Portal:The arts
T H E A R T S P O R T A L
The arts or creative arts are a vast range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompasses multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing, and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized, and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training, and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations, and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural, and individual identities while transmitting values, impressions, judgements, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life, and experiences across time and space.
Prominent examples of the arts include: visual arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting), literary arts (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose), and performing arts (including dance, music, and theatre). They can employ skill and imagination to produce objects and performances, convey insights and experiences, and construct new environments and spaces.
The arts can refer to common, popular, or everyday practices as well as more sophisticated, systematic, or institutionalized ones. They can be discrete and self-contained or combine and interweave with other art forms, such as the combination of artwork with the written word in comics. They can also develop or contribute to some particular aspect of a more complex art form, as in cinematography. By definition, the arts themselves are open to being continually redefined. The practice of modern art, for example, is a testament to the shifting boundaries, improvisation and experimentation, reflexive nature, and self-criticism or questioning that art and its conditions of production, reception, and possibility can undergo.
As both a means of developing capacities of attention and sensitivity and as ends in themselves, the arts can simultaneously be a form of response to the world and a way that our responses and what we deem worthwhile goals or pursuits are transformed. From prehistoric cave paintings to ancient and contemporary forms of ritual to modern-day films, art has served to register, embody, and preserve our ever-shifting relationships to each other and to the world. (Full article...)
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Portrait Diptych of Dürer's Parents (or Dürer's Parents with Rosaries) is the collective name for two late-15th century portrait panels by the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer. They show the artist's parents, Barbara Holper (c. 1451–1514) and Albrecht Dürer the Elder (c. 1427–1502), when she was around 39 and he was 63 years. The portraits are unflinching records of the physical and emotional effects of ageing. The Dürer family was close, and Dürer may have intended the panels either to display his skill to his parents or as keepsakes while he travelled soon after as a journeyman painter.
They were created either as pendants, that is conceived as a pair and intended to hang alongside each other, or diptych wings. However, this formation may have been a later conception; Barbara's portrait seems to have been executed some time after her husband's and it is unusual for a husband to be placed to the viewer's right in paired panels. His father's panel is considered the superior work and has been described as one of Dürer's most exact and honest portraits. They are among four paintings or drawings Dürer made of his parents, each of which unsentimentally examines the deteriorating effects of age. His later writings contain eulogies for both parents, from which the love and respect he felt toward them are evident. (Full article...) -
The General in His Labyrinth (original Spanish title: El general en su laberinto) is a 1989 dictator novel by Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It is a fictionalized account of the last seven months of Simón Bolívar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia. The book traces Bolívar's final journey from Bogotá to the Caribbean coastline of Colombia in his attempt to leave South America for exile in Europe. Breaking with the traditional heroic portrayal of Bolívar El Libertador, García Márquez depicts a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted. The story explores the labyrinth of Bolívar's life through the narrative of his memories, in which "despair, sickness, and death inevitably win out over love, health, and life".
Following the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), García Márquez decided to write about the "Great Liberator" after reading an unfinished novel by his friend Álvaro Mutis. He borrowed the setting—Bolívar's voyage down the Magdalena River in 1830—from Mutis. García Márquez spent two years researching the subject, encompassing the extensive memoirs of Bolívar's Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel Florencio O'Leary, as well as numerous other historical documents and consultations with academics. (Full article...) -
A Handful of Dust is a novel by the British writer Evelyn Waugh. First published in 1934, it is often grouped with the author's early, satirical comic novels for which he became famous in the pre–World War II years. Some commentators regard it as a transitional work due to its serious undertones, pointing towards Waugh's Catholic postwar fiction.
