Journal articles on the topic 'Women in art. Painting, American. Painting, Modern'

Thelma Johnson Streat is perhaps best known as the first African American woman to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. However, in the 1940s–1950s she inhabited multiple coinciding roles: painter, performer, choreographer, cultural ethnographer, and folklore collector. As part of this expansive practice, her canvases display a peculiar movement and animacy while her dances transmit the restraint of the two-dimensional figure. Drawing from black feminist theoretical redefinitions of the human, this paper argues that Streat’s exploration of muralism, African American spirituals, Native Northwest Coast cultural production, and Yaqui Mexican-Indigenous folk music established a diasporic mapping forged through the coxtension of gesture and brushstroke. This transmedial work disorients colonial cartographies which were the products of displacement, conquest, and dispossession, aiding notions of a new humanism at mid-century.

AbstractFor more than a century the only eyewitness account of Rembrandt's Portrait of an old woman (fig. 1) was a description made by Wilhelm Bode in 1883. At the time, he was unable to decipher the date, 1632; nor did he know anything about Aeltje Uylenburgh or the history of the panel. However, the painting's provenance has since been revealed, and it can be traced back in an almost unbroken line to its commission, a rare occurrence in Rembrandt's oeuvre. A pendant portrait, now lost, featured the preacher Johannes Sylvius, who is also the subject of an etching by Rembrandt dating from 1633 (fig. 2). Rembrandt had a close relationship with the Sylvius couple and he married their cousin Saskia Uylenburgh in 1634. After Aeltje's death in 1644, the couple's son Cornelis Sylvius inherited the portraits. We know that Cornelis moved to Haarlem in 1647, and that in 1681 he made a will bequeathing the pendants to his son Johannes Sylvius Junior. For the most part of a century they remained in the family. We lose track of the portrait of Johannes Sylvius when, in 1721, Cornelis II Sylvius refurbishes a house on the Kruisstraat in Haarlem. However, thanks to a handful of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copies, it has been possible to reconstruct the trail followed by Aeltje. In 1778, a copy from Dessau turned up at auction in Frankfurt. It was bought under the name of Johann Heinrich Roos by Henriette Amalie von Anhalt-Dessau. There is a copy of this copy in the museum of Marseilles, attributed Ferdinand Bol (fig. 3). In 2000 an article in the Tribune de Genève revealed that the original had belonged to the Burlamacchi Collection in the eighteenth century, and was then thought to be a portrait of Rembrandt's mother. Jean-Jacques Burlamacchi (1694-1748), a prominent Geneva collector, acquired major works of art, including probably the Rembrandt portrait, while travelling in Holland and Britain around 1720. It was the heirs of Burlamacchi, the Misses de Chapeaurouge, who opened the famous collection to the public. In 1790 or thereabouts, the Swiss portrait painter Marc-Louis Arlaud produced a copy, now in the museum at Lausanne (fig. 4), which for many years was thought to be an autograph work by Rembrandt. The painter Georges Chaix also made a copy, which he exhibited in Geneva in 1823. This work still belongs to the artist's family; unfortunately it has not been possible to obtain an image. After the Burlamacchi Collection was sold in about 1825, the painting was referred to somewhat nostalgically as 'Un Rembrandt "genevois"'. It was bought for 18,000 francs by the Paris art dealer Dubois, who sold it to the London banker William Coesvelt. In 1828, Coesvelt in turn sold the portrait through the London dealer John Smith, who described it as 'the painter's mother, at the age of 62'. We know that the picture was subsequently acquired from Albertus Brondgeest by the banker James de Rothschild (1792-1868) for his country house at Boulogne, as this is mentioned in the 1864 description of Rothschild's collection by Charles Blanc. Baron James's widow, Betty de Rothschild, inherited the portrait in 1868 and it was in Paris that the Berlin museum director Wilhelm Bode (fig. 5) first saw the painting. In his description of 1883 he states that the woman was not, in his opinion, Rembrandt's mother. In 1886 the portrait fell to Betty's son, Baron Alphonse (1827-1905). Bode published a heliogravure of the work in 1897, which remained for many years the only available reproduction (fig. 6). Rembrandt's portrait of a woman was a showpiece in Baron Alphonse's Paris smoking room (fig. 7). Few art historians came to the Rothschild residence and neither Valentiner nor Bredius, who published catalogues of Rembrandt in 1909 and 1935, respectively, had seen the painting. Alphonse's heir was Baron Edouard de Rothschild, who in 1940 fled to America with his daughter Bethsabée. The Germans looted the painting, but immediately after the war it was exhibited, undamaged, in a frame carrying the (deliberately?) misleading name 'Romney' (fig. 8). In 1949, Bethsabée de Rothschild became the rightful owner of the portrait. She took it with her when she moved to Israel in 1962, where under the name of Bathsheva de Rothschild she became a well-known patron of modern dance. In 1978, J. Bruyn en S. Levie of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) travelled to Tel Aviv to examine the painting. Although the surface was covered with a thick nicotine film, they were impressed by its condition. Bruyn and Levie were doubtful, however, that the panel's oval format was original, as emerges from the 'Rembrandt-Corpus' report of 1986. Not having seen the copies mentioned earlier, they were unaware that one nineteenth-century replica was also oval (fig. 9). Their important discovery that the woman's age was 62 was not further investigated at the time. Baroness Bathsheva de Rothschild died childless in 1999. On 13 December 2000 the painting was sold by Christie's, London, after a surprising new identity for the elderly sitter had been put forward. It had long been known that Rembrandt painted portraits of Aeltje Uylenburgh and her husband, the minister Cornelis Sylvius. Aeltje, who was a first cousin of Rembrandt's wife, Saskia Uylenburgh, would have been about 60 years old at the time. Given that the age of the woman in the portrait was now known to be 62, it was suggested that she could be Aeltje. The portrait was acquired for more than 28 million US dollars by the art dealer Robert Noortman, who put it on the market as 'Aeltje' with a question mark. In 2005, Noortman sold the portrait for 36.5 million to the American-Dutch collectors Mr and Mrs De Mol van Otterloo. At the time, the Mauritshuis in The Hague felt that trying to buy the portrait would be too extravagant, while the Rijksmuseum was more interested in acquiring a female portrait from Rembrandt's later period. Aeltje was thus destined to leave the Netherlands for good. A chronicle of the Sylvius family published in 2006 shows that Aeltje Uylenburgh would have been born in 1570 (fig. 10), demonstrating that she could indeed be the 62-year-old woman depicted by Rembrandt in 1632. We know that Aeltje was godmother to Rembrandt's children and that Saskia was godmother to Aeltje's granddaughter. Further evidence of the close ties between the two families is provided by Rembrandt's etching of Aeltje's son Petrus, produced in 1637. It is now generally accepted that the woman in the portrait is Aeltje. She was last shown in the Netherlands at the 'Dutch Portraits' exhibition in The Hague. In February 2008 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced that it had received on long-term loan one the finest Rembrandts still in private ownership.

Fumie Taniguchi was a nihonga painter whose modern portraits of women enjoyed widespread acclaim within art circles during the 1930s. Although she moved to America shortly after Japan lost the war and spent the latter half of her life there, her existence was suddenly forgotten. There are almost no extant examples of Taniguchi’s paintings from her American period, however, her autobiographical novels that appeared in Japanese American fanzines provide significant clues that help to trace her life. Through these publications and oral interviews with her family members, this article seeks to introduce readers to the painterly practice and life of Taniguchi, and make clear what exactly was distinctive and unique about her life and practice. For a woman who continued to struggle against the patriarchal gaze both in Japan and the Japanese American community, what did the notion of transcending borders mean?

This article analyzes female images in Chinese and Japanese painting (Bijin-ga). The subject of this research is the depiction of Chinese beautiful women on the scrolls of the X – XVII centuries and Japanese woodblock printing of the XVII – XIX centuries. Attention is given to the works of modern artists. It is noted that the aesthetic ideals are oriented towards the perception of beauty in the context of national culture of China and Japan, which undergo changes in each era, nurtured by Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism and Confucianism, which contributed to the development of female image and symbolic sound. The fact that the worldview orientation towards women and their status in the Far Eastern society faded away defines the relevance of the selected topic. The novelty of lies in the comparative analysis of philosophical-aesthetic traditions of Chinese and Japanese painting, reflected in female images in the historical development, with the emphasis on its modern development. The conclusion is made that the assessment of female image in Chinese and Japanese art requires taking into account the national mentality, spiritual traditions, and interinfluence of cultures. The perception of the changing image of women in society plays a special role. It is determined that the depiction of women in clothes and face paint that conceals their body shape and facial emotions, deprive a woman of her individuality and lower her social status. Such trend remains in the contemporary art of these countries. Up until now, female images resemble the symbolism of depiction, closeness to nature, interweaving of external and internal content substantiated by the aesthetic, ethical and philosophical saturation of painting, indicating the uniqueness of each culture and its national heritage.

Alongside Richard Haydocke’s translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s treatise on painting (1598), the article examines concepts of color concerning cosmetics, painting and complexion as they relate to aesthetics, artistic and medical practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning with white and red as ideal colors of beauty in Agnolo Firenzuola’s Discourse on the beauty of women (1541), the essay places color in relation to major issues in art, medicine and empiricism by discussing beauty as a quality of humoral theory and its colors as visual results of physiological processes. Challenging the relation of art and nature, gender and production, Lomazzo’s account of complexion and Haydocke’s additions on cosmetic practices and face-painting provide key passages that shed light on the relation of cosmetics colors, art writing and artistic practices at the convergence of the body, art and medicine in the context of the emerging English virtuosi around 1600.

AbstractThis article examines the unique self-portrait of Alexander Roslin and his artist wife, Marie- Suzanne Giroust-Roslin (1767, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), in which a male painter for once leaves the place at the easel to a painting woman. This complex multi-figure painting not only commemorates the couple’s friendship with the sitter, Henrik Villhelm Peill. Rather, it is conceived as a double image of love and advertisement – especially for her art. Further, with this painting Roslin takes a programmatic stand for his own concept of painting as much as for that of his wife: Criticized by Denis Diderot in 1765 for not painting but – like women at the toilet table – literally applying makeup, in this selfportrait with his painting wife Roslin undertakes a conspicuous narrowing of these (so different) activities. Roslin takes up the reproach of beautiful appearance and deception in order to let this criticism collapse in a second moment in the artistic concept of the artful deception of the eye – in a deceptively real painting, which – unlike women’s makeup – negates all difference between being and appearance. An in-depth analysis of the extraordinarily refined self-portrait of Madame Roslin with the laughing self-portrait of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour supports this interpretation. In a broader perspective this study is understood as a contribution to the investigation into the metaphorization of painting layers, picture surfaces, and forms of color application in pre-modern art and art criticism.

It is the contention of Clement Greenberg that the development of modern painting can be seen as a self-critical process whereby this art entrenches itself more firmly in its area of competence. The area of competence of each art, according to Greenberg, coincides with all that is unique to the nature of its medium. Each art form, then, has an essence (albeit one which is only revealed over time) and the constitutive limitations peculiar to painting are considered by Greenberg to be “the shape of the support, the properties of pigment” and above all “the flat surface.” At first sight such a formalist perspective appears to have the advantage of being able to offer an overall picture of the development of modern painting, a unified narrative leading from Manet to American abstract artists of Greenberg's own time, such as Jules Olitski. I shall be arguing here, however, that a clear gestalt is provided by Greenberg's theory only at the cost of eliminating consideration of meaning in art. My point is not that Greenberg gives too much attention to form and not enough to content, and that therefore we merely need to balance the scales. Simply to supplement Greenberg's discussion of the formal aspects of artworks with a consideration of their content would be to accept implicitly the strong division between these two aspects which he makes. It is that very separation which I am contesting: I do not believe that it is possible to make worthwhile statements about form whilst considering it, as Greenberg does, in a vacuum.

This article considers the artistic career of self-identified Osage painter Yeffe Kimball (1906–1978). Following the stylistic trends of modern American Indian painting as largely defined by non-Native critics and a male-dominated art world, Kimball’s works were accepted into major exhibits. How Kimball was able to “pass” as an American Indian artist is the core of a larger narrative—one that demonstrates and provokes critique of how her fraud took advantage of, but also contributed to strengthening, an exclusionary, devaluative settler-colonial dynamic of expropriation that continues into the present. This article critiques the manner in which museums and art schools defined societal values of “Indianness” that marginalized Native artists. Examining Yeffe Kimball’s successful ethnic fraud affirms a patriarchal, assimilationist narrative and the extent to which European-American identities, institutions, and art practices control American Indian imagery.

