Oil on canvas; 80 x 97 cm.

 

. Italian painter, illustrator and stage designer. He began his training in Faenza in the workshop of the Italian painter and ceramicist Mario Ortolani (1901-55). After living briefly in Bologna (1927) and Paris (1928) he settled in Rome in 1929, first exhibiting his work at the Venice Biennale in the following year. His paintings at this time, such as Nude (Susanna after her Bath) (1929; Faenza, Pin. Com.), were characterized by an emphasis on tonal relationships and on the influence of the Scuola Romana. In 1934 he began to work with growing success as an illustrator for the journals Quadrivio and Italia letteraria. The contacts he established with Paris were intensified with his move there in 1947, resulting in three one-man shows at the Galerie Rive Gauche (in 1950, 1953 and 1957), and in his paintings he evolved a cautious balance between the representation and the disassembling of the image. Some of his best-known series of paintings date from this time, including his Cathedrals (e.g. Cathedral with Still-life and Dog, 1960; Rome, Vatican, Col. A. Relig. Mod.), pictures of town squares populated by acrobats and musicians, and later female nudes and a series entitled Mermaids.

  

Marc Zakharovich Chagall (/ʃəˈɡɑːl/ shə-GAHL;[3][nb 1] born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal;[4] 6 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist of Belarusian Jewish origin.[1] An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic format, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.

 

Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century" (though Chagall saw his work as "not the dream of one people but of all humanity"). According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". For decades, he "had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.

 

Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.

 

He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism". Yet throughout these phases of his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk."[5] "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is".[6]

 

Contents

 

1 Early life and education

1.1 Early life

1.2 Art education

1.3 Artistic inspiration

2 Art career

2.1 Russia (1906–1910)

2.2 France (1910–1914)

2.3 Russia and Soviet Belarus (1914–1922)

2.4 France (1923–1941)

2.4.1 The Bible illustrations

2.4.2 Nazi campaigns against modern art

2.4.3 Escaping occupied France

2.5 United States (1941–1948)

2.5.1 Aleko ballet (1942)

2.5.2 Coming to grips with World War II

2.5.3 Post-war years

2.6 France (1948–1985)

2.6.1 Ceiling of the Paris Opera (1963)

3 Art styles and techniques

3.1 Color

3.2 Subject matter

3.2.1 From life memories to fantasy

3.2.2 Jewish themes

  

Early life and education

Chagall's Parents

 

Marc Chagall was born Moishe Segal in a Lithuanian Jewish family in Liozna,[7] near the city of Vitebsk (Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887.[note][8] At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish.[5] A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo", after a cosmopolitan city of the former Spanish Empire. As the city was built mostly of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II.

 

Chagall was the eldest of nine children. The family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually borne by a Levitic family.[9] His father, Khatskl (Zachar) Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from their home. His father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles each month (the average wages across the Russian Empire being 13 roubles a month). Chagall would later include fish motifs "out of respect for his father", writes Chagall biographer, Jacob Baal-Teshuva. Chagall wrote of these early years:

 

Day after day, winter and summer, at six o'clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his usual prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea and went to work. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. Why try to hide it? How tell about it? No word will ever ease my father's lot... There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands.[10]

 

One of the main sources of income of the Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia. They also made furniture and various agricultural tools.[11] From the late 18th century to the First World War, the Russian government confined Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement, which included modern Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, almost exactly corresponding to the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth recently taken over by Imperial Russia. This caused the creation of Jewish market-villages (shtetls) throughout today's Eastern Europe, with their own markets, schools, hospitals, and other community institutions.[12]:14

 

Most of what is known about Chagall's early life has come from his autobiography, My Life. In it, he described the major influence that the culture of Hasidic Judaism had on his life as an artist. Vitebsk itself had been a center of that culture dating from the 1730s with its teachings derived from the Kabbalah. Chagall scholar Susan Tumarkin Goodman describes the links and sources of his art to his early home:

 

Chagall's art can be understood as the response to a situation that has long marked the history of Russian Jews. Though they were cultural innovators who made important contributions to the broader society, Jews were considered outsiders in a frequently hostile society... Chagall himself was born of a family steeped in religious life; his parents were observant Hasidic Jews who found spiritual satisfaction in a life defined by their faith and organized by prayer.[12]:14

 

Chagall was friends with Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, and later with Menachem M. Schneerson.[13]

Art education

Portrait of Chagall by Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, his first art teacher in Vitebsk

 

In Russia at that time, Jewish children were not allowed to attend regular Russian schools or universities. Their movement within the city was also restricted. Chagall therefore received his primary education at the local Jewish religious school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible. At the age of 13, his mother tried to enroll him in a Russian high school, and he recalled, "But in that school, they don't take Jews. Without a moment's hesitation, my courageous mother walks up to a professor." She offered the headmaster 50 roubles to let him attend, which he accepted.[10]

 

A turning point of his artistic life came when he first noticed a fellow student drawing. Baal-Teshuva writes that for the young Chagall, watching someone draw "was like a vision, a revelation in black and white". Chagall would later say that there was no art of any kind in his family's home and the concept was totally alien to him. When Chagall asked the schoolmate how he learned to draw, his friend replied, "Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it". He soon began copying images from books and found the experience so rewarding he then decided he wanted to become an artist.[11]

 

He eventually confided to his mother, "I want to be a painter", although she could not yet understand his sudden interest in art or why he would choose a vocation that "seemed so impractical", writes Goodman. The young Chagall explained, "There's a place in town; if I'm admitted and if I complete the course, I'll come out a regular artist. I'd be so happy!" It was 1906, and he had noticed the studio of Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, a realist artist who also operated a small drawing school in Vitebsk, which included the future artists El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine. Due to Chagall's youth and lack of income, Pen offered to teach him free of charge. However, after a few months at the school, Chagall realized that academic portrait painting did not suit his desires.[11]

Artistic inspiration

Marc Chagall, 1912, Calvary (Golgotha), oil on canvas, 174.6 × 192.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alternative titles: Kreuzigung Bild 2 Christus gewidmet [Golgotha. Crucifixion. Dedicated to Christ]. Sold through Galerie Der Sturm (Herwarth Walden), Berlin to Bernhard Koehler (1849–1927), Berlin, 1913. Exhibited: Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, Berlin, 1913

 

Goodman notes that during this period in Russia, Jews had two basic alternatives for joining the art world: One was to "hide or deny one's Jewish roots". The other alternative—the one that Chagall chose—was "to cherish and publicly express one's Jewish roots" by integrating them into his art. For Chagall, this was also his means of "self-assertion and an expression of principle."[12]:14

 

Chagall biographer Franz Meyer, explains that with the connections between his art and early life "the hassidic spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment for his art."[14] Lewis adds, "As cosmopolitan an artist as he would later become, his storehouse of visual imagery would never expand beyond the landscape of his childhood, with its snowy streets, wooden houses, and ubiquitous fiddlers... [with] scenes of childhood so indelibly in one's mind and to invest them with an emotional charge so intense that it could only be discharged obliquely through an obsessive repetition of the same cryptic symbols and ideograms... "[5]

 

Years later, at the age of 57 while living in the United States, Chagall confirmed this when he published an open letter entitled, "To My City Vitebsk":

 

Why? Why did I leave you many years ago? ... You thought, the boy seeks something, seeks such a special subtlety, that color descending like stars from the sky and landing, bright and transparent, like snow on our roofs. Where did he get it? How would it come to a boy like him? I don't know why he couldn't find it with us, in the city—in his homeland. Maybe the boy is "crazy", but "crazy" for the sake of art. ...You thought: "I can see, I am etched in the boy's heart, but he is still 'flying,' he is still striving to take off, he has 'wind' in his head." ... I did not live with you, but I didn't have one single painting that didn't breathe with your spirit and reflection.[15]

 

Art career

Russia (1906–1910)

 

In 1906, he moved to Saint Petersburg which was then the capital of Russia and the center of the country's artistic life with its famous art schools. Since Jews were not permitted into the city without an internal passport, he managed to get a temporary passport from a friend. He enrolled in a prestigious art school and studied there for two years.[11] By 1907, he had begun painting naturalistic self-portraits and landscapes.

 

Between 1908 and 1910, Chagall was a student of Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting. While in Saint Petersburg, he discovered experimental theater and the work of such artists as Paul Gauguin.[16] Bakst, also Jewish, was a designer of decorative art and was famous as a draftsman designer of stage sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, and helped Chagall by acting as a role model for Jewish success. Bakst moved to Paris a year later. Art historian Raymond Cogniat writes that after living and studying art on his own for four years, "Chagall entered into the mainstream of contemporary art. ...His apprenticeship over, Russia had played a memorable initial role in his life."[17]:30

 

Chagall stayed in Saint Petersburg until 1910, often visiting Vitebsk where he met Bella Rosenfeld. In My Life, Chagall described his first meeting her: "Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me."[11]:22

France (1910–1914)

Marc Chagall, 1911–12, The Drunkard (Le saoul), 1912, oil on canvas. 85 × 115 cm. Private collection

Marc Chagall, 1912, The Fiddler, an inspiration for the musical Fiddler on the Roof[18]

 

In 1910, Chagall relocated to Paris to develop his artistic style. Art historian and curator James Sweeney notes that when Chagall first arrived in Paris, Cubism was the dominant art form, and French art was still dominated by the "materialistic outlook of the 19th century". But Chagall arrived from Russia with "a ripe color gift, a fresh, unashamed response to sentiment, a feeling for simple poetry and a sense of humor", he adds. These notions were alien to Paris at that time, and as a result, his first recognition came not from other painters but from poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire.[19]:7 Art historian Jean Leymarie observes that Chagall began thinking of art as "emerging from the internal being outward, from the seen object to the psychic outpouring", which was the reverse of the Cubist way of creating.[20]

 

He therefore developed friendships with Guillaume Apollinaire and other avant-garde luminaries such as Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger.[21] Baal-Teshuva writes that "Chagall's dream of Paris, the city of light and above all, of freedom, had come true."[11]:33 His first days were a hardship for the 23-year-old Chagall, who was lonely in the big city and unable to speak French. Some days he "felt like fleeing back to Russia, as he daydreamed while he painted, about the riches of Russian folklore, his Hasidic experiences, his family, and especially Bella".

