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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Louis Garrel

I think Louis Garrel is a great French actor of his generation + he is inventive and spontaneous.

Useful links:
www.louis-garrel.com
http://louisgarrel.net

David Hickey

Dave Hickey is one of the best known American art + cultural critics practising today + I think he is brilliant!

Useful link:
Interview with Dave Hickey in The Believer, November 2007, by Sheila Heti

Arthur C Clark

Arthur C. Clarke, the visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim has died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka + he was 90.

I think he was a great man + inspiration + he will be missed.

Useful link:
www.clarkefoundation.org

The Informant: A True Story

The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald is a fascinating story + provides insights into corporate crime (s) + you have all the elements of a great novel + brilliant!

Useful link:
Ask a Reporter Q&A: Kurt Eichenwald

Stellar Cuts

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

The Stellar Cut Brilliant was no innovation. The culet facets were initially copied from octraheroid crystals with dissoluted corners and occasionally applied also on Table Cuts. A number of large and even some quite small Brilliants, dating from the middle of the seventeenth century, have a star-like arrangement of small facets round the culet. I call these ‘culet facets’ in line with the term ‘girdle facets’. To describe this type of cut as the Stellar Cuts avoids confusion with the established terms Star Cut and ‘star facets’, and eliminates cumbersome descriptions such as ‘with eight facets surrounding the culet’.

The Romantic Movement In France

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The one great compensation that Corot possessed during these years was the affection of a number of his brother artists, who both admired the artist and loved the man. Corot possessed a sunny, tender, tranquil nature that endeared him to all who came in contact with him. He was never embittered by his want of success, but lived the life of a peasant, happy in his art. “Le Père Corot’ became the beloved patriarch of a colony of artists who had settled in the little village of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau, a spot attractive to artists by the richness and variety of its sylvan scenery and at the same time reasonably near to the exhibition center, Paris. In this district Corot painted the most famous pictures of his later days, e.g ‘The Pool’ and ‘Souvenir of Mortefontaine’. He particularly delighted in the poetic effects of early morning and approaching eve, ‘when all Nature sings in tune,’ and during the glare of the noonday sun he would retire indoors, for effects of brilliant sunshine did not make the same appeal to him. He preferred the minor to the major chords of Nature’s coloring, and was the supreme interpreter of her moods of wistfulness, mystery, and reverie.

Though the dreamy poetical beauty of Corot’s later landscapes, with their willowy trees and mysterious atmosphere, made an unprecedented appeal to American and British collectors towards the end of the nineteenth century, so that extravagant prices were paid for typical examples—in one year more so-called ‘Corots’ were said to have been imported into the United States than Corot himself could ever have painted—it is only in comparatively recent years that the supreme excellence of Corot’s early works and figure paintings have become recognized.

More immediately successful than Corot was his friend Jules Dupré (1812-89), whom Corot called ‘the Beethoven of Landscape.’ Duprè was the son of a porcelain manufacturer at Nantes and, like several other distinguished artists of the time, began his career by painting on china. He was one of the pioneers of ‘natural’ landscape in France, turning away from the medley of the classical painters to render with fresh obsevation and expressive detail the characteristic beauties of rural France, her pastures, forests, and villages.

One of the most vigorous and famous of the Barbizon School, Théodore Rousseau (1812-67) was born in the same year as Dupré and, like him, was an enthusiastic admirer of Constable. Rousseau was the son of a Paris tailor and, though town-born, he experienced the fascination of the forest in his early boyhood, when he stayed with an uncle who had sawmills near Besancon. This uncle persuaded his parents to allow Théodore to study art, and accordingly the young man was placed in a Paris studio. From his masters mediocre painters of classic landscape, Rousseau learnt less than from Nature, and a very early picture, painted in the open air at Montmartre—the almost country—showed a remarkable mastery in rendering air, light, and the details of Nature. In 1831 his first landscape was accepted and hung in the Salon; in 1833 he began his studies in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and again exhibited with credit; and in 1834 his picture of ‘A Cutting in the Forest of Compiègne’ was awarded a medal, and was bought by the young Duke of Orleans. This early success, far from bringing him fortune, proved disastrous, for the older landscape painters, jealous of his growing reputation and his power, cruelly determined henceforward to exclude his work from the Salon. Accordingly in 1836 his magnificent ‘Descente des Vaches’—a great picture of herds of cattle coming down in autumn from the high pastures of te Jura—was rejected by the Salon. The picture is now one of the chief treasures of the Mesdag Museum in The Hague.

For fourteen years the work of Rousseau was excluded from the Salons; as a result of this attack Rousseau in 1837 left Paris for Barbizon, where he was joined by other independent painters. After the revolution of 1848 the work of Rousseau began to be known and appreciated, but though his pictures now began to sell and he was awarded a first medal in 1849 and the Legion of Honor in 1852, he made no change in his life and continued at Barbizon till his death in 1867.