The discovery of an oil painting in seriously damaged condition with an important historical and a heterodox detail with possible origins in the late fifteenth century has afforded the opportunity for Raman microscopic analysis prior to its restoration being undertaken. The painting depicts a risen Christ following His crucifixion in a ‘ noli me tangere ’ pose with three women in an Italian terrace garden with a stone balustrade overlooking a rural landscape and an undoubted view of late-medieval Florence. The picture has suffered much abuse and is in very poor condition, which is possibly attributable to its controversial portrayal of a polydactylic Christ with six toes on His right foot. By the late sixteenth century, after the Council of Trent, this portrayal would almost certainly have been frowned upon by the Church authorities or more controversially as a depiction of the holy. Raman spectroscopic analysis of the pigments places the painting as being consistent chronologically with the Renaissance period following the identification of cinnabar, haematite, red lead, lead white, goethite, verdigris, caput mortuum and azurite with no evidence of more modern synthetic pigments or of modern restoration having been carried out. An interesting pigment mixture found here is that of the organic dye carmine and cinnabar to produce a particular bright red pigment coloration. Stratigraphic examination of the paint fragments has demonstrated the presence of an orange resin layer immediately on top of the canvas substrate, effectively rendering the pigment as a sandwich between this substratal resin and the overlying varnish. The Raman spectroscopic evidence clearly indicates that an attribution of the artwork to the Renaissance is consistent with the scientific analysis of the pigment composition. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Raman spectroscopy in art and archaeology’.

In the mid-1950s, China conducted robust cultural exchange with the Third World in tandem with a parallel political program to influence non-aligned nations in contestation to the Soviet Union and Western powers. This article examines this underrecognized facet of Maoist-era art through the international engagements of two Xi'an artists, Shi Lu (1919–1982) and Zhao Wangyun (1907–1977), who traveled to India and Egypt as cultural attaché of the Chinese state. By tracing the travels of the two artists in light of their artistic and theoretical formulations, this article argues that contact with decolonizing spheres of the Third World inspired Chinese artists to embrace forms of indigenous Chinese art like ink painting in rejection of Euro-American modernism. In solidarity with other non-Western art spheres that developed similar nativist responses to the hegemony of Western modernism, Chinese artists belonged to a global postwar movement to assert political independence through artistic autonomy and national style.

In late October, 1944, the Martha Graham Dance Company performed Appalachian Spring at the Library of Congress, establishing Graham as the master of modern dance. The significance of Appalachian Spring, however, went well beyond Graham's artistic development. Notwithstanding its traditional theme, Appalachian Spring heralded an important shift in American art. Following the Second World War a large segment of New York City artists abandoned the effort, so dominant in the interwar years, to create an explicitly “American” art in favor of a “modernist” aesthetic, best exemplified in abstract expressionist painting. Choreographed by Graham, composed by Aaron Copland, and designed by Isamu Noguchi, the “Ballet for Martha” marked an early expression of the shift from American realism to modernism. But unlike much of the radically nonrepresentational work of the late 1940s and early 1950s Appalachian Spring continued to embody the concerns of American realism, even unabashedly displaying its creators' continued embrace of the folk vernacular, while moving toward its modern aesthetic.

This article considers drawings and paintings made by the American artists Edmund Tarbell and John Sloan in relation to the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Claims about, interpretations of, and enthusiasm for ‘Dutch Pictures’ were prominent features of the transatlantic artworld in the years around 1900. Art critics, including George Moore, Charles Caffin, James Gibbons Huneker and Frank Jewett Mather, discussed the relationship between historical Dutch painting and contemporary art, while American collectors and museums purchased and displayed large numbers of paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer and their contemporaries. The article connects specific seventeenth-century Dutch ideas and objects to such paintings as Tarbell's New England Interior (1906) and Sloan's Scrubwomen, Astor Library (1910–11) and thinks more broadly about modern art's relationship to nationalism and to the past.

This essay reviews the book Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents edited by Wu Hung and published by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010, as part of an ongoing series aiming to introduce art critical texts produced in non-mainstream art locales to an English-speaking audience. Gathering a large number of translated critical essays, the book outlines the production of Chinese Contemporary Art since what is normally accepted as its onset in the late 1970s. This essay argues that this process of definition, legitimized by the prominent publisher of this book, amounts to a form of canonization performed at the expenses of other contemporaneous artistic forms—ink and academic painting—whose culturally and historically specific nature de facto excludes them from a concept of art globalization still largely determined and rooted by Euro-American modernism.

In 1933, Archibald J. Motley Jr., an African-American artist from Chicago who enjoyed a moderate level of national and international renown, issued his only formal public statement concerning the relationship he perceived between his art and race. His words, resonating with confidence, assert his conviction that painting could capture the truth of race through pigment. Reproduced opposite this declaration,Bluesof 1929 (Figure 1), which depicts well-coiffed men and women dancing in the Petite Cafe in Paris to tunes played by musicians seated in the foreground, would seem to reinforce Motley's point: paint transcribes the gradations of skin pigment incarnated by the various African, West Indian, and perhaps even African-American patrons of this nightspot. The color of skin, transmuted into the color of paint, identifies and catalogs race.

The creative work of the Hungarian theoretician and artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy has recently become an object of reevaluation and scrutinous investigation. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is also considered one of the forerunners of conceptual art. In a way, he also foresaw the "visual turn" of culture, which she made at the beginning of the 21st century, and he viewed his works in part as "exercises" in vision for a person of the future. Although today it is obvious that the art of L. Moholy-Nagy had a significant impact on the work of contemporary artists, a detailed analysis and understanding of the essence of this influence still remains insufficiently studied. In the development of his artistic method, L. Moholy-Nagy constantly evolved, moving from painting to photography and further to film works. The research explores the representatives of certain types of art in the work of Mohoy-Nagy. A detailed philosophical and art history analysis of the artist's photograms – works created in painting with light (light painting) is carried out in the research. Although the connection between Moholy-Nagy’s art and the artistic practice of the present day has been acknowledged the detailed analysis of the influence of Moholy-Nagy’s ideas on contemporary artists is still in great demand. The aim of our research is to understand the intermedial concept of Moholy-Nagy’s creative activities by means of the analysis of paintings, photographs, photograms and films produced by the artist. Our research is based on the modern theory of art as a mode of communication. The methods of our research include the conceptual, hermeneutic and comparative analysis. The methodological foundations of the research include the conception of the philosophical and art historical analysis, developed and proposed by V. I. Zhukovsky and N. P. Koptseva, which involves the appication of general scientific methods (measurement, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, analogy, etc.) to understanding the meanings of art works. As a result of our research we have revealed the meanings of Moholy-Nagy’s works of art and described their influence on the American, Hungarian and Russian artists of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries.

Abstract American modern artist Herman Trunk (1894–1963) serves as a noteworthy case study in a consideration of the relationship between religion and American modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. One of his few overtly religious works, Crucifix (c. 1930), stands out for its intriguing convergence of a most important Catholic subject with Cubist art. This essay examines Trunk’s Cubist Crucifix in relation to other Crucifix and Crucifixion paintings created around the same time period. Trunk’s Crucifix is unique among abstract paintings of religious subjects in the artist’s distinctive use of Cubism to create a quiet meditation on the crucified Christ. In some respects affirming the long tradition of Crucifix and Crucifixion paintings, Crucifix also counters those traditions to provide an alternative perspective on the Crucifix as a subject. Through his Crucifix painting, Trunk successfully brings together two traditions that historically have been viewed as diametrically opposed—Catholicism and Cubist abstraction—to produce a devotional image of the Crucifix as a form of veneration.

Right from its opening in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recreated modern art as a new myth that was rescued from European history and thus became accessible as an independent value for an American audience. Paradoxically, the myth stemmed from the opinion that modern art’s history seemed to have expired in pre-war Europe. Upon MoMA’s completion of a major expansion project in 2004, there was considerable anticipation about how the museum would represent its own history and raise its profile in a new century. As it turned out, the museum opted for a surprisingly retrospective look, since its curators were tempted to exhibit its own collection, so unique up until the sixties, in the new exhibition halls. This launched a dilemma for MoMA, as it became a place for past art with little space for new art. In an in-depth analysis of what constitutes “modern” art in the context of the preeminent questions circulating in the art world during this time—When was modern art? and Where was modern art?—the author presents a focused chronology of the administration of MoMA under the museum’s first director, Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. (1929–43), and, later, William Rubin, director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture (1968–88), with regard to their influence on the museum’s mission, exhibitions, and international profile. The author concludes with commentary on contemporary changes in art geography and contemplation on the effect on artists of the emergence of a global art market.

This article introduces in detail the genesis of Egypt’s first participation in the São Paulo Biennial (1953-1954). The story begins with a spontaneous application from a Swiss painter settled in Egypt after having lived in Brazil: Irmgard Micaela Burchard Simaika (1908-1964). Her request soon leads to the project of composing an official delegation to represent the country, at a time when Egypt was going through a period of political change, as the republic was proclaimed in June 1953. Within an artistic landscape deprived of specialized administration, the exhibition’s preparation was associated with several debates to establish who had the skills and legitimacy to select the artworks to be sent to São Paulo. The final list of artists reflects the reality of the Egyptian art worlds in the first half of the 1950s, in which academic personalities mix with a new generation keen to produce art which would stand as modern and authentically national, and with members of foreign elites well integrated into local society. This “group of modern Egyptian art painting, in the words of Burchard, includes a third of women and stands out as one of the most gender balanced pavilions in the Biennial. It thus reveals the important contribution of women to the development of modern art in Egypt and its promotion worldwide.

The end of the XIXth — beginning of the XXth centuries is a special period in the history of world art culture, characterized by the emergence of such trends as modernism, post-impressionism, avant-gardism, abstractionism, cubism, surrealism and many others. The motto of XXth-century art was "Art into Life". Often new trends became a response to the demand of the mass consumer. One of them was the art of performance. Appearing as a rejection of traditional practices of painting, sculpture and theater, performance organically incorporated wellknown and new approaches and technologies that caused an alternative way of working with space and time. It should be noted that historiography focuses on materials that explore the origins of performance and installation on a global scale. The most significant are the works by American, Western European and Polish authors. At the same time, the historiographic review showed a lack of a large scientific heritage of Russian artists in the field of performance: the process of forming modern art criticism, which would reflect the later history of performance than the first half of the XXth century, is still out of the researchers' sight.

The globalization has negatively impacted upon the tribal economies, culture and identities. The expansion of the art world under this version of globalization means that freedom of expression among artists is compromised under the pressure to conform to the market in order to succeed financially. The present scenario may change the true reflection of old culture and tradition of the Warli tribe. Because of the commercialization the transformation occurred, and they are venturing into mainstream society for the sake of their art. It has now become the commercial activity of Warli men. Because of the Industrial Revolution and modernization tribal art is a dying activity, now survives only in isolated areas whose inhabitants have a proud tradition of art and making things for themselves. Significance of the art has changed, earlier it used to be a social and religious tradition and ritual for women and everyday life, now it is a source of livelihood and exploration of individual creativity and a symbol of cultural and artistic pride. Introduction of the new modern motif of airplane, car, school building, factory are not necessarily a conscious effort to make art more commercial but rather a reflection of the changing world of the artists and to make painting more consumer- related.

Edith Wharton's treatment of the artist has received considerable critical attention, particularly in light of her focus on male artists and the disparity between her early short stories that are dominated by tales about artists and her novels that center on other subjects. Some of these studies have looked at the writer as artist and Wharton's views on the art of writing. While such a focus can be justified by the numerous writers who people Wharton's fiction, it is instructive to examine other dimensions of her reference to art and artists, especially painting, as a way of illuminating the commentary on women's roles that pervades Wharton's work. Like other writers of her era, Wharton constructed many narratives around creative artists or linked her main characters to artistic endeavors in order to interrogate American culture, its materialism, its devaluation of art, and its restrictive sphere for women. It is my contention, however, that Wharton's concern with development of the female artist was subsumed in some of her novels by rhetorical techniques that used art as a sounding board for her social critiques. Specifically, she constructed pivotal scenes around paintings in the narrative and made subtle reference to prominent themes in Victorian artwork as ironic counterpoint to and illumination of the story being told. In this essay, I explore the way in which Wharton drew on artistic representations of women with deep cultural resonance for her audience that served to underscore her critique of Victorian mythology and to garner sympathy for the characters victimized by that mythology.