 

In Paris, he enrolled at Académie de La Palette, an avant-garde school of art where the painters Jean Metzinger, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Henri Le Fauconnier taught, and also found work at another academy. He would spend his free hours visiting galleries and salons, especially the Louvre; artists he came to admire included Rembrandt, the Le Nain brothers, Chardin, van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro, Matisse, Gauguin, Courbet, Millet, Manet, Monet, Delacroix, and others. It was in Paris that he learned the technique of gouache, which he used to paint Belarusian scenes. He also visited Montmartre and the Latin Quarter "and was happy just breathing Parisian air."[11] Baal-Teshuva describes this new phase in Chagall's artistic development:

 

Chagall was exhilarated, intoxicated, as he strolled through the streets and along the banks of the Seine. Everything about the French capital excited him: the shops, the smell of fresh bread in the morning, the markets with their fresh fruit and vegetables, the wide boulevards, the cafés and restaurants, and above all the Eiffel Tower.

 

Another completely new world that opened up for him was the kaleidoscope of colours and forms in the works of French artists. Chagall enthusiastically reviewed their many different tendencies, having to rethink his position as an artist and decide what creative avenue he wanted to pursue.[11]:33

 

During his time in Paris, Chagall was constantly reminded of his home in Vitebsk, as Paris was also home to many painters, writers, poets, composers, dancers, and other émigrés from the Russian Empire. However, "night after night he painted until dawn", only then going to bed for a few hours, and resisted the many temptations of the big city at night.[11]:44 "My homeland exists only in my soul", he once said.[20]:viii He continued painting Jewish motifs and subjects from his memories of Vitebsk, although he included Parisian scenes—- the Eiffel Tower in particular, along with portraits. Many of his works were updated versions of paintings he had made in Russia, transposed into Fauvist or Cubist keys.[5]

Marc Chagall, 1912, Still-life (Nature morte), oil on canvas, private collection

 

Chagall developed a whole repertoire of quirky motifs: ghostly figures floating in the sky, ... the gigantic fiddler dancing on miniature dollhouses, the livestock and transparent wombs and, within them, tiny offspring sleeping upside down.[5] The majority of his scenes of life in Vitebsk were painted while living in Paris, and "in a sense they were dreams", notes Lewis. Their "undertone of yearning and loss", with a detached and abstract appearance, caused Apollinaire to be "struck by this quality", calling them "surnaturel!" His "animal/human hybrids and airborne phantoms" would later become a formative influence on Surrealism.[5] Chagall, however, did not want his work to be associated with any school or movement and considered his own personal language of symbols to be meaningful to himself. But Sweeney notes that others often still associate his work with "illogical and fantastic painting", especially when he uses "curious representational juxtapositions".[19]:10

 

Sweeney writes that "This is Chagall's contribution to contemporary art: the reawakening of a poetry of representation, avoiding factual illustration on the one hand, and non-figurative abstractions on the other". André Breton said that "with him alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return to modern painting".[19]:7

Russia and Soviet Belarus (1914–1922)

 

Because he missed his fiancée, Bella, who was still in Vitebsk—"He thought about her day and night", writes Baal-Teshuva—and was afraid of losing her, Chagall decided to accept an invitation from a noted art dealer in Berlin to exhibit his work, his intention being to continue on to Belarus, marry Bella, and then return with her to Paris. Chagall took 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors and drawings to be exhibited. The exhibit, held at Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery was a huge success, "The German critics positively sang his praises."[11]

People's Art School where the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art was situated

 

After the exhibit, he continued on to Vitebsk, where he planned to stay only long enough to marry Bella. However, after a few weeks, the First World War began, closing the Russian border for an indefinite period. A year later he married Bella Rosenfeld and they had their first child, Ida. Before the marriage, Chagall had difficulty convincing Bella's parents that he would be a suitable husband for their daughter. They were worried about her marrying a painter from a poor family and wondered how he would support her. Becoming a successful artist now became a goal and inspiration. According to Lewis, "[T]he euphoric paintings of this time, which show the young couple floating balloon-like over Vitebsk—its wooden buildings faceted in the Delaunay manner—are the most lighthearted of his career".[5] His wedding pictures were also a subject he would return to in later years as he thought about this period of his life.[11]:75

Bella with White Collar, 1917

 

In 1915, Chagall began exhibiting his work in Moscow, first exhibiting his works at a well-known salon and in 1916 exhibiting pictures in St. Petersburg. He again showed his art at a Moscow exhibition of avant-garde artists. This exposure brought recognition, and a number of wealthy collectors began buying his art. He also began illustrating a number of Yiddish books with ink drawings. He illustrated I. L. Peretz's The Magician in 1917.[22] Chagall was 30 years old and had begun to become well known.[11]:77

 

The October Revolution of 1917 was a dangerous time for Chagall although it also offered opportunity. By then he was one of the Russia's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, which enjoyed special privileges and prestige as the "aesthetic arm of the revolution".[5] He was offered a notable position as a commissar of visual arts for the country[clarification needed], but preferred something less political, and instead accepted a job as commissar of arts for Vitebsk. This resulted in his founding the Vitebsk Arts College which, adds Lewis, became the "most distinguished school of art in the Soviet Union".

 

It obtained for its faculty some of the most important artists in the country, such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. He also added his first teacher, Yehuda Pen. Chagall tried to create an atmosphere of a collective of independently minded artists, each with their own unique style. However, this would soon prove to be difficult as a few of the key faculty members preferred a Suprematist art of squares and circles, and disapproved of Chagall's attempt at creating "bourgeois individualism". Chagall then resigned as commissar and moved to Moscow.

 

In Moscow he was offered a job as stage designer for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theater. It was set to begin operation in early 1921 with a number of plays by Sholem Aleichem. For its opening he created a number of large background murals using techniques he learned from Bakst, his early teacher. One of the main murals was 9 feet (2.7 m) tall by 24 feet (7.3 m) long and included images of various lively subjects such as dancers, fiddlers, acrobats, and farm animals. One critic at the time called it "Hebrew jazz in paint". Chagall created it as a "storehouse of symbols and devices", notes Lewis.[5] The murals "constituted a landmark" in the history of the theatre, and were forerunners of his later large-scale works, including murals for the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Paris Opera.[11]:87

 

Famine spread after the war ended in 1918. The Chagalls found it necessary to move to a smaller, less expensive, town near Moscow, although he now had to commute to Moscow daily using crowded trains. In 1921, he worked as an art teacher in a Jewish boys' shelter in suburban Malakhovka, which housed orphaned refugees from Ukrainian pogroms.[6]:270 While there, he created a series of illustrations for the Yiddish poetry cycle Grief written by David Hofstein, who was another teacher at the Malakhovka shelter.[6]:273

 

After spending the years between 1921 and 1922 living in primitive conditions, he decided to go back to France so that he could develop his art in a more comfortable country. Numerous other artists, writers, and musicians were also planning to relocate to the West. He applied for an exit visa and while waiting for its uncertain approval, wrote his autobiography, My Life.[11]:121

France (1923–1941)

 

In 1923, Chagall left Moscow to return to France. On his way he stopped in Berlin to recover the many pictures he had left there on exhibit ten years earlier, before the war began, but was unable to find or recover any of them. Nonetheless, after returning to Paris he again "rediscovered the free expansion and fulfillment which were so essential to him", writes Lewis. With all his early works now lost, he began trying to paint from his memories of his earliest years in Vitebsk with sketches and oil paintings.[5]

 

He formed a business relationship with French art dealer Ambroise Vollard. This inspired him to begin creating etchings for a series of illustrated books, including Gogol's Dead Souls, the Bible, and the La Fontaine's Fables. These illustrations would eventually come to represent his finest printmaking efforts.[5] In 1924, he travelled to Brittany and painted La fenêtre sur l'Île-de-Bréhat.[23] By 1926 he had his first exhibition in the United States at the Reinhardt gallery of New York which included about 100 works, although he did not travel to the opening. He instead stayed in France, "painting ceaselessly", notes Baal-Teshuva.[11] It was not until 1927 that Chagall made his name in the French art world, when art critic and historian Maurice Raynal awarded him a place in his book Modern French Painters. However, Raynal was still at a loss to accurately describe Chagall to his readers:

 

Chagall interrogates life in the light of a refined, anxious, childlike sensibility, a slightly romantic temperament ... a blend of sadness and gaiety characteristic of a grave view of life. His imagination, his temperament, no doubt forbid a Latin severity of composition.[6]:314

 

During this period he traveled throughout France and the Côte d'Azur, where he enjoyed the landscapes, colorful vegetation, the blue Mediterranean Sea, and the mild weather. He made repeated trips to the countryside, taking his sketchbook.[6]:9 He also visited nearby countries and later wrote about the impressions some of those travels left on him:

 

I should like to recall how advantageous my travels outside France have been for me in an artistic sense—in Holland or in Spain, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, or simply in the south of France. There, in the south, for the first time in my life, I saw that rich greenness—the like of which I had never seen in my own country. In Holland I thought I discovered that familiar and throbbing light, like the light between the late afternoon and dusk. In Italy I found that peace of the museums which the sunlight brought to life. In Spain I was happy to find the inspiration of a mystical, if sometimes cruel, past, to find the song of its sky and of its people. And in the East [Palestine] I found unexpectedly the Bible and a part of my very being.[15]:77

 

The Bible illustrations

"The Prophet Jeremiah" (1968)

 

After returning to Paris from one of his trips, Vollard commissioned Chagall to illustrate the Old Testament. Although he could have completed the project in France, he used the assignment as an excuse to travel to Israel to experience for himself the Holy Land. He arrived there in February 1931 and ended up staying for two months. Chagall felt at home in Israel where many people spoke Yiddish and Russian. According to Jacob Baal-Teshuva, "he was impressed by the pioneering spirit of the people in the kibbutzim and deeply moved by the Wailing Wall and the other holy places".[11]:133

 

Chagall later told a friend that Israel gave him "the most vivid impression he had ever received". Wullschlager notes, however, that whereas Delacroix and Matisse had found inspiration in the exoticism of North Africa, he as a Jew in Israel had different perspective. "What he was really searching for there was not external stimulus but an inner authorization from the land of his ancestors, to plunge into his work on the Bible illustrations".[6]:343 Chagall stated that "In the East I found the Bible and part of my own being."

