idol aspect" of the Virgin (Chastel) has been commented on by many historians, and indeed the figure has been seen as "the evocation of some sanguinary idol of paganism." "Donatello seems to have been the first to understand the suggestive power of the unfinished, the non finito. He found it a useful device for correcting the optical distortions caused by the spectator's distance from the work; above all, he valued it as a means of conveying in a few sharp strokes an idea that would have been weakened by aiming at a "finish" for its own sake. For "the works inspired by the poetic frenzy are the only true ones, superior to those which are born laboriously." "This "frenzy of inspiration" appears at the outset in Donatello beginning with the grim statues of prophets for the Campanile. In the last years of his life it assumes a feverish and moving tonality that one need not hesitate to describe as "romantic." At the same time it must be seen in the humanistic setting of his day. The restlessness and commotion of the figures in the 20last reliefs are carried to a point which, though extreme, is not amenable to all "expressionistic" interpretation in the present sense of the term. If Donatello enriched and extended the emotional range of art, he did so in perfect correspondence with the highest culture of his time-even though, at the end of his life, the contorted forms and convulsed expressiveness of his figures seem to look back to a medieval devoutness foreign to the spirit of the Renaissance. The dereliction, the inner torment, which these figures betray, is resolutely modern, and they have been rightly seen as a premonition of Michelangelo's sombre terribilita. "The Mary Magdalene carved for the Baptistery embodies, in paroxysmic terms, a mystical expression of faith and penitence remote from Neoplatonist speculations. It urges the beholder on to a religious fervor not far short of St. Francis of Assisi's burning faith. After Donatello there is no equivalent in Italy of this moving visiion of the body's decay and downfall."

Exir's Advance Courses Soon in Italy, England, America & France

A bronze lover's feast:

James David Draper luxuriates in the textures and original scholarship of the Frick's well displayed exhibition of the Quentin Foundation's sculpture

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he Quentin Foundation has assembled a topflight collec22 tion of renaissance and baroque bronze statuettes, including some of the boldest statements made by Mannerist and baroque sculptors. Nearly forty are now to be seen at the Frick Collection in New York in a handsome installation made all the more enjoyable for having no vitrines. The eye can thus navel freely around the works, and it is possible to savour unimpeded the sensory appeal of these stylish figures--for the most part nude--and to relish their nuances of chasing and patination. The collection is international in character, so that one judges stylistic variations from France and northern Europe as well as Italy. The catalogue is all innovative collaboration between the dean of

bronze studies, Manfred LeitheJasper; venerated former director of the decorative arts department at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and Patricia Wengraf, the energetic and erudite London dealer. It is frankly stated in those cases when the Quentin Foundation acquired its bronzes through Wengraf. Leithe-Jasper contributes an essay on the history of bronze collecting. Wengraf uses the occasion to publish her detailed findings on Francesco Fanelli, the Baroque bronzista born in Florence but active mainly in Genoa and England. The result is that we are now much more comfortably acquainted with Fanelli, whose works from the English period are better known, if often slacker in quality owing to the multiplication of casts. The splendid Quentin Mercury, unique in its large scale and pulsing with bravura, is an ex-

ception. Two of Fanelli's standard horses are also present. One was adapted to a group of St Eustace and the Stag ill the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg but the bosky group otherwise surely remains obdurately German and not Fanelli, as the caption to fig. 16 on page 47 implies. The authors do not hesitate to say so when they disagree about attribution, as in the case of a gracefully grotesque Mannerist male deity (no. 16). Wengraf defends Adriaen de Vries as its maker, an idea Leithe-Japser does not endorse. In truth this curiosity is too slight for De Vries, and Leithe-Jasper is supported, it seems to me, by the findings of Shelley Sturman, conservator at the National Gallery in Washington, who has supplied helpful analytic reports on several of the works. In this case, Sturman finds the cu-

ter's very best ceramic sculptures. Not your usual recitations of provenance and related versions, the catalogue notes are copious but delivered with acuity and panache, pointing out minute differences, of course, but always reminding one of the actual fun that cataloguing can be. The level of illustration is uncommonly high. In23 all, this is a labor of love in which a discerning public will surely also find delight. I expect to visit the exhibition often and to see several of the same faces each time I go. James David Draper is Henry R. Kravis curator in the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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welcome relief, serving as a sort of foil. I might have had trouble sustaining the attribution to Giovanni Bandini dell'Opera of the paired clay Mars and Vulcan, but the catalogue points to Bandini's works made for Urbino (brought to light by Eike Schmidt in a 1998 article in Nuovi Studi). Indeed, the rugged Urbinate efforts contrast with Bandini's cooler Florentine manner and the Bandini idea gains in appeal and conviction. On the basis of this pail; I would venture an attribution to Bandini of another terracotta, a hawkish bust in the Ashmolean Museum, catalogued by Nicholas Penny in 1992 as a St Paul by Baccio Bandinelli. As striking as it is, I see nothing of Willem van Tetrode in the Quentin collection's painted terracotta Hercules. Soldani's haunting Dead Christ attended by angels, on its original ebony base, is among that mas-

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prous alloy unlike those of previously analysed De Vries bronzes. There are at least three total masterpieces: the north Italian Hercules and Antaeus, prototype of later versions; the Venus withholding a heart from Cupid by Carlo di Cesare del Palagio; and the Neptune by Giuseppe Piamontini. There are also superlative casts of compositions there regularly encountered. These include all elegant cast of Giambologna's Mars; an appropriately rough one of Francesco Segala's Hercules; and a gem like one of Massimiliano Soldani's Apollo Musagetes. Overall, the collection is remarkable for the excitement of textures and the integrity of surfaces that the pieces display. The collection also boasts a few terracottas on more or less the same scale as the bronzes. For exhibition purposes they provide

History of classica music traditions

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European music since the unification of Gregorian chant under Charlemagne. Composers of the middle generation of the Franco-Flemish school included Johannes Ockeghem, who wrote music in a contrapuntally complex style, with varied texture and an elaborate use of canonical devices; Jacob Obrecht, one of the most famous composers of masses in the last decades of the 15th century; and Josquin Desprez, probably the most famous composer in Europe before Palestrina, and who during the 16th century was renowned as one of the greatest artists in any form. Music in the generation after Josquin explored increasing complexity of counterpoint; possibly the most extreme expression is in the music of Nicolas Gombert, whose contrapuntal complexities influenced early instrumental music, such as the canzona and the ricercar, ultimately culminating in Baroque fugal forms. Portrait of Renaissance composer Claudio Monteverdi in Venice, 1640, by Domenico Fetti. By the middle of the 16th century, the international style began to break down, and several highly diverse stylistic trends became evident: a trend towards simplicity in sacred music, as directed by the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, exemplified in the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina; a trend towards complexity and chromaticism in the madrigal, which reached its extreme expression in the avant-garde style of the Ferrara School of Luzzaschi and the late century madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo; and the grandiose, sonorous music of the Venetian school, which used the architecture of the Basilica San Marco di Venezia to create antiphonal contrasts. The

music of the Venetian school included the development of orchestration, ornamented instrumental parts, and continuo bass parts, all of which occurred within a span of several decades around 1600. Famous composers in Venice included the Gabrielis, Andrea and Giovanni, as well as Claudio Monteverdi, one of the most significant innovators at the end of the era. Most parts of Europe had active and well-differentiated musical traditions by late in the century. In England, composers such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd wrote sacred music in a style similar to that written on the continent, while an active group of homegrown madrigalists adapted the Italian form for English tastes: famous composers included Thomas Morley, John Wilbye and Thomas Weelkes. Spain developed instrumental and vocal styles of its own, with TomĂĄs Luis de Victoria writing refined music similar to that of Palestrina, and numerous other composers writing for the new guitar. Germany cultivated polyphonic forms built on the Protestant chorales, which replaced the Roman Catholic Gregorian Chant as a basis for sacred music, and imported the style of the Venetian school (the appearance of which defined the start of the Baroque era there). In25 addition, German composers wrote enormous amounts of organ music, establishing the basis for the later Baroque organ style which culminated in the work of J.S. Bach. France developed a unique style of musical diction known as musique mesurĂŠe, used in secular chansons, with composers such as Guillaume Costeley and Claude Le Jeune prominent in the movement.

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Part IV

he beginning of the Renaissance in music is not as clearly marked as the beginning of the Renaissance in the other arts, and unlike in the other arts, it did not begin in Italy, but in northern Europe, specifically in the area currently comprising central and northern France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The style of the Burgundian composers, as the first generation of the Franco-Flemish school is known, was at first a reaction against the excessive complexity and mannered style of the late 14th century ars subtilior, and contained clear, singable melody and balanced polyphony in all voices. The most famous composers of the Burgundian school in the mid-15th century are Guillaume Dufay, Gilles Binchois, and Antoine Busnois. By the middle of the 15th century, composers and singers from the Low Countries and adjacent areas began to spread across Europe, especially into Italy, where they were employed by the papal chapel and the aristocratic patrons of the arts (such as the Medici, the Este, and the Sforza families). They carried their style with them: smooth polyphony which could be adapted for sacred or secular use as appropriate. Principal forms of sacred musical composition at the time were the mass, the motet, and the laude; secular forms included the chanson, the frottola, and later the madrigal. The invention of printing had an immense influence on the dissemination of musical styles, and along with the movement of the FrancoFlemish musicians, contributed to the establishment of the first truly international style in

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Renaissance music

Do you know Annie Grieshop? 26 E V E R L A S T I N G

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I started playing the piano when I was tall enough to reach the keys. That is one of my earliest memories: standing on my tippy-toes so I could reach those elusive keys! I still have that piano, too! When I was about 15, I announced to my parents that I wanted to be a piano tuner. They didn't think that was an acceptable idea.... So I went off to college and did a BA in Anthropology and an MA in American Studies. For a bunch of years, I worked mostly in museums, which was really very interesting. Eventually, I landed in Ames, Iowa, and joined a community old-time dance band, playing guitar. After several enjoyable years of that, I switched to piano and moved on to playing with other bands. For a classically-trained pianist, playing for dances is a real hoot -- who knew you could have so much fun? Near the end of the last century, when I was at a Major Decision Point in my life, I heard that my piano technician was looking for an apprentice -- and I knew it was finally time to do what I had always dreamed of doing. I studied with him, and I went through a home-study course. And I joined the Piano Technicians Guild, which was one of the smartest things I've ever done.

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What is going on A nnie Grieshop Answer this question briefly; I will divide the piano into three main groups: the keys, the action, and the strings. For each major group, I will describe what it does, show you a picture of at least part of it, and then describe what to look for if you are inspecting a piano to add to your family. The pictures and my descriptions are for a vertical piano, although everything is generally applicable to any piano.

KEYS

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When you press down on the front of a key, the back rises up like a seesaw and sets the action in motion. The key is actually much longer than what you see from the outside of the piano. Each key connects you to a part of the action inside the piano that 28 produces sound. Each key moves a hammer that strikes a string or set of strings to create vibrations. Depending on how you push and hold the key, you can make the sound louder or softer and longer or shorter. When you let up on the key, the sound should stop. In a grand piano and in most vertical pianos, the action sits on the top of the key. In spinet pianos, the action hangs off the back of the key. Keys must be in good condition and steady on their balance pins in order to work well (like a seesaw). If you can wobble them sideways more than a little bit, then the "felt bushings" that keep them steady on their pins are worn away. This will make it harder to control the

piano and can also cause damage to the action, especially the hammers. If a key is hard to push down, or if it doesn't come back up (or only part-way), then something is wrong. A key should go down and up smoothly so you can play smoothly.

ACTION

The action is a large collection of many moving parts that all work together so that the hammer hits the string(s) at the right time. The relationship of the keys and the action matters because that's how the power gets transmitted from the player's muscles to the hammers and the strings. The more direct the route, the easier it is to control the piano (and therefore, the sound). So a grand is the most responsive in many ways, since you are almost directly connected to the hammer. In this drawing of a spinet action, the key is truncated at the right side of the picture. Most of the action is actually below the key! That's why a spinet is the least responsive: because the power has to make four turns before it gets to the string -- 360째 just to get from the end of the key to the bottom of the hammer. And since every turning point is a potential energy-waster, a lot of power and control can be lost in a spinet. Large, mostly older upright pianos have a "sticker" that sits between the key and the action (the piece next to the up arrow in this drawing). Modern, smaller uprights (e.g. "studio" and "professional" uprights) use a shorter adjustable

piece, and console actions sit directly on the key. Action parts are made mostly of wood and wool felt, and they are held together with steel pins and glue. With age and use, the parts can start moving at the wrong time or for the wrong distance. That's when your piano needs to be regulated, so everything works together to help you play well. (See the information on what a technician does for more about that). If a piano has lived in a very damp or a very dry place, the wood and felt might have been affected. A piano is a perfect place to grow mold, if it has been in too much moisture (such as a flood or a damp basement). A piano that has gotten too dry will have cracks in various places. Wood and glue joints can break if a piano is too dry, and other parts can develop serious problems, too (more about that in the next section). Keys that move but make sound are often a sign of broken action parts. It might not be a major problem, but again, you want to know about it. If you remove the front of the piano to look at the action, also check for signs of mice. Pianos can be both home and restaurant for mice, and they can do a great amount of damage pretty quickly. Look for shredded paper, stains on the tops of keys, chew marks on the edges of keys, and scat.

STRINGS

The sound of a piano (like all sound) is created by vibration. When a hammer hits a string, the string vibrates -- and the way that

n inside a piano? you can look at the bass bridge. It will be a curved piece of wood on the right side of the back, and it will have two rows of short steel pins stuck into it. All the strings on the right side of the piano will be running over it, which makes it easier to find. Each string weaves past two pins, and those pins are under tremendous pressure. If the piano has gotten too dry, the pressure of the strings will have moved the pins and cracked the bridge. A small amount of cracking is acceptable. But if that bridge is in pieces, call your technician or say goodbye to this instrument and go look for another piano.

CONCLUSION

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Your pianoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strings produce sound by vibrating, and different speeds of vibration produce different notes. Bass strings vibrate more slowly; high strings vibrate faster. Because they are tight, the strings may exert as much as 20 tons of tension on your piano (enough to lift a house from its foundation!). The tuning pins extend into a pin block, which is made of plywood. That block of wood is what holds the pins tight and helps keep the strings at the right tension (so it will produce the note you expect). Damp or dry conditions can have a major effect on strings and the pin block in a piano. If a piano is kept in a damp place, the strings might rust. That will make their sound very "dead" and will increase the chances that they will break during a tuning. A piano kept in a place that is too dry will not have rusted strings, but the wood in the pin block may have shrunk. Now the tuning pins won't hold against the pressure of the strings, so your piano won't stay in tune. There are other wooden parts that can shrink and crack if the piano gets too dry. One of the most important parts is the "bass bridge". If you pull the bottom board off the piano (push up on those flat springs that are holding the board in place -- don't pull them down!),

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the string vibrates is what makes a piano sound like a piano. Think about it: many instruments make sound by vibrating strings, but they all sound different. You can tell a guitar from a piano from a harp because the patterns of vibration are different. In general, the longer the strings in a piano, the better the sound will be -- more pure, easier to tune, prettier. So a grand piano will tend to have the best overall sound. And when you compare that to a spinet, you can really tell the difference in the sound quality. (If you want to know more about piano sound, read Reblitz!) Once the hammer hits them, strings would keep right on vibrating until they ran out of energy, but all the sound would run together and sound mushy, which isn't what you want. So, when you let up on the key, a damper touches the strings and stops the vibration for that note. One, two, or three strings? The strings that create low sounds are very heavy, long single strings. The next group of strings is not as heavy or long, so you need two of them to equal the volume of a single heavy string. The last groups of strings, the ones that create high sounds, are much lighter and shorter, so they come in sets of three. If there weren't three of them, the lower strings would drown them out.

