The Art Of Today

(via The Outline of Art) Frank Rutter writes:

From John S Sargent To Augustus John

1

The art of today is a cosmopolitan business. Rapidity of communications and the interchange of international ideas have broken down the old frontiers of thought, so that while painters of various styles can now be found in all civilized countries, the styles throughout the world are very much alike, and it is difficult to make out a case for any distinctive national art. If it be hazardous, however, to assert that there exists at present a ‘British School’, distinct from the schools of painting in France, Spain, Italy, and other countries, it may nevertheless be said with sufficient confidence and today, in the words of Sir Robert Witt, ‘British art stands second to none in the world.’

Writing nearly fifteen years ago, the late Sir Walter Armstrong said: ‘The Pre-Raphaelite revolt is the last great movement which really belongs to the history of British Art. Those developments which have taken place since are more cosmopolitan than British. They have been moves towards assimilating our insular ideas to those of the Continent, which, in painting, means the ideas of France and Holland. Being all moves in one direction, they have had considerable similarity one with another, and it is scarcely worth while to dwell much on the differences which separate the neo-Scots school from that of Newlyn, or both from those franker disciples of Paris who have been so greatly encouraged by the genius of two Americans, Whistler and Sargent.’

Mr John Singer Sargent, R.A, who has been perhaps the greatest influence in portrait painting in our time, was himself Paris-trained. Born at Florence in 1856, the son of American parents—his father being a physician at Boston, USA—Mr Sargent was educated in Italy and Germany, studied paiting under Carolus Duran at Paris, and finally settled in England during the eighties. In his own person, therefore, Mr Sargent represented in the most marked manner the cosmopolitan experiences which go to the making of a modern painter. A word may be said here as to his master, Carolus Duran, who was born at Lille in 1837, for though this painter won the coveted Prix de Rome and spent four years in Italy, he became the leading French portrait painter of his time by reason of his later study of Velazquez in Madrid. Carolus Duran, then, was one of the pioneers who turned away the thought of his contemporaries and pupils from the Italian and Flemish to the Spanish schools of painting, and his art, like that of his still more famous pupil Mr Sargent, is largely derived from Velazquez. The English portraiture of the eighteenth century, as has already been shown, was modelled firstly on the practice of Van Dyck and secondly on that painting towards the middle of the nineteenth century, and still dominant at the present day, is based on the work of Velazquez and Goya.

While many have drawn inspiration from this common source, the results obtained from the following, in the main, the Spanish tradition, have varied considerably according to the individual temperaments of the artists. In Mr Sargent’s painting we see the irrepressible energy which we associate with Transatlantic business enterprise; he was a ‘hustler’ in paint who swept us off our feet by the amazing vivacity of his brushwork and by the almost uncanny actuality with which he set a living being before us. A vigorous draughtsman, using sweeps of paint with economic mastery, Mr Sargent developed powers of psychological penetration which made him supreme in the rendering of character. Some of his male portraits have been so merciless in their unmasking of the real minds of his sitters that they have justified the amusing but apt comment of ‘Mr Dooley’:

‘Stand there,’ he sez, ‘while I tear the ugly black heart out av ye.’

At the same time his ‘Lord Ribblesdale’ proves how noble a rendering of human dignity the artist can achieve when he is in complete sympathy with his sitter, while his brilliant group of ‘Ena and Betty Wertheimer’ is a masterpiece in which warm, living beings are presented with perfect naturalness yet with stately grandeur. The wonderful series of Wertheimer portraits, now in the National Gallery, is at once a revelation of the artist’s power in the expression of different characters and a souvenir of his long association with the astute and esteemed art dealer who, from his earliest days, stoutly affirmed his belief in the genius of Mr Sargent.

Since he first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1879, Mr Sargent’s career was one of a steady upward progress. It was not till 1894 that he was elected an A.R.A, but before this he had exhibited with distinction both at the Academy and at the New English Art Club. His early portraits show traces of the influence of the Impressionists, but Mr Sargent’s connection with this school is less obvious in his portraits than in his landscapes and watercolors.

In watercolor Mr Sargent created a new and distinct style which had a great effect on his contemporaries. How skilfully he used it as a brilliant sketching medium may be seen in ‘The Piazzetta, Venice’. Here, like Manet, he saw ‘no lines in Nature,’ but built up a vivid impression of the scene before him by brilliant touches of color and strong contrasts of light and shade. It is a broad, vigorous style which, despite its summariness, gives a marvelous sense of actuality in the hands of a master. Though pre-eminent as a portrait painter and as a sketcher in watercolor, Mr Sargent executed notable works in a variety of styles and media. He painted important decorative works for public buildings in the United States, and he also did some scuplture, notably his ‘Crucifixion’ for the Boston Library, U.S.A, a bronze study for which may be seen in the Tate Gallery.

The Art Of Today (continued)

Invention Session

I thoroughly enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's article In the Air @ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all. It was brilliant + insightful. He was spot on.

Useful link:
www.gladwell.com

Tan Dun

(via Wiki) Tan Dun is a Chinese contemporary classical composer, most widely known for his Grammy and Oscar-award winning scores for the movies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.

I've always enjoyed his music.

Useful links:
www.tandunonline.com
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/04/arts/04dunt.php

BarberOsgerby

I really liked BarberOsgerby's designs because it's simple, has energy and consistent elegance.

Useful link:
www.barberosgerby.com

Canadian Diamonds

Canada is now on the top of the pyramid as a rough diamond producer. Martin Irving is an expert on Canadian diamonds. He knows inside out the location and the available infrastructure which is crucial in determining the economic viability of the project.

Useful link:
www.diamondconsultants.ca

Call Of The Mall

Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping by the Author of Why We Buy by Paco Underhill is an interesting retail research book on consumer behavior + tricks of the trade. I liked it.

Useful link:
www.envirosell.com

Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The artisitc activity of Great Britain was at its height in 1917. In March the Imperial War Museum was instituted, and during the summer the Canadian War Memorials Fund was founded by Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere, who, acting under competent expert advice, accumulated a notable collection of pictures. When the collection was exhibited at Burlington House, prior to its dispatch to Canada, the work of the younger artists revealed to a significant degree the new spirit that was abroad in art. Nevinson and Nash were no longer alone; other artists of their own generation exhibited war pictures in which similar tendencies could be discerned. Conspicuous among those who stressed the Cubist point of view, presenting soldiers as automata and emphasizing the mechanism of war, were Messrs. P Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts; still more numerous were those who adopted a post-Impressionist simplication of statement, among the most prominent members of this school being the brothers Stanley and Gilbert Spencer, Messrs. Paul and John Nash, and Mr Henry Lamb. Pictures by all these artists and many others were also acquired for the Imperial War Museum.

Mr Henry Lamb, another member of the New English Art Club who had attracted attention before the War by his powers of drawing and the emotional force in his pictures, was a comparative late comer; for having been formerly a medical student he was fully accupied with Red Cross work up to and following the Armistice. When he resumed the brush, however, it was seen that he had taken notes during his services in Macedonia, and his picture ‘Advanced Dressing Station on the Struma, 1916’, now in the Manchester Art Gallery, is a notable contribution to the pictorial exposition of the psychology of war. It is not the excitement or frenzy of fighting that Mr Lamb shows us, but the boredom and dreariness of the men who are waiting for untterable things to happen. Precisely drawn, wonderfully clear and simple in its design, this painting depicts a quiet moment in the campaigner’s life, a moment when the weariness of all concerned finds abundant expression.

To deal with all the artists who painted war pictures between 1914 and 1918 is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, and therefore the work of many eminent painters—several of whom will be referred to subsequently—must be passed over in silence for the moment. Turning to a new subject does not necessarily change an artist’s style, and it is the evolution of a new style rather than the discovery of a new subject which vitally affects the history of art. The number of Official Artists appointed was evidence of the curious way in which the War persuaded a ‘Business Government’ to treat art with more seriousness and consideration than it had yet received in Great Britain. While many artists, like Sir John Lavery and Mr Muirhead Bone, continued their former style and practice when engaged on these new subjects, other artists, as we have seen, were fired by their experiences in the trenches to the invention of new styles for the expression of new emotions. This direct or indirect influence of the War on art was not limited only to the artists who had served abroad; occasionally it made itself felt in the work of the men who stayed at home.