Corot, with characteristic modesty, once said: ‘Rousseau is an eagle; as for me, I am only a lark who utters little cries among the grey clouds.’ There was indeed a great difference between the two men, for Rousseau did not look at Nature with the dreamy gaze of a poet, but with fiery glance of a scientist who would wrest all her secrets from her. He delighted in the infinite details of Nature, and while preserving her breadth and majesty, he delicately differentiated between plants and weeds, mosses and lichens, brushwood and shrubs. Nothing was too great for his soaring imagination, nothing was too great for his soaring imagination, nothing too small for his earnest attention. His vigorous rendering of form and his searching characterization of Nature may be seen in ‘The Oaks.

The Romantic Movement In France (continued)

Biography Of The Dollar

Biography of the Dollar: How the Mighty Buck Conquered the World and Why It's Under Siege by Craig Karmin is an entertaining book, full of lively stories + an eye-opener!

Useful link:
www.biographyofthedollar.com

Chinese Art In Florence

China: At the Court of the Emperors -- paintings, sculptures and works of art of the Tang dynasty are on display @ Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy, from March 7 - June 8, 2008 + I think the exhibition is a useful medium to educate foreigners about the rich Chinese culture.

Useful link:
www.palazzostrozzi.org

All About Jewelry

First impression is the best impression. Visit www.jewelry.com for information on jewelry + updates + trends +++++++

I liked it!

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Heard On The Street

Gem trading is all about self management + keeping emotion to a minimum + removing ego + greed + fear + staying in the moment.

Marie-Antoinette

'Marie Antoinette' will be exhibited @ the Grand Palais, Paris from March 15 - June 30, 2008 + I think the totality of a royal life that began in grandeur and ended in tragedy should be a unique reminder/total internal reflection for this generation.

Useful links:
www.grandpalais.fr
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/17/arts/FMARIE1.php

Handbook Of Business History

The Oxford Handbook of Business History by Geoffrey Jones + Jonathan Zeitlin is a great reference book for entrepreneurs + it also provides an overview of business history research worldwide.

Useful link:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5849.html

The Idol’s Eye—Originally A Mughal Cut?

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

The Idol’s Eye diamond was found in the Elure group of Indian mines controlled by the kings of Golconda. Judging from its present shape, the crystal must have been either a fairly thick macle, a triangular whole crystal or a large triangular cleavage. Robert Shipley (1948) believed that the diamond had the shape of a ‘rudely faceted, lusterless, triangular mass.’ However, Shipley was a modern gemologist and not a diamond historian, and it is my belief that at a very early stage the rough stone was fashioned into a Mughal Cut not unlike the Nassak Diamond which was illustrated by John Mawe in 1823. Only thus could the gem have been such a highly esteemed symbol of wealth and power that the Sheik of Kashmir could offer it to the Sultan of Turkey as a bribe, to fend off a threatened invasion.

Krashes claims that the early history of the stone is recorded. I am somewhat suspicious of the claim, as I am for that of many other large diamonds. In fact, according to Ian Balfour, The Idol’s Eye was not known until 1865, when it was disposed of at a sale at Christie’s and had already acquired its name. It was ‘set around with eighteen smaller brilliants’. Consequently, I believe that the diamond had already been given its present cut. Most unfortunately it was not illustrated, no weight was quoted and the names of neither the seller nor the buyer were disclosed. The Idol’s Eye eventually reappeared in the possession of the collector, ‘Sergeant’ (as he liked to be called) S.I.Habib, ‘residing in Paris, rue Lafitte’. It was then documented for an auction held at L’Hôtel des Ventes on 24 June 1909, as a ‘curved, roundish triangular Brilliant’ and was listed in the catalogue with seven other rare and important diamonds. The diamonds listed in the sale catalogue of Habib’s collection are all illustrated in simple claw-settings with their exact weights mentioned. Apparently the mounts had been done away with.

According to both Louis Aucoc, the official expert for the auction, and H.D.Fromanger, one of the most knowledeable jewelers in France and author of Bijoux et Pierres Précieuses (1970), Señor Habib had acquired all but two of the gems in the sale from Constantinople. It is possible that Sultan Adb-ul-Hamid II may have sold them to him as a precautionary measure some time just before the Turkish Revolution of 1908. The stone certainly came from the Ottoman Treasury, so either Abd-ul-Hamid or his father Sultan Abdul-Medschid may have been the buyer of The Idol’s Eye in 1865. But whether the Sultan had acquired the diamond as a rough crystal, a Mughal Cut gem or in the shape of the present Brilliant Cut is not known.