Tony Last is an English country squire, who, having seen his illusions shattered one by one, joins an expedition to the Brazilian jungle, only to find himself trapped in a remote outpost as the prisoner of a maniac. Waugh incorporated several autobiographical elements into the plot, including his own recent desertion by his wife. In 1933–34 he travelled into the South American interior, and a number of incidents from the voyage are incorporated into the novel. Tony's fate in the jungle was first used by Waugh in a short story, published in 1933 under the title "The Man Who Liked Dickens". (Full article...) -
Nixon in China is an opera in three acts by John Adams with a libretto by Alice Goodman. Adams's first opera, it was inspired by U.S. president Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to the People's Republic of China. The work premiered at the Houston Grand Opera on October 22, 1987, in a production by Peter Sellars with choreography by Mark Morris. When Sellars approached Adams with the idea for the opera in 1983, Adams was initially reluctant, but eventually decided that the work could be a study in how myths come to be, and accepted the project. Goodman's libretto was the result of considerable research into Nixon's visit, though she disregarded most sources published after the 1972 trip.
To create the sounds he sought, Adams augmented the orchestra with a large saxophone section, additional percussion, and electronic synthesizer. Although sometimes described as minimalist, the score displays a variety of musical styles, embracing minimalism after the manner of Philip Glass alongside passages echoing 19th-century composers such as Wagner and Johann Strauss. With these ingredients, Adams mixes Stravinskian 20th-century neoclassicism, jazz references, and big band sounds reminiscent of Nixon's youth in the 1930s. The combination of these elements varies frequently, to reflect changes in the onstage action. (Full article...) -
The Cross Temple (Chinese: 十字寺; pinyin: Shízì sì) is a former place of worship in Fangshan, Beijing. Buddhists and early Chinese Christians used the temple during different periods. Originally built as a Buddhist temple, some scholars hypothesise that it saw Christian use during the Tang dynasty (618–907). The temple was used by Buddhists during the Liao dynasty (916–1125) and by Christians during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). It returned to Buddhist use during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), before being sold in 1911. It was first recorded in modern scholarship in 1919, damaged during the Cultural Revolution, and re-established as a national-level protected site in 2006. Some scholars consider it to be the only place of worship of the Church of the East (also known as Nestorian Christianity) discovered in China.
Today, the site features two ancient steles, as well as groundwork and the bases of several pillars. The steles date to the Liao and Yuan dynasties, but their inscriptions were tampered with during the Ming. During the early 20th century, two stone blocks carved with crosses and other patterns were also discovered at the site, with one of them also bearing an inscription in Syriac. The blocks are presently on display at the Nanjing Museum. (Full article...) -
Louis Lambert is an 1832 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), included in the Études philosophiques section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set mostly in a school at Vendôme, it examines the life and theories of a boy genius fascinated by the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772).
Balzac wrote Louis Lambert during the summer of 1832 while he was staying with friends at the Château de Saché, and published three editions with three different titles. The novel contains a minimal plot, focusing mostly on the metaphysical ideas of its boy-genius protagonist and his only friend (eventually revealed to be Balzac himself). Although it is not a significant example of the realist style for which Balzac became famous, the novel provides insight into the author's own childhood. Specific details and events from the author's life – including punishment from teachers and social ostracism – suggest a fictionalized autobiography. (Full article...) -
Richardson in 1949
Sir Ralph David Richardson (19 December 1902 – 10 October 1983) was an English actor who, with John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, was one of the trinity of male actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. He worked in films throughout most of his career, and played more than sixty cinema roles. From an artistic but not theatrical background, Richardson had no thought of a stage career until a production of Hamlet in Brighton inspired him to become an actor. He learned his craft in the 1920s with a touring company and later the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. In 1931 he joined the Old Vic, playing mostly Shakespearean roles. He led the company the following season, succeeding Gielgud, who had taught him much about stage technique. After he left the company, a series of leading roles took him to stardom in the West End and on Broadway.