The most remarkable war picture in the Royal Academy of 1918 had for its subject a London ‘Tube’ station during an air raid. Mr Walter Baye’s great canvas ‘The Underworld’ is a vigorous and haunting painting which in its style approaches the new manner of post-Impressionism. Designed as a mural decoration, the picture shows an appropriate monumental treatment of the alien figures who sprawl about the platform. The faces are not English faces, but on occasions such as the artist depicts London’s underworld was full of these types. Mr Bayes ably commemorates in their characteristic attitudes and dishevelled condition the dreary languor of these semi-orientals waiting in safety for the ‘All clear’ signal which will tell them it is safe to return to the surface of the Metropolis. Mr Walter Bayes, who is the Head of the Westminster School of Art and a member of a well-known family of artists, had long been known as a decorative painter of great talent, but he had never previously produced a painting so precious as a human document.

The public, as well as the technical expert, can appreciate good drawing, attractive color, and well balanced design; but these things alone will not serve to capture its imagination. It demands rightly that a picture should contain an idea or an emotion that can be clearly grasped. To some artists—mostly of the younger generation—the War afforded the most astounding experience they had ever undergone, and, overwhelmed by it, they burst through the barriers of school-taught orthodox painting to express with a primitive ferocity the intensity of their own sensations. By placing on permanent record, not only the scenes caused but the emotions evoked by the War, they have rendered services to both History and Art which posterity will know how to value.

Bordeaux Wine Tasting

The Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux organizes wine tasting for professionals (by invitation only) during the first week of April every year, but on each May, the group also puts on a big tasting event that's open to the public, called 'Le Weekend des Grands Amateurs.'

Sign up @ www.wga-ugcb.com

Useful link:
www.ugcb.net

Random Thoughts

(via Fortune) Even when we started Google, we thought, "Oh, we might fail," and we almost didn't do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, "You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don't succeed." Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It's not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It's not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.

- Larry Page, President, Google

I think he was spot on.

Iron Man Movie

(via Wiki) Iron Man is a 2008 superhero film based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Iron Man. Directed by Jon Favreau, the film is about Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), a billionaire industrialist who is captured by terrorists in Afghanistan. Ordered to build a missile for them, Stark uses his resources instead to build a powered exoskeleton to make his escape. Returning to the United States, Stark improves his armor and becomes the technologically advanced superhero Iron Man. Gwyneth Paltrow plays his personal assistant Pepper Potts, Terrence Howard plays jet pilot James Rhodes, and Jeff Bridges plays Obadiah Stane.

I think Iron Man is a solid film that will appeal to a wide audience + a talented cast and crew have created a great movie.

Useful links:
http://ironmanmovie.marvel.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgzIM-9lfA

Nathaniel's Nutmeg

Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History by Giles Milton is a great book on the history of spice trade by the Dutch and English trading companies + the courageous and tragic characters + this book definitely brings the period to life.

Heard On The Street

A person's character is determined by the things he does when no one is watching.

Paraiba Tourmaline Controversy

David Federman writes about the pros and cons with the origin name Paraiba + provenance issues and the impact @ http://www.colored-stone.com/stories/may08/paraiba.cfm

I think Dave Federman was spot on.

Art: The Best And The Rest

Carol Vogel writes about the multibillion dollar art market and the speculators + the gamble/face-saving strategies by the auction houses and the impact + other viewpoints @ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/arts/design/04voge.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

$25 Billion And Counting

Eileen Kinsella writes about the exponentially larger private art markets (Russia, Asia, the Middle East) + other viewpoints @ http://www.artnewsonline.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2487

Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

4

Some two months after these last appointments, a small collection of water colors of ‘The Ypres Salient’ was exhibited at the Goupil Gallery. They were the work of a young soldier, Mr Paul Nash, who then was practically unknown, though he and his brother John Nash had already exhibited at the New English Art Club water colors which had attracted attention among connoisseurs by reason of their unsophisticated simplicity and naive charm. Though enthusiastically welcomed by some of the leading art critics, Mr Nash’s first exhibition passed almost unnoticed by the public, but a second exhibition of his war drawings, held later at the Leicester Galleries, aroused widespread interest, and the publication by Country Life of a book of his water colors established his reputation as an original artist who had and could express poignantly his own vision of the War. In the introduction to this volume of reproductions, Capt C E Montague wrote:

In drawing strange places so strangely Mr Nash contrives to bring back to the mind the strange things felt by men who were there at moments of stress. One does not see with the eyes alone, but with brain and nerves too, and if these are worked upon in unusual ways, then the messages brought in by the little waves of light that break on delicate shores in the eye are changed—some may say disturned or blurred; others may say refined into an uncommon rightness, not to be had at other times. If an artist succeeds in expressing effects of such changes, his works may well delight some of those who have felt the changes go on in themselves.

A picture like ‘Sunrise: Inverness Copse’, may not be ‘true’ as the camera sees truth; but it is true to the memory of a nerve-racked fighting man. Granted that it contain exaggerations, they are exaggerations of significant elements in the scene. The lumps and holes in the foreground are a pointed commentary on the deeply pit-marked earth exposed to constant shelling. Mr Paul Nash paints his subjects as seen by the mind’s eye, and the mind of man ever enlarges that which it has cause to fear. A sensitive and emotional artist, Mr Nash paints in these water colors not only what he has seen, but what he has felt. As a landscape painter, what he felt most deeply was the abomination of desolation caused by war. Whereas Nevinson showed us soldiers as cogs in the war machine, Nash presented the Earth as a tortured and violated entity. These two painters, the first realist, the second imaginative, each formed and inspired by the War, were the complement of each other. Nevinson showed the complicated, man-driven machinery of war; Nash its devastating effects. Many other artists of great skill and talent painted pictures of the War which were perhaps more pleasant to look upon; but none exhibited its inner ghastliness with more power, originality, and intensity of feeling. By midsummer 1917 the best judges of modern painting were convinced that the two men who had most to say about the War in paint were C R W Nevinson and Paul Nash. Representations were made to the proper authorities, with the result that during the next few months a new batch of ‘Official Artists’ included Messers C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash, Eric Kennington, and Sir John Lavery. As became his age and position, Sir John Lavery—who was born at Belfast in 1857—was enlisted, so to speak, for ‘home service’. ‘The Royal Naval Division, Crystal Palace, 1916’ is an excellent example of the war pictures—charming in their delicate color and atmosphere—which Sir John was able to paint without crossing the seas. Happy in its Whistlerian impressionism, in which Sir John is an adept, this picture is entirely worthy of the reputation of one of our leading portrait painters, but it is no new revelation either of the spirit of the times or of the significance of war.

Art During The Great War (continued)

Find Of A Lifetime

Geologists prospecting for diamonds off the coast of Namibia were lucky enough to find a 500-year-old shipwreck (Portuguese/Spanish) with tons of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins ++ I think the leaky vessel may have caught up in a storm or the cargo (treasures) may have been too heavy, tipping the ship.

Useful links:
www.namdeb.com
www.noaa.gov

Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

3

‘Often,’ says a character in one of Sundermann’s novels, ‘Art leads us astray because she has deliberately tried to reflect something quite different from the spirit of her time.’ Many visitors to the Royal Academy and other exhibitions in 1915 and 1916 felt vaguely that the pictures they saw there were leading them astray. Mr Kennington’s picture and the paintings of Mr Nevinson acted on them differently, because these seemed truer to the spirit of the time. The outworn conventions of the older artists seemed powerless to convey an adequate expression of the clash of the world conflict, and possibly it was the general failure of well-known and eminent painters to deal with the War that led the British Government to select a black-and-white artist as the first ‘Official Artist.’ In addition to the useful propaganda work accomplished by poster artists and cartoonists, it was felt that the nation should possess permanent records of typical scenes and episodes in the greatest war the world had ever known. The outcome of this feeling was the appointment in August 1916 of Mr Muirhead Bone as an official artist on the Western Front. The appointment was eminently appropriate, for Mr Bone’s known ability to make memorable designs from scaffolding and the demolition of buildings argued that he was the right man to depict the havoc of war.