 

As a result, he immersed himself in "the history of the Jews, their trials, prophecies, and disasters", notes Wullschlager. She adds that beginning the assignment was an "extraordinary risk" for Chagall, as he had finally become well known as a leading contemporary painter, but would now end his modernist themes and delve into "an ancient past".[6]:350 Between 1931 and 1934 he worked "obsessively" on "The Bible", even going to Amsterdam in order to carefully study the biblical paintings of Rembrandt and El Greco, to see the extremes of religious painting. He walked the streets of the city's Jewish quarter to again feel the earlier atmosphere. He told Franz Meyer:

 

I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.[6]:350

 

Chagall saw the Old Testament as a "human story, ... not with the creation of the cosmos but with the creation of man, and his figures of angels are rhymed or combined with human ones", writes Wullschlager. She points out that in one of his early Bible images, "Abraham and the Three Angels", the angels sit and chat over a glass of wine "as if they have just dropped by for dinner".[6]:350

 

He returned to France and by the next year had completed 32 out of the total of 105 plates. By 1939, at the beginning of World War II, he had finished 66. However, Vollard died that same year. When the series was completed in 1956, it was published by Edition Tériade. Baal-Teshuva writes that "the illustrations were stunning and met with great acclaim. Once again Chagall had shown himself to be one of the 20th century's most important graphic artists".[11]:135 Leymarie has described these drawings by Chagall as "monumental" and,

 

...full of divine inspiration, which retrace the legendary destiny and the epic history of Israel to Genesis to the Prophets, through the Patriarchs and the Heroes. Each picture becomes one with the event, informing the text with a solemn intimacy unknown since Rembrandt.[20]:ix

 

Nazi campaigns against modern art

 

Not long after Chagall began his work on the Bible, Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany. Anti-Semitic laws were being introduced and the first concentration camp at Dachau had been established. Wullschlager describes the early effects on art:

 

The Nazis had begun their campaign against modernist art as soon as they seized power. Expressionist, cubist, abstract, and surrealist art—anything intellectual, Jewish, foreign, socialist-inspired, or difficult to understand—was targeted, from Picasso and Matisse going back to Cézanne and van Gogh; in its place traditional German realism, accessible and open to patriotic interpretation, was extolled.[6]:374

 

Beginning during 1937 about twenty thousand works from German museums were confiscated as "degenerate" by a committee directed by Joseph Goebbels.[6]:375 Although the German press had once "swooned over him", the new German authorities now made a mockery of Chagall's art, describing them as "green, purple, and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying through the air ... representing [an] assault on Western civilization".[6]:376

 

After Germany invaded and occupied France, the Chagalls naively remained in Vichy France, unaware that French Jews, with the help of the Vichy government, were being collected and sent to German concentration camps, from which few would return. The Vichy collaborationist government, directed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, immediately upon assuming power established a commission to "redefine French citizenship" with the aim of stripping "undesirables", including naturalized citizens, of their French nationality. Chagall had been so involved with his art, that it was not until October 1940, after the Vichy government, at the behest of the Nazi occupying forces, began approving anti-Semitic laws, that he began to understand what was happening. Learning that Jews were being removed from public and academic positions, the Chagalls finally "woke up to the danger they faced". But Wullschlager notes that "by then they were trapped".[6]:382 Their only refuge could be America, but "they could not afford the passage to New York" or the large bond that each immigrant had to provide upon entry to ensure that they would not become a financial burden to the country.

Escaping occupied France

 

According to Wullschlager, "[T]he speed with which France collapsed astonished everyone: the French army, with British support, capitulated even more quickly than Poland had done" a year earlier. "Shock waves crossed the Atlantic... as Paris had until then been equated with civilization throughout the non-Nazi world."[6]:388 Yet the attachment of the Chagalls to France "blinded them to the urgency of the situation."[6]:389 Many other well-known Russian and Jewish artists eventually sought to escape: these included Chaim Soutine, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Ludwig Fulda, author Victor Serge and prize-winning author Vladimir Nabokov, who although not Jewish himself, was married to a Jewish woman.[24]:1181 Russian author Victor Serge described many of the people living temporarily in Marseille who were waiting to emigrate to America:

 

Here is a beggar's alley gathering the remnants of revolutions, democracies and crushed intellects... In our ranks are enough doctors, psychologists, engineers, educationalists, poets, painters, writers, musicians, economists and public men to vitalize a whole great country.[6]:392

 

After prodding by their daughter Ida, who "perceived the need to act fast",[6]:388 and with help from Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art, Chagall was saved by having his name added to the list of prominent artists whose lives were at risk and who the United States should try to extricate. Varian Fry, the American journalist, and Hiram Bingham IV, the American Vice-Consul in Marseilles, ran a rescue operation to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the US by providing them with forged visas to the US. Chagall was one of over 2,000 who were rescued by this operation. He left France in May 1941, "when it was almost too late", adds Lewis. Picasso and Matisse were also invited to come to America but they decided to remain in France. Chagall and Bella arrived in New York on 23 June 1941, the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.[11]:150 Ida and her husband Michel followed on the notorious refugee ship SS Navemar with a large case of Chagall's work.[25] A chance post-war meeting in a French café between Ida and intelligence analyst Konrad Kellen led to Kellen carrying more paintings on his return to the United States.[26]

United States (1941–1948)

Photo portrait of Chagall in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten

 

Even before arriving in the United States in 1941, Chagall was awarded the Carnegie Prize third prize in 1939 for "Les Fiancés". After being in America he discovered that he had already achieved "international stature", writes Cogniat, although he felt ill-suited in this new role in a foreign country whose language he could not yet speak. He became a celebrity mostly against his will, feeling lost in the strange surroundings.[17]:57

 

After a while he began to settle in New York, which was full of writers, painters, and composers who, like himself, had fled from Europe during the Nazi invasions. He lived at 4 East 74th Street.[27] He spent time visiting galleries and museums, and befriended other artists including Piet Mondrian and André Breton.[11]:155

 

Baal-Teshuva writes that Chagall "loved" going to the sections of New York where Jews lived, especially the Lower East Side. There he felt at home, enjoying the Jewish foods and being able to read the Yiddish press, which became his main source of information since he did not yet speak English.[11]

 

Contemporary artists did not yet understand or even like Chagall's art. According to Baal-Teshuva, "they had little in common with a folkloristic storyteller of Russo-Jewish extraction with a propensity for mysticism." The Paris School, which was referred to as 'Parisian Surrealism,' meant little to them.[11]:155 Those attitudes would begin to change, however, when Pierre Matisse, the son of recognized French artist Henri Matisse, became his representative and managed Chagall exhibitions in New York and Chicago in 1941. One of the earliest exhibitions included 21 of his masterpieces from 1910 to 1941.[11] Art critic Henry McBride wrote about this exhibit for the New York Sun:

 

Chagall is about as gypsy as they come... these pictures do more for his reputation than anything we have previously seen... His colors sparkle with poetry... his work is authentically Russian as a Volga boatman's song...[28]

 

He was offered a commission by choreographer Leonid Massine of the Ballet Theatre of New York to design the sets and costumes for his new ballet, Aleko. This ballet would stage the words of Pushkin's verse narrative The Gypsies with the music of Tchaikovsky. While Chagall had done stage settings before while in Russia, this was his first ballet, and it would give him the opportunity to visit Mexico. While there he quickly began to appreciate the "primitive ways and colorful art of the Mexicans," notes Cogniat. He found "something very closely related to his own nature", and did all the color detail for the sets while there.[17] Eventually, he created four large backdrops and had Mexican seamstresses sew the ballet costumes.

