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  Cézanne

  Nathalia Brodskaya

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  Since his death 100 years ago, Cézanne has become the most famous painter of the nineteenth century. He was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839 and the happiest period of his life was his early youth in Provence, in company with Emile Zolá, another Italian. Following Zolá’s example, Cézanne went to Paris in his twenty-first year. 
      During the Franco-Prussian war he deserted the military, dividing his time between open-air painting and the studio. He said to Vollard, an art dealer, “I’m only a painter. Parisian wit gives me a pain. Painting nudes on the banks of the Arc [a river near Aix] is all I could ask for.” Encouraged by Renoir, one of the first to appreciate him, he exhibited with the impressionists in 1874 and in 1877. He was received with derision, which deeply hurt him.
       Cézanne’s ambition, in his own words, was “to make out of Impressionism something as solid and durable as the paintings of the museums.” His aim was to achieve the monumental in a modern language of glowing, vibrating tones. Cézanne wanted to retain the natural colour of an object and to harmonise it with the various influences of light and shade trying to destroy it; to work out a scale of tones expressing the mass and character of the form.
       Cézanne loved to paint fruit because it afforded him obedient models and he was a slow worker. He did not intend to simply copy an apple. He kept the dominant colour and the character of the fruit, but heightened the emotional appeal of the form by a scheme of rich and concordant tones. In his paintings of still-life he is a master. His fruit and vegetable compositions are truly dramatic; they have the weight, the nobility, the style of immortal forms. No other painter ever brought to a red apple a conviction so heated, sympathy so genuinely spiritual, or an observation so protracted. No other painter of equal ability ever reserved for still-life his strongest impulses. Cézanne restored to painting the pre-eminence of knowledge, the most essential quality to all creative effort.
      The death of his father in 1886 made him a rich man, but he made no change in his abstemious mode of living. Soon afterwards, Cézanne retired permanently to his estate in Provence. He was probably the loneliest of painters of his day. At times a curious melancholy attacked him, a black hopelessness. He grew more savage and exacting, destroying canvases, throwing them out of his studio into the trees, abandoning them in the fields, and giving them to his son to cut into puzzles, or to the people of Aix.
       At the beginning of the century, when Vollard arrived in Provence with intentions of buying on speculation all the Cézannes he could get hold of, the peasantry, hearing that a fool from Paris was actually handing out money for old linen, produced from barns a considerable number of still-lifes and landscapes. The old master of Aix was overcome with joy, but recognition came too late. In 1906 he died from a fever contracted while painting in a downpour of rain.

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  Art as Extraordinary Science - A...

  Jenny Waller

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  Art education has gone through a number of paradigms since its origins in the medieval guilds. Yet ever since joining the university system in the 1970s, art departments have struggled to articulate a contemporary paradigm which accurately reflects what they do, to the extent that it often seems more realistic to say that art can't be taught at all.
  At the same time, science departments have struggled with the problem first noted by science historian Thomas Kuhn in 1962 – that the history of science depends on the creative brilliance of 'extraordinary scientists' who yet have no place within the confines of traditional university teaching.
  In this book, Jenny Waller argues that both these problems result from our assumptions about what counts as education. Taking the axes of Articulation and Acceptance by the university disciplines, she creates a grid-matrix of educational assumptions resulting in the quadrants Professional Practice, Normal Science, Extraordinary science and Voodoo. Then using the findings from a year-long ethnographic study of Fine Art studio teaching in a university department, she shows how contemporary art teaching fits into the quadrant of extraordinary science, providing a powerful contemporary paradigm for what art educators do.
  At the same time, her analysis of how art is taught provides science teachers with a blueprint for developing the potential of their students to be truly extraordinary.
  "This articulation…makes an original and significant contribution to the current literature on teaching and learning practices in the creative arts."
  Professor Bruce Brown, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for research, University of Brighton

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  William Lee Martin: The Nutcracker

  William Lee Martin

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  The Texas comedian returns with his third television one-hour special talking all things Christmas including traditions, the pitfalls of having family over, and finding the ultimate gift in this one-of-a-kind stand-up special.

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  Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! The...

  NPR

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  Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! is NPR’s weekly hour-long quiz program. Each week on the radio listeners test their knowledge against a panel of the best and brightest in the news and entertainment world: Adam Felber; Roy Blount, Jr.; Paula Poundstone; Mo Rocca; Roxanne Roberts; Charlie Pierce; and others. 
  This two-disk set features highlights from the popular “Not My Job” segment of the show, during which celebrity guest contestants answer questions on topics unrelated to their particular area of expertise and compete for the ultimate prize: NPR veteran announcer Carl Kasell’s voice on a lucky listener’s answering machine.Contents:Barack ObamaTerry GrossMajor Robert BatemanLee SmithHarold RamisPenn JilletteJaneane GarofaloBrian WilliamsKen JenningsSarah SilvermanTom HanksTom & Ray Magliozzi

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  Andrea Mantegna and the Italian...

  Joseph Manca

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  Mantegna; humanist, geometrist, archaeologist, of great scholastic and imaginative intelligence, dominated the whole of northern Italy by virtue of his imperious personality. Aiming at optical illusion, he mastered perspective. He trained in painting at the Padua School where Donatello and Paolo Uccello had previously attended. Even at a young age commissions for Andrea’s work flooded in, for example the frescos of the Ovetari Chapel of Padua. In a short space of time Mantegna found his niche as a modernist due to his highly original ideas and the use of perspective in his works. His marriage with Nicolosia Bellini, the sister of Giovanni, paved the way for his entree into Venice. Mantegna reached an artistic maturity with his Pala San Zeno. He remained in Mantova and became the artist for one of the most prestigious courts in Italy – the Court of Gonzaga. Classical art was born. Despite his links with Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna refused to adopt their innovative use of colour or leave behind his own technique of engraving.

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  Deities Dolls and Devices -...

  Lauren E. Talalay

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  A report on the prehistoric ceramic figurines recovered from the Franchthi Cave in Greece. 
   
  Talalay reports on a small body of figurines (twenty-four figurines and twenty-one fragments) recovered during excavations at Franchthi Cave and at the nearby open-air settlement along the present shoreline. She also reexamines the theoretical and methodological foundations of scholarship in the field of figurine studies. A thorough and pathfinding study of the most important body of figurines from southern Greece, this book will be especially valuable to specialists in prehistoric Greece and to all scholars interested in early representations of the human figure in prehistoric art and in the significance of these representations to the members of early human communities. The book also makes a contribution to the growing body of literature on gender in early societies with a critical evaluation of the uses of evidence in addressing gender issues.

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