The Idol’s Eye changed hands several times until it was acquired in 1979 by the London jeweler Lawrence Graff, who sold it to an anonymous buyer in 1983. According to an analysis made at the GIA Trade Laboratory, New York, in June 1979, its details are:

Type II B
Carat weight: 70.21 ct
Diameter: 26.1mm = 100 percent
Height: 13.43mm = 47.8 percent
Table size: 18.61mm = 66.2 percent
Culet size: c.3mm = 10.7 percent

The low height dimension indicates that the original rough must have been rather flat, which confirms my view of the shape of the rough and the original Mughal Cut. The clarity is registered as being exceptionally high: ‘potentially flawless’, or at least ‘potentially internally flawless’, which means that some minor ‘naturals’ and ‘extra facets’ as well as a small ‘feather’ and some ‘bruises’ could easily be removed with insignificant loss of weight. The color has been defined as ‘light blue, natural color’, though in the 1909 auction catalogue it was said to be capable of changing from pale blue to aquamarine depending on the light.

The Romantic Movement In France

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

2

While Géricault, Delacroix, and other ‘Romantics’ were liberating the painting of history, poetry, and real life from the trammels of Classicism, another group of French painters was engaged in rescuing landscape painting from the deadness and artificiality which had overtaken it since the days of Poussin and Claude Lorrain.

Among the earliest of the French artists to paint Nature as she is, and not as the pedantic ‘classics’ thought she ought to be, was Jean Bapiste Camille Corot (1796-1875). Born in Paris, the son of a small linen-draper having a shop in the Rue de Bac, Corot was for eight years a commercial traveler in the cloth trade. It was not till he was twenty-six that he was reluctantly allowed by his family to abandon trade and devote himself to painting. His father made him an allowance of sixty pounds a year, and till he was nearing fifty this was practically all Corot had to live upon.

In 1822 he entered the studio of Victor Bertin (1775-1825), a painter of classical landscape so successful in his day that the French Government, attracted by his own work and that of his pupils, created a new Prix de Rome for Landscape Painting. This prize was usually carried off by Bertin’s pupils, who thus came to regard Rome as the finishing school of their artistic education. The turning-point in Corot’s life came in 1826, when he also went to Rome, and there he formed a friendship with another French painter, Aligny (1798-1871), who had some influence on his early efforts. Aligny, though a classical painter, had a much more honest feeling for Nature than most of his kind, and though his pictures are rigid in execution they show unusual carefulness in composition and detail. The early Roman paintings of Corot are distinguished by precise drawing, careful composition, and a deliberate soberness of detail, but they also have a lovely limpidity of color unequalled in the work of his contemporaries and a delicate feeling for light and air. Breaking away from the brown convention of his day, Corot painted southern landscape and architectural subjects in delicate tints of pale blues and greens, light biscuit-color and pearly greys.

For some seven or eight years Corot remained in Italy, gradually forming a style which was absolutely his own and in which, while remaining true to the actual facts of Nature, he expressed her most poetical aspects. Occasionally he also painted pictures with small figures, and these, with their precision and delicate color and subtle lighting, were nearer akin to the Dutch style of Vermeer and other seventeenth-century masters than to the accepted styles of Italian figure painting.

It is strange to think that the paintings of Corot—for which millionaires now eagerly offer thousands of pounds—were for long years utterly neglected by his contemporaries. He exhibited regularly in the Paris Salon from 1827, but his exhibits aroused neither censure nor admiration—they were simply ignored. For thirty years he never sold a picture. The first critic to notice his work was the poet Alfred de Musset, who praised his picture in the Salon of 1836, but with the exception of two favorable notices received in 1837 and 1847, he was generally as neglected by the press as by the public. It was not till he was sixty that Corot began to capture the attention of the critics and collectors.

The Romantic Movement In France (continued)

Natural vs. Synthetic Authenticity

The insightful article Synthetic Authenticity, by John Cloud was extremely useful + I think authentic words have natural meaning + in the gemstone industry there is a saying: 'Genuine people like genuine stones.'

Useful link:
www.strategichorizons.com

Monday, March 17, 2008

Perfume Posse

I found a lot of interesting facts about perfumes via www.perfumeposse.com + the jargons used to define and describe the different qualities were intriguing because of the subjectivity + similarities with colored stone and diamond grading.

Useful links:
http://sniffapalooza.com
www.sniffapaloozamagazine.com
www.scent-systems.com

Copper Story

China is the world's biggest copper user, with consumption expected to reach 5 million tonnes in 2008 + according to industry sources Australians are paying a hefty price for China's pre-Olympic building boom with stopped trains + stolen phone lines + pilfered power cables because organized gangs are stealing copper cabling worth millions of dollars and selling it to China. Shocking!

Useful link:
www.resourceinvestor.com

Random Thoughts

Home is where the art is.

Leatherheads

Leatherheads is a romantic comedy set in the world of 1920s professional football starring, written, produced and directed by George Clooney + starring John Krasinski and Renée Zellweger.

Useful links:
www.leatherheadsmovie.com
www.clooneystudio.com

Natural Wine

I found the introduction to natural wine via www.morethanorganic.com educational + useful.

I think the colored gemstone + diamond industry may have a lot to learn from the natural wine industry.