Almost any piano can be rebuilt, if you want it badly enough. If it's a family heirloom that you love, then invest the money to make it play29 right. If it's not, then think about other options. What I've written and shown here are only general guidelines, so get more information if you need it. But please don't ask anyone (especially a beginning player) to play a piano that is in bad condition or out-of-tune. Get the most out of your investment, both in money and in effort, and keep that piano in good condition! Most of the graphics on this page were drawn by Lonna Nachtigal, a fine artist from Ames, Iowa. Thanks, Lonna!

Monet and Pissarro in London

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mpressionists Visit London After Franco-Prussian War

The years following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 are of capital importance in the development of Impressionism. It was born at La Grenouillere in 1869, but a series of events, meetings and influences go to layout its direction; plot its course and precipitate its sparse elements to the point of condensation and definition of a style. The painters have passed the stage where they know only what they do not want; they are conscious of the impor-

tance of their enterprise and have found certain of their rules definitive. They know what they prefer and have taken certain irreversible steps. Since the meeting between Renoir and Monet, when they studied the reflection of water at La Grenouillere, they know how to realise their intuitions, have discovered how to communicate their personal feeling to each other while still keeping all its particular flavour. They have a sharp sense of life, a strong taste for adventure. Partly gripped by the revolutionary spirit which was so active just before 1870, they have the feeling that general progress is possible

and become interested in the development of experimental science. Their aversion to convention and restraint, the feebleness of official teaching, even the hostility they feel and which is confirmed every time they come up against authority or its representatives, all this incites them to push farther forward. It also permits them to surmount in their way the catastrophe which is about to befall France. It belongs to a society which is in no way theirs. It might even be said that the war, in causing the collapse (provisional) of out-of-date social structures, was to leave the way open for installation of real values. It causes a break in habits

his snow and ice effects. They are astonished by the way he has succeeded in giving an impression of whiteness to the snow, they who so far had not been successful with their big white patches laid on with wide sweeps of the brush. They come to the conclusion that this marvellous result is not obtained by using a uniform white but by a large number of patches of different colour placed alongside one another and, from a distance, giving the desired effect." Pissarro, in a letter to Dewhurst in November 1902, wrote: "In 1870 I was in London with Monet and we met Daubigny and Bonvin; Monet and I were enthusiastic about the London landscapes. Monet was working in the parks while I, staying in Lower Norwood, then a charming district, studied the effects of fog, snow and spring. We were working from nature and later Monet painted in London some superb fog studies. We also used to go to the museum. The watercolours and painting of Turner and John Constable, as well as the works of Old Crome, certainly had their effect on us. We admired Thomas Gainsborough, Lawrence, Joshua Reynolds and the others at the Royal Academy, but we were particularly taken by the landscapists who were nearer to what we were seeking in 'plein air', light and fleeting effects." In a letter to his son on 8 May 1903, he also remarked: "Turner and Constable, while useful to us, confirmed that these painters did not understand31 the analysis of shadow which, in Turner's case, is always a deliberate effect, a hole. As for division of tones, Turner confirmed its value as a way of painting but not as the exact one." Much later on the aging Monet, who alone has led Impressionism to its greatest importance, declares that to his mind Turner's art is "antipathetic because of the exuberant romanticism of his imagination". Apparently one may attach more weight to what Pissarro had to say because of the deeply scru-

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tween England and France has been abundant and fruitful. After the contacts between Gericault and Delacroix on the one hand and Bonington and the Fieldings on the other, and above all Whistler, dividing his time between London and Paris, is a sort of hyphen between the two pictorial worlds which are moving farther and farther apart. Monet goes to England from Boulogne in 1868 and returns very satisfied. For Monet and Pissarro this enforced stay at this particular time in their development seems to be a happy stroke of fate, both as concerns influences, meetings and confirmation of their views. Delacroix is known to have had a strong influence on the painters of the group who sometimes were not afraid to acknowledge it: Renoir, in the Salon of 1870, showed a "Woman of Algiers," in which the striking colouring and even the composition itself left no doubt about the admiration he felt for the master of Romanticism. Delacroix's technique, particularly that offlochetage (flossiness), which was like a pre-Divisionism, for long had attracted their attention, as did observations such as this from about 1846 or 1847: "Constable says that the superior green of his fields results from composition of a multitude of different greens. What brings a lack of intensity and life to the verdure of most landscapists is the fact that they usually paint it in a uniform colour. What he says here about the green of his fields may be applied to all tones." The English landscape offers Monet and Pissarro subjects which touch them deeply, but they also find themes for meditation and discussion in the museums. Unfortunately our only information on these points is from much later recollections and letters. In 1899 Signac, recording conversations with the two painters, wrote: "In London ... they studied his [Turner's] work and analysed his technique. They are struck primarily by

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and routine, healthy for everyone. It makes it necessary to move, to travel abroad (England and Holland), which proves particularly fruitful. It allows for re grouping and meeting. On the news of the declaration of war on Prussia each of the Impressionist painters reacts in his own manner, but what appears to be most important to all is that painting must be saved at all costs, and their painting first. Bazille gets to work immediately but unfortunately has only a few months to live. He is killed in battle at Beaune-la-Rolande on 28 November, leaving behind only promises. On the contrary Cezanne, not very concerned about being called up for the army, leaves Aixen-Provence and the calm of his family to go and work at L'Estaque. Renoir is mobilised into a cavalry regiment, first at Bordeaux then at Tarbes. Degas, on the coast, and Monet, staying at Le Havre, hurry back to Paris. Both wait for the fall of the Empire to enlist, the former in the artillery and the latter in the National Guard. Monet stays first at Le Havre but, when things really begin to happen, succeeds in reaching England after entrusting a number of his works to Pissarro. The latter in turn, having had to leave all his work at Louveciennes, leaves for London. They follow events in France intensely but from a distance. But the tenor of daily life is shattered for all of them; the cafe gatherings, exchanges of views, doctrinal discussions, friendly or stormy, are over. Each one, according to where he is and what he is doing, finds that the solution is to get down to hard work. In the midst of this upheaval even Monet stuffs enough materials into his soldier's kit to paint some studies from nature. Exile and isolation causes Monet to take refuge in his work. And I believe it is of the greatest importance that events should have led him to England. Since the time of Romanticism literary and artistic exchange be-

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ing it, without placing before our intelligence another way of conceiving our condition; the traditional manner of Coordinating the whole phenomena is not reversed. Impressionism, and Monet is fully aware of it at the end of his career, has produced a revolution in vision. Breaking away from criteria and conventions inherited from the classic tradition, it has turned the order of things upside down to put man and the universe into a new relationship. The evolution of art and thought allow us today to see even better its full consequences. On the material level also, the sojourn of Monet and Pissarro in London was to have very great consequences; during this same period Daubigny, also a refugee in England, paints views of the Thames which are a great financial success and assure him of a living. Alarmed by the financial problems which face Monet, he undertakes, perhaps in charity, to introduce him to his dealer Durand-Ruel. The latter, which has left Paris and brought his stock, has opened a gallery in New Bond Street. Durand-Ruel is interested in the painters of the Barbizon school. And he begins to consider the painters of the following generation as the possible successors - Corot, Diaz, Daubigny and Courbet. Monet was not entirely unknown to him because in the International Review of Art and Curia, published under his direction at the Paris Salon of 1870, he had commented on the entries of Degas and Monet as well as Sisley, Pissarro and Monet, although Monet had been rejected by the jury. But in London they come into direct contact and their friendship is established. Despite financial difficulties which Durand-Ruel himself shortly has to face, he greatly increases his efforts and attempts to support and put this new painting on the market. DurandRuel was an exemplary art dealer: an ex-33 pert lover of art, with the courage of his own convictions, very sure taste, patient and tenacious, daring to be the first and only one, not hesitating to risk his own fortune on his choice. He was to play a decisive role in the survival, then the triumph, of Impressionism.

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pulous and exacting mind of the artist and also because of the wealth of his detail. In 1870 what later was called Impressionism had barely taken shape. The movement was still very fresh. If the enthusiasm of the painters in the group was great and they were assured of their convictions, they nevertheless avidly and gladly welcomed any support for their ideas. Pissarro, with just discernment, uses the verb "to confirm". We can well believe that he and Monet were happy to find confirmation of the correctness of their enterprise, then in full development, in such a celebrated and admired master. They still wondered about the manner of treating shadow, the division of tones and the best technical means of securing the intensity of light they wanted. Thus they found an ally in the works of Turner and Constable. This is incontestable even if, the sketches of Turner and Constable, so important in the eyes of the modern critic, were not yet to be seen at that time in the London museums. For this reason Clark possibly goes too far in minimizing the contribution of British painters to Impressionism. When Monet shows a certain reserve about Turner, he places it on the aesthetic, not the technical level. On the other hand affirmations by Pissarro and Signac are essentially on considerations of craft and are of a practical and visual order. Finally, when Monet makes his declaration, he is near the end of his life. Since that visit to London long ago the impressionist technique has evolved, has become more explicitly formulated. Monet then has another manner of envisaging the deep significance of his work. To put things in their right perspective we may recall another statement by Pissarro to Dewhurst: "Turner and Constable have been useful to us as have all the great painters. But the basis of our art is indisputably of French tradition. Our masters are Clouet, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain; the 18th century with Chardin, and the group of 1830 with Corot." It is also true that Impressionism has developed far beyond Turner's ideas. He is a romantic. His imagination ennobles the world. He becomes delirious before the effects of nature, which he amplifies to the point of paroxysm. In his mind nature is transformed into a vast whirlwind of forces in which man finds his place; it is presented like a Byronic exaltation of the elements. But this world of raging or flashing outbursts keeps its order; the paradoxes are respected. The painter interprets it without destroy-

The Troubled Life

Vincent Of by: Bonnie Butterfield

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he 19th century European society of Van Gogh's day was not ready to accept his truthful and emotionally morbid way of depicting his art subjects. His internal turbulence is clearly seen in most of his paintings, which set the stage for the direction of a new style of painting called Expressionism. It is characterized by the use of symbols and a style that expresses the artist's inner feelings about his subject. 34 Therefore, an understanding of the paintings by Van Gogh requires insight into his turbulent life, because his style of painting is exemplified by a projection of the painter's inner experience onto the canvas he paints. In Vincent Van Gogh's own words, he said, "What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter, and then the painting." To understand an artist of Expressionism we must first explore their biography. Many of us can identify with the roadblocks that Vincent Van Gogh experienced in his many career and romantic pursuits, all ending in failure. His reaction to these experiences however, demonstrates a biological and psychological abnormality, causing behaviors that alienated those around him. As he became more isolated from so-

ciety and began to pour all of his energies into painting, his eccentricities and outbursts developed pathological traits, which caused him first, to be institutionalized, and second, it led to his suicidal

death at the young age of 37. During his short and turbulent life, he sold only 1 painting for 400 francs, just 4 months before his death. It is titled "The Red Vineyard". Nonetheless, he produced

an incredible number of masterpieces that will continue "living" for the rest of human history. Most casual art lovers see Van Gogh as a troubled, but success-

crucible that could hold all of the artist's passions, conflicts, and unrealized dreams. Thus, a look into his childhood will give us an understanding of Van Gogh's cre-

Co. located at The Hague, in Belgium, and later transferred to the London and Paris galleries. He quickly learned all the painters and their respective styles

ful artist. This is far from the actual truth of his turbulent life, which was fraught with failure in every occupational pursuit he attempted including painting, and was marked by intermittent episodes of depression, violence and acting out behaviors. Thanks to the preservation of 1000's of letters Van Gogh had written to friends and family, especially to his brother Theo, we have a nearly complete understanding of his feelings, experiences, and views on every aspect of his life. Surprisingly, his incredible artistic talent went undeveloped and unrecognized until he was 27 years old, after he had already failed at two other career choices, as an art dealer and a Protestant minister. Under the shroud of family shame when he was found incompetent to follow in his father's ministerial footsteps, he began to study art. He obsessively poured himself into this newly found talent and completed thousands of sketches and oil paintings before he shot himself to death at the age of 37 years old. Many observers of Van Gogh's life justifiably believe that his eccentricities, which were visible from early childhood, compounded to create many distressing experiences that directly impacted the development of Expressionism. Painting was no longer the medium used primarily to capture photographic images. It became a

ative expression, as well as an understanding of the origins of Expressionism. Vincent's sister, Elizabeth Van Gogh, described his demeanor as a child. He was "intensely serious and uncommunicative, and walked around clumsily and in a daze, with his head hung low." She continued by saying, "Not only were his little sisters and brothers (he was the oldest of 8) like strangers to him, but he was a stranger to himself." A servant who worked for the Van Gogh family when Vincent was a child described him as an, "odd, aloof child who had queer manners and seemed more like an old man," than the child he was. Vincent was a disappointment to his mother, and eventually to his entire family, even his beloved brother Theo Van Gogh who supported him financially for the 10 years that he worked as a painter. In Vincent's own words, he says of Theo, that he was the one "who comforts his mother and is worthy to be comforted by his mother." On the other hand, Vincent was rejecting and obstinate, making himself inaccessible to all family members, except for Theo. Vincent later described his childhood as "gloomy and cold and sterile." Unaware of his own artistic genius, Vincent Van Gogh first tried to learn the art of selling the works of other artists. As a young man of 16, he became apprenticed to an art dealer at the firm of Goupil &

and what constitutes a valuable piece of artwork. In fact, he actually learned too well! If a customer became interested in purchasing a poorly done painting, Van Gogh would provide a long discourse on why it was a piece of junk. He was even known to become argumentative with many of the art patrons. Following his failure as an art dealer, Vincent Van Gogh later wrote to his sister Wilhelmina Van Gogh that the galleries and art firms "are in the clutches of fellows who intercept all the money," and that only "one-tenth of all the business that is transactedâ&#x20AC;Śis really done out of belief in art." Vincent Van Gogh did not understand the mechanics of interpersonal diplomacy, or the principles of salesmanship. During this period he fell in love for the first time, and openly professed his love for Eugenia, a respectable upper class woman. Eugenia35 was insulted by his unwanted advances, and she harshly rebuffed him. Van Gogh's inability to read the intent and emotions of others caused him to fail to see that she had never expressed any interest in him. Failing in his first romantic experience, he also blundered miserably in his first job as an art dealer. He was dismissed by the art firm, and with a relatives help, he temporarily took a position as an assistant teacher and curate. Following a short stint as a teacher, he returned home to Hol-