Born at Glasgow in 1867, Mr Muirhead Bone came to London in 1901, and was a prominent member of the New English Art Club long before the War. His masterly etchings and drawings of architectural subjects have long been highly prized by connoisseurs. In 1915-16 Mr Bone had devoted much of his time to the interpretation of British war industries, sketching ‘The Building of a Liner’, ‘The Yards on the Clyde,’ and similar subjects. After his new appointment the regular publication in parts, from the Office of Country Life, of reproductions of Mr Bone’s drawings made on the Western Front, opened a new era in the pictorial treatment of the War. Drawings like the ‘Sketch in Albert’ show with what economy and distinction Mr Bone achieved his task of presenting with pictorial dignity and actual truth the aspect of ravaged buildings and wasted landscape. Though Mr Bone’s reputation was made before the War, these portfolios increased his admirers a hundredfold, and the unexpected popularity and wide demand for his books of sketches soon convinced the authorities that there was room and to spare for another official artists.

In April 1917 Mr James McBey, another Scottish artist, born in Aberdeenshire in 1883, who was akin in style to Mr Bone, and also chiefly known for his etchings and drawings, was appointed the Official Artist for Egypt and Palestine. The same month Sir William Orpen, R.A, was sent to France as an official artist. A large collection of the paintings he made there was freely presented by the artist to the nation and may be seen in the Imperial War Museum.

Art During The Great War (continued)

A Positive Understanding Of Islam’

Sarah H. Bayliss writes about why many cultural institutions around the world are showcasing Islamic art + other viewpoints @ http://www.artnewsonline.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2494

Executricks

Executricks: Or How to Retire While You're Still Working by Stanley Bing is an interesting book because I think we all need Stanley Bing's global positioning system for a sane and pleasantly successful life.

Useful link:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/stanleybing

Style And Tradition

The article, Top jewelers turn to their heritage to sell on the global stage @ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/02/arts/rcajmenkes.php was interesting, and I think today heritage is becoming the buzz word among top jewelers because it inspires and sells.

Lipstick Theory

The article, Hard Times, but Your Lips Look Great @ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/fashion/01SKIN.html?_r=1&oref=slogin was brilliant and insightful + I have learned something new today.

Jack Kirby

(via Wiki) Jack Kirby was one of the most influential, recognizable, and prolific artists in American comic books, and the co-creator of such enduring characters and popular culture icons as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, Captain America, and hundreds of others stretching back to the earliest days of the medium. He was also a comic book writer and editor. His most common nickname is 'The King'. Historians and most comics creators acknowledge Kirby as one of the medium's greatest and most influential artists.

Jack Kirby will be remembered forever.

Useful links:
www.kirbymuseum.org
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/05/02/jack.kirby/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M50Mjdsh_iw

Gold Update

It has been reported that MMTC Ltd, India’s largest bullion trader, is expected to import 140 tonnes of gold in 2008-09 + MMTC/Produits Artistiques Métaux Précieux have also decided to to make gold and silver medallions and coins, which I think will further the demand for precious metals.

Useful links:
www.pamp.ch
www.mmtclimited.com

A Spectacular Win In DTC’s ‘One against Hundred’ Game

Total internal reflections of Chaim Even Zohar on the renowned Belgian rough diamond trading company Diamanthandel A. Spira BVBA + how the company got listed in the new Diamond Trading Company (DTC) client list for the 2008-2011 contract period + other viewpoints @ http://www.idexonline.com/portal_FullEditorial.asp

Greatest Songs Of All Time

The complete list of Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time are @ http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/500songs

A few of my favorites:
- Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan
- A Change Is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke
- Blowin' in the Wind, Bob Dylan
- Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
- Stairway To Heaven, Led Zeppelin
- One, U2
- No Woman, No Cry, Bob Marley and the Wailers
- That'll Be the Day, Buddy Holly and the Crickets
- Georgia on My Mind, Ray Charles
- Hotel California, The Eagles
- Billie Jean, Michael Jackson
- I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, U2
- You Can't Always Get What You Want, The Rolling Stones
- Losing My Religion, R.E.M.
- Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain, Willie Nelson
- Candle in the Wind, Elton John
- Tears in Heaven, Eric Clapton
- C'mon Everybody, Eddie Cochran
- The Boys of Summer, Don Henley
- Piano Man, Billy Joel
- Love Me Tender, Elvis Presley

Useful link:
www.rollingstone.com

Knowing Your Opponent

How to get inside your opponents' heads rather than their hearts? The article Inside a deal was brilliant. http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11288484

Useful link:
www.psychologicalscience.org

Stephen Gregory

I really liked Steven Gregory's unique skull embedded with precious stones + I think it's one-of-a-kind art form with its own beauty and luster with a precious message.

Useful links:
www.opus-art.com
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2277561,00.html

Forevermark

De Beers says it plans to launch the world’s leading diamond brand Forevermark via carefully selected jewelers in Asia/South Africa + it's own independent grading laboratories in Belgium and England using proprietary technology exclusively for Forevermark diamonds.

I think this concept will definitely re-assure diamond consumers of all ages at a cost (if they don't care).

Useful links:
www.forevermark.com
www.debeersgroup.com
www.dtc.com

Twilight Becomes Night: A New Documentary

In her new documentary, Twilight Becomes Night, filmmaker Virginie-Alvine Perrette shows why America should fear a chain store takeover. Brilliant! I liked it.

Useful link:
www.twilightbecomesnight.com

Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The versatility of Mr Nevinson and the way in which he alters his style to suit his subject is seen in ‘A Group of Soldiers’. The great truth about the English ‘Tommy’ after 1915 was that he was the British working man in disguise, and here with unerring accuracy Mr Nevinson has penetrated to the man behind the uniform, and unveiled the man of toil, the unit of the machine. Some have demurred that in the foremost figures the hands are exaggerated but, while the point is open to debate, a slight exaggeration is permissible as emphasising the fact that these men belong to the horny-handed class. In this group, where there is no movement to be registered, Futurist devices would be out of place and they are avoided, but there is still a faint trace of Cubism in the definite angles of the simple modelling, and this helps to give a monumental sense of strength and doggedness to the sturdy figures.

In landscape, as well as in his figure paintings, Mr Nevinson contrived to get at the reality behind te thing seen. ‘The Road from Arras to Bapaume’ is neither impressionistic nor photographic, but it gives the essential truth of a scene acutely remembered. All the inessential details have been suppressed, with the result that the main recollections of the truth—the white, switchback track of Roman straightness, the lopped-down tree-trunks, the stream of moving traffic, and the limitless expanse—are recorded with increased strength and intensity. This is one of Mr Nevinson’s later war pictures, and while he no doubt enjoyed greater facilities and privileges when he returned to France in July 1917 as an ‘official artist’ than he had done in 1914-15 as a motor mechanic, the essential qualities in his pictures remained the same. His reputation was made with the earlier pictures, in which the mannerisms were most marked; in the later works these mannerisms were pruned to a vanishing point, and realities were stated without any serious loss in strength and with increased clarity.

It is no wonder that the war pictures of Mr Nevinson took London by storm in the early days of the War. He was the first to show the grim inner realities of modern fighting, and others who dealt only with appearances seemed in comparison remote from the heart of the subject. When other young artists were released from the fighting line, a new series of visions of men as automata expressed the new outlook of a new generation, but their work did not begin to appear in exhibitions till nearing the time of the Armistice in 1918.