 

When the ballet premiered on 8 September 1942 it was considered a "remarkable success."[11] In the audience were other famous mural painters who came to see Chagall's work, including Diego Rivera and José Orozco. According to Baal-Teshuva, when the final bar of music ended, "there was a tumultuous applause and 19 curtain calls, with Chagall himself being called back onto the stage again and again." The ballet also opened in New York City four weeks later at the Metropolitan Opera and the response was repeated, "again Chagall was the hero of the evening".[11]:158 Art critic Edwin Denby wrote of the opening for the New York Herald Tribune that Chagall's work:

 

has turned into a dramatized exhibition of giant paintings... It surpasses anything Chagall has done on the easel scale, and it is a breathtaking experience, of a kind one hardly expects in the theatre.[29]

 

Coming to grips with World War II

 

After Chagall returned to New York in 1943, however, current events began to interest him more, and this was represented by his art, where he painted subjects including the Crucifixion and scenes of war. He learned that the Germans had destroyed the town where he was raised, Vitebsk, and became greatly distressed.[11]:159 He also learned about the Nazi concentration camps.[11] During a speech in February 1944, he described some of his feelings:

 

Meanwhile, the enemy jokes, saying that we are a "stupid nation." He thought that when he started slaughtering the Jews, we would all in our grief suddenly raise the greatest prophetic scream, and would be joined by the Christian humanists. But, after two thousand years of "Christianity" in the world—say whatever you like—but, with few exceptions, their hearts are silent... I see the artists in Christian nations sit still—who has heard them speak up? They are not worried about themselves, and our Jewish life doesn't concern them.[15]:89

 

In the same speech he credited Soviet Russia with doing the most to save the Jews:

 

The Jews will always be grateful to it. What other great country has saved a million and a half Jews from Hitler's hands, and shared its last piece of bread? What country abolished antisemitism? What other country devoted at least a piece of land as an autonomous region for Jews who want to live there? All this, and more, weighs heavily on the scales of history.[15]:89

 

On 2 September 1944, Bella died suddenly due to a virus infection, which was not treated due to the wartime shortage of medicine. As a result, he stopped all work for many months, and when he did resume painting his first pictures were concerned with preserving Bella's memory.[17] Wullschlager writes of the effect on Chagall: "As news poured in through 1945 of the ongoing Holocaust at Nazi concentration camps, Bella took her place in Chagall's mind with the millions of Jewish victims." He even considered the possibility that their "exile from Europe had sapped her will to live."[6]:419

With Virginia Haggard McNeil

 

After a year of living with his daughter Ida and her husband Michel Gordey, he entered into a romance with Virginia Haggard, daughter of diplomat Sir Godfrey Digby Napier Haggard and great-niece of the author Sir Henry Rider Haggard; their relationship endured seven years. They had a child together, David McNeil, born 22 June 1946.[11] Haggard recalled her "seven years of plenty" with Chagall in her book, My Life with Chagall (Robert Hale, 1986).

 

A few months after the Allies succeeded in liberating Paris from Nazi occupation, with the help of the Allied armies, Chagall published a letter in a Paris weekly, "To the Paris Artists":

 

In recent years I have felt unhappy that I couldn't be with you, my friends. My enemy forced me to take the road of exile. On that tragic road, I lost my wife, the companion of my life, the woman who was my inspiration. I want to say to my friends in France that she joins me in this greeting, she who loved France and French art so faithfully. Her last joy was the liberation of Paris... Now, when Paris is liberated, when the art of France is resurrected, the whole world too will, once and for all, be free of the satanic enemies who wanted to annihilate not just the body but also the soul—the soul, without which there is no life, no artistic creativity.[15]:101

The Tower Of London remembers the First World War 1914-1918

 

The major art installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London, marked one hundred years since the first full day of Britain's involvement in the First World War. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies progressively filled the Tower's famous moat between 17 July and 11 November 2014. Each poppy represented a British military fatality during the war.

 

The poppies encircled the iconic landmark, creating not only a spectacular display visible from all around the Tower but also a location for personal reflection. The scale of the installation was intended to reflect the magnitude of such an important centenary and create a powerful visual commemoration.

 

All of the poppies that made up the installation were sold, raising millions of pounds which were shared equally amongst six service charities.

Prospect Cottage, the home and garden of the late film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener, and author Derek Jarman.

 

The gable wall carries John Donne’s poem, “The Sun Rising” :

 

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school-boys and sour prentices,

Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices ;

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

In that the world's contracted thus ;

Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;

This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere

Pablo Picasso (/pɪˈkɑːsoʊ, -ˈkæsoʊ/; Spanish: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso]; 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces.Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.Picasso's work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso,[1] a series of names honouring various saints and relatives.[9] Ruiz y Picasso were included for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish law. Born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.[10] His mother was of one quarter Italian descent, from the territory of Genoa.[11] Though baptized a Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist.[12] Picasso's family was of middle-class background. His father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruiz's ancestors were minor aristocrats.Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were "piz, piz", a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for "pencil".[13] From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son's technique, an apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting, though paintings by him exist from later years.In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria.[15] After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.[16] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him, at just 13. The student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.Picasso's father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the country's foremost art school.At age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolment. Madrid held many other attractions. The Prado housed paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbarán. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; elements such as his elongated limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso's later work.Picasso's training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist's beginnings.[17] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called "without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting."In 1897, his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, for example, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favourite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.Picasso made his first trip to Paris, then the art capital of Europe, in 1900. There, he met his first Parisian friend, journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm. During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his work Picasso; before he had signed Pablo Ruiz y Picasso.Picasso's Blue Period (1901–1904), characterized by sombre paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in Spain in early 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year.[22] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In his austere use of colour and sometimes doleful subject matter – prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects – Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901 he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art..Pablo Picasso, 1905, Au Lapin Agile (At the Lapin Agile) (Arlequin tenant un verre), oil on canvas, 99.1 × 100.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904),] which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso's works of this period, also represented in The Blindman's Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.The Rose Period (1904–1906)[25] is characterized by a lighter tone and style utilizing orange and pink colours, and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress, in Paris in 1904.[15] Olivier appears in many of his Rose Period paintings, many of which are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e. just prior to the Blue Period) and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will".By 1905, Picasso became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein. Gertrude Stein became Picasso's principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris. At one of her gatherings in 1905, he met Henri Matisse, who was to become a lifelong friend and rival. The Steins introduced him to Claribel Cone and her sister Etta who were American art collectors; they also began to acquire Picasso and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy. Michael and Sarah Stein became patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picasso.In 1907 Picasso joined an art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler was a German art historian and art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism that they jointly developed. Kahnweiler promoted burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.Picasso's African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso painted this composition in a style inspired by Iberian sculpture, but repainted the faces of the two figures on the right after being powerfully impressed by African artefacts he saw in June 1907 in the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro.[30] When he displayed the painting to acquaintances in his studio later that year, the nearly universal reaction was shock and revulsion; Matisse angrily dismissed the work as a hoax.[31] Picasso did not exhibit Le Demoiselles publicly until 1916.Other works from this period include Nude with Raised Arms (1907) and Three Women (1908). Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and "analyzed" them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque's paintings at this time share many similarities.Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre of cubism, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art. In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry, and Gertrude Stein. Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Apollinaire pointed to his friend Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated.Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage. "Hard-edged square-cut diamonds", notes art historian John Richardson, "these gems do not always have upside or downside".[33][34] "We need a new name to designate them," wrote Picasso to Gertrude Stein: Maurice Raynal suggested "Crystal Cubism".[33][35] These "little gems" may have been produced by Picasso in response to critics who had claimed his defection from the movement, through his experimentation with classicism within the so-called return to order following the war.At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon. Braque and Derain were mobilized and Apollinaire joined the French artillery, while the Spaniard Juan Gris remained from the Cubist circle. During the war, Picasso was able to continue painting uninterrupted, unlike his French comrades. His paintings became more sombre and his life changed with dramatic consequences. Kahnweiler’s contract had terminated on his exile from France. At this point Picasso’s work would be taken on by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. After the loss of Eva Gouel, Picasso had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse. During the spring of 1916, Apollinaire returned from the front wounded. They renewed their friendship, but Picasso began to frequent new social circles.Towards the end of World War I, Picasso made a number of important relationships with figures associated with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris, and others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Erik Satie's Parade, in Rome; they spent their honeymoon near Biarritz in the villa of glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz.After returning from his honeymoon, and in desperate need of money, Picasso started his exclusive relationship with the French-Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. As part of his first duties, Rosenberg agreed to rent the couple an apartment in Paris at his own expense, which was located next to his own house. This was the start of a deep brother-like friendship between two very different men, that would last until the outbreak of World War II.Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant to the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo Picasso,.who would grow up to be a dissolute motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova's insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso's bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev's troupe, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several drawings of the composer.In 1927 Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova's death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter with her, named Maya. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso's death.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

 