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t Van gogh

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land for a visit with his parents and decided to stay. He took a job in a bookshop. While working as a clerk for the bookseller, he rented a room with a family named Rijken. Mrs. Rijken said that she had to scold numerous youngsters for taunting Vincent Van Gogh and calling him "a queer freak." He was only 24 years old. Vincent soon realized that he was also inadequate as a teacher and a bookseller, and he was becoming desperate to find work. His parents were reluctant to continue supporting their oldest son, who was a failure in their eyes. This drew him to finally attempt to satisfy his father's greatest wish that he become a minister. In Amsterdam, he began studying for the University entrance exams in theology, but soon found that he did not have the ability to learn the required math and foreign languages. With a relative's help he entered an evangelical school in Brussels and subsequently became a missionary preacher in the Borinage, a mining district in Belgium. Van Gogh found his personal calling working among the downtrodden miners and their families, and was known to give away his clothing and money to help the 36poor living in shacks on the blackened earth of the coal fields. Nonetheless, he could not convincingly communicate his religious feelings to his flock, and while viewing the pride that they could maintain in spite of their miserable living conditions, they influenced Vincent to take on their lower class beliefs. His own religious convictions began slipping away, no longer seeming adequate or relevant. Living in the same filth and poverty that his brethren were forced to experience, he lost religion but gained a new fascination in his charcoal drawings of the peasant class living around him. Vincent returned home for an extended visit and fell deeply in love with his first cousin Kee Vos, who had also been staying with

his family. However, for someone to merely contemplate marriage with one's own cousin was a serious breach of an important taboo strongly held in 19th century Holland? Interestingly, Kee, like Eugenia his first love, had no interest in Vincent. Undaunted by her obvious disinterest in him, Vincent attempted to visit her at her family's home, but was refused entry. Kee's father repeatedly told him that she was not at home. Vincent thought that her family was keeping her away from him against her will, and that she was actually at home. Forcing a dramatic encounter with Kee's father, Vincent impulsively attempted to demonstrate the intensity of his affections for Kee. He held his hand in the flame of a kerosene lamp and said to Kee's father, "Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame!" After blowing the flame out, Kee's father took Vincent to a nearby saloon to get him intoxicated and to reduce his extreme agitation. Then he convinced Vincent that Kee could not see him, and that their relationship had no future. When Van Gogh's father, a devoted Christian minister, discovered that Vincent had fallen in love with Kee, his first cousin, and that he had also strayed from his religious beliefs, a bitter quarrel caused a life-long break in the father/son relationship. Cast from the family home, Vincent Van Gogh threw himself into his artwork and began a relationship with a low class prostitute named "Sien." She moved in with him and he became deeply empathetic with her own personal suffering. Van Gogh not only lovingly sketched her image, but because she was in poor health, he also took care of all her needs. However, because she was a prostitute, the Van Gogh family was scandalized by her presence in Vincent's living quarters, which further caused friction in Vincent's relationship with them. Van Gogh's eccentric behavior

increased as his contempt for middle-class proprieties soon alienated all who tried to help him. He began wearing ragged, unwashed clothing, did not respond to acquaintances on the street, and lived an isolated existence. His only activity was to draw and paint in ways that conveyed his sympathies for the hard lives of peasants. His greatest painting, "The Potato Eaters" was the result of his deep empathy with the peasant class. An old man reported that when he was ten years old he knew Vincent Van Gogh, who he frequently saw painting landscapes in Nuenen, Belgium. From the viewpoint of children in the neighborhood, Vincent Van Gogh was a curious sight indeed. He would sit on a stool alongside roadway painting scenery for hours at a time. The witness describes Van Gogh as a "funny, red-bearded man with a straw hat, smoking a pipe and painting intently, and not responding to anyone's attempts to communicate with him." N his many letters, it is clear that Van Gogh was aware of his depressive tendencies, and that he had experienced them most of his life. After one of his mental crises he wrote "Well, even in that deep misery I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself: in spite of everything I shall rise again, I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing, and from that moment everything has seemed transformed in me." Van Gogh seemed to utilize the incredible high spirits, which always followed his severe depressions, as a source of his creative energy. In 1886, at the age of 33, Van Gogh went to Paris and mingled with Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Seurat, and other painters who were later considered among the best. His painting techniques were influenced by these impressionists, and their use of bright colors and their choice of less sentimental subject matter altered the direction his style of painting would

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take. Unless depression overcame him, he carefully avoided his tendency to paint dark canvases and subjects who were weighted down with the drudgeries of life. However, after two years of working among the Parisian artistic community, Van Gogh's delicate nervous system began to collapse. His friendship with Paul Gauguin was in Van Gogh's own words, "electric," but like all of his other relationships it was doomed by Van Gogh's inability to comprehend normal social relationships. On December 24, 1888, an argument ensued between them. Van Gogh unsuccessfully attacked Gauguin, then mutilated himself by cutting a large piece off of his ear, he wrapped the severed ear in paper, and gave it to a startled prostitute whom he had befriended. When his brother learned of this incident, he had Vincent institutionalized for two weeks in Arles, France in 1888. This was followed by several more breakdowns in 1890. Psychologists studying Van Gogh's history of mental breakdowns have theorized that each mental crisis was preceded by a perceived threat to the deep attachment he felt for a loved one. His first collapse occurred shortly 38after his beloved brother Theo Van Gogh, had announced his engagement to his future wife Johanna. Vincent's second mental breakdown came a few days after a violent argument and the hasty departure of his close friend, fellow painter Paul Gauguin. His third mental crisis occurred shortly before the wedding of his brother Theo. Apparently, Vincent perceived the romantic relationship between Theo and Johanna, and their subsequent marriage, as a loosening of the bonds he held with his brother. In May 1890, he stayed for three days with Theo, his wife and new baby. Theo's lung condition had grown worse, and Vincent was clearly concerned with his brother's health. Selfishly, he was also worried about Theo's

deteriorating financial prospects, which had already reduced the living allowance that was sent to Vincent each month. Reflecting his plunging mood Vincent painted "The Undergrowth with Two Figures" in June 1890, 1 month before his suicide death. It has a lonely and depressive style and coloration. In one of his last letters dated July 1890, he sadly wrote to his brother Theo, "I feel...a failure. That's it as far as I'm concerned...I feel that this is the destiny that I accept, that will never change." In contrast, one of his last paintings which he completed in late July 1890 titled "Wheat Field with Crows," reflects an ambivalence of optimism and hopelessness with the dark clouds of depression slowly lifting up from the skyline. It is common knowledge among clinical psychologists that a person with bi-polar disorder (known as manic depression during Van Gogh's time), invariably attempt suicide while rising up from the depression towards the manic phase. A few days after he finished this painting, Vincent Van Gogh, on July 27, 1890, killed himself with a gunshot to the chest. His brother Theo died of lung disease 6 months after the death of Vincent. Although he only sold one painting during his life-time, he is considered the most powerful Expressionist, and his paintings each sell for millions of dollars. Ironically, Vincent Van Gogh is deemed by society to be one of our greatest and most successful artists. Conclusion I personally believe that the intense interest that today's society has for Van Gogh lies not in the quality of his paintings, but in his ability to project his turbulent emotional experience onto the canvas. Because he was an Expressionist, we know more about his mental state than we do ANY other great painter in history. For example, his painting "Starry Night over the Rhine", gives us

the sense that he was just beginning to plunge into a state of depression. This painting was created in Arles, France in September, 1888, and it remains housed in the MusĂŠe d'Orsay in Paris. Van Gogh's state of mind at the time he painted it can only be speculated about. It is suspected that he was probably on the verge of going into a deep depressive state. The very dark colors, with glimpses of light are typical of his style during the early phase of his depressive episodes. So to, is the appearance of the shadowy figures of a man and woman in the far right-hand corner of the painting, widely believed to be suggestive of his dependent, yet ambivalent relationship with his brother and sister-in-law? In general, Van Gogh's mood had begun to sour while he was in France, surrounded by many great painters of the day. His awkwardness in social relationships began to take a toll. He was plagued by frequent extreme shifts in his emotional state. Mania and feelings of grandiosity were always followed by self-loathing, and the despair of deep depressions. It appears likely that just after he completed the painting above, he sunk further into the depths of depression. We know that two months later, on December 24, 1888, his mood began to revert back to the manic state, when his violent argument with Gauguin occurred. It resulted in self-mutilation, which is a common behavior in mental patients during manic excitement. Without access to modern medicine, the frequency of these self-destructive episodes increased until Van Gogh's suicide in 1890. From a behavioral standpoint, Van Gogh's ability to express his internal state of mind in his artwork, provides us with a vivid record of the see-saw activity of his brain's chemistry. When he began to slip into depression, his paintings would take on a deep, dark feeling of doom, with only hints

of light optimism remaining. However, as the depression deepened, his canvases become dark vessels of hopelessness. Amazingly, a complete reversal would always occur, catapulting him into a frenzy of grandiose feelings and creative activity as the mania took hold. His paintings

would become electric with brilliant colors, and the canvas textures jumped to life with jittery strokes of paint, brilliantly mirroring his manic state of mind. Because Van Gogh was an Expressionistic painter, we know more about his internal life than we do about any of civilization's other

Master painters. He alone has allowed us to peer into his mind, while he was in the act of creating his art. This is truly the unique and lasting contribution that Vincent Van Gogh has given to us in the study of our great Masterpieces.

Van Gogh and

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ew Yorkers have been treated to a recent arrival on museum-mile: the Neue Gallery at Fifth Avenue and89th Street, equidistant betwixt the Met and the Guggenheim. Visitors to the Neue Gallery have come to expect ground-breaking exhibits that shed light on special themes,artists and cross-currents of design, crafts and architecture in early 20th century Austrian and German arts. Now comes something of a different order: an exhibit that pairs Vincent Van Gogh with a host of artists that were influenced by his vibrant color, tortured line and intense self-portraits. At the Neue Gallery, the selfportraits command the emotional center. Van Gogh created the template for the modern selfportrait,and many are included in here. Ludwig Meidner and Lovis Corinth can be considered lesser lights yet their inclusion in this show is right-on: both portray searching self-portraits that echo van Gogh's modern take on Rembrandt's incisive psychological depth and rigorously honest self-

by Al Doyle

appraisal. It is hard to think of any artist who has not been influenced by this soul-searching and scathing approach to self depiction on canvas: Picasso, Matisse, Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning all fell under the spell of this highflying Dutchman. See the images reproduced here by Paul Klee and Karl Schmidt-Rotloff for more examples of Vincent's reach into the modern psyche. While the Klee relies on the intensive gaze to portray the artistic temperament, Schmidt-Rotloff is dependent on vibrant color and Van Gogh inspired brushwork for packing an emotive punch in the painting. There is a downside to this intense Sturm und Drang: the maudlin conceit of the misunderstood artiste (think Van Gogh as played by Kirk Douglas in the Hollywood's Lust For Life). There are several other interesting themes explored in this show: the importance of arbitrary color in the expressionist landscape; the use of still life as a locus of emotional depth that goes much deeper than the shop-worn vanitas typical of the Dutch tradition. Especially poignant and indicative

of the spell cast by Van Gogh is the depiction of wilted Sunflowers by Egon Schiele. Unfortunate that the New York exhibit is missing the iconic Van Gogh Sunflowers with which it was paired with at the Van Gogh Museum inAmsterdam where the exhibit was first seen. Any exhibit featuring Van Gogh will be a crowded event with the masses turning out for the latest installment of the "Vincent Diaries" as to any other serial entertainment. If possible, try to catch this show on off-hours: make and attempt to avoid the weekend crowds as this is a smaller space39 and the intimacy of the works on view suffer under pressure. Jill Lloyd is a guest curator of this exhibit, which along with her accompanying catalog marks a milestone event in the short history of the Neue Gallery in that this is the first venture beyond the strict confines of the German and Austrian purview and also outside the curatorial ranks of the Gallery proper. The exhibit remains on view until July 2nd, 2007 at the Neue Gallery in NYC.

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the Neue Gallery, NYC

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Pottery not?

is it antique or

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the college, its designer and its potter. Grueby Faience was a factory that was known both for its art pottery and its architectural tiles. One of the great pleasures of pottery is that they are often marked. A single mark on a piece of pottery can reveal the country and often the factory that it was manufactured in as well as the year it was made. The marks can even tell you the very month that is was made. Marks are usually printed under the glaze, using a stamp or transfer technique. You will find them located on the bottom or back of an object. Sometimes they are painted over or under the glaze. If a piece has no mark, it may predate the use of marks and would be worth researching. It was common in the late-nineteenth and twentieth century wares to have no mark. The value of pottery depends on its condition. A cracked vase or bowl is useful only as a cabinet piece, because it cannot be handled, used or displayed in the front, this is a drawback. Just because these pieces are old does not necessarily mean they are valuable. Ornamental objects such as vases or figures are often more valuable than utilitarian pieces like cups and saucers the 41 most least sought after of pottery wares. Although all potteries are fragile, if damaged collectors will only accept very rare pieces. On common pieces chips, cracks and replaced parts destroy the value. If you find a piece that the designs are printed on these are usually less valuable than pieces that the designs are hand painted on.