The first serious rival to Mr Nevinson appeared in April 1916, when a large painting, ‘The Kensington’s at Laventie’ by Mr Eric H Kennington, was exhibited in Regent Street. Mr Kennington, a young painter of promise in whom Mr William Nicholson had taken an interest, was an artist of quite another type. He was untouched by the most modern movements, except that he had a leaning towards simplicity of drawing and emphasis of design: this and a knowledge of the War from within was all he had in common with Mr Nevinson. After only three months training in England as a Territorial, Private Kennington went to France at the beginning of November 1914 with the 13th Battalion of the London Regiment (The Kensingtons). He returned to England in 1915, when he was discharged unfit for further service, and then began to paint this great picture of a typical moment in the life at the Front during the terrible winter of 1914-15. The moment chosen for representation in this picture was when his platoon, after serving for four days and nights in the fire trenches, enduring the piercing cold of twenty degrees of frost and almost continuous snow, had at last been relieved. The men have emerged from the communication trench terminating in a ruined farmyard, and are forming up along the ruined village street. Each figure in the picture is an actual portrait, and the artist has given the following description of his work:

Corporal J Kealey is about to give the order ‘Fall in, No.7 Platoon.’ ....In the first four....reading from right to left—are Pte.Slade, resting wtih both hands on his rifle; Lee—Cpl. Wilson, Pte. Guy, and Pte.McCafferty, who is turning to look at te other men falling in behind....On the extreme left is Pte.H Bristol....Directly behind Pte.Guy are two men in waterproof sheets: Pte.Kennington (the artist) in a blue trench helmet and Pte.W.Harvey....On the ground is Pte. A Todd...He has fallen exhausted by continual sickness, hard work, lack of sleep, long hours of ‘standing—to ,’ and observing.

This picture shows quite another aspect of realism. It is a stately presentation of human endurance, of the quiet heroism of the rank and file. The deadliest enemy here is the piercing cold, which seems to pervade the whole picture. Apart from its human emotional appeal, this large picture—in which the figures are two—thirds life—size—possesses a peculiar technical interest in that it is painted on glass. The advantage of this method is that the pigment is hermetically sealed, and so long as the thick plate—glass endures unbroken the color of the surface will remain for centuries as fresh as on the day which it was painted. The technical difficulties, however, will be apparent even to laymen when it is realized that in order to use this method the whole picture has to be painted backward. Not only has the subject to be reversed on the other side of the glass, but the process of painting has to be reversed also: the upper touches, which on a canvas would have been the last, must be laid first on the glass, and what would have been the first brush stroke on a canvas must be put on the glass last. Looking at the apparent case with which the whole picture has been painted, and remembering the infinite difficulties of the method employed, ‘The Kensingtons at Laventie’ must be pronounced a great technical achievement as well as a noble memorial of British fortitude.

Art During The Great War (continued)

Random Thoughts

'What we wanted to do was once the customer come into our store we wanted to be sure that we are able to hold them for another few minutes, because they say that if you are able to make them sit for 10-15 minutes, they are ready to shop for another 30 minutes, so for us, every minutes is moolah.'

- B S Nagesh, MD
www.shoppersstop.com

T- rays

(via Wiki) Electromagnetic waves sent at terahertz frequencies, known as terahertz radiation, terahertz waves, terahertz light, T-rays, T-light, T-lux and THz, are in the region of the electromagnetic spectrum between 300 gigahertz (3x1011 Hz) and 3 terahertz (3x1012 Hz), corresponding to the submillimeter wavelength range between 1 millimeter (high-frequency edge of the microwave band) and 100 micrometer (long-wavelength edge of far-infrared light).

I found the article Detecting T-rays @ http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11286550 interesting because of its wide application in various faculties of science and technology + I also believe T-rays could be useful in detecting unique chemical signatures in sophistcated treated/synthetic colored stones and diamonds.

Useful links:
www.nist.gov
www.ieee.org

The Memory Project

I really liked the O2 Memory Project . Congratulations to Gabby Shawcross + Jason Bruges for designing the Memory Project. It was Brilliant!

Useful link:
www.o2memoryproject.com

The Adventures Of Johnny Bunko

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need by Daniel H. Pink is a fascinating book with good sense of humor + it's informative.

I liked it.

Useful link:
www.johnnybunko.com

The Perth Mint

(via Wiki) The Perth Mint is Australia's oldest operating mint + today the Mint continues to provide refining and other services to the gold industry and manufactures many coin related numismatic items for investors and coin collectors.

Interestingly the mint has become a prime tourist destination for the Asian visitors, especially the Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Japanese and Indian customers because of their passion for gold.

Useful link:
www.perthmint.com.au

Heard On The Street

Either learn how to play the game or bring more money.

Carbon Footprint

I found the carbon footprint analysis (a paper - pdf) by the MIT class @ http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/mit-class-calcu.html interesting because I think Timothy Gutowski and his team were spot on + definitely we may have to change our lifestyle to save the environment.

Useful links:
www.mit.edu
www.ieee.org

Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

2

Before the War Mr Christopher R W Nevinson was only known to the few as a young artist of promise. After studying at the Slade School of Art, he had formed ties of friendship in Paris with the Italian artist Gino Severini, and so had become influenced by Futurism. He was also interested in Cubism, and though he never definitely adhered to ‘Vorticism,’ he exhibited once with Mr Wyndham Lewis, Mr Edward Wadsworth, Mr William Roberts, and other Vorticists. During the early stages of the War Mr Nevinson was driving a motor ambulance behind the Belgian Front, and being invalided with rheumatic fever early in 1915 he was able to resume painting during his convalscence. Thus he was practically the first artist who had the opportunity to exhibit in London pictures of the War based on personal experience of the realities of modern fighting. It was in the spring of 1915 that Mr Nevinson showed his first three war pictures in the exhibition of the London Group at the Goupil Gallery, and though these betrayed Futurist and Cubist influence, they were perfectly intelligible as illustrations of actual incidents.

Dr Johnson maintained that there was some good to be got out of every book, and similarly it may be argued that there is some good to be got out of every artistic theory. It was the peculiar distinction of Mr Nevinson to leave aside all the extravagances of Futurism and Cubism, and snatch from them the two things which helped him to render realistically a new world in a new way. The particlar good thing in the work of the Italian Futurists was their successful suggestion of movement. By a generous use of slanting lines in the composition,Mr Nevinson gave a vivid sense of movement and life to his early painting ‘Returning to the Trenches.’ His French soldiers, with packs on their backs, their bodies and rifles sloping in the direction in which they were marching, were not portrayed as they would be shown in a photograph: the aim here was not to portray a group of individual soldiers, but to express the onward rush of an advancing army, and this impression was vividly and irresistibly conveyed. Further, the use of straight lines and avoidance of curves—characteristics derived from Cubism—suggested that the movement was that of a vast machine rather than of a collection of human beings.

The distinguished art critic, Mr A Clutton Brock, has pointed out in one of his essays that for fifty years or more a belief has been growing on us that man is a machine and ‘should be conscious of the fact that he is one.’ The popular play ‘R.U.R’ was an expression of this consciousness in dramatic form; in painting it was confessed by the Cubist method which, as Mr Clutton Brock has said,

does express, in the most direct way, the sense that in war man behaves like a machine or part of machine, that war is a process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharp distinction of planes, expresses this sense of a mechanical process better than any other way of representation.

Familiarity with the working of the ‘war machine’ prepared the mind of the public to accept that vision of the world as a complicated piece of mechanism which is the essence both of Cubism and Futurism. The War offered to the Cubists one of the few subjects which their technique was fitted to express, and the marvel is that this opportunity, missed by the French and Italian inventors of the new method, was seized upon with conspicuous success by a handful of almost unknown British artists.

From the first Mr Nevinson stood out from all previous painters of war by reason of his power in suggesting movement, and the implication in his pictures that modern war was not the affair of human individuals, but the creaking progress of a complicated machine. His remarkable painting of the interior of a hospital, ‘La Patrie’ now the property of Mr Arnold Bennett, is tragical in its intensity, but it is the tragedy of automata crushed and mangled in the revolutions of a pitiless machine. Other artists have painted the interiors of base-hospitals, pictures of men bandaged but smiling, and attended by a bevy of comely nurses, so that the spectator might imagine it was rather pleasant than otherwise to be wounded; but Mr Nevinson permits no falsifying of the facts; he shows us the reality of the thing, the broken débris of the war-machine, the pain and the suffering and, above all, the relative insignificance of the individual pawn in this mighty war game.