Crystal Cubism (French: Cubisme cristal or Cubisme de cristal) is a distilled form of Cubism consistent with a shift, between 1915 and 1916, towards a strong emphasis on flat surface activity and large overlapping geometric planes. The primacy of the underlying geometric structure, rooted in the abstract, controls practically all of the elements of the artwork.This range of styles of painting and sculpture, especially significant between 1917 and 1920 (also referred to as the Crystal Period, classical Cubism, pure Cubism, advanced Cubism, late Cubism, synthetic Cubism, or the second phase of Cubism), was practiced in varying degrees by a multitude of artists; particularly those under contract with the art dealer and collector Léonce Rosenberg—Henri Laurens, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz most noticeably of all. The tightening of the compositions, the clarity and sense of order reflected in these works, led to its being referred to by the French poet and art critic Maurice Raynal as 'crystal' Cubism.Considerations manifested by Cubists prior to the outset of World War I—such as the fourth dimension, dynamism of modern life, the occult, and Henri Bergson's concept of duration—had now been vacated, replaced by a purely formal frame of reference that proceeded from a cohesive stance toward art and life.As post-war reconstruction began, so too did a series of exhibitions at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie de L'Effort Moderne: order and the allegiance to the aesthetically pure remained the prevailing tendency. The collective phenomenon of Cubism once again—now in its advanced revisionist form—became part of a widely discussed development in French culture. Crystal Cubism was the culmination of a continuous narrowing of scope in the name of a return to order; based upon the observation of the artists relation to nature, rather than on the nature of reality itself.Crystal Cubism, and its associative rappel à l’ordre, has been linked with an inclination—by those who served the armed forces and by those who remained in the civilian sector—to escape the realities of the Great War, both during and directly following the conflict. The purifying of Cubism from 1914 through the mid-1920s, with its cohesive unity and voluntary constraints, has been linked to a much broader ideological transformation towards conservatism in both French society and French culture. In terms of the separation of culture and life, the Crystal Cubist period emerges as the most important in the history of Modernism.Cubism, from its inception, stems from the dissatisfaction with the idea of form that had been in practiced since the Renaissance. This dissatisfaction had already been seen in the works of the Romanticist Eugene Delacroix, in the Realism of Gustave Courbet, in passing through the Symbolists, Les Nabis, the Impressionists and the Neo-Impressionists. Paul Cézanne was instrumental, as his work marked a shift from a more representational art form to one that was increasingly abstract, with a strong emphasis on the simplification of geometric structure. In a letter addressed to Émile Bernard dated 15 April 1904, Cézanne writes: "Interpret nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone; put everything in perspective, so that each side of an object, of a plane, recedes toward a central point."Cézanne was preoccupied by the means of rendering volume and space, surface variations (or modulations) with overlapped shifting planes. Increasingly in his later works, Cézanne achieves a greater freedom. His work became bolder, more arbitrary, more dynamic and increasingly nonrepresentational. As his color planes acquired greater formal independence, defined objects and structures began to lose their identity.'Walpurgis Night, and The Angel that other master Alfred Kubin the Western Window (whose hero is the esoteric scholar John Dee). Picasso was also a member of this Order And it seems the same is true about Picasso, if we can trust the word of Marijo Ariens-Volker, who in her article "Alchemical, Kabbalistic, and Occult Symbolism in the Work of His Contemporaries (discussed in chapter 4), brings up several disturbing arguments. According to this researcher, Picasso, at the beginning of his stay in Paris, lived with his friend Ricardo Vines, who frequented the Librairie du Merveilleux, the general headquarters of the "independent group of esoteric studies" created by Papus. Among those closest to the painter at this time, we find André Salmon, who makes reference to Papus, the Martinists, and the Masons in several of his texts There were also Juan Gris an extremely assiduous Mason 38 Max Jacob, who considered kabbalah as his "life philosophy" and will be, before being expelled by Breton for impenitent Catholicism, frequently published in Littérature, and Guillaume Apollinaire who often spoke of Hermes Tres megistus and whose library held many books by Papus and other Martinists, as well as the official journals of the Order and even a document from the 1908 Spiritualist Congress. According to his grandson, Olivier Widmaier, Picasso was extremely well versed in the kabbalah, read the Zohar, and was a spiritualist his conversations with Brassai, Picasso admitted he had been a "member of an Order during his cubist period," probably the Martinist Order: some of the collages he made at this ime even bear signs that Ariens-Volker analyzes as allusions to the Martinist grade of unknown superior 40 210 Papus (whose "confused mysticism" would be denounced by Gérard Legrand in Médium in November 1953) claimed he had received Martinist initiation from the son of a close friend of Saint-Martin, but he also spent time with the "famous" theoretician of modern occultism, the "priest" (and Mason) Alphonse Louis Constant, alias Eliphas Levi 211 (Osiris is a black god," Breton writes in Arcanum 1 and was part of Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott's Theosophical Society. He wanted to make the Martinist order which was connected with Christian illuminism-a mystical society, "a school of moral chivalry that would strive to develop the spirituality of its members by the study of the invisible world and its laws through the exercise of devotion and intellectual assistance, and by the creation in each spirit of a faith that would be more solid by being based on by Papus's son Phillipe d'Encausse.

 

"Deriving directly from Christian Illuminism, Martinism had to adopt the principles [...]

The Order as a whole is above all a school of moral chivalry, striving to develop the spirituality of its members by studying the invisible world and its laws, by exercising devotion and intellectual assistance and by the creation in each spirit of a faith all the more solid as it is based on observation and on science.

Martinists do not do magic, either white or black. They study, they pray, and they forgive the insults as best they can.

Accused of being devils by some, clerics by others, and black magicians or insane by the gallery, we will simply remain fervent knights of Christ, enemies of violence and revenge, resolute synarchists, opposed to any anarchy from above or from below, in a word from the Martinists. ”

Papus, The Initiation, November 1906

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Cubism

 

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Other components of Picasso’s references: esotericism, the Rosicrucian movement and opium.

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The magico-religious aspect of the Gosolan ceremonies, as well as their pagan and esoteric roots, must have attracted Picasso, who was superstitious and had been initiated into the occult by two masters, his close friends Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire68. In Gósol, the painter had the opportunity to enrich his training with in situ practices.

 

The Gosolan rites highlighted the continuity between the pagan world and the Christian one. This continuity was maintained by the Neoplatonists and, once the Inquisition was abolished, secret circles that had preserved the “living” tradition resurfaced, such as the Rosicrucians led by Sâr Péladan. The Grand Master sought, among other things, to merge the Rosicrucian movement with Christianity. Their ideas influenced Picasso’s entourage69 and Picasso’s Gosolan work reflects this union between pagan and Christian symbols.

 

Furthermore, opium, which Picasso and his circle appreciated, was linked to ancient mystery religions, in particular the cult of wheat presided over by Demeter and Persephone (fig.16). Opium facilitated access to knowledge, immortality of the soul and states of revelation. The flower from which opium is extracted, the poppy, is one of the emblems of the goddess Persephone. It is the flower that Picasso drew in his Gosolan notebook, his Carnet Catalan. Opium pipes are also represented in this notebook where the word “opium” is written, as well as a prescription for laudanum.

Opium, as Jean Cocteau, Sir Harold Acton, or Fernande71 explain, provides the opium smoker with the ability to constantly metamorphose, the sensation of being able to get anywhere he wants without the slightest effort, and an out-of-body experience that allows one to contemplate everything, oneself and the world, with impartiality72. Cocteau called opium “the flying carpet” and Picasso considered the scent of opium to be “the most intelligent of odors.”73

 

Opium placed these artists on the level of the ancient initiates, and the capacity for metamorphosis that it gave them allowed them to feel and see like them. The theatrical stagings of the ancient initiatory Mysteries in Parisian esoteric circles74 found some of their last real vestiges in Gósol.

 

Notes

 

68. RICHARDSON, JOHN, op. cit., Vol. I (1881-1906), pp. 207, 216, 331 and 334.

 

69. See the number of publications by Papus and Sâr Péladan, among other occultists, in the Apollinaire library: BOUDAR, GILBERT and DÉ-CAUDIN, MICHEL The library of Guillaume Apollinaire. Paris, Éditions du Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1983. See also M. FREIXA, op. cit., pp. 435-439; Gabriela di Milia, “Picasso and Canudo, a Couple of Transplants” in AA.VV. Picasso: the Italian journey 1917-1924, under the direction of Jean Clair, London, Thames and Hudson, 1998, pp. 75-77 and RICHARDSON, JOHN, op cit., Vol. I (1881-1906), p. 340.

 

70. According to Fernande Olivier, Picasso stopped smoking opium in 1908 following the suicide of a friend due to multiple intoxication. In Gósol, they were still smoking opium. The couple took refuge in the small village of Rue-des-Bois, in the suburbs of Paris, in 1908 to put an end to their opium addiction. OLIVIER, FERNANDE, op. cit., p. 183.

 

71. OLIVIER, FERNANDE Recuerdos íntimos. Escritos para Picasso. Barcelona. Ed. Parsifal. 1990 (1st ed. Souvenirs intimes: écrits pour Picasso, Calmann-Lévy, 1988), pp. 149 and 150 and OLIVIER, FERNANDE Picasso y sus amigos. Madrid. Taurus Ediciones. 1964 (Picasso and his friends, Stock, Paris, 1933), pp. 45 and p. 46.

 

72. COCTEAU, JEAN Opio. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 2002 and ACTON, HAROLD Memorias de un esteta (originally Memoirs of an Aesthete), Valencia, Ed. Pre Textos, 2010, pp. 522 and 523.

 

73. RICHARDSON, JOHN El aprendiz de brujo. Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2001. (1st edition The sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1991), pp. 313 and 314.

 

74. Sâr Péladan had organized theatrical performances of the ancient Mysteries. Reference consulted on May 9, 2011 on fratreslucis.netfirms.com/Peladan01.html

 

www.picasso.fr/details/ojo-les-archives-mars-2013-ojo-21-...

 

ANDRÉ BRETON AND HERMETICISM. FROM << MAGNETIC FIELDS >>> TO << THE KEY TO THE FIELDS >>>

 

Communication by Mrs. A. BALAKIAN (New York)

 

at the XIVth Congress of the Association, July 26, 1962.

 

In one of his most recent essays, "Before the Curtain," André Breton accused academic criticism of having made no formal effort to establish the esoteric schemes of art and poetry: "By abstaining until now from taking them into account, academic criticism has devoted itself purely and simply to inanity... thus the great emotional movements that still agitate us, the sensitive charter that governs us, would they proceed, whether we like it or not, from a tradition completely different from that which is taught: on this tradition the most unworthy, the most vindictive silence is kept (1)." Would not our investigation, "Hermeticism and Poetry," be a denial of this reproach?

 

It is true that hermeticism in all its forms has served as a cult for surrealism since Les Champs Magnétiques, the first surrealist document, until André Breton's last collection of essays, published under the cryptographic title of La Clé des Champs, which sums up the definitive position he reached after having searched for more than a quarter of a century for the occult foundations of the human pyramid. Already in he First Manifesto of the Magician Shepherd of the Magnetic Fields had proclaimed that Rimbaud's Alchemy of the Word should be taken literally. In the article, "Why I am Taking the Direction of the Surrealist Revolution", which dates from 1925, he had considered the surrealists as an army of adventurers who act under the orders of the marvelous. On many occasions he has traced the underground framework that, according to him, unites poetic minds since what he calls "the admirable fourteenth century" when Flamel mysteriously received the manuscript of the book of Abraham Juif, through the work of the alchemists of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, passing through the work of Martinès, Saint-Martin, Fabre d'Olivet, Abbé Contant, through that of the enlightened ones of the nineteenth century: Hugo, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, to a certain degree Mallarmé, and more recently up to the work of Jarry, Apollinaire, and Raymond Roussel; Breton thus marks the parallel between the occultists and the poets. The philosopher's stone does not simply transform metals but takes on a symbolic meaning; according to Breton it unleashes the human imagination, a word to which he attributes a very special meaning. It is not a deceptive faculty but a liberating one. Without it we are forced to live under the empire of rationalism, that is to say on the surface of things and according to the evident current of phenomena. According to Breton, imagination alone would be capable of delivering us from this condition. Indeed, he attributes to imagination this special characteristic of the human being that Hermes Trismegistus would have defined as "the intimate union of sensation and thought" . This faculty, not inert but latent, "domesticated" (the word is Breton's) for centuries, could find its repressed impulses to make us envisage an unexpected and dynamic rather than organized order of the world. The hermetic tradition that is perpetuated in an underground way at all times and under any form of culture, does not constitute a conscious influence; it is rather a kind of transfusion that at each new mystical crisis of humanity strengthens those

 

(1) La Clé des Champs, Sagittaire, 1953, p. 93.