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Granite Ware. It is tough and thick, plain or transfer=printed, it was frequently used for large dinner services or as commercial tableware. Most American and European Arts and Crafts potters of the late nineteenth century worked in pottery rather than porcelain. True to its style, their wares were naturalistic and organic in color and shape, most were often handmade. Some of the most recognized potters of the nineteenth included people like Charles Volkmar, Chelsea Keramic, Lonhuda, George Ohr, Grueby Faience, Adalaide Alsop Robineau and Artus Van Briggle. There were manufactures and schools that were noted for their potter abilities as well such as Rookwood, Weller and Newcomb College. Charles Volkmarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pottery was decorated with ladscapes and animals, which reflects his training as a painter. Chelsea Keramic became the Dedham Pottery and made blue-and- white tableware. Many of the best art potters were trained at Rookwood. The firm made lamps, mantels and wall plaques and many other unusual items. Lonhuda was best known for a high-glass brown glaze on a yellow body, his work imitated Native American pottery shapes and images. Weller was one of the largest pottery works in the world, which manufactured everything from matte-green art pottery to the oil-slick glazes of Jacques Sicard. George Ohr was a self-proclaimed eccentric and genius, who made thousands of pieces of pottery, with no two alike, using a variety of techniques. Newcomb College trained women potters, and every piece is marked with the initials of

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ntique pottery can be hard to determine if it is antique, this article gives information on how to determine if your piece is antique or not. Pottery is made from clay baked in a kiln. The metal or mineral content is what created the basic color. Clay can be many different colors such as red, yellow, white, brown or gray. Pottery is most often used for less expensive ware. Red ware is the name for objects made of red clay, it can be thrown on a potterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wheel or simply molded by hand. It s brittle and can be easily damaged, it is usually coated with a glaze, because it has large pores and absorbs the liquids. Yellow ware is English of American earthenware commonly used for kitchen items like mixing bowls. These are not often marked. Stoneware is refined earth wares made of a combination of clays and gassy ingredients. Most stone wares range in color from light gray to brown and are durable, dense and lightweight when thinly potted. Spatter ware and sponge wares were both produced in the nineteenth century, and were used mostly for decoration. Spatter ware is earthenware that has been spattered with colored liquefied clay, usually blue or red. Sponge ware is earthenware made for everyday use. It is heavier potted and more primitive that spatter ware, it is decorated with dabs of color applied with a sponge. Another variety of pottery is ironstone, which is an early nineteenth century type of white earthen ware that is sometimes called Stone China, or in America, White

We are not yet really modern

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propose that our polluted earth needs to be redeemed and our alienated humanity saved. I propose that architecture can play a key role in this. An example is Louis Kahn, who tried to design buildings to be places which would nurture the creative community of the persons who used them. Consider: The city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small 42boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life. ...The city, from a simple settlement, became the place of assembled institutions. The measure of its greatness as a place to live must come from the character of its institutions, sanctioned by their sensitivity to desire for new agreement, not by need, because need comes from what already is. Desire is the thing not made, the roots of the will to live. (Louis Kahn, in Lobell, Between Silence and Light, 1979, pp. 44-5) This endeavor to make differences which make a difference can be pursued in all areas of life, not just architecture. In place of postmodernism's "play of signifiers", we can cultivate significant play: activity in which persons find

pleasure, fellowship, satisfaction, etc., in creative work directed to solving real problems in ways that straightforwardly enrich both their (our) own and others' lives.... Instead of decorating sheds into which persons must [under]go to spend their life time doing things that are not intrinsically nourishing or beautiful, we can work to liberate persons (including ourselves) from ever again having to subject themselves to such life circumstances. Etc.... Venturi polemically asserts that while it is OK to decorate construction, it is not OK to "construct decoration", which is how he describes modernist buildings that attempted by their visual form to be unique and thus to stand out from their surroundings. One specific example he cites is another housing project for the aged, by Paul Rudolph: a high-rise tower with windows in which the elderly's plastic flowers definitely look out of place (Learning from Las Vegas, ref. lost). (One precursor of postmodern architecture's ideal of the "decorated shed" is: automobile hubcaps.) Insofar as the modernist building does no more to improve persons' quality of life than the postmodernist building, both fall short

of the criteria Louis Kahn proposes: to construct spaces which better address human need, and, beyond that, foster persons' opportunities to create and to come to new social agreements for the universally satisfying arrangement of their lives -- places which nurture: "desire... the roots of the will to live". One may wish to call this a further elaboration of the idea of modernity, which, as the project of unending disciplined examination and critical reconstruction of our form of life in all its aspects, has obviously only been fragmentarily realized in our contemporary world (where, to pick one rather inconsequential example almost at random: persons still frequently ritually "dress up" for work and other social activities, only substituting (e.g.) Armani suits for birds' feathers...). If, alternatively, one wishes to limit "modernism" to its factual achievements -- emphasizing its failures and existing limitations over its more constructive accomplishments and its as yet unrealized potential --, then one might justly characterize the orientation I am here urging, with its renewed -redoubled -- ethical and humanistic commitment, as being: "beyond postmodernism".

Louis Kahn

February 20, 1901 or 1902 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; March 17, 1974

Jacques Derrida

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Lack of philosophical clarity

hough Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on several occasions and was highly regarded by contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas, and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other Analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and W. V. Quine, as pseudo philosophy or sophistry. Searle, a frequent critic of Derrida dating back to their exchange on speech act theory in Limited Inc (where Derrida strong-

ly accused Searle of intentionally misreading and misrepresenting him), exemplified this view in his comments on deconstruction in the New York Review of Books, 2 February 1994, for example: ...anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making

claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial. Michel Foucault, who has often been closely associated with Derrida, also revealed his dissatisfaction of Derrida's style of writing in a conversation with Searle. According to Foucault, Derrida practices the method of obscurantism terrorist (terrorist obscurantism; an ironic term given Derrida's later preoccupation with terrorism). Searle quotes Foucault's explanation of the term as the following: He writes so obscurely you

can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, "You didn't understand me; you're an idiot." That's the terrorism part. Foucault's resentment towards Derrida may be linked to Derrida's influential critique of Foucault's Madness and Civilization, and the fact that Foucault was at one time Derrida's teacher. However, after their falling out in the 1960s, they reconciled when Foucault helped to secure Derrida's release from prison, when he was arrested on false charges in Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s. A controversy surrounding Derrida's work in philosophy and as a philosopher arose when the University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary doctorate, despite opposition from some of members of its philosophy faculty and a letter of protest signed by eighteen professors from other institutions, including W. V. Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and RenĂŠ Thom. In their letter they claimed that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and described Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." The letter concluded that: "... Where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university."

NIETZSCHE'S CRITICAL THEORY

SCIENCE

ART

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self, Nietzsche nonetheless differs from the enlightenment project of philosophical modernity in general, from Kant if not Descartes, for he does not exclude his own provocative solution from the very pernicious problem of the limit of critical reflection. Rather than a revolutionary call for still another effort, as it may be heard from authors as dissimilar as the Marquis de Sade and JĂźrgen Habermas, that is: from the height of the enlightenment to our own postenlightenment times, Nietzsche recognizes the tragic limit of critique as such. Any critical project is irrecusably subject to distortion precisely because an organon, even a reflective organon, simply cannot be used on itself. Thus the reflexive limit of the critical project entailed that what Nietzsche was to name "the problem of science" could not be recognized on the ground of science. Regarded as a radically critical, which is also to say: quintessentially philosophic approach to the question of science, Nietzscheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grounding question of theoretical or scientific knowledge quickly takes the philosophic reader to the depths of critical reflection? Not even the original author of the critical philosophy, puts science so manifestly in question (though to be sure Kant does show the extent to which science itself is constrained by the preconditions of the understanding as such). And if Kant is scrupulously uncritical in this regard, we are still more47 restrained as a culture today. It is anti-modern, anti-science, and indeed: irrational to challenge the hegemony of science, scientia, episteme. Thus, we tend not to challenge the epistemic value of natural or physical science. This reticence extends from real, ordinary, non-philosophical life to embrace not only physics and genetic engineering but the newly chic technoculture of information technology and cognitive science as knowledge. When a physicist speaks (whether in the tones of

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sis of past resemblances. Kant's critical reflection began by noting that whatever is must also be possible, the question is how? What metaphysics had heretofore ambitioned without success, to Kant's mind, mathematics and physics seemed patently to have attained. The Euclidean shape of space, the successive arrow of time, and these conditions were the necessary, eternal prerequisites for or conditions of the possibility of experience in space and in time. The claims that every event must have a cause or that two things cannot, in the same way, and at the same time, occupy the same space were therefore preconditions for the possibility of scientific knowledge just because science was built upon such axioms: scientific knowledge was as manifest in the axioms of physical space and time as in the axioms of mathematical speculation. So far was Nietzsche from standing in Kantian humility and awe before the starry sky above, much less the moral law within, that Nietzsche would have been one of the few men in his century or any other to challenge the apotheosisation of Newton or else, for more evolutionary tastes, Darwin. Kant's error lay in "solving" the "problem of science," invoking it as a touchstone for philosophy rather than raising "the problem of science itself ... as a problem, as questionable" as Nietzsche would claim that he alone was the first to do. As inherently uncritical, the enterprise of science was even more subject to the same intrinsic limitations as philosophy: "it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests". Metaphysics was possible as a science neither in mathematics nor natural science nor indeed Theoontology (or cosmology). Although Nietzsche liked to claim that he aspired to a more radical doubt than Descartes and although he was surely more critical than Kant in calling for the key reflex of the critical project to be turned against it-

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n his post- (if not neo) Kantian and informatively pre-Heideggerian reflection on the very possibility of knowledge and truth, Nietzsche's critique of truth articulates the "tragic" limit of critique as such. At this tragic limit, Nietzsche's radicalization of Kant's critical projectinverts or opposes traditional readings of Kant's critical program. Nietzsche aligns both Kant and Schopenhauer with what he named the effectively, efficiently pathological optimism of the rationalist drive to knowledge, patterned on the Cyclopean eye of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy. For the rest of Nietzsche's writerly life, the name of Socrates would serve both as a signifier for the historical personage marking the end of the "tragic age" of the Greeks as well as a signifier for the philosophical tradition of the idealization of reason, knowledge, and truth: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Schopenhauer. The path of science, for Kant, especially regarded as the developmental course of natural science, or more accurately: mathematical physics, represented the paradigmatic progress ideal or evolution of a positive increase in knowledge beyond what was known by (or given in experience). On this schematic outline, the scientific knowledge of (say) Newtonian physics progresses to an underlying truth beyond appearances. All knowledge, Kant wrote, begins with experience but the mystery of truth entails that all knowledge does not stop there, which further entails that what can be known is not limited to experience. One can pronounce the mathematical and physical truth of what is beyond any possible experience; more typically and more mundanely, the achievement of theoretically informed, empirically or practically verified science means that in spite of the logical force of David Hume's critique, one can predict what will be; one can know the future on the ba-

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geekish jocularlity as in the case of the late "Mr." Richard Feynman or with the savage gravity of Stephen Weinberger) we swallow what is said without a word, if only in the fear (now more than justified post the "science wars" or "clash of the wimps vs. the nerds") that any question or reservation be interpretable as a sign of our own anxiously culpable scientific incompetence or audacity. Such a seemingly uncritical adulation of science (as the impressive and imperial achievements of technoscientific engineering in the form of roads/aqueducts, bridges or in the inventions, steam- and oil-driven, of the machine age, or more recently, the age of computer images and instant media communications such as television, telephones, cellular phones, the internet, and so on) has characterized intellectual culture since the days not only of Newton but of Lucretius and there are those who will argue, with Nietzsche at the forefront, that this is the true legacy of Plato's academy and his pre-Cartesian idealization of geometry as the sine qua non for wisdom itself. In the contextual (conceptual) and diffuse complex of Nietzsche's early (and later) reflections on the 48relation between truth and lie, science comes to be "seen for the first time as a problem." Because the problem of science cannot be seen on the ground of science (this is the simple dyad of truth and lie in a truth table/truth value sense), Nietzsche appropriated the perspective reflex he calls the prism, lens, or reflective "optic" of art and life. But Nietzsche's critical project itself is far from transparent, which may be why the majority of specialist scholars appear to have overleapt the convolutions of Nietzsche's same critical epistemic concerns. From the start, Nietzsche argues, the whole of philosophy (like language itself) followed an illogical course. It is only as philosophy develops that "it takes on

the pathos of truth and truthfulness. Initially, this has nothing to do with matters of logic. Instead it indicates merely that no conscious deception is propagated". Thus Nietzsche offers a contrast between earlier culture (including philosophic culture and he uses similar language in a discussion of the philosophic virtue of Thales first articulation of the ubiquity of liquidity with our own current outlook vis-Ă -vis truth and lie, appearance and reality: "A man who does not believe in nature's truthfulness but perceives instead metaphor hoses, disguises, masquerades everywhere -- seeing divinities in bulls, the wisdom-plentiful author of nature in stallions, nymphs in trees: when such a man now institutes truthfulness as his own law, he comes as well to believe in the truthfulness of nature toward him". Thus Nietzsche always foregrounds willed illusion as the ultimate test of the highest art of tragic redemption: "one must," he says, "will illusion." The later Nietzsche repeats this earlier reflection by reminding us that in contradistinction to the origins of mythic culture, and what remains the case in our dreams, rather than a play of appearances, revealing the artistry behind the world, rather than a festival play, or a game, we transform deception into a moral (not merely an epistemic) issue. In this framework, in an early NachlaĂ&#x; entry entitled "On the lie" Nietzsche expresses the notion of "truth and lie" beyond good and evil in a precisely "extramoral sense" articulating the contrast between art and knowledge and between ancient, tragic wisdom and modern nihilism: "The assertion of knowledge has a moral source". To understand the philosophic importance of Nietzsche's critique of science as such only natural science but also theology, history, philology, and even philosophy, etc.), we recall that Nietzsche will later echo his earlier reflections on the value of truth with reference to deception by reminding us not of

the possibility of lying or of the illusion of play-acting, dressing up (as the actors in the comic play Shakespeare named after a dream dress up as Oberon or Titania, or even Bottom, but rather of being duped. One refuses the idea that one should be lied to. But "it is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance". For Nietzsche, regarding the "blind rage with which philosophers resist being deceived," it is imperative to pose the deflationary question "Why not"? The rage to avoid deception (cf. Nietzsche's Hobbesian cum Piercian convention of a Friedensschluss coined to avoid "the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain kinds of deception", to abolish suffering, the drive to be sure that everything, including "God and nature" be found subject to the very same laws (Kant) are all for Nietzsche symptomatic not of the logical substratum of the world in truth but the same "moral prejudice." And as we strive to avoid being hoodwinked, to eliminate error and lie, our valuation of the pure, monological, and singular truth threatens a blind eye to the world we can countenance and thereby the world of possible experience and understanding in a schematism reducing the range of polyvalent perspectives to no more than a logically univocal "false" alternative. The critical question Nietzsche raises against science is not what we today would call a critisism or critique of science. Nietzsche is not concerned with the products (value) of science per se (whether religion or morality, history or thermodynamics) and thus he can and does praise science (in its integrity) again and again. Instead, Nietzsche's critical undertaking challenges the possibility of any knowledge of the philophical foundations of science (as art) in the light what he speaks of as life. As an art or techne/technique, science is a means for winning the truth. Thus Nietzsche famously and iconoclastically argues for a paral-

In the philosophy of science, truth and lie are epistemologically authorized (not just moral) opposites. And, again, defining art qua art as beyond the constraints or limitations of truth means that art -- including the poetic expression of the "truth of art" -- is beyond any opposition to lie. We have, according to one convention, two categories, or, for another enduring coinage: two cultures. It is of capital importance to note that such a distance or disparity hardly means that art and truth/knowledge are not comparable. Rather are art and truth/science always and only unilaterally compared in coordinate or binary terms as "two cultures." Artists speak of science (Leonardo, Cezanne, van Gogh, Klee, ValĂŠry) invoking the language of science and scientists speak of art (and beauty) in science's terms. It is thus evident in C.P. Snow's influential lecture of the same name, that art and knowledge (or science) are to be judged or arraigned on the terms of the sciences and not the other way around -- which other way is also not accidentally Nietzsche's way. For Nietzsche, considering, on the one hand, "the value of knowledge, and, on the other hand, a beautiful illusion which has exactly the same value as an item of knowledge -- provided only that it is an illusion in which one believes --, one realizes that life requires illusions, untruths which are taken to be truths". Nietzsche's critique49 of knowledge as art, the illusion of truth as illusion quawilled illusion, refuses the idealizing terms of the opposition between knowledge and art and thus highlights the "nihilistic" consequences implicit in the uncritical ranking of knowledge above art. For Nietzsche, "truth," precisely in and according to its ideal Platonic definition, "cannot be recognized." With this critical explication, Nietzsche means no challenge to the Platonic ideal but only argues that qua empirical "truth": there is

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rational on logical grounds. By the same token, there is no contest (no ratio; no analogy or comparison) between art (qua irrational) and knowledge (or science). Thus while Nietzsche claims that both art and science trade in illusions, traditional philosophers of science together with the vast majority of scholars in other disciplines, but above all, the scientists themselves hear in Nietzsche's assertions (when they advert to them at all) only the chaotic impressions of what they sometimes bemusedly think to recognize (inaccurately enough) as the "Dionysian" because and just because such scientists, for their part, happen to know that the object of science is the pure and simple truth. The recent science/culture skirmish is thus both a contemporary result of this insularity and a testament to the ongoing hegemony of science. The unimpeachably mainstream view in the philosophy of science and among real-life scientists themselves contends (this is a minimum) that if scientific knowledge is to be counted as known as such, that is, as true, it must certainly or very probably not be false. The great appeal of Popper's falsificationist ideology (particularly but not only) for naĂŻve philosophers of science, and the theoretical core of the mainstream criticisms raised against astrology (mostly by intellectually aggrieved scientists) and Freudian psychoanlysis (mostly by Adolf GrĂźnbaum) is its aura of modern free thinking and logical enlightenment. But molecular biology or (as the example of Pons-Fleischmann illustrates) low-temperature fusion physics are disciplines not falsifiable in peer-review practice (experimental design and critique). The received or normal account of science has to be argued at all costs. The possibility of conceptual, theoretical and experimental change remains as difficult to advance, to test, to defend as they have been throughout science's history.