In the 1940s, together with Olivier and John Burrell, Richardson was the co-director of the Old Vic company. There, his most celebrated roles included Peer Gynt and Falstaff. He and Olivier led the company to Europe and Broadway in 1945 and 1946, before their success provoked resentment among the governing board of the Old Vic, leading to their dismissal from the company in 1947. In the 1950s, in the West End and occasionally on tour, Richardson played in modern and classic works including The Heiress, Home at Seven, and Three Sisters. He continued on stage and in films until shortly before his sudden death at the age of eighty. He was celebrated in later years for his work with Peter Hall's National Theatre and his frequent stage partnership with Gielgud. He was not known for his portrayal of the great tragic roles in the classics, preferring character parts in old and new plays. (Full article...) -
Kathleen Mary Ferrier CBE (22 April 1912 – 8 October 1953) was an English contralto singer who achieved an international reputation as a stage, concert and recording artist, with a repertoire extending from folksong and popular ballads to the classical works of Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Elgar. Her death from cancer, at the height of her fame, was a shock to the musical world and particularly to the general public, which was kept in ignorance of the nature of her illness until after her death.
The daughter of a Lancashire village schoolmaster, Ferrier showed early talent as a pianist, and won numerous amateur piano competitions while working as a telephonist with the General Post Office. She did not take up singing seriously until 1937, when after winning a prestigious singing competition at the Carlisle Festival she began to receive offers of professional engagements as a vocalist. Thereafter she took singing lessons, first with J. E. Hutchinson and later with Roy Henderson. After the outbreak of the Second World War Ferrier was recruited by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), and in the following years sang at concerts and recitals throughout the UK. In 1942 her career was boosted when she met the conductor Malcolm Sargent, who recommended her to the influential Ibbs and Tillett concert management agency. She became a regular performer at leading London and provincial venues, and made numerous BBC radio broadcasts. (Full article...) -
Fôrça Bruta (Brazilian Portuguese: [ˈfoʁsɐ ˈbɾutɐ] ) is the seventh studio album by Brazilian singer-songwriter and guitarist Jorge Ben. It was recorded with the Trio Mocotó band and released by Philips Records in September 1970. Conceived at a time of political tension in dictatorial Brazil, its title comes from the Portuguese term meaning "brute force" and has been interpreted ironically due to the music's relatively relaxed style.
The album introduced an acoustic samba-based music that is mellower, moodier, and less ornate than Ben's preceding work. Its largely unrehearsed, nighttime recording session found the singer improvising with Trio Mocotó's groove-oriented accompaniment while experimenting with unconventional rhythmic arrangements, musical techniques, and elements of soul, funk, and rock. Ben's lyrics generally explore themes of romantic passion, melancholy, and sensuality, with women figuring prominently in his songs. In a departure from the carefree sensibility of his past releases, they also feature elements of identity politics and postmodernism, such as irony and reimagining of established idioms. (Full article...) -
A carillonneur plays the 56-bell carillon of the Plummer Building, Rochester, Minnesota, US
A carillon is a pitched percussion instrument that is played with a keyboard and consists of at least 23 bells. The bells are cast in bronze, hung in fixed suspension, and tuned in chromatic order so that they can be sounded harmoniously together. They are struck with clappers connected to a keyboard of wooden batons played with the hands and pedals played with the feet. Often housed in bell towers, carillons are usually owned by churches, universities, or municipalities. They can include an automatic system through which the time is announced and simple tunes are played throughout the day.
Carillons come in many designs, weights, sizes, and sounds. They are among the world's heaviest instruments, and the heaviest carillon weighs over 91 metric tons (100 short tons). Most weigh between 4.5 and 15 metric tons (5.0 and 16.5 short tons). To be considered a carillon, a minimum of 23 bells are needed; otherwise, it is called a chime. Standard-sized instruments have about 50, and the world's largest has 77 bells. The appearance of a carillon depends on the number and weight of the bells and the tower in which it is housed. They may be found in towers which are free-standing or connected to a building. The bells of a carillon may be directly exposed to the elements or hidden inside the structure of their tower. (Full article...) -
Rogier van der Weyden, The Magdalen Reading, 62.2 cm × 54.4 cm (24.5 in × 21.4 in). c. 1435–1438. Oil on mahogany, transferred from another panel. National Gallery, London.