 

www.persee.fr/doc/caief_0571-5865_1963_num_15_1_2248

poppies.hrp.org.uk/about-the-installation

 

The major art installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London, marking one hundred years since the first full day of Britain's involvement in the First World War. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies will progressively fill the Tower's famous moat over the summer. Each poppy represents a British military fatality during the war.

 

The poppies will encircle the iconic landmark, creating not only a spectacular display visible from all around the Tower but also a location for personal reflection. The scale of the installation intends to reflect the magnitude of such an important centenary creating a powerful visual commemoration.

  

Altman was born in Vinnytsia, Imperial Russia. From 1902 to 1907 he studied painting and sculpture at the Art College in Odessa. In 1906 he had his first exhibition in Odessa. In 1910 he went to Paris, where he studied at the Free Russian Academy, working in the studio of Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, and had contact with Marc Chagall, Alexander Archipenko, and David Shterenberg. In 1910 he became a member of the group Union of Youth. His famous Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, conceived in Cubist style, was painted in 1914. After 1916 he started to work as a stage designer.

 

In 1918 he was the member of the Board for Artistic Matters within the Department of Fine Arts of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment together with Malevich, Baranoff-Rossine and Shevchenko. In the same year he had an exhibition with the group Jewish Society for the Furthering of the Arts in Moscow, together with Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, El Lissitzky and the others. In 1920 he became a member of the Institute for Artistic Culture, together with Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and others. In the same year, he participated in the exhibition From Impressionism to Cubism in the Museum of Painterly Culture in Petrograd. From 1920 to 1928 he worked on stage designs for the Habimah Theatre and the Jewish State Theatre in Moscow. In 1923 a volume of his Jewish graphic art was published in Berlin. In 1925 he participated in Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderns (Art Deco) in Paris. His first solo exhibition in Leningrad was in 1926.

Oil on canvas; 102 x 80 cm.

 

(b Faenza, 4 Aug 1909; d Rome, 5 April 1981). Italian painter, illustrator and stage designer. He began his training in Faenza in the workshop of the Italian painter and ceramicist Mario Ortolani (1901-55). After living briefly in Bologna (1927) and Paris (1928) he settled in Rome in 1929, first exhibiting his work at the Venice Biennale in the following year. His paintings at this time, such as Nude (Susanna after her Bath) (1929; Faenza, Pin. Com.), were characterized by an emphasis on tonal relationships and on the influence of the Scuola Romana. In 1934 he began to work with growing success as an illustrator for the journals Quadrivio and Italia letteraria. The contacts he established with Paris were intensified with his move there in 1947, resulting in three one-man shows at the Galerie Rive Gauche (in 1950, 1953 and 1957), and in his paintings he evolved a cautious balance between the representation and the disassembling of the image. Some of his best-known series of paintings date from this time, including his Cathedrals (e.g. Cathedral with Still-life and Dog, 1960; Rome, Vatican, Col. A. Relig. Mod.), pictures of town squares populated by acrobats and musicians, and later female nudes and a series entitled Mermaids.

  

Mysore Shrinivas Sathyu is a leading film director, stage designer and art director from India.

 

His first assignment as an independent Art director was for Haqeeqat, a film by Chetan Anand, which got him the Filmfare Award in 1964. He also did work in theatre as a designer and director, including designing sets and lights for productions of Hindustani Theatre, Okhla Theatre of Habib Tanvir, Kannada Bharati and other groups He is best known for his directorial film Garam Hawa (1973) is based on the partition of India. He was awarded Padma Shri in 1975.

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (Spanish: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso]; 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,[2][3] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

 

Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.[4][5][6][7]

 

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortune, making him one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

"Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red" at the Tower of London, marks one hundred years since the first full day of Britain's involvement in the First World War. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies will progressively fill the Tower's famous moat over the summer. Each poppy represents a British military fatality during the war.

 

The poppies will encircle the iconic landmark, creating not only a spectacular display visible from all around the Tower but also a location for personal reflection. The scale of the installation intends to reflect the magnitude of such an important centenary creating a powerful visual commemoration.

 

The plan is to sell all of the poppies that make up the installation and, in doing so, raise millions of pounds which will be shared equally amongst six service charities.

Today, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month those who fell during the world wars are remembered. Today is known as Armistice day when the First World War ended.

 

The 11th November 2014 also marks the last day of the fitting "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red“ memorial at the Tower of London which marked the centenary of the start of the First World War.

 

Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies progressively filled the Tower's famous moat from 5th August to 11th November. Each poppy represents a British military fatality during the war.

 

I was fortunate to see the display in London back in August (when this picture was taken). Now the moat is completely full with a sea of red poppies.

 

From the 12th November the display will be removed by thousands of volunteers and the individual poppies will be sent to those who have bought them to raise money for charity.

   

The Tower Of London remembers the First World War 1914-1918

 

The major art installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London, marked one hundred years since the first full day of Britain's involvement in the First World War. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies progressively filled the Tower's famous moat between 17 July and 11 November 2014. Each poppy represented a British military fatality during the war.

 

The poppies encircled the iconic landmark, creating not only a spectacular display visible from all around the Tower but also a location for personal reflection. The scale of the installation was intended to reflect the magnitude of such an important centenary and create a powerful visual commemoration.

 

All of the poppies that made up the installation were sold, raising millions of pounds which were shared equally amongst six service charities.

Oil on canvas; 86.5 x 71.8 cm.

 

Russian painter, draughtsman and stage designer. He studied at the University of St Petersburg (later Petrograd) in 1908 and in the private studio of Savely Zeidenberg (1862–1924). In 1909–10 he attended the studio of Yan Tsyonglinsky (1850–1914) in St Petersburg, where he became acquainted with the avant-garde artists Yelena Guro (1877–1913), Mikhail Matyushin and Matvey Vol’demar (1878–1914). In 1911–12 he worked in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton in Paris, then in Switzerland (1913) before returning to St Petersburg. As a painter he was a modernist, and his work developed rapidly towards abstraction, although he did not adhere to any particular branch of it. His works of the time use various devices of stylization and decorativeness, and some of them echo the free associations of Marc Chagall, but fundamentally they remain geometrically based compositions. In 1919–20 he made a series of abstract sculptural assemblages and a great number of abstract collages.

 

Annenkov became popular as an illustrator, producing elegant drawings for a number of magazines in Petrograd in 1913–17, including Satirikon, Argus, Lukomor’ye and Solntse Rossii. He designed and illustrated many books for Moscow and Petrograd publishing houses in the 1910s and 1920s. In the early 1920s he designed a great number of book covers in the Constructivist style. He illustrated children’s books, especially for the private publishing house Raduga in Petrograd. But his most important illustrations were those for Aleksandr Blok’s revolutionary poem Dvenadtsat’ (‘The Twelve’; St Petersburg, 1918), which were successful improvisations on the poem’s themes, combining stylization and emotion. He also drew and painted a great number of portraits, especially of cultural and political figures. His monumental Portrait of the Red Army Leader L. Trotsky (1923; Moscow, Cent. Mus. Revolution), which has an urban background in Constructivist style, was particularly successful.

 

From 1913 Annenkov worked as a stage designer. He worked for the Krivoye Zerkalo (Distorting Mirror) Theatre in Petrograd (1914–15) and for the Komissarzhevsky Theatre in Moscow (1914–18). He then worked for a number of theatres in Petrograd, sometimes as designer and producer. He collaborated with Vsevolod Meyerkhold (e.g. Lev Tolstoy’s Pervyy vinokur, ‘First distiller’, Hermitage Theatre, Petrograd, 1919) and with Nikolay Yeureinov. Annenkov’s designs for Bunt mashin (‘Revolt of the machines’, Georg Kaiser adapted by Aleksey Tolstoy, Bol’shoy Dramatic Theatre, Petrograd, 1924) used a Constructivist-inspired mechanized set. Annenkov also designed a number of celebrations and pageants commemorating the Revolution of 1917, including the ambitious re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace, which took place in Uritsky (now Dvortsovaya) Square in Petrograd on 7 November 1920 and involved monumental scenery and c. 7000 performers. In 1922–4 he led the revival of the activities of the World of art group and in 1924 worked towards the establishment of the Society of easel painters. The same year he settled in Paris, where he aligned himself with the Ecole de Paris. He continued to design books, stage and film sets in France and Germany, and he exhibited at many joint Russian and French exhibitions. He also became active as an exhibition organizer himself, especially for the USA.

 

V. Rakitin From Grove Art Online

© 2009 Oxford University Press

 

The Postcard

 

A postally unused postcard that was published by Charles Skilton & Fry Ltd. The card, which has a divided back, was printed in Great Britain. The photography was by Lord Lichfield, courtesy of Weidenfeld Publishers Ltd.