This paper is a distillation of the author’s dissertation submitted for the Degree of Master of Arts by Research in History of Art: Renaissance to Modernism to the School of Humanities at the University of Buckingham in September 2016. The dissertation sought to answer the question, ‘What were the artistic and thematic influences on the evolution of the “white writing” style of the American painter, Mark Tobey?’ Tobey’s distinctive approach to abstraction brought him great acclaim and considerable success in the middle decades of the 20th century but today barely receives a footnote or a few brief sentences in art history texts and courses. It is the intention of this author to argue for the originality and importance of Tobey’s contribution to modern painting, and explain how he arrived at this unique style.This paper is divided into three parts. The first explores the artistic figures and movements that had an impact on Mark Tobey’s early development. The second focuses on the wide and varied range of thematic sources for Tobey’s painting throughout his life. The painter cited them as ‘the Orient, the Occident, science, religion [and] cities…’ In the third part, the years Tobey spent as a teacher at Dartington Hall in Devon will be examined, including the painter’s travels to the Far East with his friend, the potter Bernard Leach, and the particular circumstances and influences that resulted in the painter’s artistic breakthrough when he produced his first so-called ‘white writing’ paintings at Dartington.

AbstractRenowned American protest painter George Tooker’s sacramental art opens new perspectives on the relation of the sacramental economy to modern cultural critique. Differing from extant scholarship and taking into account preparatory drawings, this article claims that George Tooker’s The Seven Sacraments altarpiece is best understood in continuity with the rest of the artist’s protest painting. This interpretation does not diminish the religious or conciliatory significance of Tooker’s masterwork but rather draws out its unique voice as a way of protesting the alone-while-together structures of American society. As western societies confront epidemics of loneliness amidst hyper-connectivity, Tooker suggests generative horizons by which sacramental theology might contribute to that conversation—not in posing a simple fix against existential loneliness, but showing forth sacraments as interconnected, graced practices which first and foremost acknowledge loneliness while at the same time denying it the power to be the final word.

The article focuses on a comprehensive study of Alexander Melamid’s portraiture included in his first independent project after thirty years of collaborative creativity with Vitaly Komar. Throughout the entire thirty-year period of cooperation, the painters signed their works with the Komar and Melamid trademark making it difficult to determine the artists’ individual characters. A detailed analysis of the solo works of the 60-70s, before the beginning of collaborative creativity, is presented; it helps us to detect individual traits in the works of the duet and to better identify the artists’ personalities, to reconstruct the technical features of each artist’s painting style. In 2007, Alexander Melamid began creating a large-scale series of paintings which would become his new conceptual line of creative work; later, in 2009, the artist developed and supplemented the series with portraits of Italian clergy and Russian oligarchs. Characteristic features of the Holy Hip Hop! portrait series, exhibited at the Detroit Museum of Modern Art in 2008, are studied in the article. The artist paid special attention to the psychological characters of the portrayed, the entire series is painted in one color scheme, within one scale. The pictorial series is an integral conceptual statement. The purely plastic qualities of the paintings fade into the background. They are not so important for Alexander Melamid - he uses academic painting as a tool to convey more accurately the psychology of the portrayed whom he treats with ironic interest. It is important to note that Alexander Melamid erases the line between the classical and the marginal art, just as Francois Millet did in his time. The article succeeded in updating sociocultural issues with the help of contextual comparison with portraiture by Diego Velazquez and contemporary American artist Kehinde Wiley whose creative life has deeply integrated into the socio-political realities of the United States of the beginning of the 21st century and the African-American cultural tradition. Kehinde Wiley is known for his realistic large-scale portrayals of African-Americans in poses borrowed from works of classical European painting of the 17-19th centuries. The artist openly propagandizes, deliberately emphasizing the didactic function of his paintings. It is in the context of contemporaries’ works and the political situation in the USA of the 2000-2010s that Alexander Melamid’s work should be considered.

Resumen. El arte, en este caso la pintura, constituye una fuente histórica que permite el estudio de la situación de las mujeres en determinados contextos históricos. Ninguna obra es creada de forma inocente, sino que está condicionada por la mirada de la persona que la produce. La pintura, en su dimensión vitalista, comprende una respuesta estética a una realidad en la que infieren de forma consciente o inconsciente la identidad del artista, así como el espacio político, social y económico en el que se desarrolla. De la misma forma ocurre con la repetición de temáticas y modelos de representación, no aluden a simples modas, ya que se generan en una sociedad determinada. Por tanto, a través del análisis de obras protagonizadas por mujeres se pretende mostrar los modelos femeninos que prevalecen en España en la década de 1920, época significativa respecto a la cuestión femenina. Así como la importancia de la mirada de el/la artista a la hora de representar figuras femeninas. Mientras que los artistas varones siguen situando a las mujeres como objetos de representación, las mujeres usan el arte como medio reivindicativo, situándose como sujetos creadores.Palabras clave: arte, mujeres, iconografía, España, años veinte.Abstract. Art, in this case paint, is a historical source that allows the study of the situation of women in certain historical contexts. No piece of art is created innocently; moreover, the perspective of the person who creates it conditions it. Painting, in its vitality dimension, comprises an aesthetic response to a reality in which consciously or unconsciously the identity of the artist, political, social and economic space infer. Something similar happens with the repetition of topics and models of representation, which do not refer to mere fashions, mostly because they are generated in a given society. Therefore, through the analysis of works that feature women, the objective is to show female models prevailing in Spain in the 1920s, as well as the importance of the perspective of the artist, both male and female, when representing female figures. While male artists continue using women as objects of representation, women use art as a means of protest, portraying themselves as creative subjects.Keywords: art, women, iconography, Spain, 1920s.

Diego Rivera made the following sketches during a seven-to-eight-month stay in the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1928. A prominent member of the Partido Comunista de México (Communist Party of Mexico), Rivera traveled to Moscow to participate in the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the 1917 Revolution. Word of Rivera's dedication to muralism as a politically potent art form preceded his arrival, and he quickly became embroiled in debates about Soviet art's ideological aims and physical characteristics. He lectured on monumental painting at the Komakademiia (Communist Academy) and joined the Oktiabr' (October) group, a body of artists—many former Constructivists—working in varied media but united in their rejection of easel painting in favor of works intended for public display and mass audiences. Rivera also received a commission from Anatolli Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, for a fresco cycle (ultimately unrealized) at the Red Army's headquarters. As Maria Gough argues in this issue, the group of drawings, long assumed to be from a single notebook, is likely an amalgamation of sketches created during two distinct events, the tenth-anniversary celebrations in November 1927 and the May Day festivities of the following year. Rivera's sketches capture his reaction to these officially mandated public demonstrations—spectacles so large in scale that they defined a new type of mass political event. In January 1928, Rivera met two young American scholars—Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Jere Abbott, the future director and associate director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, respectively—who were on the Russian leg of a European tour designed as an education in contemporary artistic developments. The three met regularly, visiting exhibitions and the studios of Moscow-based artists. The fruits of this unlikely friendship between a radical art-world celebrity and two fledgling art historians were seen in Rivera's one-man show at MoMA in the winter of 1931–32, a blockbuster that decimated the young museum's existing attendance records. In support of the exhibition, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a founding trustee of the Museum, purchased the sketches to help defray the cost of the artist's stay in New York. She donated the works to MoMA in 1935.

Igor Rončević has been painting for a very long time with the consciousness that his painterly signature can be constructed from a series of disparate fragments, and so his collage paintings are composed of elements or stylistic details thanks to which his canvas has become a place where ambivalent worlds meet - an ntersection of their paths. Rončević is therefore, a painter of ludic individualism, but, at the same time, painter with wide erudition and above all, a curious pirit, who, in a unique way - in different clusters of itations - applies and joins together experiences from he entire history of art. In his works we have for some ime observed the meetings of some of at first sight rreconcilable contrasts - the experiences of Pop art, European and American abstraction, experiences of gestural and lyrical provenance, different traces and tyles of figuration... All this heterogeneous material has been relativized in his interpretation, often even in blasphemous combinations; in a conspicuously easy and organic way, these combinations merge into a unique whole consisting of forms and meanings which are difficult to decipher. Analysis of Rončević’s paintings reveals the absence of a specific rational system that accumulates the building blocks of a painting - a mental landscape - but not the absence of a peculiar talent for creating compositional balance in a painting.The basic building block in the cycle Dulčić’s fragments is the line - stripes, that is linear, ribbon-like shapes, curved lines which meander on the surface of the canvas, and in the painted area, lines freely applied with a finger in fresh paint. The basic ludic element is colour, and the cartography of the canvas is a road with innumerable directions. The painter, treating the surface of the canvas as a field of total action, creates networks of interlacing multicoloured verticals, lively blue, blue-green and brown hues, coloured without an apparent system or principle, and also of varying width but, despite the seemingly limited starting points of his painting, he creates situations rich in interesting shifts and intriguing pictorial and colouristic happenings. The painter’s main preoccupation is the interaction of ‘neon’ colours (obviously a reference to the twentieth-century’s ‘neon’ enthusiasts), which has been achieved with a simple composition consisting of a knot of interwoven ribbons of intense colours which belong to a different chromatic register in each painting. Streams of complementary or contrasting colours, which spread out across the painted field like the tributaries of a river, subject to confluence, adopting features of the neighbouring colour, sharing the light and darkness of a ‘neon’. Although the impression implies the opposite, the application of colours, their touching and eventual interaction are strictly controlled by the skill of a great colourist. Dulčić’s fragments display Rončević’s fascinating power of unexpected associative perception. The painter now reaches for the excess of colour remaining on his palette from the work on previous paintings. He applies the colour to the canvas with a spatula in a relief impasto, and he revives the dried background with a lazure glaze of a chosen colour. On a saturated but still obviously ‘neon’ grid, the painter - evenly, like a collage detail - applies islands of open colour on the surface of the painting, which he finally paints with a brush, applying vertical white lines over the colour. These shapes of an associative and metaphorical nature are an integral part of the semantic scaffolding of composition but, without particular declarative frameworks and associative attributes, we can never precisely say what they actually represent although they are reminiscent of many things, such as seeds, bacteria, cellular microcosm, unstable primitive forms of life, the macrocosm of the universe, the structures of crystals, technical graphs, calligraphy, secret codes... The linear clarity of the drawing makes motifs concrete and palpable, possessing volume, in fact, possessing bulging physicality. In new paintings, the personal sign of the artist, which arrived in the painting from the activity of the conscious and the unconscious, has been replaced with small shapes, most similar to an oval, which look like separate pieces attached to the surface of the painting and which are reminiscent of specific painterly and artistic tendencies. Their monochrome surfaces are filled with verticals which are particles of the rational or, to put it better, from the constructivist stylistic repertoire, reminiscent, for example, of Daniel Buren’s verticals. Two divergent components - the abstract and the rational - stylistically and typologically separate, but chronologically parallel - pour into an evocative encounter which reveals a nostalgia towards two-dimensional painting. Experiences of posters and graphic design, gestural abstraction, abstract expressionism, lyrical abstraction and everything else that can be observed in this cycle of paintings are a homage to global modern painting, while the islands on the paintings pay tribute to the constructivist section of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The contents of Rončević’s paintings are also reminiscent of the rhythmicality of human figures in Dulčić’s representations of the events on Stradun, town squares, beaches, dances... In addition, to Rončević, as a Mediterranean man - in his formative years - Dulčić was an important painter and, if we persist in searching for formal similarities in their ‘handwritings’, we will find them in the hedonism of painterly matter and the sensuality of colour, luxuriant layers, the saturation of impasto painting, gestural vitality, but mostly in the Mediterranean sensibility, the Mediterranean sonority of colour, their solarity, the southern light and virtuosity of their metiérs. Like Dulčić, Rončević is also re-confirmed as a painter of impulses, of lush, luscious and extremely personalized matter, of layers of pigments, of vehement and moveable gestures, of fluid pictorialism…* * *Let us also say in conclusion that Rončević does not want to state, establish or interpret anything but to incessantly reveal possibilities, their fundamental interchangeability and arbitrariness, and following that, a general insecurity. With the skill of an experienced master painter, he also questions relationships with eclecticism and the aesthetics of kitsch; for example, he explores how far a painter can go into ornamentalization, decorativeness and coquetry without falling into the trap of kitsch but to maintain regularly the classy independence of a multilayered artifact and to question the very stamina of painting. He persistently reveals loyalty to the traditional medium of painting, the virtuosity of his métier and a strong individual stamp, strengthening his own position as a peculiar and outstandingly cultivated painter, but he also exhibits the inventiveness which makes him both different and recognizable in a series of similar painting adventures.