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lel between the ascetic practices of and ideals of both religious and scientific projects in the third section of On the Genealogy of Morals. The ascetic striving for truth Nietzsche describes as alienating and alien to us "Man does not exist by nature in order to know. Two faculties required for different purposes truthfulness (and metaphor) have engendered the inclination to truth". For Nietzsche, rather than an ordinary perceptual correspondence, the idealist fantasy of seeing and saying the truth, the drive to know depends upon the humanizing (anthropomorphic) inclination or direction of egologocentric engagement with the world: "Ultimately, every law of nature is a sum of anthropomorphic relations" and Nietzsche adds an addendum contra the modern scientific ideal of quantificational objectivity: "especially number ...". This we may regard as Nietzsche's Protagorean qua Procrustean Delphic principle: "the basic thought of science is that man is the measure of all things." Otherwise said: "All natural science is nothing but an attempt to understand man and what is anthropological; more correctly, it is an attempt to return continuously to man via the longest and most roundabout ways". Nietzsche's reflections on truth and lie return again and again to the problem of logic, in the wake of Socrates' transformation of the philosophic enterprise because with Socrates "truthfulness gains possession of logic". By the time we get to Aristotle, the challenge of "the infinite difficulty of classification" finds its determinative resolution in the principle of noncontradiction, as Aristotle underscores this first principle as an axiomatic assumption apart from any necessity for demonstration. This same principle sets the terms for what Nietzsche calls the conflict between art and knowledge. The outcome of this conflict is decided at the outset. There is no articulable or logical basis for conflict between the irrational and the

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no truth. "Truth is unknowable; everything knowable illusion". Again, "Knowing the truth is impossible" or in the more famous expression of this in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions". If we dare (and this at our own hermeneutic peril) to overlook or if (let's be phenomenological about it and say:) if we "bracket" Nietzsche's epistemologically bold style, it is manifest that he does no more than affirm the exactly critical perspective for beings such as ourselves who know and can know only via appearances. "Without metaphor there is no authentic knowing. Knowing is only an operation using the most arbitrary metaphors." Thus for Nietzsche, "Strictly regarded, knowing takes only the form of tautology and is empty". Ergo knowledge is "nothing more than an imitation of a perceived imitation. Naturally, as a result, it is unable to penetrate the domain of truth". Nietzsche's critical claim that "there is no truth" thus targets the connection between the unchanging ideal of logical certainty (absolute knowledge) and the mutability of real or natural objects or "things." Observing that "Pure logic 50is the impossibility which supports science", Nietzsche highlights the impropriety (or coordinate incoherence) of logic as the theoretical support of empiricalscience. (Note that this does not -- and could never be though to -- undermine the pure coherence of logical abstraction as such.) Declaiming "the pathos of truth in a world of lies," Nietzsche recollects the conflict of ideal truth with the changing reality of the real world, precisely as an opposition fixed as an incontrovertible obstacle to knowledge or science in philosophy ever since the Eleatic dedication of faith in the world of unchanging being. Nietzsche's point is not the point of convergence or agreement with formal or informal logical calculi but rather the nuanced

observation that although "rhetorical figures" (which he parenthetically identifies as "the essence of language," so that we do not overlook the dynamic scheme of his argument) "are logically invalid inferences," what is then consequently said to be true is generated by contrast with the recognition of what is false as such: "this is the way reason begins". Nietzsche's deconstructive genealogy of the discursively theoretical character of truth in contrast with its first, mythic or primitive origins patterns a similarly minded history of the problem of enlightenment civilization, as of true religion, and of science, social and natural. For Nietzsche, the drive for knowledge begins with an impossible demand in the fantastic judgment that "to be true means to be true always." Such a totalizing and infinite demand cannot have grown out of experience but only on the basis of the seduction of the words that are always the same: seemingly tokens of eternity. The philosopher is "caught in the nets of language" and "logic itself is merely slavery within the fetters of language". We strive for noumenal apprehension -- pure knowledge, pure form -- of the "thing in itself" but all we grasp -- and all we can ever grasp -- in any conceptual or perceptual apprehension, no matter how precisely refined an apprehension, is never the essence of ideal apprehension but always and only "eben diese Welt". Because "this very world" is reality itself, in flux away from what has been and toward what is not yet, reality -- that is: empirical nature -- is always change. It is, like us, part of that species of being hostage in time to the immutable reality of the dynamic mode of becoming -- as both what is and what is not. Although the later Nietzsche mocks the philosophers' "idiosyncracies" most evident in what he calls their Egyptianism, as "their hatred of even the idea of becoming," he had earlier acknowledged the very human con-

dition that would end in this adimadversion to "change, age, as well as procreation and growth" At the start of his unpublished essay on The Pathos of Truth, the first of the unpublished "Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books," he writes "We observe every passing away and perishing with dissatisfaction, often with astonishment, as if we had witnessed therein something fundamentally impossible... Every New Year's Eve enables us to feel the mysterious contradiction of being and becoming". But because of the "stone" fact that no fact is stone, the supreme law of philosophic knowledge lacks any purchase on the empirical world because what is never beyond change or time. What this humanely tragic reflection means for science and the theory of truth is that when Nietzsche celebrates the sciences of nature in antiquity and in the works of his contemporaries such as Robert Mayer and Ernst Mach, he celebrates natural science but not science's own (idealist and ideological) ideal of itself as neutral instrument of pure knowing. In spite of its logical self-image (eagerly polished and continually renewed by the reigning philosophy of science), science, for Nietzsche, especially and particularly natural science, is and can only be a discipline of the body. Thus construed as an ultimately sensual (more complex, more nuanced) rationality, (physical) science for Nietzsche must be a science not of ideal conceptions (paradigmatic or theoretical projections) but constantly artful, a praxical techne of recondite reality becoming in time. This practical or real technical object of science is the dynamic "truth" of what works as real (be this the working of artful belief or "willed" illusion) not the ideal and literal "truth of truth." Nietzsche does not stop here (he is not a pragmaticist, Emersonian, Quinean, or, indeed, Davidsonian) but adds that the so-called (scientific and logical) truth of truth (ideal

for what is humanly or naturally impossible (all natural knowledge is inherently anthropomorphic and hence the human and the natural are inevitably convertible). The impossibility of a logical description of the world is thus not an impossibility enjoined by Nietzsche's terms of analysis but and precisely following upon the logical, unchanging terms philosophers set as the (unconditioned) conditions of knowledge.

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decided to accept the evidence of the senses -- to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions". Taking his own thinking on logic, on truth, and reality to its "conclusions" or "ultimate consequences," Nietzsche describes his anti-atomistic ideal of the non-lawlike working of the will to power as an alternative account of "'nature's conformity"' to law For Nietzsche, "knowledge" as a purely logical enterprise strives

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truth) is purely unreal: not figuratively but literally insofar as it is theoretically ideal. This logical ideality is the truth of tautology: logical truth. The becoming and changing nature Nietzsche recalls to us, as scientists and as philosophers of science, is and can only be an illogical nature and Nietzsche calls us to that same natural world for what he ultimately regards as the honest sake of science: "We possess scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have

WHITMAN'S

COMPLETE WORKS to claim a deep native tap root for the book, too, in some sort. I came on the stage too late for personally knowing much of even the lingering revolutionary worthiesthe men of '76. Yet, as a little boy, I have been pressed tightly and lovingly to the breast of Lafayette (Brooklyn, 1825), and have talked with old Aaron Burr, and also with those who knew Washington and his surroundings, and with original Jeffersonians, and more than one very old soldier and sailor. And in my own day and maturity, my eyes have seen and ears heard, Lincoln, Grant and Emerson, and my hands have been grasped by their hands. Though in a different field and range from most of theirs, I give the foregoing pages as perfectly legitimate, resultant, evolutionary and consistent with them. If these lines should ever reach some reader of a far-off future age, let him take them as a missive sent from Abraham Lincoln's fateful age. Repeating, parrot-like, what in the preceding divisions has been already said, and must serve as a great reason why of53 this whole book-first, that the main part about pronounced events and shows (poems and persons, also) is the point of view from which they are viewed and estimated: and second, that I cannot let my momentous, stormy, peculiar era of peace and war, these states, these years, slip away without arresting some of its specimen events-even its vital breaths-to be portrayed and inscribed from out of the midst of it, from its own days and nightsnot so much in themselves (statistically and descriptively our times are copiously noted and memo-

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ive, with the title pasted on in plain white paper: Walt Whitman, Complete Poems and Prose-Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs with Sands at Seventy, Annex to L. of G.-Portraits from Life, and Autograph Ed'n 1888-9. Altogether, the volume combines the homely democratic simplicity associated with Whitman's name with the essential features of a handsome book-a worthy garment for the great thoughts presented. The note at the end, written for this edition on Nov. 13, 1888, states the author's motives for publishing it, and may be called his Literary Valedictory. "As I conclude-and (to get typographical correctness,) after running my eyes diligently through the three big divisions of the preceding volume-the interrogative wonder-fancy rises in me whether (if it be not too arrogant to even state it), the 33 years of my current time, 1855-1888, with their aggregate of our new world doings and people, have not, indeed, created and formulated the foregoing leavesforcing their utterance as the pages stand-coming actually from the direct urge and developments of those years, and not from any individual epic or lyrical attempts whatever, or from my pen or voice, or any body's special voice. Out of that supposition the book might be considered an autochthonic record, and expression, fully rendered, of and out of these 30 to 35 years-of the soul and evolution of America-and, of course, by reflection, not ours only, but more or less of the common people of the world. Seems to me I may dare

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Fine "Personally Handled" Edition of the Poet, With Autograph-A Volume That Book Lovers Will Prize-Some of Its Notable Features-New Poems and Prose-Whitman's Estimate of His Own Career-Opinion of Tennyson. The complete edition of Walt Whitman's works, just issued by the poet himself in one volume, is a book to be prized by the bibliophile as well as treasured by Whitman's friends. The plates of the three uniform volumes comprising Whitman's writings are used, but with the broad margins and finer paper of the uncut sheets, the guise seems an entirely new one. The text has received a final revision, there is the charm of certain additions, there are several portraits of Whitman ranging from his early prime to one taken in his 70th year, and there is the great value of the direct association of the poet's personality, as guaranteed in the words of the handsome title page, with its fine profile reproduced from a photograph: Complete Poems and Prose of Walt Whitman. 1855-1888. Authenticated and Personal Book (Handled by W. W.) Portraits from Life. Autograph. On the first fly leaf of the copy before the writer are the words, written in the poet's familiar hand: "S-B-, from his friend, the author, Walt Whitman, with affection and memories.-Dec. 21, 1888." The handwriting is strikingly firm and bold, showing that the paralysis that afflicts the author has not affected his firm hand. The cover is a plain one, with marbled sides and back of dark ol-

randized with an industrial zeal), but to give from them here their flame-like results in imaginative and spiritual suggestiveness, as they present themselves to me, at any rate, from the point of view alluded to. "Then a few additional words yet to this hurried farewell note. In another sense (the warp crossing the woof and knitted in) the book is probably a sort of autobiography, an element I have not attempted especially to restrain or erase. As alluded to at the beginning, I had about got the volume well started by the printers, when a sixth recurrent attack of my war paralysis fell upon me. It has proved the most serious and continued of the whole. I am now uttering

"'November Boughs'

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and printing this book in my 70th year. To get out the collectionmainly the born results of health, flush life, buoyancy and happy outdoor volition-and to prepare the Boughs have beguiled my invalid months the past summer and fall. ('Are we to be beaten down in our old age?' says one white-haired old fellow remonstratingly to another in a budget of letters I read last night.) Then I wanted to leave something markedly personal. I have put my name with pen and 54ink with my own hand in the present volume. And from engraved or photographed portraits, taken from life, I have selected some, of different stages, which please me best, (or at any rate displease me least), and bequeath them at a venture to you, reader, with my love. W. W., Nov. 13, 1888." "Leaves of Grass" has the following prefatory verses in this volume: "Come, said my soul, Such verses for my body let us write (for weare one), That should I after death invisibly return, Or, long, long hence, in other spheres, There to some group of mates the chants resuming, (Tallying earth's soil, trees,

winds, tumultuous waves). Ever with pleased smile I may keep on. Ever and ever yet the verses owning as, first, I here and now, Signing for soul and body, set to them my name, WALT WHITMAN." The second book, "Specimen Days and Collect," contains two things which alone would make it invaluable, the preface to the first issue of "Leaves of Grass," that of 1855, and the great essay, "Democratic Vistas." Since Whitman included verse only in the final form of "Leaves of Grass" the original preface is given in the prose book. It is known as a masterpiece of composition in the grand style. Its thoughts borne free on the wings of a spontaneous rhythm. Many of its passages will be recognized as having been worked over into later poems. "Democratic Vistas" is one of the greatest essays ever written concerning America. Whitman speaks here as a seer. Probably no one has ever taken a more comprehensive, far-seeing national view. It is a paper for statesmen in the highest sense. With his healthy, strong, optimistic mind, he looks far ahead through the centuries and perceives the grand destiny of our country, but this does not make him ignore the shadows of the picture, and the very clearness of his prophetic vision shows to him, also, the plainer the perils that beset the road to the goal, as in these words of warning: "Shift and turn the combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the future of America is, in certain respects, as dark as it is vast. Pride, competition, segregation, vicious willfulness, and license beyond example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall hold in behemoth, who bridle leviathan? Flaunt it as we choose, athwart and over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty, and dreadful, threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it: Democracy grows rankly up the thickest, nox-

ious, deadliest plants and fruits of all-brings worse and worse invaders-needs newer, larger, stronger, keener compensations and compellers."