Art During The Great War (continued)

Wiener Werkstätte

The first exhibition devoted to Wiener Werkstätte Jewelry, now open at the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue in New York, includes 40 pieces, many made by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, founders of the firm. Wiener Werkstätte Jewelry is open until June 30, 2008.

Useful links:
http://wiener-werkstaette.com
www.neuegalerie.org

Random Thoughts

It is important to understand your own fortitude and zone of comfort. The worst thing is to be intrinsically uncomfortable. It means you are likely to jump and make the wrong decision and be panicked out of something for no good reason. You will never hold a strong position in something when you will be the first out of it. Remember that events are by definition in the public consciousness, and if you react to what is in the newspapers, you are probably going to be doing the same thing at the same time as everyone else. If it initiates the same activity as others, then you're not applying any superior knowledge.

- Colin McLean

Graphic Novel Update

I found nbc.com/heroes online comic-book concept interesting. I liked it. Great idea!

Useful links:
http://www.nbc.com/Heroes
www.gameloft.com
www.heroestheseries.com

Celebrating Sixties

(via budgettravel) A new museum celebrating Sixties' counterculture and music is set to open this summer on the site of the 1969 Woodstock festival (bethelwoodscenter.org.museum).

A must-visit.

Useful link:
www.bethelwoodscenter.org

Diamond Promotion Service Update

I really liked the Diamond Promotion Service (DPS) microsite @ http://www.dps.org/promotingyourreputation/index.html because it provides excellent reference materials on consumer confidence issues + customer loyalty. Brilliant!

Useful link:
www.dps.org

Lean Lexicon

Lean Lexicon by Lean Enterprise Institute + Chet Marchwinski + John Shook is a great reference book + it explains A3 lean methodology perfectly.

Useful link:
www.lean.org

Art During The Great War

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

A survey of the work of official war artists and others

1

It was shown in the last chapter how at the beginning of the present century the art world was deluged with theories and ‘isms’, while several of the pictures illustrated afforded evidence that a sinister violence and subterranean unrest became manifest in European painting before it exploded in European politics and precipitated a great war. On the Continent—and to a slighter extent in England also—the ‘wild men’ of painting had betrayed in form and color that spirit of merciless aggression which eventually provoked Armageddon. The principal British contribution to the extreme left of modern painting was a development of Cubism known as ‘Vorticism,’ and it is not altogether without significance that the leader of this movement, Mr P Wyndham Lewis, should have begun in the early spring of 1914 a series of abstract paintings with titles taken from military textbooks. His ‘Plan of Campaign’, exhibited at London in June 1914, was based not on any vision of landscapes and figures, but on such a diagram of a battle disposition as we may find in any history book. The parallel lines and blocks stand for the divisions of contending forces, and the heavy blocks in the upper right hand corner are supposed to represent te extended left wing of one army outflanking and falling with superior on the right wing of the other army. This is the ‘plan of campaign’. Here again we have a curious premonition of the War expressed in paint. The case of Mr Wyndham Lewis typifies the general effect the War had on art. When a student at the Slade School Mr Lewis made himself remarked by the uncommon power of his drawing. Caught up in the vortex which swept so many ambitious young artists into the whirlpool of ‘abstract painting’ because of their desire to attain novelty at all costs, Mr Lewis was led in the years immediately preceding the War to paint ‘abstract’ pictures, incomprehensible to the multitude and difficult for even the initiated to understand. Then in 1918, after two years experience with the heavy artillery in France, he returned to London and returned to realism. ‘The Gun Pit,’ which he painted for the Canadian War Memorials, was no abstract picture, but a perfectly comprehensible painting based on vision, on his remembered experience with the big guns and of the big-built men who worked them.

The chief effect of the War on painting, therefore, was to bring about a return to realism, but it was a new realism modified, as we shall see, by certain principles derived from movements which, in themselves, appeared to be extravagant. Not only did the War restore to sanity many of the most promising of the younger artists, it also prepared the public to accept and understand their works. Youthful artists, who in peace time might have waited till middle age before their talent was recognized, became famous in a year or two. The wall of prejudice was broken down by the unparalleled unheaval of our normal world, so that even conservative minds were ready to consider impartially a new vision of new events. Further, though there was no slackness on the part of the younger artists in joining the colors, the artistic activity of Great Britain may be said to have reached its zenith during the years of War. Never before had so much official and State patronage been given to British artists, never before did the British public so clearly recognize that picture-making was not a mere pasttime but an activity which had its own function and purpose of usefulness to humanity.

As early as 1914-15 the first public recognition of the artist’s value to the State in war time came in connection with the recruiting campaign. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was dead and done with, but in its place was substituted a new gospel of ‘Art for the Idea’s sake.’ Art was recognized as an element of education and social progress, because nothing else in the world could impress an idea so vividly and lastingly on the human memory. During the first winter and spring of the War close on a hundred posters were commissioned from various artists by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, and 2,500,000 copies of these posters were distributed throughout the United Kingdom. In addition to these official posters, generous contributions were made to the campaign by several private firms. The recruiting posters issued by the London Electric Railways will be long remembered for their efficiency and artistic qualities, notably Mr Brangwyn’s ‘Remember Belgium’ and Mr G Spencer Pryse’s ‘The Only Road for an Englishman’. Later the use as a poster during the War Savings Campaign of a reproduction of Whistler’s portrait of his Mother—as a gentle reminder that ‘Old Age Must Come’—was significant of a growing belief on the part of Authority that the most artistic picture can make the widest public appeal.

Simultaneously with the appearance of the recruiting posters on the hoardings, came the war cartoons in the newspapers. It is impracticable to give a list of the British artists who did excellent work in this direction—every reader will remember notable drawings.

Meanwhile what of painting? It was said rather bitterly in 1916 that ‘no visitor to the Royal Academy would know that there was a war on.’ It may be admitted frankly that the exhibitions in these years looked much the same as those in years of peace. Pictures of the War were infrequent, and when present they were rarely successful. The failure of the older artists to grapple with the situation was neither surprising nor shameful. They did not possess the requisite experience. Some endeavored to the topical, and envisaged the War after their memory of Crimean pictures, changing the uniforms into khaki but repeating the old arrangements. But sword-waving officers, swaggering cavalrymen, and neatly brushed infantry were no longer convincing even to civilians. Standing before an Academy picture of a charge, a wounded New Zealander was overheard to remark: ‘That’s absurd! One man with a machine gun would wipe out the lot.’ New methods of warfare demanded new methods of painting for their efficient expression. The battle in art, as at the Front, was for the young, and the first man to capture the imagination of London by his war pictures was a young artist hitherto practically unknown.

Art During The Great War (continued)

The Diamond Trading Company Update

(via idexonline) The Diamond Trading Company (DTC) has released the full list of its Sightholders, broken down into UK, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa Canada and industrial Sightholders @ www.dtcsightholderdirectory.com

The info was educational and useful.

Ullens Center For Contemporary Art

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) was founded in Beijing by collectors Guy + Myriam Ullens + I think they have created a unique platform for emerging artists to share and learn.

A must-visit.

Useful link:
www.ucca.org.cn

Simple Visuals

Explanatory videos = simple + creative + clear = sticks! The simple visuals are great. I liked it.

Useful link:
www.commoncraft.com

Ayala Museum

(via Wiki) The Ayala Museum is an art and history museum located at the corner of Makati Avenue and Dela Rosa Street, beside the Greenbelt Mall in Makati City, The Philippines + it is one of the leading museums in the Philippines, as well as one of the most modern.

A must-visit.