Ekphrasis enables poets to invade the most difficult and sensitive areas of thought without the pressure of direct expression. Ekphrastic poetry has a tendency to draw together contradictions; the work of art acting as intermediary between points of opposition, tension and contrast. The presence of the ekphrastic object in a poem is an acknowledgement of the unbridgeable hermeneutic gap between poetry, history and the real, indeed it often acts as the marker that exposes this gap. Also in a practical way, through both its critical and art-historical backgrounds, the practice of ekphrasis is located very firmly within arguments of a temporal nature; it is important to remember that paintings have a material history as well as a conceptual one, and that contemporary poetry is increasingly taking into account, and even seeking to replicate in some cases, the space of the museum itself as well as the paintings within it.
 Therefore, the present paper aims at affording a new study of the poetry of the contemporary American poetess Jorie Graham through illuminating the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, which is meant to verbally represent what is already represented visually, and its relation to presentations of the most perplexing concepts in modern and contemporary literature in general and poetry in particular, namely, memory and personal history. The paper is an attempt to investigate how Jorie Graham uses images from painting, photography and films in her poems to manipulate time and represent personal history through memory which, in turn, leads to a consideration of how she uses ekphrasis to approach the ethics of representing public history, and how she uses the different temporal conventions of each genre to write about the past

The artist Endel Kõks (1912–1983) is a member of the same generation of Estonian art classics as Elmar Kits and Lepo Mikko. After Kits’s and Kõks’s debut at the exhibition of the Administration of the Cultural Endowment’s Fine Art Foundation (KKSKV) in Tallinn in 1939, the three of them started to be spoken about as the promising Tartu trio. In 1944, Endel Kõks ended up in Germany as a wounded soldier, while Kits and Mikko remained in Estonia. The Kõks’s works that have surreptitiously arrived in his homeland are incidental and small in number. Thus, without any proof, an image developed or was developed of him in Soviet-era art history as a mediocre painter and especially as a weak abstractionist, which is somewhat prevalent even today. I would dispute this based on the conclusions that I reached when helping to organise the exhibition of exile Estonian art between 2008 and 201142 and Endel Kõks’s solo exhibition between 2011 and 201343; conclusions that I have supplemented with the opinions expressed by exile Estonian art historians and artists.In 1951 Kõks moved to Sweden. Paul Reets has highlighted the years between 1952 and 1956, and assumed that these were difficult years due to the contradictions he faced. According to Reets, one obstacle was influence of the Pallas on Kõks’s painting style, which was conservative and adhered to the trends of Late Cubism. According to both Eevi End and Paul Reets, Kõks painted his first abstract painting in 1956 Rahutus (Restlessness) according to the former and Konflikt (Conflict) according to the latter). A black-and-white photo exists of Restlessness, which is slightly reminiscent of Pollock, and this is not the same work that P. Reets refers to. They both note that this was a convincing and mature abstraction not a searching for form, and as Reets states, Kõks had severed himself from the Pallas.The abstract paintings created between 1956 and 1960 – Kompositsioon (Composition) (1958), Rõõmus silmapilk (Joyful Moment) (1959) and others – are constructed on the impact of a joyfully colourful palette and lines, and demonstrate a kinship with the abstract works of Vassili Kandinsky. There is also a similarity to Arshile Gorky, whose works he may have seen at the exhibition of modern American art in Stockholm in 1953.Kõks’s transition into a pure form of abstraction occurred in 1963. Reets has characterised this as a “the most wondrous year that one can expect to see in an artist’s life. Not an unexpected year, but one that was unexpectedly and extremely rich when it came to his works.” The artist started to create series of works, of which the best known is undoubtedly Elektroonika (Electronics), which was comprised of 36 sheets. According to Kõks, he developed the need and idea to create the series while listening to experimental music, watching experimental films and thinking about nuclear physics. Created with a glass printing technique, or vitreography, each work is unique due to the post-printing processing, paint dripping, spraying and additional brushstrokes and images. Of course, all this alludes to Jackson Pollock.In 1962, Kõks painted the abstract composition Astraalne (Astral), which depicts a red circle and bent violet rectangle next to it on an interesting yellowish-brown surface that creates a rough effect. Using only these two symbols, the artist creates a sense of floating in cosmic space. Starting in 1964–1965 this style gradually came to dominate his work, and in was in this style that Kõks created the works that express the greatness of his talent and the charm of the “shaper of nature forms” in the purest sense.The construction of these works is brilliantly simple, and comprised of symbols and images placed on a relatively uniform surface. The nervous brittleness and rapid movement have disappeared from the paintings. The mood is calm and reveling. There is a monumental feel to many of the pictures. Masterful, delicate colour combinations triumph. And as time goes on, the more abundant and interesting the texture becomes. Eevi End believes that Kõks was influenced by Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and other representatives of the school of Hard-edge painting that other influential direction operating in American abstractionism during the 20th century. Kõks himself has defined his abstract paintings as biomorphic abstraction, characterized by a free formalism, spatiality and atmospherics (Arshile Gorky, William de Kooning, Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock.)Kõks’s abstraction that features intellectual and cognizant images is totally the opposite of Elmar Kits’s excellent and spontaneous colourful abstraction. Kits remains true to the Pallas colour tradition; Kõks breaks out of it. Kõks feels secure painting abstract pictures and enjoys the game, which cannot be said of the thoroughly abstract works of Lepo Mikko or Alfred Kongo. Those who doubt this statement should remember that, in order to provide an assessment of Kõks’s abstract pictures, one must have seen them in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. Conclusions cannot be drawn based exclusively on the works in Estonia. As an abstractionist, he is in no way weaker than his contemporaries, just very different and the determination of superiority is a matter of taste. Endel Kõks’s greatness lies in the fact that he was able to fit with what was happening in world art (which many exile artists could not); he experimented with new directions and finally put together something new for himself, and thereby developed Estonian art as a whole.

With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slaves then. Noble had known the “peculiar institution” at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to embark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. Were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom? Between 1865 and 1869 Noble exhibited in northern cities a total of eight paintings with African American subjects. Two of these, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865, repainted ca. 1870) and Margaret Garner (1867), featured mixed-race women, or mulattos, as they had come to be called. From a young female up for auction, to the famous fugitive Margaret Garner, his portrayals show a transformation taking place within perceptions of biracial women in post-emancipation America. Opinions about mulattos surfaced in a range of theoretical discussions, from the scientific to the political, as strategists North and South envisioned evolving social policy.

The article was inspired by the authors’ reviews of modern productions of Handel’s Baroque operas in 2019, presented in the three German cities: Halle, Bad Lauchstädt and Bernburg. Halle, where Georg Friedrich Handel (1685–1759) was born, is also a venue of the annual International Handel Festival, dedicated to the works of the great Saxon and his contemporaries. The concept of the festival in 2019, Sensitive, heroic, sublime: Handel’s women, was devoted to studying the female images embodied in his operas. In considering the scientific and artistic concept, the authors concluded that the directors’ understanding of these operas has expanded through the integration into musical drama of the compositional principles of film editing and the expressive means of modern, primarily screen arts. To study this phenomenon, we turned to the scientific tools developed in Russia by the two Soviet researchers who have become seminal in their field. One of them was the psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who, exploring the spiritual world of the protagonists in fine literature, revealed their psychological contradictions, expressed in the conflict of the narrative and the plot. Another The other, Sergei Eisenstein, was well-versed in Vygotsky’s manuscript of his study, Psychology of Art, and, influenced by some of these ideas, created his own “psychology of art”, which is set out in his works of various years. The core of this concept was “the transition from the Expressive Movement to the image of the art work… as a process of interaction of layers of consciousness” [1, p. 188], which allowed for multiple entries into the artistic image (one of the authors has applied this method of analysis in a work devoted to the integration of the principles of painting and cinema: [2, pp. 63–86]). Some features of the cinematograph also support such entries, and the first among equals here is the principle of intellectual editing developed by Eisenstein. In his montage theory, other types of editing—linear, parallel, associative—have been generalized and developed into a large-scale system for exploring the psychology of heroes in art. The essence of these processes, identified in the article, made it possible for the authors to discern the phenomenon of building the meaning in the Halle directors’ interpretations of Handel’s operas, which arises from the merger of the two seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting layers of consciousness: Baroque and eclectic modern, which emerged at the turn of the last century.

The French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau often used the motifs of fantastic beings and animals in his works, amongst which the unicorn found its place. Moreau got the inspiration for the unicorn motif after a visit to the Cluny Museum in Paris, in which six medieval tapestries with the name "The Lady and the Unicorn" were exhibited. Relying on the French Middle Age heritage, Moreau has interpreted the medieval legend of the hunt for this fantastic beast (with the aid of a virgin) in a new way, close to the art of Symbolism and the ideas of the cultural and intellectual climate of Paris at the end of the 19th century. In the Moreau's paintings "The Unicorn" and "The Unicorns", beautiful young nude girls are portrayed in the company of one or multiple unicorns. Similarly to the lady on the medieval tapestry, they too gently caress the animal, showing a close and sensual relationship between them. Although they were rid of their clothes, the artist donned lavish capes, crowns and jewellery on them, alluding to their privileged social status. Their beauty, nudity and closeness with the unicorns ties them to the theme of the femme fatal, which was often depicted in the Symbolist art forms. Showing the fairer sex as beings closer to the material, instinctual and irrational, Moreau has equated women and animals, as is the case with these paintings. Another important theme of the Symbolic art forms which can be seen on the aforementioned paintings is nature, wild and untouched. The landscape in the paintings shows a harmony between the unrestrained nature and the heroes of the painting, freed from strict moral laws of the civil society, or civilization in general. Putting the ladies and the unicorns in an ideal forest landscape, Moreau paints an intimate vision of an imaginary golden age, in this case the Middle Age, through a harmonic relationship of unicorns, women and nature. In that manner, Moreau's unicorns tell a fairy tale of a modern European man at the end of the 19th century: a fairy tale of harmony, sensuality and beauty, hidden in the realms of imagination and dreams.

This short notice, entitled “When a ‘Hobo’ Works,” which appeared in the New York Times, July 13, 1912, might seem overwrought to contemporary readers in its definitive nature. The need to delineate work and nonwork, however, was quite serious business for Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. During this period, as evidenced in newspaper and journal articles, legislation, and popular culture, there was growing apprehension about the perceived differences and slippage among the ideas of the tramp, the hobo, the vagrant, the unemployed worker, and the worker. Most of this conversation was directed toward defining work and nonwork for men — specifically for white men. Tramping came to be viewed as an affliction of both mind and body, with writers, politicians, and reformers seeking to define the tramp and then theorizing how to put these newly codified bodies to work.Some of the most complex images of joblessness from this period were produced by the Ashcan school of artists, who frequently portrayed jobless men in their paintings and drawings. The Ashcan school, a group of six realist painters who lived and worked in New York City from 1900 to the First World War, established a national reputation as radicals rebelling against what they argued was a conservative artistic community woefully out of touch with modern American life. Ashcan artists depicted what they claimed to be the realities of the city around them — busy streets, shopgirls, ethnic communities, construction workers, and prostitutes, as well as tramps. John Sloan's The Coffee Line, 1905 (Figure 1), is typical of the kinds of images that Ashcan artists produced. The scene is a snowy winter's night in New York with a band of men in line to get a free cup of coffee. Jobless men are the stars here; unwitting leads in Sloan's slice of New York City life. The painting did much to communicate nationally a visual image of the tramp in New York City; it won honorable mention in 1905 at the Carnegie Institute International Exposition and was then exhibited in Chicago; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Dallas; and Seattle.