The Magdalen Reading is one of three surviving fragments of a large mid-15th-century oil-on-panel altarpiece by the Early Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden. The panel, originally oak, was completed some time between 1435 and 1438 and has been in the National Gallery, London since 1860. It shows a woman with the pale skin, high cheek bones and oval eyelids typical of the idealised portraits of noble women of the period. She is identifiable as the Magdalen from the jar of ointment placed in the foreground, which is her traditional attribute in Christian art. She is presented as completely absorbed in her reading, a model of the contemplative life, repentant and absolved of past sins. In Catholic tradition the Magdalen was conflated with both Mary of Bethany who anointed the feet of Jesus with oil and the unnamed "sinner" of Luke 7:36–50. Iconography of the Magdalen commonly shows her with a book, in a moment of reflection, in tears, or with eyes averted.
The background of the painting had been overpainted with a thick layer of brown paint. A cleaning between 1955 and 1956 revealed the figure standing behind the Magdalene and the kneeling figure with its bare foot protruding in front of her, with a landscape visible through a window. The two partially seen figures are both cut off at the edges of the London panel. The figure above her has been identified as belonging to a fragment in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, which shows the head of Saint Joseph, while another Lisbon fragment, showing what is believed to be Saint Catherine of Alexandria, is thought to be from the same larger work. The original altarpiece was a sacra conversazione, known only through a drawing, Virgin and Child with Saints, in Stockholm's Nationalmuseum, which followed a partial copy of the painting that probably dated from the late 16th century. The drawing shows that The Magdalen occupied the lower right-hand corner of the altarpiece. The Lisbon fragments are each a third of the size of The Magdalen, which measures 62.2 cm × 54.4 cm (24.5 in × 21.4 in). (Full article...) -
Joanne Rowling CH OBE FRSL (/ˈroʊlɪŋ/ ROH-ling; born 31 July 1965), known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author and philanthropist. She wrote Harry Potter, a seven-volume fantasy series published from 1997 to 2007. The series has sold over 600 million copies, been translated into 84 languages, and spawned a global media franchise including films and video games. The Casual Vacancy (2012) was her first novel for adults. She writes Cormoran Strike, an ongoing crime fiction series, under the alias Robert Galbraith.
Born in Yate, Gloucestershire, Rowling was working as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International in 1990 when she conceived the idea for the Harry Potter series. The seven-year period that followed saw the death of her mother, the birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband, and relative poverty until the first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in 1997. Six sequels followed, concluding with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007). By 2008, Forbes had named her the world's highest-paid author. (Full article...) -
Charles Kenneth Horne, generally known as Kenneth Horne, (27 February 1907 – 14 February 1969) was an English comedian and businessman. He is perhaps best remembered for his work on three BBC Radio series: Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh (1944–1954), Beyond Our Ken (1958–1964) and Round the Horne (1965–1968).
The son of a clergyman who was also a politician, Horne had a burgeoning business career with Triplex Safety Glass, which was interrupted by service with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. While serving in a barrage balloon unit, he was asked to broadcast as a quizmaster on the BBC radio show Ack-Ack, Beer-Beer. The experience brought him into contact with the more established entertainer Richard Murdoch, and the two wrote and starred in the comedy series Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh. After demobilisation Horne returned to his business career, and kept his broadcasting as a sideline. His career in industry flourished, and he later became the chairman and managing director of toy manufacturers Chad Valley. (Full article...) -
Aquaman is an American superhero unsold television pilot developed by Smallville creators Al Gough and Miles Millar for The WB Television Network, based on the DC Comics character of the same name. The pilot show was produced by both DC Comics and Warner Bros. Television Studios, with the exception of Tollin/Robbins Productions. Millar Gough Ink, who was also known from producing the Superman prequel hit series, Smallville, also produced the film. Gough and Millar wrote the pilot, which was directed by Greg Beeman. Justin Hartley starred as Arthur "A.C." Curry, a young man living in a beachside community in the Florida Keys who learns about his powers and destiny as the Prince of Atlantis.