 

Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon

 

Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, was born on the 21st. August 1930. She was the younger daughter of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and the younger sister and only sibling of Queen Elizabeth II.

 

Margaret spent much of her childhood with her parents and sister. Her life changed at the age of six when King Edward VIII, her paternal uncle, abdicated to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson. Margaret's father became king, and her sister became heir presumptive, with Margaret second in line to the throne.

 

Margaret's position in the line of succession diminished over the following decades as Elizabeth's children and grandchildren were born. During the Second World War, the two sisters stayed at Windsor Castle despite suggestions that they should be evacuated to Canada. During the war years, Margaret was too young to perform official duties and continued her education, being nine years old when the war broke out and turning 15 just after hostilities ended.

 

From the 1950's onwards, Margaret became one of the world's most celebrated socialites, famed for her glamorous lifestyle and reputed romances. Most famously, she fell in love in the early 1950's with Peter Townsend, a married RAF officer in the royal household.

 

In 1952, Margaret's father died, her sister became queen, and Townsend divorced his wife. He proposed to Margaret early in the following year. Many in the government believed that he would be an unsuitable husband for the Queen's 22-year-old sister, and the Archbishop of Canterbury refused to countenance her marriage to a divorced man.

 

Margaret abandoned her plans with Townsend and married Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960; the Queen created him Earl of Snowdon. The couple had two children, David and Sarah, and divorced in 1978. Margaret did not remarry.

 

Margaret was a controversial member of the British royal family. Her divorce received much negative publicity, and her private life was for many years the subject of speculation by the media and royal watchers. Her health deteriorated in the last 20 years of her life. She was a heavy smoker for most of her adult life, and had a lung operation in 1985, a bout of pneumonia in 1993 as well as three strokes between 1998 and 2001.

 

Annus Horribilis

 

Margaret died in London at the age of 71 on the 9th. February 2002, following a fourth stroke. Margaret's death contributed to the Queen's 'Annus Horribilis' to which she referred in a speech at the London Guildhall on the 24th. November 1992.

 

Other events contributing to the Queen's awful year of 1992 included:

 

-- The publication of photographs of Diana sitting alone on a bench at the Taj Mahal when she was on a trip to India with Charles on the 11th. February 1992.

 

-- In March Andrew and Sarah announced their separation.

 

-- In April, Princess Anne and Mark Phillips divorced.

 

-- In June, Andrew Morton's biography of Diana was published. The book was controversial as it detailed Diana's suicidal unhappiness within her marriage, and her struggles with depression. At the time of publication, Buckingham Palace denied any cooperation between the princess and Morton, but it was later revealed that Diana was the main source behind the book's content.

 

-- In August, there were scandals in the tabloids relating to both Sarah and Diana.

 

-- In November, there was an enormously destructive fire at Windsor Castle which prompted controversy over who should pay for the restoration.

 

After the Queen's Guildhall speech, the Annus Horribilis continued unabated -- on the 9th. December, Charles and Diana announced their separation.

 

Princess Margaret - The Early Years

 

Princess Margaret was born at 9:22 p.m. on the 21st. August 1930 at Glamis Castle in Scotland, her mother's ancestral home, and was affectionately known as Margot within the royal family. She was the first member of the royal family in direct line of succession to be born in Scotland since the 1600's.

 

She was delivered by Sir Henry Simson, the royal obstetrician. The Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, was present to verify the birth. The registration of her birth was delayed for several days to avoid her being numbered 13 in the parish register. Margaret was baptised in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on the 30th. October 1930 by Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

 

At the time of her birth, Margaret was fourth in the line of succession to the British throne. Her father was the Duke of York (later King George VI), the second son of King George V and Queen Mary. Her mother was the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother), the youngest daughter of the 14th. Earl and the Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

 

The Duchess of York originally wanted to name her second daughter Ann Margaret, as she explained to Queen Mary in a letter:

 

"I am very anxious to call her Ann

Margaret, as I think Ann of York

sounds pretty, & Elizabeth and Ann

go so well together."

 

King George V disliked the name Ann but approved of the alternative, Margaret Rose.

 

Margaret's early life was spent primarily at the Yorks' residences at 145 Piccadilly (their town house in London) and Royal Lodge in Windsor. The Yorks were perceived by the public as an ideal family: father, mother and children, but unfounded rumours that Margaret was deaf and mute were not completely dispelled until her first main public appearance at her uncle Prince George's wedding in 1934.

 

Margaret was educated alongside her sister, Elizabeth, by their Scottish governess, Marion Crawford. Margaret's education was mainly supervised by her mother, who in the words of Randolph Churchill "never aimed at bringing her daughters up to be more than nicely behaved young ladies".

 

When Queen Mary insisted upon the importance of education, the Duchess of York commented:

 

"I don't know what she meant.

After all, I and my sisters only

had governesses, and we all

married well — one of us very

well".

 

Margaret resented her limited education, especially in later years, and criticised at her mother. However, Margaret's mother told a friend that she "regretted" that her daughters did not go to school like other children, and the employment of a governess rather than sending the girls to school may have been done only at the insistence of King George V.

 

J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, read stories to the sisters as children.

 

Margaret's grandfather, George V, died when she was five, and her uncle acceded as King Edward VIII. Less than a year later, on 11 December 1936, in the abdication crisis, he left the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American, whom neither the Church of England nor the Dominion governments would accept as queen. The Church would not recognise the marriage of a divorced woman with a living ex-husband as valid.

 

Edward's abdication made a reluctant Duke of York the new king, and Margaret became second in line to the throne with the title The Princess Margaret to indicate her status as a child of the sovereign. The family moved into Buckingham Palace; Margaret's room overlooked The Mall.

 

Margaret was a Brownie in the 1st. Buckingham Palace Brownie Pack, formed in 1937. She was also a Girl Guide and later a Sea Ranger. She served as President of Girlguiding UK from 1965 until her death in 2002.

 

At the outbreak of World War II, Margaret and her sister were at Birkhall, on the Balmoral Castle estate, where they stayed until Christmas 1939, enduring nights so cold that drinking water in carafes by their bedside froze. They spent Christmas at Sandringham House before moving to Windsor Castle for much of the remainder of the war.

 

Viscount Hailsham wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill to advise the evacuation of the princesses to the greater safety of Canada, to which their mother famously replied:

 

"The children won't go without me.

I won't leave without the King.

And the King will never leave."

 

At Windsor, the princesses staged pantomimes at Christmas in aid of the Queen's Wool Fund, which bought yarn to knit into military garments. In 1940, Margaret sat next to Elizabeth during their radio broadcast for the BBC's Children's Hour, addressing other children who had been evacuated from cities. Margaret spoke at the end by wishing all the children goodnight.

 

Unlike other members of the royal family, Margaret was not expected to undertake any public or official duties during the war. She developed her skills at singing and playing the piano, often tunes from stage musicals. Her contemporaries thought she was spoiled by her parents, especially her father, who allowed her to take liberties not usually permissible, such as being allowed to stay up to dinner at the age of 13.

 

Crawford despaired at the attention Margaret was getting, writing to friends:

 

"Could you this year only ask

Princess Elizabeth to your party?

Princess Margaret does draw all

the attention, and Princess

Elizabeth lets her do that."

 

Elizabeth, however, did not mind this, and commented:

 

"Oh, it's so much easier when

Margaret's there — everybody

laughs at what Margaret says".

 

King George described Elizabeth as his pride and Margaret as his joy.

 

Princess Margaret and the Post-War Years

 

At the end of the war in 1945, Margaret appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace with her family and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Afterwards, both Elizabeth and Margaret joined the crowds outside the palace, incognito, chanting:

 

"We want the King, we want the Queen!"

 

On the 15th. April 1946, Margaret was confirmed into the Church of England. On the 1st. February 1947, she, Elizabeth and their parents embarked on a state tour of Southern Africa. The three-month-long visit was Margaret's first visit abroad, and she later claimed that she remembered "every minute of it".

 

Margaret's chaperone was Peter Townsend, the King's equerry, and very firm toward Margaret, whom he apparently considered an indulged child. Later that year, Margaret was a bridesmaid at Elizabeth's wedding. In the next three years, Elizabeth had two children, Charles and Anne, whose births moved Margaret further down the line of succession.

 

In 1950, the former royal governess, Marion Crawford, published an unauthorized biography of Elizabeth's and Margaret's childhood years, titled The Little Princesses, in which she described Margaret's "light-hearted fun and frolics" and her "amusing and outrageous antics".

 

The Margaret Set

 

Around the time of Princess Elizabeth's wedding in November 1947, the press started to follow the social life of "unconventional" Margaret and her reputation for vivacity and wit. As a beautiful young woman, with an 18-inch waist and "vivid blue eyes", Margaret enjoyed socialising with high society and young aristocrats, including Sharman Douglas, the daughter of the American ambassador, Lewis Williams Douglas.

 

A celebrated beauty known for her glamour and fashion sense, Margaret was often featured in the press at balls, parties, and nightclubs with friends who became known as the "Margaret Set". The number of her official engagements increased, and she joined a growing number of charitable organisations as president or patron.

 

Favoured haunts of the Margaret Set were The 400 Club, the Café de Paris and the Mirabelle restaurant. Anticipation of an engagement or romance between Margaret and a member of her set were often reported. In 1948, international news grew that her engagement to "Sunny", the Marquess of Blandford, would be announced on her 18th. birthday.

 

Similar speculation moved to the Hon. Peter Ward, then Billy Wallace and others. The set also mixed with celebrities, including Danny Kaye, whom she met after watching him perform at the London Palladium in February 1948. He was soon accepted by the royal social circle.

 

In July 1949, at a fancy dress ball at the American Ambassador's residence, Margaret performed the can-can on stage, accompanied by Douglas and ten other costumed girls. A press commotion ensued, with Kaye denying he had taught Margaret the dance. Press interest could be intrusive. During a private visit to Paris in 1951, Margaret and Prince Nicholas of Yugoslavia were followed into a nightclub by a paparazzo who took photographs of them until British detectives physically removed him from the club.