The article analyzes the conditions and factors that influenced the formation of contemporary art and cinema in China, South Korea and Japan. We can determine the peculiarities of the development of Chinese contemporary art, such as the desire of the first artists, after the Cultural Revolution, to reflect its flux and effects as much as possible. Further, artistic tendencies become diverse: the commercial component and a certain element of the state of affairs are viewed in the works of art by Chinese authors, but the desire for self-expression in different ways testify to the progressive phenomena characteristic of art. Modern Korean art proves that the scientific and technological revolution and the dominant avant-garde component of mass culture in general cannot supplant the ultimate traditional artistic creativity. One of the characteristic features of contemporary Korean art is a demonstration of belonging to the culture of the country. First of all, this is the influence of the traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, along with the painful memories of war and long-term colonization by Japan. One can note the simplicity, orderliness, harmony of colors and shapes as an inalienable feature of Korean contemporary art, but modern tendencies show the striving for the discovery of individuality of the artist, which manifests itself in non-standard artistic forms. Japanese visual art combines the works of autochthonous traditions and European artistic principles. Considerable attention is paid to the issue of the relationship between nature and man, reflected in the work of adherents of the synthesis of Japanese traditions and Western variety of forms. Particular attention is paid to contemporary artists in Japan with the latest technology – video art, 3D painting, interactive installations and installations-hybrids. Chinese cinema with the generation of directors, known as the Fifth Generation, reveals new trends. These artists initially sought to convey events and tragedies during the Cultural Revolution, but over time they turned to other themes and genres. Directors of the "Sixth Generation" paid special attention to social problems, the place of action in their films is unknown China – small settlements or cities. Modern Korean cinema covers two large areas: cinema for women – melodrama, and for men – adventure. Today the adventure genre is oriented mainly to teens, and the melodrama genre has been transformed from the problems of the middle-aged women's interest towards the youth audience, therefore, it is more likely to come closer to the romantic comedy. The tragedy of Korea, which is split up into two parts, worries the movie-makers. In recent years there have been changes in South Korean position in exposing North Korean residents. If the previous decades in South Korean cinema was cultivating the image of the enemy: North Korean could be either a spy or killer, but now the inhabitants of North Korea are perceived and presented in films differently, not embodying exclusively negative features. In Japanese cinema, the emphasis is on the visual array, which allows you to bring forward contemplation and the deep meaning is transmitted by artistic images typical of the oriental art in general. In films, much attention is paid to the smallest details; certain asceticism along with the aesthetization of the frame is a reflection of purely Japanese features – minimalism as the meaning of existence. Familiarity with the peculiarities of the development of contemporary art and cinema in China, Korea and Japan is a necessary component for further dialogue between the cultures of East and West in terms of balanced interaction and artistic transformations of the modern world.

EZRA’S CAGE”. BETWEEN POETRY AND POLITICSEzra Pound 1885–1975 was, next to Thomas Stearns Eliot, the most prominent American poet of modernist. He was considered the creator of vorticism and imagism — modern trends in art and world culture. In his works he reached to different eras and cultural trends. He was as well fascinated by medieval Provençal, Spanish and Italian literature, and Japanese art of haiku. On his work also had an impact scholasticism, Confucianism and Far East literature. In addition to poetry, Pound was also involved in literary criticism, painting and sculpture, he wrote historiosophical es­says and dramas. The greatest fame brought him, however, written for many years, „Canto”. During his stay in the British Isles he also dealt with politics and economics. He was considered a supporter of the theory of Social Credit of Hugh Douglas Clifford, aBritish engineer and economic theorist. In the early twenties Pound went to Italy. Here he became fascinated with fascism and the person of Benitto Musollini. In his works including his poetic works appeared clear fascist and anti-Semitic accents. He criticized Jewish international financiers and banking critique of usury. During World War II he gave propaganda „talks” in the Italian radio. He praised the organization of the fascist state and fascism as an idea, and at the same time warned the threat from international Jewish conspiracy. His views meant that he was accused of collaboration and treason. He was arrested and imprisoned in the US prison camp near Genoa. He spent almost amonth in aclosed cage. During his stay in the camp he had nervous breakdown. After transportation to the United States for many years he was locked out in hospital for mentally ill. After leaving the hospital, he returned to public space. Still creative, he was nominated for the most prestigious literary awards. His works have been translated into many languages around the world, including Polish. He died in Italy in 1975.

Background. А history of the development of the human community is at the same time a history of the relationship between men and women, their role in society, in formation of mindset, development of science, technology and art. A woman’s path to the recognition of her merits is a struggle for equality and inclusion in all sectors of public life. Originated with particular urgency in the twentieth century, this set of problems gave impetus to the study of the female phenomenon in the sociocultural space. In this context, the disclosure of the direct contribution of talented women to art and their influence on its development has become of special relevance. The purpose of the article is to summarize segmental of information that highlights the contribution of women to the treasury of world art, their creative and inspiring power. Analytical, historical-biographical and comparative studying methods were applied to reveal the gender relationships in art and the role of woman in them as well as in the sociocultural space in general. The results from this study present a panorama of gifted women from the world of art and music who paved the way for future generations. Among them are: A. Gentileschi (1593–1653), who was the first woman admitted to The Florence Academy of Art; M. Vigee Le Brun (1755–1842), who painted portraits of the French aristocracy and later became a confidant of Marie-Antoinette; B. Morisot (1841–1895), who was accepted by the impressionists in their circle and repeatedly exhibited her works in the Paris Salon; F. Caccini (1587–1640), who went down in history as an Italian composer, teacher, harpsichordist, author of ballets and music for court theater performances; J. Kinkel (1810–1858) – the first female choral director in Germany, who published books about musical education, composed songs on poems of famous poets, as well as on her own texts; F. Mendelssohn (1805–1847) – German singer, pianist and composer, author of cantatas, vocal miniatures of organ preludes, piano pieces; R. Clark (1886–1979) – British viola player and composer who created trio, quartets, compositions for solo instruments, songs on poems of English poets; L. Boulanger (1893–1918) became the first woman to receive Grand Prix de Rome; R. Tsekhlin (1926–2007) – German harpsichordist, composer and teacher who successfully combined the composition of symphonies, concerts, choral and vocal opuses, operas, ballets, music for theatrical productions and cinema with active performing and teaching activities, and many others. The article emphasise the contribution of women-composers, writers, poetesses to the treasury of world literature and art. Among the composers in this row is S. Gubaidulina (1931), who has about 30 prizes and awards. She wrote music for 17 films and her works are being performed by famous musicians around the world. The glory of Ukrainian music is L. Dychko (1939) – the author of operas, oratorios, cantatas, symphonies, choral concertos, ballets, piano works, romances, film music. The broad famous are the French writers: S.-G. Colette (1873–1954), to which the films were devoted, the performances based on her novels are going all over the world, her lyrics are being studied in the literature departments. She was the President of the Goncourt Academy, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, a square in the center of Paris is named after her. Also, creativity by her compatriot, L. de Vilmorin (1902–1969), on whose poems С. Arrieu, G. Auric, F. Poulenc wrote vocal miniatures, is beloved and recognized as in France as and widely abroad. The article denotes a circle of women who combined the position of a selfsufficient creator and a muse for their companion. M. Verevkina (1860–1938) – a Russian artist, a representative of expressionism in painting, not only helped shape the aesthetic views of her husband A. Yavlensky, contributing to his art education, but for a long time “left the stage” for to not compete with him and help him develop his talent fully. Furthermore, she managed to anticipate many of the discoveries as for the use of light that are associated with the names of H. Matisse, A. Derain and other French fauvist. F. Kahlo (1907–1954), a Mexican artist, was a strict critic and supporter for her husband D. Rivera, led his business, was frequently depicted in his frescoes. C. Schumann (1819–1896) was a committed promoter of R. Schumann’s creativity. She performed his music even when he was not yet recognized by public. She included his compositions in the repertoire of her students after the composer lost his ability to play due to the illness of the hands. She herself performed his works, making R. Schumann famous across Europe. In addition, Clara took care of the welfare of the family – the main source of finance was income from her concerts. The article indicates the growing interest of the twentieth century composers to the poems of female poets. Among them M. Debord-Valmore (1786–1859) – a French poetess, about whom S. Zweig, P. Verlaine and L. Aragon wrote their essays, and her poems were set to music by C. Franck, G. Bizet and R. Ahn; R. Auslender (1901–1988) is a German poetess, a native of Ukraine (Chernovtsy city), author of more than 20 collections, her lyrics were used by an American woman-composer E. Alexander to write “Three Songs” and by German composer G. Grosse-Schware who wrote four pieces for the choir; I. Bachmann (1926–1973) – the winner of three major Austrian awards, author of the libretto for the ballet “Idiot” and opera “The Prince of Hombur”. The composer H. W. Henze, in turn, created music for the play “Cicadas” by I. Bachmann. On this basis, we conclude that women not only successfully engaged in painting, wrote poems and novels, composed music, opened «locked doors», destroyed established stereotypes but were a powerful source of inspiration. Combining the roles of the creator and muse, they helped men reach the greatest heights. Toward the twentieth century, the role of the fair sex representatives in the world of art increased and strengthened significantly, which led Western European culture to a new round of its evolution.

Identity studies live. This latest batch of publications explores what made not just the Romans but the Italians, Christians, and Etruscans who they were. We begin with both age and beauty, the fruits of a special exhibition at the Badischen Landesmuseum Karlsruhe in the first half of 2018 into the most famous of Roman predecessors, the Etruscans. Most of the exhibits on display come from Italian museums, but the interpretative essays that break up the catalogue – which are also richly illustrated – are by both Italian and German scholars. These are split between five overarching sections covering introductory affairs, the ages of the princes and of the city-states, the Etruscans’ relationship with Rome, and modern reception. The first contains essays treating Etruscan origins, history, identity, and settlement area. The second begins with the early Iron Age Villanova site, before turning to early Etruscan aristocratic culture, including banqueting, burials, language, writing, and seafaring. The third and longest section considers the heyday of Etruscan civilization and covers engineering and infrastructure, crafts and production, munitions, women's roles, daily life, dance, sport, funerary culture, wall painting, religious culture, and art. The fourth section treats both the confrontation between Etruscan and Roman culture and the persistence of the former after ‘conquest’ by the latter. The fifth section contains one essay on the modern inheritance of the Etruscan ‘myth’ and one on the history of scholarship on the Etruscans. Three aspects to this volume deserve particular praise. First, it includes not only a huge range of material artefacts but also individual essays on Etruscan production in gold, ceramic, ivory, terracotta, and bronze. Second, there is a recurring interest in the interconnections between the Etruscans and other cultures, not just Romans but Greeks, Iberians, Celts, Carthaginians, and other Italian peoples. Third, it includes the history of the reception of Etruscan culture. Amid the just-shy-of-200 objects included (almost every one with description and high-quality colour image), the reader can find everything from a mid-seventh-century pitcher made from an Egyptian ostrich egg painted with birds, flowers, and dancers (147), through the well-known third- or second-century bcTabula Cortonensis – a lengthy and only partially deciphered Etruscan inscription that documents either a legal transaction or a funerary ceremony (311) – to the 2017 kit of the Etruschi Livorno American Football team (364). Since we have no extant Etruscan literature, a volume such as this is all the more valuable in trying to get a sense of these people and their culture, and the exceptionally high production value provides quality exposure to material otherwise scattered throughout Italy.