Useful links:
www.ayalamuseum.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayala_Museum
http://www.newsweek.com/id/134270

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The first phase of Cubism is simple in comparison with the second, for if the first consisted in cutting up natural objects into geometrical shapes, the second consisted in shuffling the pieces. This curious development, with which the name of Picasso is chiefly associated, professed to show, not merely one aspect of objects, but a number of sectional aspects seen from different standpoints and arbitrarily grouped together in one composition. By this method the painting of a simple object like a teacup is transfigured into an unrecognizable fugue—consisting of fragments of the cup as seen from above, from the sides, and, as held up in the air, from below. These ingenious conglomerations, professing to give us ‘the greater reality’ of things seen, leave us as bewildered, confused, and uninformed as a metaphysician’s analysis of truth and error. As an example of the second phase of Cubism we give Picasso’s ‘Portrait of M Kahnweiler’, in which all we can recognize are fragmentary frontal aspects of his waistcoat (with watch-chain), left eye, left ear, and one side of his nose drowned in a chaotic sea of various aspects of receipt-files and other unrecognizable objects. Thus a movement which originated in an attempt to secure a primitive simplicity was led astray by false doctrine, till it finally wandered into a blind alley of complexity, for the complications of neo-Impressionist painting were child’s play in comparison with the entaglements of the puzzle-pictures of the later Cubists.

Following upon the distortions of M Matisse and the strange pictures of the Cubists, in which the facts of vision were either ignored or so juggled with that they became incomprehensible, it is not surprising that yet another school of painters arose who abandoned representation as an indispensable element in picture-making and argued that painting should be as free as music to give emotional pleasure without any appeal to association of material ideas. This claim that painting should be abstract, and not concern itself with the concrete, was argued by the Polish artist Wassily Kandinsky, working at Munich in 1914, more convincingly in his book The Art of Spiritual Harmony than in his kaleidoscopic pictures. In theory it seems plausible enough that if a musician is free to weave melodies without reference to natural sounds, a painter should be free to construct compositions without reference to natural forms. It is also true that the emotional pleasure we derive from the stained-glass windows of an old cathedral does not depend on the subject painted. We are enchanted with the radiant beauty of the pattern of color. So far so good, but now comes the point that no artist living or dead has yet succeeded in convincing the world that these stained-glass windows would give us any keener or purer emotional pleasure if they had no subjects, or been able himself to produce an abstract painting more beautiful in color and pattern than paintings based on concrete forms.

Kandinsky, however, went a step further, and claimed that his abstract paintings were not mere dream patterns, but had a meaning for the initiated in that they were based on the psychological effect on the observer of various lines and colors. But these effects are by no means definitely established, they are still a subject for speculation, and till they are fixed by the common consent of mankind, experiments in the ‘art of spiritual harmony’ must necessarily be uncertain and inconclusive. Indeed, in Kandinsky’s own ‘Compositions’—as his abstract paintings are entitled—outward and visible signs alone give us a clue to the inward and spiritual meaning, and it is by discerning faint traces of a gun carriage, a puff of smoke, and falling houses in one of his pre-War pictures, painted in 1913, that we obtain a sense of that ‘clash and conflict of ideas in the spiritual world’ that the painting is said to express.

The sectional representation of divers aspects of different objects was developed with an added emphasis on the expression of movement, by the group of Italian painters known as the ‘Futurists’. Futurism was a literary as well as an artistic movement, and it was largely a protest against the tyranny of the past on the part of ardent nationalists, who resented that the present achievements of their country should be obscured by the glory of its past. The leader of the movement was a writer, Signor Marinetti, and his skilled pen justified the extraordinary practices of his artist friends by sonorous phrases. A pictorial record of the commonplace fact that the seat of a chair is visible after the sitter has got up and walked away, was majestically alluded to as an example of ‘the plastic interpenetration of matter.’ As regards color, the Futurists accepted the divisionism and complementarism of the neo-Impressionists, but in the rendering of form they sought to introduce new principles: ‘Universal dynamism must be rendered in painting as a dynamic sensation; movement and light destroy te materiality of bodies.’ An amusing example of the ‘dynamic decomposition of matter’ is Giacomo Balla’s painting ‘A Lady and her Dog’, which may be regarded as a synthesis of rapid motion photography. A multiplicity of paws and tails indicates that the animal is trotting with wagging tail, four ghostly chains suggest the whirling of his lead, and an army of shoes presents the movement of his owner’s feet. In concentrating their endeavors on the expression of movement, the Futurists attempted to convert painting from an art of space to an art of time. Their daring experiments have produced few pictures likely to stand the test of time, but possibly an exception may be made for Signor Balla’s ‘Centrifugal Force’. This painting of revolving spheres shooting forth golden sparks into an azure void was not only decorative in design and color, but also nobly expressive of the Force that shoots meteorolites through the universe. An abstract painting that succeeds in expressing an abstract idea is clearly legitimate art, but pictures of this calibre are unfortunately the exception among abstract paintings.

Nevertheless it would be wrong to assert that the experiments of the modern extremists in painting have been wholly valueless. Technically they have widened the horizon of painting and opened the road to a new realism in which the firm structure and rigid design of te Cubists can be combined with a truth and beauty of color derived from the Impressionists. Psychologically their work is of profound interest to every student of history. Coming events cast their shadow before them on the field of art. The patient reader who has followed this history thus far will have observed the increasing endeavor on the part of painters to give an expression of strength. In examining their works he will have noticed that, however greatly they may vary in their aspects and styles, nearly all of them contain en element of violence. These Fauviste, Cubist, and Futurist paintings never soothe us to rest; they aim at galvanising us into action. All of them must be regarded as symptoms, as expressions in art of the unrest, agitation, and suppressed violence seething subterraneously in Europe prior to the oubreak of the Great War.

Heard On The Street

I guess that suckers come in all shapes, sizes, and colors and that at one time or another, we're all suckers.

Gregor Schneider

Gregor Schneider is an artist + his art works/concepts are interesting because they are different from the mainstream, but in my view some are shocking, really.

Useful link:
www.gregorschneider.de

Environment Update

It's always good to learn that scientists/inventors/entrepreneurs are constantly looking for new ways to save the environemnt, I found the ideas @ http://www.newsweek.com/id/130625/page/1 interesting. I think they were brilliant.

John Calleija

There is something special about John Calleija's jewelry designs: beauty and soul.

Useful link:
www.calleija.com.au

All the Money In The World

All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make--and Spend--Their Fortunes by Peter W. Bernstein + Annalyn Swan is an inspiring book + provides insider's view of what makes them tick and how they got to the top.

Distance Learning vs Nearness Learning

I found the article on distance learning @ http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11088431 very interesting, in fact, I think Nearness learning is more appropriate term than Distance learning.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

3

If we look at the southern landscape by Cézanne, we shall perceive that in his desire to make the objects look solid and enduring the artist has sharpened some curves into angles and emphasized cubic forms. This method of expressing the volume of objects was seen to be powerful and effective, and was seized upon by certain of the Fauves, who, desirous above all things of being forcible, elaborated their discovery into a dogma. Further, they supported their practice by a specious theory based on a smattering of science. We have seen how at the beginning of the present century there was a craze for the Primitive among a certain section of artists. These young men picked up from mineralogists the idea that crystal was the primitive form of all things. A strange new test was applied to pictures: Did they or did they not show evidence of crystallization? A phrase torn from a scientific handbook was adopted as an aesthetic watchword:

All secondary forms arise from the decrement of particles from the edges and angles of these primitive forms.

Therefore to restore natural objects and human beings to their ‘primitive’ forms, it was necessary to eliminate all curved lines and to reconstruct forms and faces in their ‘primary form’, octahedraon, dodecahedron, six-sided prism or whatever other geometrical figure might be most suitable. Among the earliest pictures embodying this new doctrine were landscapes in which meadows were crumpled up into crisp, candy-like masses, and marines in which all the waves had a sharp edge. These pictures were the work of a young Frenchman names Georges Bracque; and it is still a matter for considerable argument whether Bracque or the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso is to be regarded as the true founder of Cubism.