A Review from the Close.

"November Boughs" begins with a review of the poet's career, and works from the standpoint of the journey's close: "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads." There is humility and modesty in its tone, as well as hopefulness, assertion and a brave, serene confidence. Characterizing his poems, he thus prescribes his purpose and his method: The word I myself put primarily for the description of them as they stand at last is the word suggestiveness. I round and finish little, if anything, and could not consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought, there to pursue your own flight. Another impetus word is comradeship as for all lands, and in a more commanding and acknowledged sense than hitherto. Other word signs would be good cheer, content and hope. The chief trait of any given poet is always the spirit he brings to the observation of humanity and nature, the mood out of which he contemplates his subjects. [illegible] Universal as are certain facts and symptoms of communities or individuals at all times, there is nothing so rare in modern conventions and poetry as their normal recognizance. Literature is always calling in the doctor for consultation and confession, and always giving evasions and swathing suppressions in place of that 'heroic nudity' on which only a genuine diagnosis of serious cases can be built. And in respect to editors of Leaves of Grass in time to come (if there should be such) I take occasion now to confirm these lines with the settled convictions and deliberate renewals of

The Latest Poems

The latest poems, given under the title of "Sands at Seventy" are like the voice of an old friend whose tones we have learned to love for the sake of the words they have conveyed, the thoughts they have clothed. So ever after, whatever the words be, the tones have a welcome sound. It is so with all old poets; their message has been spoken, their great harvest has been gathered, but the aftermath is to be valued, and scant though it may be, it still contains the quality, the savor of the rich soil that has rejoiced us with its abundant yield. These latest poems of Whitman's are fragmentary utterances; they have the old character of form and expression, but are intermittent flashes; detached images, brief glimpses. As with Dr. Holmes, these songs are pervaded by the reminiscent atmosphere of sunset hours. In one of the traits that have strongly characterized Whitman there is no perceptible decline-that of graphic, terse and vivid delineation with a word or phrase that both depicts and suggests, like the sure brush stroke of a master painter. An example of this is to be found in the stately beginning on the poem of the death of Gen. Grant: "As one by one withdraw the mighty actors," striking at once the keynote of a majestic theme that is sustained with the same power to the close: Thou from the prairies!-tangled and many veined and hard has been thy part, To admiration has it been enacted? It is a glorious calm that pervades these four lines: After the dazzle of day is gone, Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars; After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus,or perfect band, Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true. And, in these lines called "Halcyon Days" the re [sic] is manifest what was once said of Appollonius

of Tyana, that old age, as well as youth, has its bloom: Not from successful love alone, Nor wealth, nor honored middle age, nor victories of politics or war, But as life wanes and all the turbulent passions calm, As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, As softness, fullness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air, As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish'd and indolent ripe on the tree, Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all! The brooding and blissful halcyon days! A strong group of poems are the "Fancies at Navesink;" reflections on the meanings of the ocean rides as the pulse of the power that vivifies all-the "fluid, vast identity, holding the universe with all its parts as one." Then the ebb, with its images of death, failure and despair swept on to oblivion-but that not the end, for Duly by you, from you, the tide and the light againduly the hinges turning. Duly the needed discord parts offsetting, blending, Weaving from you, from Sleep, Night, Death itself. The rhythms of birth eternal. The six-line poem on Whittier's 80th birthday is a beautiful tribute. Those fond of drawing analogies might find much satisfaction in the resemblance in the names of the two poets, one a Hicksite55 Quaker, the other the son of Hicksite Quakers. Whitman passing his last years across the river from the great Quaker City, always using the quaint Quaker terminology of "Fifth Month," etc., and devoting the last pages of his "November Boughs" to a collection of notes on Elias Hicks, 1 of whom he says in his prefatory note: As myself a little boy hearing so much of E. H., at that time long ago in Suffolk and Queens and Kings counties-and more than once personally seeing the old

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songs yet remain to be sung.

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30 years, and to hereby prohibit, as far as word of mine can do so, any elision of them. He continued with the following reverent words: Then still a purpose inclosing all, and over and beneath all. Ever since what might be called thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance ('to justify the ways of God to man' is Milton's well known and ambitious phrase) which is the foundation of moral America. I felt it all as positively then in my young days as I do now in my old ones: to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only considered from the point of view of all, but of each. While I cannot understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clew and purpose in nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, through time. My book ought to emanate buoyance and gladness legitimately enough, for it was grown out of those elements, and has been the comfort of my life since it was originally commenced. He ends with the words: In the free evening of my day, I give to you, reader, the foregoing garrulous talk, thoughts, reminiscences, As idly drifting down the ebb, Such ripples, half-caught voices echo from the shore. Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West when it worthily rises-First, what Herder taught to the young Goethe, that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polished and select few. Second, that the strongest and sweetest

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man-and my dear, dear father and mother faithful listeners to him at the meetings-I remember how I dreamed to write, perhaps, a piece about E. H. and his look and discourses however long afterwardfor my parents' sake-and the dear Friends, too! And the following is what has at last but all come out of it-the feeling and intention never forgotten yet! Whitman's opinion of Tennyson is of particular interest, since the British laureate is one of our great American's most intimate, though never beheld, friends across the Atlantic. In the brief paper, "A Word About Tennyson," Whitman says: Let me assume to pass verdict, or, perhaps, momentary judgment, for the United States on this poet-a removed and distant position giving some advantages over a nigh one. What is Tennyson's service to his race, times, and especially to America? First, I should say-or, at least, not forget-his personal character. He is not to be mentioned as a rugged, evolutionary, aboriginal force-but (and a great lesson is in it) he has been consistent throughout with the native, healthy patriotic spinal element and promptings of himself. His moral line is local and conventional, but it is vital 56and genuine. He reflects the upper crust of his time, its pale cast of thought-even its ennui. Then the simile of my friend, John Burroughs, is entirely true. 'His glove is a glove of silk, but the hand is a hand of iron.' He shows how one can be a royal laureate, quite eloquent and 'aristocratic,' and a little queer and affected, and at the same time perfectly manly and natural. As to his non-democracy, it fits him well, and I like him the better for it. I guess we all like to have (I am sure I do) some one who presents those sides of a thought or a possibility, different from our own-different, and yet with a sort of home-likeness-a tartness and contradiction offsetting the theory as we view it, and construed from taste and proclivi-

ties not at all his own…Yes, Alfred Tennyson is a superb character, and will help give illustriousness, through the long roll of time, to our 19th century. In its bunch of orbic names, shining like a constellation of stars, his will be one of the brightest. His very faults, doubts, swervings, doublings upon himself, have been typical of our age. We are like the voyagers of a ship casting off for new seas, distant shores. We would still dwell in the old suffocating and dead haunts, remembering and magnifying their pleasant experiences only, and more than once impelled to jump ashore before it is too late, and stay where our fathers stayed and live as they lived. May-be I am non-literary and non-decorous (let me at least be human and pay part of my debt) in this word about Tennyson. I want him to realize that here is a great and ardent nation that absorbs his songs, and has a respect and affection for him personally as almost for no other foreigner. I want this word to go to the old man at Farringford as conveying no more than the simple truth: and that truth (a little Christmas gift) no slight one, either. There are many other words worth reading in this new section of the volume; papers on Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Fr. Taylor, remarks on "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," and various random notes and reminiscences, including some additional ones about the war. It is all pervaded by the healthy personal feeling, lofty patriotism and deep spirituality inherent in Whitman. Altogether, this complete edition may be called monumental in our literature.

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A Song

57 1 e th e ak m ill w uble; I continent indissol e ake th e ak m ill w I e, om one upon; I will emlif C sh t ye er ev n su e eth ce most splendid ralands, With the love of comrades, With th divine magnetic long love of comrades. 2 g all the rivers of on al s ee tr as k ic th ip sh over nion I will plant compa great lakes, and alslab e th of es or sh t e th g on America, and al make inseparable cities, with their arm ly loou ve the prairies; I wills; By the love of comrades, By the man each other's neck of comrades. 3 u, ma femme! yo e rv se to , cy ra oc em D me, O s, In the love of comFor you these, fromI am ng so e es th g in ill tr For you! for you, the high-towering love of comrades. rades, In

by Walt Whitman

History of film Part IV

Film continuity

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eal film continuity, which means showing action moving from one shot into another joined to it, can be dated to Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, made in 1898. In the first shot of this film, an old couple outside an art exhibition follow other people inside through the door. The second shot showed what they do inside. The further development of action continuity in multi-shot films continued in 1899. In the latter part of that year, George Albert Smith, working in Brighton, England, made The Kiss in the Tunnel. This started with a shot from a “phantom ride” at the point at which the train goes into a tunnel, 58and continued with the action on a set representing the interior of a railway carriage, where a man steals a kiss from a woman, and then cuts back to the phantom ride shot when the train comes out of the tunnel. A month later, the Bamforth Company in Yorkshire made a restaged version of this film under the same title, and in this case they filmed shots of a train entering and leaving a tunnel from beside the tracks, which they joined before and after their version of the kiss inside the train compartment. In 1900, continuity of action across successive shots was definitively established by George Albert Smith and James Williamson, who also worked in Brighton. In that year Smith made Seen through the Telescope, in which

the main shot shows street scene with a young man tying the shoelace and then caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an old man observes this through a telescope. There is then a cut to close shot of the hands on the girl's foot shown inside a black circular mask, and then a cut back to the continuation of the original scene. Even more remarkable is James Williamson's Attack on a China Mission Station, made around the same time in 1900. The first shot shows the gate to the mission station from the outside being attacked and broken open by Chinese Boxer rebels, then there is a cut to the garden of the mission station where the missionary and his family are seated. The Boxers rush in and after exchanging fire with the missionary, kill him, and pursue his family into the house. His wife appears on the balcony waving for help, which immediately comes with an armed party of British sailors appearing through the gate to the mission station, this time seen from the inside. They fire at the Boxers, and advance out of the frame into the next shot, which is taken from the opposite direction looking towards the house. This constitutes the first “reverse angle” cut in film history. The scene continues with the sailors rescuing the remaining members of the missionary's family. G.A. Smith further developed the ideas of breaking a scene shot in one place into a series of shots taken from different camera positions over the next couple of years, starting with The Little Doc-

tors of 1901. In this film a little girl is administering pretend medicine to a kitten, and Smith cuts in to a big Close Up of the kitten as she does so, and then cuts back to the main shot. In this case the inserted close up is not shown as a Point of View shot in a circular mask. He summed up his work in Mary Jane's Mishap of 1903, with repeated cuts in to a close shot of a housemaid fooling around, along with superimpositions and other devices, before abandoning filmmaking to invent the Kinemacolor system of color cinematography. James Williamson concentrated on making films taking action from one place shown in one shot to the next shown in another shot in films like Stop Thief! And Fire! Made in 1901 and many others.

Film continuity developed

Other film-makers then took up all these ideas, which form the basis of film construction, or “film language”, or “film grammar”, as we know it. The best known of these film-makers was Edwin S. Porter, who started making films for the Edison Company in 1901. When he began making longer films in 1902, he put a dissolve between

The film business

By 1907 there were about 4,000 small “nickelodeon” cinemas in the United States. The films were shown with the accompaniment of music provided by a pianist, though there could be more musicians. There were also a very few larger cinemas in some of the biggest cities. Initially, the majority of films in the programmed were Pathé films, but this changed fairly quickly as the American companies cranked up production. The programmed was made up of just a few films, and the show lasted around 30 minutes. The reel of film, of maximum length 1,000 feet (300 m), which usually contained one individual film, became the standard unit of film production and exhibition in this period. The programmed was changed twice or more a week, but went up to five changes of programmers a week after a couple of years. In general, cinemas were set up in the established entertainment districts of the cities. In other countries of the Western world the film exhibition situation was similar. With the change to “nickelodeon” exhibition there was also a change, led by Pathé in 1907, from selling films outright to renting them through film exchanges. The litigation over patents between all the major American filmmaking companies had continued, and at the end of 1908 they decided to pool their patents and form a trust to use them to control the American film business. The companies concerned were Pathé, Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Lubin,

Selig, Essanay, Kalem, and the Kleine Optical Company, a major importer of European films. The George Eastman company, the only manufacturer of film stock in the United States, was also part of the combine, which was called the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), and Eastman Kodak agreed to only supply the members with film stock. License fees for distributing and projecting films were extracted from all distributors and exhibitors. The producing companies that were part of the trust were allocated production quotas (two reels, i.e. films, a week for the biggest ones, one reel a week for the smaller), which were supposed to be enough to fill the programs of the licensed exhibitors. Vitagraph and Edison already had multiple production units, and so had no difficulty meeting their quota, but in 1908 Biography lost their one working director. They offered the job of making their films to D. W. Griffith, an unimportant actor and playwright, who took up the job, and found he had a gift for it. Alone he made all the Biography films from 1908 to 1910. This amounted to 30 minutes of screen time a week. But the market was bigger than the Motion Picture Patents Company members could supply. Although 6,000 exhibitors signed with the MPPC, about 2,000 others did not. A minority of the exchanges (i.e. distributors) stayed outside the MPPC, and in 1909 these independent exchanges im-59 mediately began to fund new film producing companies. By 1911 there were enough independent and foreign films available to program all the shows of the independent exhibitors, and in 1912 the independents had nearly half of the market. The MPPC had effectively been defeated in its plan to control the whole United States market, and the government anti-trust action, which only now started against the MPPC, was not really necessary to defeat it.