Background and context: The human papillomavirus (HPV) is a ubiquitous virus that causes many cancers: cervical, oropharyngeal, anal, penile, vaginal and vulvar cancers, the most serious consequence being cervical cancer that takes the life of a woman between the ages of 35-60 every two minutes in this world. There are existing tools to prevent this cancer today: at the primary prevention level, the HPV vaccines that are up to 90%-97% preventive; at the secondary level, simple screening tests including Pap test, HPV DNA testing, and VIA; and at tertiary level, effective early treatment of precancerous conditions. Yet, cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the developing world. One of the main reasons for this gap is the lack of awareness that cervical cancer is a preventable public health problem. Hence, education and innovative models are necessary for successful control of this disease. The HPV vaccines are recommended between 9-26 years in males and females. Hence, our organization, The Global Initiative Against HPV and Cervical Cancer (GIAHC), decided to empower the next generation to join the fight against HPV and cervical cancer. Aim: To empower the younger generation to play a proactive role to raise awareness and increase the uptake of HPV vaccination and cervical cancer screening through the use of arts in medicine and social media. Strategy/Tactics: An educational PowerPoint presentation was developed by medical and nursing students to present to middle and high school students and in other community settings. Program/Policy process: A 30-minute-long presentation was developed so that it could fit into a classroom period. A script for the presenter, a reference sheet, slides to highlight how HPV can affect both sexes, risk factors and effective ways to prevent it were developed. Emphasis was placed on the HPV vaccine for boys and girls. This was followed by a game, and a short inspirational and aspirational film and a few words to empower them. Outcomes: The program has met with good success: The presentation has been shown by our students in several states in the US and in other countries. Our student group has grown from 2 to 60 in one year. Middle and high school students also want to get involved to spread the message. Students are continually coming up with other creative ways through, dance, painting, poetry video clips and using social media to spread the message. Students of the American Medical Women's Association (AMWA) and Medical Women's International Association (MWIA) have now partnered with us. The Department of Education has expressed an interest to collaborate with us. What was learned: Empowering the younger generation and providing them with the tools to play a pro active role to interweave science with various creative art forms can have far-reaching and greater impact on communities and societies to raise awareness about HPV.

AbstractAry Scheffer (1795-1858) is so generally included in the French School (Note 2)- unsurprisingly, since his career was confined almost entirely to Paris - that the fact that he was born and partly trained in the Netherlands is often overlooked. Yet throughout his life he kept in touch with Dutch colleagues and drew part of his inspiration from Dutch traditions. These Dutch aspects are the subject of this article. The Amsterdam City Academy, 1806-9 Ary Scheffer was enrolled at the Amsterdam Academy on 25 October 1806, his parents falsifying his date of birth in order to get him admitted at the age of eleven (fifteen was the oficial age) . He started in the third class and in order to qualify for the second he had to be one of the winners in the prize drawing contest. Candidates in this were required to submit six drawings made during the months January to March. Although no-one was supposed to enter until he had been at the Academy for four years, Ary Scheffer competed in both 1808 and 1809. Some of his signed drawings are preserved in Dordrecht. (Figs. 1-5 and 7), along with others not made for the contest. These last in particular are interesting not only because they reveal his first prowess, but also because they give some idea of the Academy practice of his day. Although the training at the Academy broadly followed the same lines as that customary in France, Italy and elsewhere (Note 4), our knowledge of its precise content is very patchy, since there was no set curriculum and no separate teachers for each subject. Two of Scheffer's drawings (Figs. 2 and 3) contain extensive notes, which amount to a more or less complete doctrine of proportion. It is not known who his teacher was or what sources were used, but the proportions do not agree with those in Van der Passe's handbook, which came into vogue in the 18th century, or with those of the canon of a Leonardo, Dürer or Lebrun. One gets the impression that what are given here are the exact measurements of a concrete example. Scheffer's drawings show him gradually mastering the rudiments of art. In earlier examples the hatching is sometimes too hasty (Fig. 4) or too rigidly parallel (Fig.5), while his knowledge of anatomy is still inadequate and his observation not careful enough. But right from the start he shows flair and as early as 1807 he made a clever drawing of a relatively complex group (Fig. 6) , while the difficult figure of Marsyas was already well captured in 1808 and clearly evinces his growing knowledge o f anatomy, proportion , foreshortening and the effects of light (Fig. 7). The same development can be observed in his portrait drawings. That of Gerardus Vrolik (1775-1859, Fig.8), a professor at the Atheneum Illustre (the future university) and Scheffer' s teacher, with whom he always kept in touch (Note 6), is still not entirely convincing, but a portrait of 1809, thought to be of his mother (Fig.9, Note 7), shows him working much more systematically. It is not known when he left the Academy, but from the summer of 1809 we find him in France, where he was to live with only a few breaks from 1811 to his death. The first paintings and the Amsterdam exhibitions of 1808 and 1810 Ary Scheffer's earliest known history painting, Hannibal Swearing to Avenge his Brother Hasdrubal's Death (Fig. 10) Notes 8-10) was shown at the first exhibition of living masters in Amsterdam in 1808. Although there was every reason for giving this subject a Neo-Classical treatment, the chiaroscuro, earthy colours and free brushwork show Scheffer opting for the old Dutch tradition rather than the modern French style. This was doubtless on the prompting of his parents,for a comment in a letter from his mother in 1810 (Note 12) indicates that she shared the reservations of the Dutch in general about French Neo-Classicism. (Note 11). As the work of a twelve to thirteen year old, the painting naturally leaves something to be desired: the composition is too crowded and unbalanced and the anatomy of the secondary figures rudimentary. In a watercolour Scheffer made of the same subject, probably in the 1820's, he introduced much more space between the figures (Fig. 11, Note 13). Two portraits are known from this early period. The first, of Johanna Maria Verbeek (Fig. 12, Note 14), was done when the two youngsters were aged twelve. It again shows all the characteristics of an early work, being schematic in its simplicity, with some rather awkward details and inadequate plasticity. On the other hand the hair and earrings are fluently rendered, the colours harmonious and the picture has an undeniable charm. At the second exhibition of works by living masters in 1810, Ary Scheffer showed a 'portrait of a painter' (Fig. 13), who was undoubtedly his uncle Arnoldus Lamme, who also had work in the exhibition as did Scheffer's recently deceased father Johan-Bernard and his mother Cornelia Scheffer-Lamme, an indication of the stimulating surroundings in which he grew up. The work attracted general attention (Note 16) and it does, indeed, show a remarkable amount of progress, the plasticity, effects of light, brushwork and colour all revealing skill and care in their execution. The simple, bourgeois character of the portrait not only fits in with the Dutch tradition which Scheffer had learned from both his parents in Amsterdam, but also has points in common with the recent developments in France, which he could have got to know during his spell in Lille from autumn 1809 onwards. A Dutchman in Paris Empire and Restoration, 1811-30 In Amsterdam Scheffer had also been laught by his mother, a miniature painter, and his father, a portrait and history painter (Note 17). After his father's death in June 1809, his mother, who not only had a great influence on his artistic career, but also gave his Calvinism and a great love of literature (Note 18), wanted him to finish his training in Paris. After getting the promise of a royal grant from Louis Napoleon for this (Note 19) and while waiting for it to materialize, she sent the boy to Lille to perfect his French as well as further his artistic training. In 1811 Scheffer settled in Paris without a royal grant or any hope of one. He may possibly have studied for a short time under Prudhon (Note 20) , but in the autumn of 1811 he was officially contracted as a pupil of Guérin, one of the leading artists of the school of David, under whom he mastered the formulas of NeD-Classicism, witness his Orpheus and Eurydice (Fïg.14), shown in the Salon of 1814. During his first ten years in Paris Scheffer also painted many genre pieces in order, so he said, to earn a living for himself and his mother. Guérin's prophecy that he would make a great career as a history painter (Note 21) soon came true, but not in the way Guérin thought it would, Scheffer participating in the revolution initiated by his friends and fellow-pupils, Géricault and Delacroix, which resulted in the rise of the Romantic Movement. It was not very difficult for him to break with Neo-Classicism, for with his Dutch background he felt no great affinity with it (Note 22). This development is ilustrated by his Gaston de Foix Dying on the Battlefield After his Victory at Ravenna, shown at the Salon of 1824, and The Women of Souli Throwing Themselves into the Abyss (Fig.15), shown at that of 1827-8. The last years of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Influence of Rembrandt and the Dutch masters In 1829, when he seemed to have become completely assimilated in France and had won wide renown, Scheffer took the remarkable step of returning to the Netherlands to study the methods of Rembrandt and other Dutch old masters (Note 23) . A new orientation in his work is already apparent in the Women of Souli, which is more harmonious and considered in colour than the Gaston dc Foix (Note 24). This is linked on the one hand to developments in France, where numbers of young painters had abandoned extreme Romanticism to find the 'juste milieu', and on the other to Scheffer's Dutch background. Dutch critics were just as wary of French Romanticism as they had been of Neo-Classicism, urging their own painters to revive the traditions of the Golden Age and praising the French painters of the 'juste milieu'. It is notable how many critics commented on the influence of Rembrandt on Scheffer's works, e.g. his Faust, Marguérite, Tempête and portrait of Talleyrand at the Salon of 1851 (Note 26). The last two of these date from 1828 and show that the reorientation and the interest in Rembrandt predate and were the reasons for the return to the Netherlands in 1829. In 1834 Gustave Planche called Le Larmoyeur (Fig. 16) a pastiche of Rembrandt and A. Barbier made a comparable comment on Le Roi de Thule in 1839 (Note 27). However, as Paul Mantz already noted in 1850 (Note 28), Scheffer certainly did not fully adopt Rembrandt's relief and mystic light. His approach was rather an eclectic one and he also often imbued his work with a characteristically 19th-century melancholy. He himself wrote after another visit to the Netherlands in 1849 that he felt he had touched a chord which others had not attempted (Note 29) . Contacts with Dutch artists and writers Scheffer's links with the Netherlands come out equally or even more strongly in the many contacts he maintained there. As early as 1811-12 Sminck-Pitloo visited him on his way to Rome (Note 30), to be followed in the 1820's by J.C. Schotel (Note 31), while after 1830 as his fame increased, so the contacts also became more numerous. He was sought after by and corresponded with various art dealers (Note 33) and also a large number of Dutch painters, who visited him in Paris or came to study under him (Note 32) Numerous poems were published on paintings by him from 1838 onwards, while Jan Wap and Alexander Ver Huell wrote at length about their visits to him (Note 34) and a 'Scheffer Album' was compiled in 1859. Thus he clearly played a significant role in the artistic life of the Netherlands. International orientation As the son of a Dutch mother and a German father, Scheffer had an international orientation right from the start. Contemporary critics and later writers have pointed out the influences from English portrait painting and German religious painting detectable in his work (Note 35). Extracts from various unpublished letters quoted here reveal how acutely aware he was of what was likely to go down well not only in the Netherlands, but also in a country like England, where he enjoyed great fame (Notes 36-9) . July Monarchy and Second Empire. The last decades While most French artists of his generation seemed to have found their definitive style under the July Monarchy, Scheffer continued to search for new forms of expression. In the 1830's, at the same time as he painted his Rembrandtesque works, he also produced his famous Francesca da Rimini (Fig. 17), which is closer to the 'juste milieu' in its dark colours and linear accents. In the 1840's he used a simple and mainly bright palette without any picturesque effects, e.g. in his SS. Augustine and Monica and The Sorrows of the Earth (Note 41), but even this was not his last word. In an incident that must have occurred around 1857 he cried out on coming across some of his earlier works that he had made a mistake since then and wasted his time (Note 42) and in his Calvin of 1858 (Fig. 18) he resumed his former soft chiaroscuro and warm tones. It is characteristic of him that in that same year he painted a last version of The Sorrows of the Earth in the light palette of the 1840's. Despite the difficulty involved in the precise assessment of influences on a painter with such a complex background, it is clear that even in his later period, when his work scored its greatest successes in France, England and Germany, Scheffer always had a strong bond with the Netherlands and that he not only contributed to the artistic life there, but always retained a feeling for the traditions of his first fatherland. Appendix An appendix is devoted to a study of the head of an old man in Dordrecht, which is catalogued as a copy of a 17th-century painting in the style of Rembrandt done by Ary Scheffer at the age of twelve (Fig.19, Note 43). This cannot be correct, as it is much better than the other works by the twelve-year-old painter. Moreover, no mention is made of it in the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1859, where the Hannibal is given as his earliest work (Note 44). It was clearly unknown then, as it is not mentioned in any of the obituaries of 1858 and 1859 either. The earliest reference to it occurs in the list made bv Scheffer's daughter in 1897 of the works she was to bequeath to the Dordrecht museum. A clue to its identification may be a closely similar drawing by Cornelia Scheffer-Lamme (Fig. 20, Note 46), which is probably a copy after the head of the old man. She is known to have made copies after contemporary and 17th-century masters. The portrait might thus be attributable to Johan-Bernard Scheffer, for his wife often made copies of his works and he is known from sale catalogues to have painted various portraits of old men (Note 47, cf. Fig.21). Ary Scheffer also knew this. In 1839 his uncle Arnoldus Lamme wrote to him that he would look out for such a work at a sale (Note 48). It may be that he succeeded in finding one and that this portrait came into the possession of the Scheffer family in that way, but Johan-Bernard's work is too little known for us to be certain about this.