Picasso was born at Malaga in 1881, and appeared in Paris about the end of the nineteenth century as an accomplished and masterly draughtsman. His early work ‘Mother and Child’ shows the normality of his art and his genuine gifts before he attached himself definitely to the Fauviste movement. Possessed of the quick and fertile brain of an inventive engineer, Picasso poured forth in quick succession a number of paintings of startling novelty in a variety of styles before he reached the mode that is now known as Cubism. On his practice, the outcome of a restless search for novelty of effect and of tireless experiments in pattern-making, others built up a new pseudo-philosophy of art. As a theory Cubism was based on two dogmatic assertions and a fallacious conclusion. It was argued:

1. Strength is beauty.
2. A straight line is stronger than a curved line.

It is hardly necessary to point out how fairly are both these contentions, for in the first place nothing is more beautiful or weaker than a flower, and in the second it is a commonplace of construction that an arch is stronger than a horizontal on two perpendiculars. Nevertheless, blind to the error of their major and minor premise, the Cubists with a parade of logic proceeded to the conclusion that a painting wholly composed of straight lines is stronger and therefore more beautiful than a painting containing curved lines. Picasso’s ‘Head of a Lady in a Mantilla’ illustrates the first phase of Cubism, in which the human body is cut up into geometrical forms. It is a ‘crystallization’ of a human head, which looks less like a painting than a woodcarving executed by a savage with a blunt instrument, yet once our eyes have grown accustomed to the strange barbarism of the technique we have to acknowledge that this head is not altogether wanting in expression.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)

Lucas Cranach

Souren Melikian writes about Lucas Cranach and his earliest masterpieces + other viewpoints @ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/24/arts/melik26.php

Cranach: 8 Mar—8 Jun 2008 @ The Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Useful links:
www.royalacademy.org.uk
www.staedelmuseum.de

Indiana Jones Escapades

(via budgettravel) Expedia has created unique travel deals either based on or inspired by Indiana Jones escapades @ www.expedia.com/indianajones

Brilliant!

Useful link:
www.expedia.com

Judgment Under Uncertainty

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Daniel Kahneman + Paul Slovic + Amos Tversky is a fascinating book + I found it useful in analyzing market behavior.

Useful links:
http://www.princeton.edu/~kahneman
www.decisionresearch.org

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, then, Gauguin appeared to Paris, not only as the inventor of a new style of picture, but also as the protagonist of a new mental attitude towards life and art. At that period there was a certain lassitude among the highly cultured, expressed by the term fin de siècle—and it was not difficult to make out a case for regarding modern civilization as a disease. There is much in city life that is repugnant to some temperaments, and the yearning for simplicity among artists had its parallel in the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement in politics. The argument put forward by a new generation of artists was this: ‘If modern life is diseased, modern art must be diseased also. We can only restore art to health by starting it afresh like children or savages.’ Thus began the reaction against the complexity of neo-Impressionist painting, and this movement, chiefly influenced by the example of Gauguin, gave birth to a group of painters known in Paris as the fauves (i.e wild beasts). This Fauviste movement was an extreme emotional reaction against the cold intellectual tendencies of hyperscientific painting. In so far as these ‘wild beasts’ painters sought to make painting simpler and less complicated, it may be argued that they were moving in a right direction. A similar reaction in England, fifty years earlier, had led Holman Hunt and Millais to go back to the painters before Raphael for qualities of line and color which they though desirable. But the French painters, in their rage against civilization, went much further back: one by one all the Old Masters were swept away by revolutionaries who sought inspiration from the rudimentary art of savages and barbarians. Forcible, childlike scrawls began to appear in Paris exhibitions, and these paintings were based not so much on my new view of Nature as on the savage art of Polynesia and Central Africa. The rough-hewn intensity of negro carvings excited jaded minds which were satiated with the plastic perfection of the sculpture of Michael Angelo.

The passion for simplicity and the desire to secure a maximum of expression with a minimum of means—which are the chief virtues of the Fauves—are found in the highest degree in the work of Henri Matisse, who is generally regarded as the leading exponent of this school. Born in the North of France in 1869, Matisse as a young man made a great reputation among connoisseurs by the extraordinary power of his drawing. Beginning as an almost academic draughtsman, influenced at first by Impressionism and then by Gauguin, painting landscapes, figures, and still-life, the art of Matisse has passed through a number of phases, each of which has had offshoots in a band of imitators. If Gauguin has been the most lasting influence, Matisse is in no sense an imitator of this master. Though he retained the high-keyed Impressionist palette of bright, clean colors, Matisse abandoned the mosaic method of painting, using a sweeping brush and large planes of color to fill in the masses of what are essentially linear designs. Many of his drawings are wonderful in their summary expression of form and movement, but while in his pictures we admire the masterly sureness and simplicity of his drawing, we are often bewildered by his wilful distortion of natural form.

One of his defenders has sought to explain that Matisse exaggerates deformity in a model by a temperamental necessity which pushes him to affirm a truth without discretion to the point of paradox. Most people will find it difficult to accept a passion for realism as a reasonable explanation why an artist should present the calf of a leg as having a greater circumference than a thigh! On the other hand, decorative intent is patent in all the pictures of Matisse, and we frequently find that distortions of form are used to help and emphasize the rhythm and equilibrium of the linear pattern; accordingly it seems more reasonable to conclude that these distortions are wilful, not accidental, and that the painter subordinates natural representation to formal design, and desires us to admire his pictures, not because they are ‘true,’ but because he has created a pattern of line and color which should appeal to pure aesthetic sensibilities. Matisse is historically important, therefore, as a pioneer of the doctrine that mere ‘actuality’ is unimportant to pictorial art. He may also be regarded as the introducer of ‘shock tactics’ into art. Even if we dislike his pictures, we find it difficult to forget them, because they make so forcible an impact on our vision. His ‘Head of a Woman’ is an example of the powerful effect he achieves with the utmost simplicity and economy of means.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)

Praying Mantis In Amber

Experts believe an 87-million-year-old praying mantis found encased in amber in Japan's northeastern Iwate Prefecture may be a missing link between mantises from the Cretaceous period and modern-day insects.

Julian Ryall writes @ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080425-amber-mantis.html

Useful links:
www.kuji.co.jp
www.kmnh.jp
www.amnh.org

Nano Art

I found the Nano photos via Materials Research Society @ http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/04/gallery_nano_art stunningly beautiful + the eye-catching images are truly a unique convergence of science and art.

Useful link:
www.mrs.org

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

(via Wiki) Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books -- that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognisable likeness of the portrait subject.

I liked The Arcimboldo Effect because they have double meaning + that otherness.

Useful links:
www.nhm-wien.ac.at
www.kunsthistorischesmuseum.at
www.palazzograssi.it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2276324,00.html

Nina Paley

I found Nina Paley's computer-generated animated film, Sita Sings the Blues (the ancient Hindu epic the Ramayana + the breakup of Paley's 21st-century marriage) + the imaginative format @ http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2008/04/sita brilliant.

Useful links:
www.ninapaley.com
www.tribecafilmfestival.org

The Journalist And The Whistle Blower

I found Chaim Even Zohar's reflections on investigative journalists dilemmas when dealing with materials provided by whistle blowers + the impact @ http://www.idexonline.com/portal_FullEditorial.asp interesting and insightful.

Arnold Lulls

(via Diamond Cuts in Historic Jewelry:1381-1910) Herbert Tillander writes:

In the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London there is a most remarkable album depicting jewels that date from about 1550 to 1610. This is Arnold Lull’s record of the treasures of Queen Anne of Denmark. Some of the drawings were intended as a record of jewels acquired by Anne from 1603 to 1625 after her marriage to King James I of England. To some extent, the album is a pictorial inventory (similar to Mielich’s Kleinodienbuch) of the jewels delivered by Lulls and his collaborators. Some of the pieces are believed to be Lull’s own designs.