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worldwide, because of its Wild West violence. From 1900, the Pathé company films also frequently copied and varied the ideas of the British filmmakers, without making any major innovations in narrative film construction, but eventually the sheer volume of their production led to their film-makers giving a further precision and polishes to the details of film continuity. Film history from 1906 to 1914

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every shot, just as Georges Méliès was already doing, and he frequently had the same action repeated across the dissolves. In other words, Edwin Porter did not develop the basics of film construction. The Pathé Company in France also made imitations and variations of Smith and Williamson's films from 1902 onwards using cuts between the shots, which helped to standardize the basics of film construction. In 1903 there was a substantial increase in the number of film several minutes long, as a result of the great popularity of Georges Méliès’ le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), which came out in early 1902, though such films were still a very minor part of production. Most of them were what came to be called “chase films”. These were inspired by James Williamson's Stop Thief! of 1901, which showed a tramp stealing a leg of mutton from a butcher's boy in the first shot, then being chased through the second shot by the butcher's boy and assorted dogs, and finally being caught by the dogs in the third shot. Several English films made in the first half of 1903 extended the chase method of film construction. These included An Elopement à la Mode and The Pickpocket: A Chase Through London, made by Alf Collins for the British branch of the French Gaumont company, Daring Daylight Burglary, made by the Sheffield Photographic Company, and Desperate Poaching Affray, made by the Haggar family, whose main business was exhibiting films made by others in their travelling tent theatre. All of these films, and indeed others of like nature were shown in the United States, and some them were certainly seen by Edwin Porter, before he made The Great Train Robbery towards the end of the year. The time continuity in The Great Train Robbery is actually more confusing than that in the films it was modeled on, but nevertheless it was a greater success than them

DEEP FOCUS Reviews by Bryant Frazer

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t's hard to defend the artiness of BLUE. With a Kieslowski movie (maybe with all Kieslowski movies), either you get it or you don't. If you get it, you're a fan. The movie becomes a mystical, dream-like experience. You recall the most indulgent camera angles and close-ups at the oddest moments of your day. Perhaps you hum a few bars of Zbigniew Preisner's formidable score as you drink your coffee in the morning, or you have a nightmare about the kind of car crash that sets this story in motion. And when a friend doesn't appreciate the film -- in fact, they think it's a dull, pretentious throwback to the French New Wave or somesuch -- you find yourself speech-

less. It's hard to use words to explain the cinema's moments of great beauty, and you may as well give up before you begin. THREE COLORS: BLUE is the first film in Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy built around the precious themes of liberty, equality, and fratenity (the second and third films are WHITE and RED, respectively). The concepts correspond to the three colors of the French flag, and the conceit is actually less a stricture than a simple excuse for Kieslowski to make a set of movies that meditate on love, loss, and our essential humanity. Liberty is personified in the newly-widowed Julie (Binoche), who survives the automobile accident that kills her

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lowski's films. The relationships and imagery are drawn so intricately that the pictures reward repeated viewing, and it's only on the second or third time around that the whole power of one of these films really becomes apparent. It's easy to belittle a film like this, with its languid pace, elliptical dialog, and propensity for introspection (navel-gazing?). Don't these somber sequences substitute a content New Age-ism for any real statements in response to the questions they pose? Isn't Kieslowski living in a blithe, egocentric dream world? How can we be expected to identify with the rich widow of a French composer as she mourns her way through Paris? Yet through Binoche's performance and Kieslowski's guidance, we do identify. We feel Julie's alone-61 ness even as we understand her resolve to cast off her sentiment and distance herself from the inexorable sadness. At the end of BLUE, as Preisner's music swells up on the soundtrack, all of the disparate characters and situations that make up Julie's story finally come together. Pictures recall pictures as Julie is finally reflected in the eyes of another, and the delicate shape of another character is traced on a video monitor, echoed in shades of blue. These final moments articulate character and contradictory emotion in one crystalline, irrefutable passage of images, absolutely wordless -- the very definition of great cinema. If you're asking the same questions as our director, the simple clarity of such images provides answers enough.

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husband Patrice (a famous composer) and daughter Anna. This sea change in her life drives her to divorce herself from familiar people and surroundings, but she's dogged by an unwelcome artifact from her husband's life. His unfinished composition, Song for the Unification of Europe, is the subject of intense interest, and although Julie disposes of Patrice's notes for the piece (and tries to dispose of all her own memories), it continues to insinuate itself into her life until she confronts the music as well as her own devastated psyche. It sounds very color-by-numbers, but the film is actually anything but. Kieslowski is a bold filmmaker, with a knack for hypnotizing an audience. As much as Kieslowski's THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE seemed concerned with lenses, this one dwells on reflections -- Julie's face reflected on the curve of a spoon, a doctor's face reflected in the iris of her eye, filling the screen. The richness of imagery occasionally rivals that of a novel (Julie touches a sugar cube to coffee; as we watch, the sugar turns the luminous color of her own skin). And Kieslowski works at capturing the essence of memory and the passage of time. At four moments during the film, the screen fades completely and music swells â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Patrice's unfinished piece â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and then the music cuts, and the scene fades back in at exactly the moment where it faded out. It's part of the mystery of the film that a viewer can have an immediate and intuitive grasp on such an abstract device. Intuition, indeed, is the driving force behind Kies-

THEATRE OF THE

ABSURD T

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he following article by Jerome P. Crabb was originally published on this web site on September 3, 2006. The “Theatre of the Absurd” is a term coined by Hungarian-born critic Martin Esslin, who made it the title of his 1962 book on the subject. The term refers to a particular type of play which first became popular during the 1950s and 1960s and which presented on stage the philosophy articulated by French philosopher Albert Camus in his 1942 essay,The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he defines the human condition as basically meaningless. Camus argued that humanity had to resign itself to recognizing that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe was beyond its reach; in that sense, the world must ultimately be seen as absurd. Esslin regarded the term “Theatre of the Absurd” merely as a "device" by which he meant to bring attention to certain fundamental traits discernible in the works of a range of playwrights. The playwrights loosely grouped under the label of the absurd attempt to convey their sense of bewilderment, anxiety, and wonder in the face of an inexplicable uni64verse. According to Esslin, the five defining playwrights of the movement are Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, and Harold Pinter, although these writers were not always comfortable with the label and sometimes preferred to use terms such as "Anti-Theater" or "New Theater". Other playwrights associated with this type of theatre include Tom Stoppard, Arthur Kopit, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, Edward Albee, N.F. Simpson, Boris Vian, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, and Jean Tardieu. Although the Theatre of the Absurd is often traced back to avantgarde experiments of the 1920s and 1930s, its roots, in actuality, date back much further. Absurd elements first made their appearance shortly after the rise of Greek drama, in the wild humor and buffoonery of Old Comedy and the plays of Aristophanes in particular. They were further developed in the late classical period by Lucian, Petronius and Apuleius, in Menippean satire, a tradition of carnivalistic literature, and depicting “a world upside down.” The morality plays of the middle Ages may be considered a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd, depicting everyman-type characters dealing with allegorical and sometimes existential problems. This tradition would carry over into the Baroque allegorical drama of Elizabethan times, when dramatists such as John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Jakob Biederman and Calderon would depict the world in mythological archetypes. During the nineteenth century, absurd elements may be noted in certain plays by Ibsen and, more obviously,

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Strindberg, but the acknowledged predecessor of what would come to be called the Theatre of the Absurd is Alfred Jarry's "monstrous puppet-play" Ubu Roi (1896) which presents a mythical, grotesque figure, set amidst a world of archetypal images. Ubu Roi is a caricature, a terrifying image of the animal nature of man and his cruelty. In the 1920s and 1930s, the surrealists expanded on Jarry’s experiments, basing much of their artistic theory on the teachings of Freud and his emphasis on the role of the subconscious mind which they acknowledged as a great, positive healing force. Their intention was to do away with art as a mere imitation of surface reality, instead demanding that it should be more real than reality and deal with essences rather than appearances. The Theatre of the Absurd was also anticipated in the dream novels of James Joyce and Franz Kafka who created archetypes by delving into their own subconscious and exploring the universal, collective significance of their own private obsessions. Silent film and comedy, as well as the tradition of verbal nonsense in the early sound films of Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers would also contribute to 66the development of the Theatre of the Absurd, as did the verbal "nonsense" of François Rabelais, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Christian Morgernstern. But it would take a catastrophic world event to actually bring about the birth of the new movement. World War II was the catalyst that finally brought the Theatre of the Absurd to life. The global nature of this conflict and the resulting trauma of living under threat of nuclear annihilation put into stark perspective the essential precariousness of human life. Suddenly, one did not need to be an abstract thinker in order to be able to reflect upon absurdity: the experience of absurdity became part of the average person's daily existence. During this period, a “prophet” of the

absurd appeared. Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) rejected realism in the theatre, calling for a return to myth and magic and to the exposure of the deepest conflicts within the human mind. He demanded a theatre that would produce collective archetypes and create a modern mythology. It was no longer possible, he insisted, to keep using traditional art forms and standards that had ceased being convincing and lost their validity. Although he would not live to see its development, The Theatre of the Absurd is precisely the new theatre that Artaud was dreaming of. It openly rebelled against conventional theatre. It was, as Ionesco called it “anti-theatre”. It was surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless. The dialogue often seemed to be complete gibberish. And, not surprisingly, the public’s first reaction to this new theatre was incomprehension and rejection. The most famous, and most controversial, absurdist play is probably Samuel Beckett’sWaiting for Godot. The characters of the play are strange caricatures who have difficulty communicating the simplest of concepts to one another as they bide their time awaiting the arrival of Godot. The language they use is often ludicrous, and following the cyclical patter, the play seems to end in precisely the same condition it began, with no real change having occurred. In fact, it is sometimes referred to as “the play where nothing happens.” Its detractors count this a fatal flaw and often turn red in the face fomenting on its inadequacies. It is mere gibberish, they cry, eyes nearly bulging out of their head--a prank on the audience disguised as a play. The plays supporters, on the other hand, describe it is an accurate parable on the human condition in which “the more things change, the more they are the same.” Change, they argue, is only an illusion. In 1955, the famous character actor Robert Morley predicted that the success of Waiting for Godot meant

“the end of theatre as we know it.” His generation may have gloomily accepted this prediction, but the younger generation embraced it. They were ready for something new—something that would move beyond the old stereotypes and reflect their increasingly complex understanding of existence. Whereas traditional theatre attempts to create a photographic representation of life as we see it, the Theatre of the Absurd aims to create a ritual-like, mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams. The focal point of these dreams is often man's fundamental bewilderment and confusion, stemming from the fact that he has no answers to the basic existential questions: why we are alive, why we have to die, why there is injustice and suffering. Ionesco defined the absurdist everyman as “Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots … lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, and useless.” The Theatre of the Absurd, in a sense, attempts to reestablish man’s communion with the universe. Dr. Jan Culik writes, “Absurd Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore the importance of myth and ritual to our age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition, by instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and primeval anguish. The Absurd Theatre hopes to achieve this by shocking man out of an existence that has become trite, mechanical and complacent. It is felt that there is mystical experience in confronting the limits of human condition.” One of the most important aspects of absurd drama is its distrust of language as a means of communication. Language, it seems to say, has become nothing but a vehicle for conventionalized, stereotyped, meaningless exchanges. Dr. Culik explains, “Words failed to express the essence of human experience, not being able to penetrate beyond its surface. The Theatre of the Ab-

been in fashion, undoubtedly was a genuine contribution to the permanent vocabulary of dramatic expression…. [It] is being absorbed into the mainstream of the tradition from which … it had never been entirely absent … The playwrights of the post-Absurdist era have at their disposal, then, a uniquely enriched vocabulary of dramatic technique. They can use these devices freely, separately and in infinite variety of combinations with those bequeathed to them by other dramatic conventions of the past.” In a New York Times piece entitled “Which Theatre is the Absurd One?”, Edward Albee agrees with Esslin’s final analysis, writing, “For just as it is true that our response to color and form was forever altered once the impressionist painters put their minds to canvas, it is just as true that the playwrights of The Theatre of the Absurd have forever altered our response to the theatre.”

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What, then, has become of this wonderful new theatre—this movement that produced some of the most exciting and original dramatic works of the twentieth century? Conventional wisdom, perhaps, suggests that the Theatre of the Absurd was a product of a very specific point in time and, because that time has passed, it has gone the way of the dinosaur. In a revised edition of his seminal work, Martin Esslin disagrees: “Everyartistic movement or style has at one time or another been the prevailing fashion. It if was no more than that, it disappeared without a trace. If it had a genuine content, if it contributed to an enlargement of human perception, if it created new modes of human expression, if it opened up new areas of experience, however, it was bound to be absorbed into the main stream of development. And this is what happened with the Theatre of the Absurd which, apart from having

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surd constituted first and foremost an onslaught on language, showing it as a very unreliable and insufficient tool of communication. Absurd drama uses conventionalised speech, clichés, slogans and technical jargon, which it distorts, parodies and breaks down. By ridiculing conventionalised and stereotyped speech patterns, the Theatre of the Absurd tries to make people aware of the possibility of going beyond everyday speech conventions and communicating more authentically.” Absurd drama subverts logic. It relishes the unexpected and the logically impossible. According to Sigmund Freud, there is a feeling of freedom we can enjoy when we are able to abandon the straitjacket of logic. As Dr. Culik points out, “Rationalist thought, like language, only deals with the superficial aspects of things. Nonsense, on the other hand, opens up a glimpse of the infinite.”

Taming of a shrew Part II

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

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illiam Shakespeare Play Taming of the Shrew Cast and characters in The Taming of the Shrew play by William Shakespeare Index of plays by William Shakespeare Introduction - Full, free online text - The Taming of the Shrew This section contains the free online text of The Taming of the Shrew the famous Shakespearean play. The enduring works of the great Bard feature many famous and well loved characters. The full online text and script of The Taming of the Shrew convey vivid impressions. The language used today is, in many ways, different to that used in the 16th century Elizabethan era and this 68is often reflected in the script and text used in Shakespearean plays. It is therefore not surprising that we have no experience or understanding of some of the words contained in the text / script of The Taming of the Shrew. We have therefore included a free online Shakespeare Dictionary for most of the more obscure words used in the script and text of his plays, some of which are obsolete in modern language or Dictionaries. Make a note of any unusual words or text that you encounter whilst reading the online text of the play and then check their definition in the free online Shakespeare Dictionary. Script / Text of The Taming of the Shrew The script of this play is extremely

long. To reduce the time to load the script of the play, and for ease in accessing specific sections of the script, we have separated the text into Acts. Please click on the appropriate links to access the Act of your choice.

Introduction

This section contains the script of Act I of The Taming of the Shrew the play by William Shakespeare. The enduring works of William Shakespeare feature many famous and well loved characters. Make a note of any unusual words that you encounter whilst reading the script of The Taming of the Shrew and check their definition in the Shakespeare Dictionary The script of The Taming of the Shrew is extremely long. To reduce the time to load the script of the play, and for ease in accessing specific sections of the script, we have separated the text of The Taming of the Shrew into Acts. Please click the Taming of the Shrew Script to access further Acts. Script / Text of Act I the Taming of the Shrew

Act I SCENE I. Before an alehouse on a heath. Enter Hostess and SLY

SLY

I'll pheeze you, in faith. Hostess A pair of stocks, you rogue!

SLY

ye are a baggage: the SLYs are no rogues; look in the chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore paucas pallabris; let the

world slide: sessa!

Hostess

You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?

SLY

No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy: go to thy cold bed, and warm thee.

Hostess

I know my remedy; I must go fetch the third--borough. Exit

SLY

Third, or fourth, or fifth borough, I'll answer him by law: I'll not budge an inch, boy: let him come, and kindly. Falls asleep Horns winded. Enter a Lord from hunting, with his train

Lord

Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my hounds: Brach Merriman, the poor cur is emboss'd; And couple Clowder with the deep-mouth'd brach. Saw'st thou not, boy, how Silver made it good At the hedge-corner, in the coldest fault? I would not lose the dog for twenty pound. First Huntsman Why, Belman is as good as he, my lord; He cried upon it at the merest loss And twice to-day pick'd out the dullest scent: Trust me, I take him for the better dog.

Lord

Thou art a fool: if Echo were as fleet, I would esteem him worth a dozen such. But sup them well and look unto them all: To-morrow I intend to hunt again. First Huntsman I will, my lord.