Background. The last quarter of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century, marked in Ukraine by significant social changes, actualized the necessity to turn to eternal spiritual values of national culture, among which Taras Shevchenko’s creativity takes leading positions. During this time, a number of works appeared in Ukrainian musical and stage art that supplemented the domestic “Shevchenkiana” (a total of the works devoted to Shevchenko): the operas by O. Zlotnik, V. Gubarenko, H. Maiboroda, L. Kolodub). The tradition of embodying the image of T. Shevchenko was creatively developed by O. Rudianskyi. The significant role of choral scenes in his opera “The Way of Taras” led to their involvement in revealing the leading idea of the work: to show the main periods of the life of the great poet. Choral scenes are peculiarly organized in the time-space of the opera, gaining symbolic meaning. The disclosure of this symbolism becomes the key to understanding in the modern context of the historical role of T. Shevchenko’s life and work. The purpose of this study is to identify the symbolism of chronotope in the choral dramaturgy of the opera by O. Rudianskyi. The following events from the life of Shevchenko are presented in the opera «The Way of Taras» by O. Rudianskyi (1992, 2nd ed. 2002: the libretto by V. Yurechko & V. Reva): his arrival to Kiev from St. Petersburg after the graduation of the Academy of Arts, the activity in The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, finally, the arrest and the exile. The composer uses the choral factor in full – almost every stage of the opera has choral episodes, which receive various functions depending on the development of the dramaturgy of the opera. O. Rudianskyi created the images of the Ukrainians peasants, young men and women, children, members of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, prisoners, soldiers -- by the use of male, female, children and mixed choir compositions. The opera includes: the "Ukrainian world", which obtains its characteristic precisely due to the presence of choral singing; the "Kazakh world", which is represented mostly by solo and dancing episodes; the "Russian world", which is presented through the spoken dialogues, orchestral fragments, choral recitation. The radical contrast in the depiction of Ukraine, the Kazakh steppes, and the St. Petersburg world creates to the chronotope changes in connection with the plot: Taras Shevchenko is free in Ukraine, he is not free in Russia and Kazakhstan. The opera-biography “The Way of Taras” almost for the first time at the Ukrainian musical stage emphasizes in the image of Shevchenko, who was a poet and a painter, the versatile of his creative personality. O. Rudianskyi introduces the method of artistic documentalism in revealing the events of T. Shevchenko’s life path, but along with the real people (Kostomarov, Petrov, Veresai), there are also fictional characters (the caretaker of the steppe – «Berehynia stepu»). Each of the pictures of the opera highlights a certain episode of the biography of the hero. The fragmentary character inherent in the opera by O. Rudianskyi makes it similar the opera “in four novels” «Taras Shevchenko» by H. Maiboroda and the opera-phantasmagoria «Poet» by L. Kolodub. Two female characters in the opera, Oksana and Zabarzhada, presents as a symbol of Taras’s unrealizable love. The image of Oksana – the first love of the poet – is created due to choreography, that makes it possible to define a ballet as another genre component of the composition. The development of the female theme involves both the women’s and the mixed choirs. O. Rudianskyi found a new approach to embodiment of the personality of the artist and poet in the first picture of the opera. This is the moment when T. Shevchenko is painting one of his picture on the bank of the Dnieper, reciting, at the same time, the lines of his immortal verse «Reve ta stohne Dnipr shyrokyi» («The broad Dnieper is roaring and moaning»), which became a folk song. In the fifth picture of the opera it is being sung powerfully by the choir – all Ukrainian people. So, the poet is presented as a prophet and spiritual leader of the people. Inspired by the Poet, people spoke out against the tyranny of the authorities. T. Shevchenko’s prayer with a mixed choir «To me, O God, give love on Earth» («Meni zh, mii Bozhe, na zemli podai liubov») is the reminiscence of the first picture, where the Poet created his immortal verse (its reciting with the vocalization of the choir basses). Conclusions. Thanks to choral scenes in the opera “The Way of Taras” by O. Rudiiyansky, a single space-time is created, in which the composer gives to the choir a symbolic meaning. In the choral presentation, the song about Dnieper River sounds as a symbol of freedom of the Ukrainian people; the effect by choir “church bells” symbolizes the conciliarity of Ukraine; the Marche funebre is the personification of the soldier serve, and the words-symbols “path”, “movement” embody Poet’s fate, inextricably linked with the fate of the Ukrainian people. The symbol of the opera whole is the word-image “path”. The semantics of the path, the moving is revealed both on the stage and on the mental levels: the Dnieper waves are constantly moving, the peasants are going to work, the path of prisoners is endless, and human life itself is the Path...