Arnold Lull himself was a Dutch jeweler and dealer who appears to have moved to London in 1585, but retained his Dutch nationality. His drawings illustrate a wide range of historic diamond cuts, mostly Table Cuts, square, rectangular and lozenge-shaped, but also a large number of fancy outlines. It is fascinating to find a number of diamond cuts that were obselete by about 1600 and, rather surprisingly, two different Stellar Cut Tables, predecessors of the Brilliants of a later period. The three Chequer Cut diamonds are equally interesting to a diamond historian. There are also two jewels containing Table Cut diamonds of gradually decreasing size set in a row, the earliest known example of this style, now popular with modern designers.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) also learnt painting from Camille Pissarro, whose style he copied closely in his early work, but at least he was never a Realist. His father was a Breton, but his mother was a Peruvian Creole, and a passion for the Tropics was in his blood. As a boy he ran away and went to sea, but after several voyages in various parts of the world he returned to Paris and entered business life. One day in a shop window he saw some pictures which brought back memories of the light and color he had seen in the Tropics; he made inquiries as to the authors, and so became acquainted with Pissarro. Gauguin was thirty at this time, and though he began painting now as a amateur, it was not till two years later, in 1880, that he began to exhibit, and another year passed before he decided to give all his time to art. Gauguin soon broke away from the dogmas of the neo-Impressionists, though his debt to them is confessed in the splendor of his color—and for a time he was influenced by Cézanne, this influence showing itself in a tendency towards simplification. Gauguin made certain innovations of his own, he deliberately simplified forms and reintroduced the fashion of binding them with heavy dark outlines, and while his style grew more decorative his subjects became more imaginative.

In one of his letters Van Gogh records that while Gauguin was living with him at Arles he (Van Gogh) was for a while ‘led into working from imagination.’

The association of Gauguin and Van Gogh was unfortunate, for their aims and temperaments were too distinct to mingle with ease. Van Gogh was all humility, Gauguin was proud and haughty, and though the warm-hearted Dutchman venerated his friend, the latter’s cold cynicism often got on his nerves and contributed to his depression. Van Gogh wanted to devote his life to suffering humanity; Gauguin wanted to forget the suffering and dwell in an ‘enchanted land.’ After Van Gogh’s mental collapse at Arles, Gauguin went to Brittany and established himself at Pont Aven, where he found ‘big, simple mortals and an unspoilt Nature.’ But even rural France was too sophisticated for a man whose romantic temperament found its ideal among the unspoilt barbarians of the Pacific. In 1891 Gauguin sailed for Tahiti, where he fulfilled his intention to paint a primitive folk in a primitive style. Admitting the technical interest and decorative merit of Gauguin’s Brittany pictures, it remains doubtful whether he would have been so great a figure in modern art had he not, like R I Stevenson, been fascinated by the life and manners of the Kanakas. His Tahitian pictures with their exotic subjects made a wide appeal to the popular imagination, though they did not become generally known till after the artist’s death in 1903. But if he complained bitterly at the lack of purchasers for his pictures, Gauguin delighted in his new home, and never regretted having left Europe. ‘I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into truth, into Nature.’ Nevertheless he idealized the Nature he found in the Pacific; he dwelt in a land of dreams and his pictures were charming conventions. When a literary friend in Paris quarrelled with his ideal, Gauguin replied: ‘Your civilization is your disease, my barbarism is my restoration to health.’

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)

HyperShot

(via Wired) HyperShot is a unique application developed by computer graphics genius Henrik Wann Jensen + it uses a proprietary photon-mapping technique to simulate complex lighting situations ranging from reflected sunlight to spots beamed through colored gels to create ultrarealistic images, like the diamonds @ http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/multimedia/2008/04/st_render?slide=2&slideView=2

Amazing!

Useful link:
http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik

Gemological Instruments

I found the following websites useful.

- GIA/Gem Instruments
- Mineralab
- OGI
- Sarin
- Stuller

This Is Dubai

I found the article on Derek Khan @ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/fashion/17CROOK.html interesting because in the jewelry industry it's very difficult for a comeback if you have had a heavily included/blemished career, but here he is, as a stylist to the stars, in Dubai, on his feet. Good luck!

I thought I’d never see jewelry again.
- Derek Khan

Contemporary Botanical Artists

Contemporary Botanical Artists: The Shirley Sherwood Collection by Shirley Sherwood + Victoria Matthews is an inspiring book of dazzling beauty.

Useful link:
www.kew.org

Visitors will be able to see the world's first gallery dedicated entirely to botanical art at Kew Gardens in London.

Panyu + DMCC

Panyu (China) + DMCC (Dubai) = Diamonds + Colored stones trade. Dubai + Panyu are the new emerging gem and jewelry capital (s) of the world.

Useful links:
www.panyu.gov.cn
www.dmcc.ae

Heard On The Street

You must practice your skills, study your opponents and work hard + same with the markets.

Cell Phone Movie

Filmmaker Spike Lee + Nokia = a cell phone movie from everyday people. According to Spike Lee with a simple mobile phone, almost anyone can now become a filmmaker. You can submit text, music, video or images at certain times between now and Aug. 21, 2008 to www.nokiaproductions.com

Useful links:
www.nokiaproductions.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Lee
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000490

Hans Mielich

(via Diamond Cuts in Historic Jewelry:1381-1910) Herbert Tillander writes:

In 1937, Erna von Watzdorf, a research worker at the Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden, published a detailed article on Hans Mielich. She furnished proof that after he had finished his studies at the Regensburg Academy of Art, he went to Italy and Spain and there concentrated on the study of crafts such as armor and jewelry. He soon realized that reproducing objects required the same concentration on personality, light and shade as the portrayal of the human face.

He began painting large pièces de résistance at the Bavarian Court and was soon commissioned by Albrecht V Duke of Bavaria, to produce a color inventory of his wife’s jewelry collection. Mielich took over four years to complete the Kleinodienbuch, a vivid work of absolute precision and detail, in which even the interior light reflections in the Pyramidal Point Cut diamonds were depicted. It is possible that he may also have created some original pieces of jewelry , but no drawings of these appear to have been documented. Most of Mielich’s jewelry ‘portraits’ have been acquired by either the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek or the Bayerishces Nationalmuseum, both in Munich.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

From Paris Van Gogh went to Arles in the South of France, where he exposed himself to the risks of sunstroke by frequently painting in blazing sunshine without any headcovering. A curious incident made public the fact that he was becoming abnormal. Teasing him for a present, a girl in a café once playfully said to him, ‘Well, if you can’t give me anything else, give me one of your big ears.’ Shortly before Christmas this little waitress, whom the artist admired, was horrified to receive a parcel which was found to contain a freshly severed human ear. Van Gogh was found in bed with his head bleeding and with raging brain fever. Subsequently he was taken to an asylum, but his portrait of himself with a cap on his head and a pipe in his mouth, painted after this breakdown, proves that his hand had not lost its steadiness nor his eye its power to see essentials with brilliant intensity.

In the summer of 1889 he was well enough to leave Arles, and after a short stay in Paris, his brother arranged for him to live in the house of a doctor at Auvers-sur-Oise. Van Gogh appeared to be in the best of health and spirits, and there is no doubt that he fough bravely against the clouds which threatened his keen intellect. But the day came when he felt himself to be a doomed man, with nothing but mental darkness ahead, and on July 28, 1890, in a fit of depression he shot himself fatally. The fact that his mind eventually became unhinged, so that some of the pictures of his last years betray an abnormal vision, does not invalidate the splendid sanity of the bulk of Van Gogh’s productions. Technically Van Gogh got his modelling by sweeping contours, instead of by a series of petty planes, and so gave weight to objects, while cleanly preserving their silhouettes as co-ordinated parts of a decorative design. We are impressed by his strength, as we are by that of Cézanne; but it is not physical strength alone, but also moral force. His color is of a high order and pitch, showing a fine sensibility for the splendor of pigment, but Van Gogh was too seriously absorbed in life and humanity for his paintings ever to degenerate into mere decorations. One of the pictures in which he most completely expressed himself was ‘The Prison Yard’, in which he conjures up wtih forcible economy the tragic aspect of these prisoners pacing their monotonous round, makes the high walls eloquent of the impossibility of escape, and without a touch of sentimentality contrives to express his compassionate pity for these dregs of humanity who are yet ‘men and brothers.’

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)