The Aquaman pilot was expected to debut in the fall schedule of 2006, but following the merger of the WB and UPN, the resulting CW Network opted not to buy the series. After they passed on the pilot, it was made available online through iTunes in the United States on July 25, 2006 and became the number-one most downloaded television show on iTunes. It received generally favorable reviews, was later released on other online markets, and aired on Canadian television network and YTV. (Full article...) -
Office of the Dead, folios 121v–122r; the manuscript's closing leaves
The Black Hours, MS M.493 (or the Morgan Black Hours) is an illuminated book of hours completed in Bruges between 1460 and 1475. It consists of 121 pages (leaves) with Latin text written in Gothic minuscule script. The words are arranged in rows of fourteen lines and follow the Roman version of the texts. The lettering is inscribed in silver and gold and placed within borders ornamented with flowers, foliage and grotesques, on pages dyed a deep blueish black; hence its designation as a Black books of hours. The book contains fourteen full-page miniatures and opens with the months of the liturgical calendar (folios 3 verso – 14 recto), followed by the Hours of the Virgin, and ends with the Office of the Dead (folio 121v).
MS M.493 has been in the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, since 1912. It is one of seven surviving black books of hours, all originating from Bruges and dated to the mid-to-late 15th century. They are so named for their unusual dark blueish appearance, a colourisation achieved through the expensive process of dyeing the vellum with iron gall ink. This dye is very corrosive and the surviving examples are mostly badly decomposed; MS M.493 is in relatively good condition due to its very thick parchment. (Full article...)
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The poilu's holiday December 25 and 26, 1915, a French World War I poster depicting a poilu's Christmas leave from the war. "Poilu", literally meaning "hairy one", is a nickname for French infantrymen. The word carries the sense of the infantryman's typically rural, agricultural background. Beards and bushy moustaches were often worn. The image of the dogged, bearded French soldier was widely used in propaganda and war memorials.
Did you know...
- ... that Marilyn Monroe posed naked in 1948 to raise US$50 to pay the rent for her room at the Hollywood Studio Club (pictured)?
- ... that Circle of Chalk, a Yuan Dynasty play, is still being performed in European versions set in 14th-century China, Soviet Georgia and East Germany?
- ... that Penelope Boothby was painted by Henry Fuseli and sculpted by Thomas Banks, as well as being the subject of a book of poetry by her grieving father Sir Brooke Boothby, Bt?
In this month
- 9 June 1904 – The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hans Richter, plays its first concert
- 18 June 1964 – Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, whose still lifes and landscapes were noted for their tonal subtlety, dies in Bologna at the age of 73
- 20 June 1703 – The Love Suicides at Sonezaki by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, often considered the greatest Japanese dramatist, receives its first performance
- 24 June 1924 – Efua Sutherland, a foundational figure in modern Ghanaian drama, is born in the Cape Coast region of Ghana
- 29 June 1861 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning (pictured), one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era, dies in Florence at the age of 55
News
- August 5: DaBaby Levitating remix losing US radio audiences after the rapper's comments on HIV/AIDS
- June 11: Taylor Swift's Evermore records biggest sales week of the year as it returns to No 1 on album chart
- May 27: Olivia Rodrigo's song good 4 u debuts at No 1 on US Billboard Hot 100 chart
- May 25: 'Rock and roll never dies': Italy wins Eurovision after 30 years
- February 10: Disney to shut down Blue Sky Studios, animation studio behind 'Ice Age'
Featured biography
Abbas Kiarostami (born 1940) was an internationally acclaimed Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer. An active filmmaker since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker Trilogy (1987–94), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Kiarostami has worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director and producer and has designed credit titles and publicity material. He is also a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. Kiarostami is part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and includes pioneering directors such as Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi. These filmmakers share many common techniques including the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues. Kiarostami has a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. (Full article...)
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| “ | Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. | ” |
— Salvador Dalí, People (September 27, 1976)
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