Film directors in American cinema have used the artist (painter, singer, thespian, writer, etc.) as a vehicle for auteurist identification in feature bio-pics for decades. The portrayal of the protagonists in these films usually falls victim to the "Van Gogh" syndrome, that is, the insistance on the creative inner turmoil, the solitary, misunderstood genius, and brave rebellion of its central character. This approach, however, breaks down completely when confronted with the void that is the historical figure known as "Andy Warhol." The popular image of Warhol, his studied superficiality, unapologetic commercialism, and outright catatonic demeanour, is completely disruptive to the traditional humanist artist biography. It is unsurprising, then, that recent film protagonists within the more traditional bio-pic framework found Warhol a figure that needed to be contained, neutralised, discredited, and even shot. Mainstream cinematic narrative has added little to the conventions of the artist biography since the Renaissance. Renaissance painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari appropriated the Petrarchian edifying "Great Lives" model to ennoble and sanitise the often problematic and distasteful personalities who populated the Italian art world. This approach prevailed over the next several hundred years, and was expanded upon by the intellectual figures of the Romantic period (who were very aware of Vasari's work). The Romantics contributed to the profile of a proper artist the following traits: misunderstood intellectual fury, dark psychological depths, and flouting of social convention. The bio-pic genre, especially as it relates to biographies of artists, also lauds humanistic "greatness" as its standard of significance. The bio-pic absolutely relies on a strong central figure, who can be shown in about two hours to have some substantial educational value, worthy of the expense of the film-makers and the attention of the viewer. In the mid-1990s, not long after his unexpected death in 1987, a character called "Andy Warhol" appeared in supporting roles in a number of feature films. The Doors (1991), Basquiat (1996), and I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) all feature an Andy Warhol character grounded squarely in various popular myths. All of the three 90s feature films which include Warhol in a substantial speaking role explicitly contrast him against another artist-figure. This other artist is presented as somehow preferable to Warhol, whether in conviction, authenticity, or validity of vision. The artist in question, Basquiat/Morrison/Solanas, predictably serves as the film-makers' lens through which the past is refracted (though more problematically in the case of Solanas). Warhol is outward sign of Basquiat's slide, the danger of fame-mongering for Morrison, and Valerie Solanas's misogynist nemesis. In each case, the more valorised figure is at first twinned with Warhol when drawn into his orbit. Eventually, the film's narrative contrasts the main subject against what the diegetic Warhol represents. In each case, Warhol becomes a metonymic representation of a larger organising factor: the economic/personality-driven entertainment industry, phallocentric hegemony, art's dead end, etc. The demonisation of Warhol in recent bio-pics is a good starting point for examining how his image is being interpreted by the mainstream media. It is clear that in this particular forum, Warhol's impact is understood only negatively. The purpose of this study will be to demonstrate how uncomfortable the creative arts world in general, and narrative film-making in particular, is with the "empty" legacy of Warhol and his Factory, and how the reactions against it illustrate a fear of Warhol's anti-humanist, subject-less project. It is fascinating that in the feature films, Warhol appears solely as a character in other people's stories rather than as the focus of biographical treatment. Warhol's very conscious emptying-out project has made nearly impossible any effort to deal with him and his legacy in any traditional narrative manner. Warhol's public persona -- simple, boring, derivative, and unheroic -- is directly at odds with the conventional "artist-hero" subjects necessary to the bio pic genre. This type is seen most typically in the old potboilers The Agony and the Extasy, about Michelangelo, and Lust for Life, about Van Gogh, as well as the more recent Artemisia about Artemisia Gentileschi. The very fact of Andy's posthumous film career fits neatly into his performative œuvre as a whole, and is easily interpreted as an extension of his life-long project. Warhol's entire self-imaging stratagem steadfastly affirmed that there is no center to illuminate -- no "real" Andy Warhol behind the persona. Warhol constantly disavowed any "meaning" beyond the surface of his art works, and ascribed it no value beyond market price. He preferred methods and forms (advertising, silk-screening, and film-making) that were easy for his Factory workers to execute and endlessly duplicate after his vague orders. Further, he ascribed no importance to his own bodily shell as "artist Andy Warhol". In an act of supreme self-branding, Warhol sent actors to impersonate him at lectures (most famously at University of Utah, who demanded he return the lecture fee), since he was only a packaged, reproducible product himself. In Warhol's art, there is no hand-made integrity, no originality, no agonised genius in a garret. He displays none of the traits that traditionally have allowed artists to be called geniuses. Warhol's studio's automation, the laying bare of the cheapest and slickest aspects of the culture industry, has long been the most feared facet of Warhol's artistic legacy. It is beside the point to argue that Warhol's meaninglessness is thematised to the degree that it has meaning. Warhol's erasure of all humanistic "aura" clearly remains threatening to a great number of artists, who rely heavily on such artistic stereotypes. Basquiat In 1996's Basquiat, painter/director Julian Schnabel used the dead painter as a proxy for telling his "I was there" version of the 80s New York art scene. In Schnabel's rather heavy-handed morality tale, young African-American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat's meteoric burn-out career is treated as a metaphor for the 80s art world as a whole. Schnabel clearly knows his Vasari. His film's scenario is a barely modified adaptation of humanist/romantic artist mythology. Traces of Vasari's tale of Cimabue's discovery of Giotto, as well as Van Gogh's various misunderstood artist scenarios are laboriously played out. In fact, the first words in the film invoke the Van Gogh cliché, foregrounding Schnabel's myth-making impulse. They are art critic Rene Ricard's, speaking over Basquiat waking up in a cardboard box in Central Park: "everyone wants to get on the Van Gogh boat. ... No one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another Van Gogh, ... When you first see a new picture, you have to be very careful. You might be staring at Van Gogh's ear." This quote sets the tone for Basquiat's art world experience narrative, trotting out every single Van Gogh-inspired legend (with heroin abuse standing in for the cut-off ear) to apply to Basquiat. In fact, the film veritably thematises Romantic cliché. The film's main project is the mythologisation of Jean-Michel and by extension Schnabel. However, by foregrounding the Van Gogh/Basquiat connection in such self-conscious terms, it seems the viewer is supposed to find it "ironic". (The irony is really that this po-mo window dressing is otherwise deeply at odds with the rest of the film's message.) The film suggests that Basquiat is both worthy of the allusion to the great humanistic tradition, and that his special case ("the first great black painter") changes all the rules and makes all clichés inapplicable. Schnabel's art, which is usually described as "Neo-Abstract Expressionist", and particularly his market value, relies heavily on the aura created by previous artists in the macho heroic mold. His paintings take up Pollock's "all over" effect but with de Kooning's jauntier color. He also fastens found objects, most famously broken plates, in a pastiche of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Like Warhol, Schnabel often borrows recognisable motifs. However, instead of advertising and popular culture, Schnabel's come from a more elevated tradition; Old Master paintings appropriated from "legitimate" art history. Needless to say, Julian Schnabel himself has much invested in reaffirming the artist-genius myth that is threatening to be deconstructed by a good number of art critics and historians. Schnabel's agenda is specifically art historical, though no less political. Schnabel, through Basquiat, restores the artist to his proper place as individual creator challenging the outmoded conventions of established art. Warhol, portrayed as the quintessential post-modern artist, represents all that has gone wrong in the art world: superficiality, mass production, commodification, popular culture influence, and the erasure of art history and deep significance. In spite of the film's self-consciousness about the phoniness of the gallery scene, Basquiat's lionisation by it validates a retrograde concept of "pure" artist's vision. Schnabel is attacking what he sees as the deadening effect of post-modernism that threatens Schnabel's own place in art history. Basquiat's escalating drug problem and alliance late in the film with Warhol signals that he has followed the wrong direction, that he is hitting a dead end. The character Milo (Gary Oldman), the Schnabel manqué, sets up the contrast to illustrate Basquiat's slide. Milo is aligned with all that is exemplary in establishment virtues of hearth and home (doting fatherhood, settled domesticity, good living). The wholesome hand-made integrity of Milo/Schnabel's art, in line with traditional definitions of artistic greatness, is deeply at odds with the affected commercialism of Warhol's work. Schnabel's artistic influences show up clearly in his very marked progressive view of art history and clearly named privileged pantheon. In the film, Schnabel is at pains to insert Basquiat and himself into this tradition. The very first scene of the film sees Jean-Michel as a child with his mother at the MOMA, where she is in tears in front of Picasso's Guernica. In the narrative, this is quickly followed by Ricard's Van Gogh quote above. As an adult, Jean-Michel enacts Rauschenberg's edict, to "narrow the gap between art and life". This is illustrated by Jean-Michel not restricting his artistic output to work on canvas in a studio. He graffitis walls, signs table tops à la Rauschenberg, and makes designs on a diner countertop in maple syrup. Later, Jean-Michel is shown painting in his studio walking around the canvas on the floor, in an all-over technique, mirroring the familiar Hans Namuth film of Jackson Pollock. Aligning Jean-Michel with the pre-Warhol, and especially Abstract Expressionist artists, positions Basquiat and Schnabel together against the "dead end" of Warhol's version of Pop. Basquiat and the director have inherited the "right" kind of art, and will be the progenitors of the next generation. Warhol as a "dead end" leads to a discussion of the relationship between artists' procreative sexuality and their art. In the film, Warhol is assumed to be asexual (rather than homosexual), and this lack of virility is clearly linked to the sterility, transitoriness, and barrenness of his art. Schnabel/Milo and Basquiat, in their marked heterosexuality, are the "fathers" of the next generation. In Basquiat's collaboration with Warhol, even Andy understands his own impotence. Warhol says, "I can't teach you anything, you're a natural, are you kidding me?", and most importantly, "you paint out everything I do, Jean-Michel". By privileging Jean-Michel's art (and his own) over Warhol's, Schnabel is clearly trying to paint out the mutation of the Warholisation of art, and paint in his own art historical eugenics. The Doors In a less substantial role but in a similar vein, Warhol also appears briefly in Oliver Stone's 1991 The Doors, as part of a brief "rising fame" montage of New York incidents. Like Schnabel, Stone has a lot to lose from investment in Warhol's spiritual and aesthetic emptiness. Though brief, Warhol's appearance in the film, like in Basquiat, serves as a cautionary tale for its hero. The contrast made between the vacuous Factory crowd and the "authentic" Doors presages the dominant trope for the Warhol character that Schnabel would expand upon later. The Factory sequence dramatises the glamour and seductiveness of the hollow side of fame that may lead Morrison off his spiritual-quest path. The Native American shaman who Jim sees at pivotal points in his life appears at the Factory, warning him not to take the wrong path represented by Warhol. The Doors are at a pivotal moment, the onset of fame, and must act carefully or risk ending up as meaningless as Warhol. Stone's chronicling of the 60s relies heavily on what could be called the humanist ideal of the power of the individual to effect change, raise consciousness, and open minds. Via Stone's simple reductiveness, Warhol represents here the wrong kind of counter-culture, the anti-hippie. By emulating Warhol, the Doors follow the wrong shaman. To Stone, Warhol's superficiality represents all that is dangerous about celebrity and entertainment: the empty, mind-destroying cocaine high of the masses. I Shot Andy Warhol The film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) problematises the idea put forth in the other films of Warhol as artistic anti-Christ, simply because the film's subject is much more difficult to heroise, and like Warhol does not fit snugly into bio-pic conventions. Like Basquiat, the film also takes the point of view of a protagonist at the edge of Warhol's sphere of influence, here radical feminist and S.C.U.M. (the Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto scribe Valerie Solanas, in order to criticise what Warhol represents. Unlike the previous films, here Warhol's character is central to the narrative. Although Warhol clearly represents something very negative to the Solanas character, the film never fully endorses its subject's point of view. That Warhol deserved and needed to be shot for any reason beyond Solanas's personal demons is never established. Perhaps this ambivalence is a flaw of the film, but it is also telling about the problematic legacies of feminism and Pop, two movements that have led to challenges of the hero-artist ideal. In this film, the relationship between Warhol and the main protagonist is extremely complex. Andy and his crowd are presented as clearly odious. Though Valerie comes off as more interesting and sympathetic, she is also still clearly an unhinged oddball spewing specious ideology. Within the film, Valerie's attraction to the Factory scene seems to stem from something her friend, transvestite Candy Darling, says: "if anyone can make you a star, Andy Warhol can". Valerie desperately wants attention for her radicalism (and likely for other psychological reasons, which make radicalism attractive to her, as well), and sees Andy's power for "star-making", especially among the more marginal of society, as something from which she can profit. Valerie's mistake seems to be in confusing the artistic avant-garde with the politically radical. Valerie finds kinship in Warhol's androgyny and lack of enthusiasm for sex, but does not realise immediately that Andy is interested in her play Up Your Ass primarily for its titillation and shock value, and is entirely uninterested in it from a content standpoint. The content/emptiness conflict in Valerie and Andy's "artistic visions" becomes one of the major thematics in the film. Though like Solanas, he finds community with margin-dwellers, Andy is portrayed as far too implicated in and dependent on the so-called culture industry in order to be "Andy Warhol -- Superstar". Andy's interest in the low-life that Valerie represents is, of course, wholly superficial, which enrages her. She sees no worthy theoretical position in the banal contentlessness of Andy's circle. Valerie's manifesto and dramatic works have almost an excess of content. They work to kick people in the balls to get them to open their eyes and see the appalling conditions around them. The Warhol here, like in The Doors, wants people to see empty banality, but has no interest in effecting change. Valerie's play, as read simultaneously in the lesbian coffee shop and at Andy's studio, dramatises this divergence. When Warhol and crowd read the script with dull inflection, inert on the couch, one can imagine the very words being put to use in a Warhol film. When Valerie and friends perform those same words, the passionate engagement and deep meaningfulness -- at least to Valerie -- capture her urgent commitment to her ideas. As Valerie gets more desperate to disseminate her ideas, and thus begins to further alienate the Factory crowd, she starts to see Andy as in fact the bodily symbol of the "man" she wants cut up. Not only does he represent the patriarch of the art world who has dismissed her and has invalidated her vision, but also more broadly the hierarchy and deep structure of Andy's world parallels the consumeristic and image-driven society at large. If Valerie wants to live with integrity within her own code, the "man" must be deposed. On top of the personal gratification she would receive in this act, Solanas would also finally find a world-wide audience for her views. Now we can understand why, when asked by the press why she shot Andy, Valerie tells them "he had too much control over my life." Unhappily, instead of women rising up against their male oppressors to take up their rightful place of superiority, Solanas gets labeled a "lunatic" by the same media and larger establishment which (in this film) proclaim Warhol a genius. Solanas dissolves into a bit-player in the Andy Warhol story. One of the major interests of this film is that it excerpts a player from the limits of that "master narrative" story and allows them their own subjecthood. I Shot Andy Warhol, with its assertive quotational title, seems to want to reinscribe subjecthood to one of the most truly radical of Andy's superstars, reclaiming the value of Valerie's polemics from the emptiness of her anecdotal role in Warhol's biography. Though Valerie clearly sees Andy as her nemesis, the film constructs him as a boring, ineffectual, self-absorbed effete. The great weakness of the film is that their conflict begins to look like a midget wrestling contest. Since both are competing for higher freakdom, the broader implications of either of their projects are only rarely glimpsed. It should be clear by now that for so many, fictional Warhol is not just a problematic figure, but nearly a monstrous one. The film-makers clearly show what elements of Warhol's representative strategy they find so threatening. Schnabel and Stone have the most to lose in the replacement of their value systems (genius investment and 60s macho spirituality) by what they perceive as postmodern de-centredness, and therefore need to attack that threat the most forcefully. Less conservatively, for Harron, Warhol's Pop objectification of everyone, including women, seems to threaten women's hard-won subjectivity through feminism. Warhol, Morrison, Basquiat and Solanas were all artists who played heavily on their roles as outsiders to mainstream society. These films build the film-makers' soapbox on the "right" way to be alienated, bourgeois-hating, and rebellious, and the films assume a sympathetic viewing audience. Even though the interest in Warhol and his flashy milieu probably got at least two of these films made in the first place, it seems clear that even the more independently-minded film establishment would rather align themselves with the romanticised artist bio-pic subject than the black hole they fear Warhol personifies. Perhaps the character Andy Warhol is put to most appropriate use when he is only glimpsed, such as in the films Death Becomes Her, where he appears as one of the party guests for people who have taken the magic potion to live forever, and as part of the 70s glam wallpaper in 54. This kind of "product placement" use of Warhol most succinctly encapsulates the vacant banality he espoused. In these films, Warhol is unburdened by other artists' attempts to fill him up with meaning. Warhol is taken at his word. His easily recognisable and reproducible bodily shell is hollow and superficial, just as he said it was. Warhol, Morrison, Basquiat and Solanas were all artists who played heavily on their roles as outsiders to mainstream society. These films build the film-makers' soapbox on the "right" way to be alienated, bourgeois-hating, and rebellious, and the films assume a sympathetic viewing audience. Even though the interest in Warhol and his flashy milieu probably got at least two of these films made in the first place, it seems clear that even the more independently-minded film establishment would rather align themselves with the romanticised artist bio-pic subject than the black hole they fear Warhol personifies. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Julie Turnock. "Painting Out Pop: "Andy Warhol" as a Character in 90s Films." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php>. Chicago style: Julie Turnock, "Painting Out Pop: "Andy Warhol" as a Character in 90s Films," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Julie Turnock. (1999) Painting out pop: "Andy Warhol" as a character in 90s films. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php> ([your date of access]).

Using Craig Owens’ argument about the repression of the discursive in modernist art, the article provides an analytical and theoretical account of the complex and changing relationship between the visual and the textual in American painting since c. 1950. The article focuses on the status of verbal inscriptions on a canvas, their function, meaning, and relation to the medium of painting. In the introductory section of the text special attention to the poststructuralist, expanded understanding of such notions as “text” and “writing” and its consequences in visual arts as well as the unresolvable dialectic of looking and reading and its theoretical implications addressed in more recent art theory. The analytical part starts with the discussion of the paradox of Pollock’s drip paintings as both the epitome of modernist autonomy and a figure of “arche-writing” (a potential script); than it focuses on more specific cases of textuality in C. Twombly’s, J. Johns’ and E. Ruscha’s works, and finally deconstructive modalities of “writing in painting” in works by Ch. Wool, G. Ligon, K. Aptekar and M. Tansey become the object of interpretation. In conclusion, it is argued that the latter artist’s work – Reader – epitomizes the differential superposition not only of painting and writing but also of the modern and the postmodern, the past, and the present experience of “reading” images. As a result, the long perspective on the process of the emergence of the textual in painting described in the article does not so much operate with the logic of binary oppositions between modernism and postmodernism or exclusion of text and its subsequent inclusion, as allows us to look at it in terms of layers of signs, always already there, coming to visibility at different historical moments.

After illustrating the varied artistic production of the Kwanyin Clan, one of the most important Chinese graffiti crews, this paper analyses six of their main artworks in detail (styles, techniques, aesthetic conceptions and artworks texts). In these artworks, the Kwanyin Clan tried for the first time to merge Euro-American graffiti practice with the ancient traditional arts practiced and appreciated by the Chinese literati (calligraphy, poetry, painting, seals and ceramics). Comparing the Kwanyin Clan members to ‘modern literati writers’, the present article shows how this crew succeeded in reinventing ancient Chinese art forms using Euro-American graffiti vocabulary, paving the way for a new development of graffiti art in China.

Modern history has looked on the United States of America as a country with a very distinct and proud national heritage and identity, though this was not always so. When founded in 1776, America was a nation that had not yet developed the identity and customs that would soon come to define the country nationally and internationally. The articulation of this distinct identity fell to the artist class and, in particular, first and second generation American painters. Painters such as Thomas Eakins, Thomas Cole, and the Hudson River School of artists pulled from their natural surroundings to create art that would foster pride in the values of peace, liberty, and freedom. Without these early painters, the United States would not have the strong identity that is so well known today.