Lord

What's here? one dead, or drunk? See, doth he breathe? Second Huntsman He breathes, my lord. Were he not warm'd with ale, This were a bed but cold to sleep so soundly.

Lord

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O monstrous beast! how like a swine he lies! Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image! Sirs, I will practise on this drunken man. What think you, if he were convey'd to bed, Wrapp'd in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers, A most delicious banquet by his bed, And brave attendants near him when he wakes, Would not the beggar then forget himself? First Huntsman 70Believe me, lord, I think he cannot choose. Second Huntsman It would seem strange unto him when he waked.

Lord

Even as a flattering dream or worthless fancy. Then take him up and manage well the jest: Carry him gently to my fairest chamber And hang it round with all my wanton pictures: Balm his foul head in warm distilled waters And burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet: Procure me music ready when he wakes, To make a dulcet and a heavenly sound;

And if he chance to speak, be ready straight And with a low submissive reverence Say 'What is it your honour will command?' Let one attend him with a silver basin Full of rose-water and bestrew'd with flowers, Another bear the ewer, the third a diaper, And say 'Will't please your lordship cool your hands?' Some one be ready with a costly suit And ask him what apparel he will wear; Another tell him of his hounds and horse, And that his lady mourns at his disease: Persuade him that he hath been lunatic; And when he says he is, say that he dreams, For he is nothing but a mighty lord. This do and do it kindly, gentle sirs: It will be pastime passing excellent, If it be husbanded with modesty.

First Huntsman

My lord, I warrant you we will play our part, As he shall think by our true diligence He is no less than what we say he is.

Lord

Take him up gently and to bed with him; And each one to his office when he wakes. Some bear out SLY. A trumpet sounds Sirrah, go see what trumpet 'tis that sounds: Exit Servingman Belike, some noble gentleman that means, Travelling some journey, to repose him here. Re-enter Servingman How now! who is it?

Servant

An't please your honour, players That offer service to your lordship.

Lord

Bid them come near. Enter Players Now, fellows, you are welcome.

Players

We thank your honour.

Lord

Do you intend to stay with me tonight?

A Player

So please your lordship to accept our duty.

Lord

With all my heart. This fellow I remember, Since once he play'd a farmer's eldest son: 'Twas where you woo'd the gentlewoman so well: I have forgot your name; but, sure, that part Was aptly fitted and naturally perform'd.

A Player

I think 'twas Soto that your honour means.

Lord

'Tis very true: thou didst it excellent. Well, you are come to me in a happy time; The rather for I have some sport in hand Wherein your cunning can assist me much. There is a lord will hear you play to-night: But I am doubtful of your modesties; Lest over-eyeing of his odd behavior,-For yet his honour never heard a play-You break into some merry passion And so offend him; for I tell you, sirs, If you should smile he grows impatient.

A Player

Fear not, my lord: we can contain ourselves, Were he the veriest antic in the world.

Lord

Go, sirrah, take them to the but-

Exeunt SCENE II. A bedchamber in the Lord's house. Enter aloft SLY, with Attendants; some with apparel, others with basin and ewer and appurtenances; and Lord

SLY

For God's sake, a pot of small ale.

First Servant

Will't please your lordship drink a cup of sack?

Second Servant

Will't please your honour taste of these conserves?

Third Servant

What raiment will your honour wear to-day?

SLY

I am Christophero SLY; call not me 'honour' nor 'lordship:' I ne'er drank sack in my life; and if you give me any conserves, give me conserves of beef: ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear; for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet; nay, sometimes more feet than shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the over-leather.

Lord

Heaven cease this idle humour in your honour! O, that a mighty man of such descent,

Of such possessions and so high esteem, Should be infused with so foul a spirit!

SLY

What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher SLY, old SLY's son of Burtonheath, by birth a pedlar, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom. What! I am not bestraught: here's--

Third Servant

O, this it is that makes your lady mourn!

Second Servant

O, this is it that makes your servants droop!

Lord

Hence comes it that your kindred shuns your house, As beaten hence by your strange lunacy. O noble lord, bethink thee of thy birth, Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment And banish hence these abject lowly dreams. Look how thy servants do attend on thee, Each in his office ready at thy 71 beck. Wilt thou have music? hark! Apollo plays,Music And twenty caged nightingales do sing: Or wilt thou sleep? we'll have thee to a couch Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed On purpose trimm'd up for Semiramis. Say thou wilt walk; we will bestrew the ground: Or wilt thou ride? thy horses shall be trapp'd, Their harness studded all with

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Exit a Servingman I know the boy will well usurp the grace, Voice, gait and action of a gentlewoman: I long to hear him call the drunkard husband, And how my men will stay themselves from laughter When they do homage to this simple peasant. I'll in to counsel them; haply my presence May well abate the over-merry spleen Which otherwise would grow into extremes.

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tery, And give them friendly welcome every one: Let them want nothing that my house affords. Exit one with the Players Sirrah, go you to Barthol'mew my page, And see him dress'd in all suits like a lady: That done, conduct him to the drunkard's chamber; And call him 'madam,' do him obeisance. Tell him from me, as he will win my love, He bear himself with honourable action, Such as he hath observed in noble ladies Unto their lords, by them accomplished: Such duty to the drunkard let him do With soft low tongue and lowly courtesy, And say 'What is't your honour will command, Wherein your lady and your humble wife May show her duty and make known her love?' And then with kind embracements, tempting kisses, And with declining head into his bosom, Bid him shed tears, as being overjoy'd To see her noble lord restored to health, Who for this seven years hath esteem'd him No better than a poor and loathsome beggar: And if the boy have not a woman's gift To rain a shower of commanded tears, An onion will do well for such a shift, Which in a napkin being close convey'd Shall in despite enforce a watery eye. See this dispatch'd with all the haste thou canst: Anon I'll give thee more instructions.

gold and pearl. Dost thou love hawking? thou hast hawks will soar Above the morning lark or wilt thou hunt? Thy hounds shall make the welkin answer them And fetch shrill echoes from the hollow earth.

First Servant

Say thou wilt course; thy greyhounds are as swift As breathed stags, ay, fleeter than the roe.

Second Servant

Dost thou love pictures? we will fetch thee straight Adonis painted by a running brook, And Cytherea all in sedges hid, Which seem to move and wanton with her breath, Even as the waving sedges play with wind.

Lord

We'll show thee Io as she was a maid, And how she was beguiled and surprised, As lively painted as the deed was done.

Third Servant

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Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood, Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds, 72And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep, So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn.

Lord

Thou art a lord, and nothing but a lord: Thou hast a lady far more beautiful Than any woman in this waning age.

First Servant

And till the tears that she hath shed for thee Like envious floods o'er-run her lovely face, She was the fairest creature in the world; And yet she is inferior to none.

SLY

Am I a lord? and have I such a lady?

Or do I dream? or have I dream'd till now? I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak; I smell sweet savours and I feel soft things: Upon my life, I am a lord indeed And not a tinker nor Christophero SLY. Well, bring our lady hither to our sight; And once again, a pot o' the smallest ale.

Second Servant

Will't please your mightiness to wash your hands? O, how we joy to see your wit restored! O, that once more you knew but what you are! These fifteen years you have been in a dream; Or when you waked, so waked as if you slept.

SLY

These fifteen years! by my fay, a goodly nap. But did I never speak of all that time?

First Servant

O, yes, my lord, but very idle words: For though you lay here in this goodly chamber, Yet would you say ye were beaten out of door; And rail upon the hostess of the house; And say you would present her at the leet, Because she brought stone jugs and no seal'd quarts: Sometimes you would call out for Cicely Hacket.

SLY

Ay, the woman's maid of the house.

Which never were nor no man ever saw.

Why, sir, you know no house nor no such maid, Nor no such men as you have reckon'd up, As Stephen SLY and did John Naps of Greece And Peter Turph and Henry Pimpernell And twenty more such names and men as these

Now Lord be thanked for my good amends!

Third Servant

SLY

ALL

Amen.

SLY

I thank thee: thou shalt not lose by it. Enter the Page as a lady, with attendants

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Page

How fares my noble lord?

My men should call me 'lord:' I am your goodman.

Marry, I fare well for here is cheer enough. Where is my wife?

My husband and my lord, my lord and husband; I am your wife in all obedience.

SLY

Page

Here, noble lord: what is thy will with her?

SLY

Are you my wife and will not call me husband?

Page

SLY

I know it well. What must I call her?

Lord

Madam.

SLY

Al'ce madam, or Joan madam?

Lord

'Madam,' and nothing else: so lords call ladies.

SLY

Madam wife, they say that I have dream'd And slept above some fifteen year or more.

Page

Ay, and the time seems thirty unto me,

Being all this time abandon'd from your bed.

SLY

'Tis much. Servants, leave me and her alone. Madam, undress you and come now to bed.

Page

Thrice noble lord, let me entreat of you To pardon me yet for a night or two, Or, if not so, until the sun be set: For your physicians have expresSLY charged, In peril to incur your former malady, That I should yet absent me from your bed: I hope this reason stands for my excuse.

SLY

Ay, it stands so that I may hardly tarry so long. But I would be loath to fall into my dreams again: I will therefore tarry in despite of the flesh and the blood.

Enter a Messenger Messenger

Your honour's players, heating your amendment, Are come to play a pleasant comedy; For so your doctors hold it very meet, Seeing too much sadness hath congeal'd your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy: Therefore they thought it good you hear a play And frame your mind to mirth and

merriment, Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.

SLY

Marry, I will, let them play it. Is not a comondy a Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick?

Page

No, my good lord; it is more pleasing stuff.

SLY

What, household stuff?

Page

It is a kind of history.

SLY

Well, well see't. Come, madam wife, sit by my side and let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.

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Irish influence on American culture By Aleksandra Konstantinovic

Voices Raised Above the Ruin

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n a country where the soil grows naught but sorrow and the poor are driven to piety, one would hardly expect to find a strain of defiance that goes back scores of centuries. And yet, Ireland, a country that has been on the brink of starvation many times, has seen some of the best writers and orators rise from its boggy shore. These men and women wrote novels, poems, songs, articles, and perhaps most importantly, plays. The dramas that were composed borrowed heavily from Ireland's rich culture, and naturally, could not be contained on one little island. Even from across the Atlantic, Ireland has had a great influence on American theatre. Most theatre has its origins in a very basic and very ancient custom: storytelling. The first "actors" in Ireland were the seanchai, storytellers who preserved (and no doubt embellished) their history through telling stories rather than recording them in writing. These Celtic performers were travelers; they wandered from house to house and recited epic poems and songs and danced in exchange for a warm bed and whatever food the family could offer. One component of Celtic theatre that almost any modern American would recognize comes not in the form of a play, but in the form of dance, Irish step dance, more commonly known now as Riverdance. Ages before Michael Flately, the Irish people had been step-dancing, or "clogging" for years. Interestingly enough, these dances were first done at crossroads in the countryside; it was traditional belief that the place where two roads crossed carried magical qualities. Whole towns would turn out for dances where a local band would play and every man, woman, and child could outshine Flately even without any elaborate costumes. The evolution of theatre is astounding; from these old oratorical and musical traditions, musical theatre was born. Eventually, the seanchais' yarns were written down, and just as Shakespeare was gaining fame an island away, the age of the ancient storytellers came to its curtain-call. As theatre evolved, so did those who saw it as their calling. The next era of Irish theatre saw names such as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, who were both Irishmen, but never chose to identify themselves as such. The playwrights Shaw and Wilde hardly ever wrote anything to do with Ireland, rather they focused on issues that appealed to the masses, such as marriage, education, government, and class. John Millington Synge, however, used his plays to show the real Ireland. His show, The Playboy of the Western World, showed the Irish people in all their poverty and squalor. This play shocked audiences in Ireland, England, and America alike and even boosted contributions from Irish-Americans to their home country. The 20th century also saw the genius of Samuel Beckett, who has a theater named after him in Dublin as well as in New York. Most recently, The Pirate Queen, a musical chronicling the life of Irish clan chieftain and part time pirate Grace O'Malley opened on Broadway to rave reviews. This almost amusing to look back and see the infatuation that America has had with Irish culture. Even those with one-sixteenth of a drop of Irish blood will go back to the Emerald Isle to see where their roots are. The assimilation of the Irish into America's melting pot has been met with that streak of defiance that does not seem to be too keen on melting away. The Americans are lucky to walk out of theaters and Riverdance halls with the voices of those who rose above the ruin still ringing in their ears.

Professor Nasser D. Khalili and the Khalili Collections

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rofessor Nasser D. Khalili KCSS, KCFO is a scholar, collector and benefactor of international standing, who has often been called the ‘cultural ambassador of Islam’ by leaders of Muslim countries. After completing his schooling and national service in Iran he moved to the United States of America in 1967, where he continued his education. In 1978 he settled in the United Kingdom. Since 1970 he has assembled, under the auspices of the Khalili 76Family Trust, five of the world’s finest and most comprehensive art collections: The Arts of the Islamic World (700-1900), Japanese Art of the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Swedish Textiles (1700-1900), Spanish Damascened Metalwork (1850-1900) and Enamels of the World (1700-2000). Together, the five collections comprise some 25,000 works. The Khalili Collections are fully represented in a series of over 40 catalogues, of which 90% have already been published. Once completed, the series will form a unique survey of each field and will be the largest art publication project of any collector to date. Selections from each Collection have been exhibited in over 35 world-class museums, such as the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert

Museum in London, the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the Alhambra Palace in Granada, the Portland Art Museum in the USA and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Key objects have been loaned to more than 40 different museums and institutions, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA to Somerset House London, England. The next two exhibitions will be The Arts of Islam: Treasures from the Nasser D Khalili Collection at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, and the Enamels of the World (1700-2000) at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, later this year. Nasser Khalili is a frequent lecturer. He has also made notable contributions to the scholarship of Islamic art, having endowed in 1989, the Nasser D. Khalili Chair of Islamic Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, the first chair devoted to the decorative arts of Islam to be founded at any university. He has also supported a research fellowship in Islamic art at the University of Oxford. The Khalili Family Trust made a significant endowment to the University of Oxford to establish and support The Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, which opened in 2005. Nasser Khalili is a graduate, Associate Research Profes-

sor and Member of the Governing Body of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of London. He was appointed to the International Board of Overseers at Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA, in 1997 and in 2003 received the honorary degree Doctor of Humane Letters from Boston University. In May 2005 he also received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts London, and in 2007 he was given the High Sheriff of London award for his cultural contribution to London. Nasser Khalili is the co-founder and chairman of the Maimonides Foundation, which promotes peace and understanding between Jews and Muslims. He has been awarded other honours, which include Trustee of the City of Jerusalem, Knight Commander of the Royal Order of St Francis I (KCFO) at Westminster cathedral. He is exceptional in having received Knighthoods from two Popes. His Holiness the late Pope John Paul II honoured him as Knight of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St Sylvester (KSS) and His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI has further elevated him to Knight Commander in the said order (KCSS) for his pursuit of peace and culture amongst nations.

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Babak Ghanaat Graphic Desiner & Poet 速

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