 

In 1952, although Margaret attended parties and debutante balls with friends such as Douglas and Mark Bonham Carter, the set were seen infrequently together. They regrouped in time for Coronation season social functions. In May 1953, Margaret met singer Eddie Fisher when he performed at the Red, White and Blue Ball.

 

She asked him to her table and he was "invited to all sorts of parties". Margaret fell out with him in 1957, but years later, Fisher still claimed the night he was introduced to her was the greatest thrill of his lifetime. In June 1954, the Set performed the Edgar Wallace play 'The Frog' at the Scala Theatre. It was organized by Margaret's by now best girlfriend Judy Montagu with Margaret as Assistant Director.

 

The play drew praise for raising £10,500 for charity, but was also criticised for incompetent performances. By the mid 1950's, although still seen at fashionable nightspots and theatre premieres, the set was depleted by its members getting married. As Margaret reached her late twenties unmarried, the press increasingly turned from predicting whom she might marry to suspecting she would remain a spinster.

 

'Romances' and the Press (1947–1959)

 

The press avidly discussed "the world's most eligible bachelor-girl" and her alleged romances with more than 30 bachelors, including David Mountbatten and Michael I of Romania, Dominic Elliot, Colin Tennant (later Baron Glenconner), Prince Henry of Hesse-Kassel, and future Prime Minister of Canada John Turner.

 

Most had titles and almost all were wealthy. Blandford and Lord Dalkeith, both wealthy sons of dukes, were the likeliest potential husbands. Her family reportedly hoped that Margaret would marry Dalkeith, but, unlike him, the princess was uninterested in the outdoors. Billy Wallace, sole heir to a £2.8 million (£78 million today) fortune and an old friend, was reportedly Margaret's favourite date during the mid-1950's.

 

During her 21st. birthday party at Balmoral in August 1951, the press was disappointed to only photograph Margaret with Townsend, always in the background of pictures of royal appearances, and to her parents a safe companion as Elizabeth's duties increased.

 

The following month her father underwent surgery for lung cancer, and Margaret was appointed one of the Counsellors of State who undertook the King's official duties while he was incapacitated. Her father died five months later, on the 6th. February 1952, and her sister became Queen.

 

Romance with Peter Townsend

 

-- The Early Relationship

 

During the war, the King suggested choosing palace aides who were highly qualified men from the military, instead of only aristocrats. Told that a handsome war hero had arrived, the princesses met Townsend, the new equerry, on his first day at Buckingham Palace in 1944; Elizabeth reportedly told her sister, 13 years old, "Bad luck, he's married".

 

A temporary assignment of three months from the RAF became permanent. George VI and the Queen Mother were fond of Townsend; the king reportedly saw the calm and efficient combat veteran as the son he never had. He may have been aware of his daughter's infatuation with the non-titled and non-wealthy Townsend, reportedly seeing the courtier reluctantly obey the princess's order to carry her up palace stairs after a party.

 

Townsend was so often near Margaret that gossip columnists overlooked him as a suitor for the princess. When their relationship began is unclear. The princess told friends she fell in love with the equerry during the 1947 South Africa tour, where they often went riding together. Her biographer Craig Brown stated that, according to a National Trust curator, Townsend requested the bedroom next to hers during a trip to Belfast in October 1947.

 

In November 1948, they attended the inauguration of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. In later life, Townsend admitted at this point there was an attraction between them, but neither of them ever acknowledged it to one another. Not long after he discovered his wife Rosemary was involved in an extramarital affair, which ended.

 

Contemporary anecdotes about their closeness then dissipated until late 1950, when friendship seems to have rekindled, coinciding with Townsend's appointment as Deputy Master of the Household and the breakdown of his marriage.

 

From the spring of 1951 came several testimonies of a growing romantic attraction. A footman told how the King diverted the pair's picnic plans, adding that whatever the King and Queen knew about the developing relationship, few royal staff failed to notice as it was obvious to them.

 

Townsend said that his love for Margaret began in Balmoral in 1951, and recalled an incident there in August when the princess woke him from a nap after a picnic lunch while the King watched, to suggest the King knew. Townsend and his wife separated in 1951, which was noticed by the press by July.

 

Margaret was grief-stricken by her father's death and was prescribed sedatives to help her sleep. Of her father she wrote:

 

"He was such a wonderful person,

the very heart and centre of our

happy family."

 

Margaret was consoled by her deeply-held Christian beliefs, sometimes attending church twice daily. She re-emerged attending events with her family in April, and returned to public duties and the social scene when official mourning ended in June.

 

American newspapers noted her increasing vitality and speculated that she must be in love. With the widowed Queen Mother, Margaret moved out of Buckingham Palace and into Clarence House in May 1953, while her older sister, now Queen, and her family moved out of Clarence House and into Buckingham Palace. After the king's death, Townsend was appointed Comptroller of Margaret's mother's restructured household.

 

In June 1952, the estranged Townsends hosted Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret at a cocktail party at their home. A month later, Rosemary Townsend and her new partner John de László attended judging at the Royal Windsor Horse Show. It is thought that the romance between Margaret and Townsend began around this time.

 

The first reports that Townsend and Margaret wished to marry began in August 1952, but these remained uncommon. The Townsend divorce in November was mentioned little in Britain and in greater detail abroad. After the divorce was finalized in December 1952, however, rumours spread about him and Margaret; the divorce, and shared grief over the death of the king in February 1952, likely helped them come together within the privacy of Clarence House, where the princess had her own apartment.

 

-- The Marriage Proposal

 

Private Secretary to the Queen Sir Alan Lascelles wrote that Townsend came to tell him that he had asked Margaret to marry him shortly before Christmas 1952. Other sources claim it occurred in April 1953. He was 15 years her senior, and had two children from his previous marriage. Margaret accepted and informed her sister, the Queen, whose consent was required by the Royal Marriages Act 1772.

 

During the abdication crisis, the Church of England refused to countenance the remarriage of the divorced.

 

Queen Mary had recently died, and, after the coronation of Elizabeth II, the new queen planned to tour the Commonwealth for six months. She told her sister:

 

"Under the circumstances, it isn't

unreasonable for me to ask you

to wait a year."

 

Although foreign media speculated on Margaret and Townsend's relationship, the British press did not. After reporters saw her plucking fluff from his coat during the coronation on the 2nd. June 1953. Townsend later said:

 

"I never thought a thing about it,

and neither did Margaret. After

that the storm broke."

 

The People first mentioned the relationship in Britain on the 14th. June 1953. With the headline "They Must Deny it NOW", the front-page article warned that "scandalous rumours about Princess Margaret are racing around the world", which the newspaper stated were "of course, utterly untrue".

 

The foreign press believed that the Regency Act 1953—which made Prince Philip, the Queen's husband, regent instead of Margaret on the Queen's death—was enacted to allow the princess to marry Townsend, but as late as the 23rd. July most other British newspapers except the Daily Mirror did not discuss the rumours. Acting Prime Minister Rab Butler asked that "deplorable speculation" end, without mentioning Margaret or Townsend.

 

The constitutional crisis that the proposed marriage caused was public. The Queen was advised by Lascelles to post Townsend abroad, but she refused, and instead transferred him from the Queen Mother's household to her own, although Townsend did not accompany Margaret as planned on a tour of Southern Rhodesia.

 

Prime Minister Churchill personally approved of "a lovely young royal lady married to a gallant young airman" but his wife reminded Churchill that he had made the same mistake during the abdication crisis. His cabinet refused to approve the marriage, and Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, did not approve of Margaret marrying a divorced man; opponents said that the marriage would threaten the monarchy as Edward VIII's had.

 

The Church of England Newspaper said that:

 

"Margaret is a dutiful churchwoman

who knows what strong views leaders

of the church hold in this matter."

 

However the Sunday Express—which had supported Edward and Wallis—asked:

 

"IF THEY WANT TO MARRY,

WHY SHOULDN'T THEY?"

 

Churchill discussed the marriage at the 1953 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference held with the coronation; the Statute of Westminster 1931 requires Dominion parliaments to also approve any Bill of Renunciation changing the line of succession.

 

The Canadian government stated that altering the line twice in 25 years would harm the monarchy. Churchill informed the Queen that both his cabinet and Dominion prime ministers were against the marriage, and that Parliament would not approve a marriage that would be unrecognized by the Church of England unless Margaret renounced her rights to the throne.

 

Prince Philip was reportedly the most opposed to Townsend in the royal family, while Margaret's mother and sister wanted her to be happy, but could not approve of the marriage. Besides Townsend's divorce, two major problems were financial and constitutional.

 

Margaret did not possess her sister's large fortune, and would need the £6,000 annual civil list allowance and £15,000 additional allowance Parliament had provided for her upon a suitable marriage. She did not object to being removed from the line of succession to the throne, as the Queen and all her children dying was unlikely, but receiving parliamentary approval for the marriage would be difficult and uncertain.

 

At the age of 25 Margaret would not need Elizabeth's permission under the 1772 Act; she could, after notifying the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, marry in one year if Parliament did not prevent her. If Churchill told the Queen, however, one could easily leave the line of succession, another could easily enter the line, dangerous for a hereditary monarchy.

 

The Queen told the couple to wait until 1955, when Margaret would be 25, avoiding the Queen having to publicly disapprove of her sister's marriage. Lascelles—who compared Townsend to Theudas "boasting himself to be somebody"—hoped that separating him and Margaret would end their romance.

 

Churchill arranged for Townsend's assignment as air attaché at the British Embassy in Brussels; he was sent on the 15th. July 1953, before Margaret's return from Rhodesia on the 30th. July. The assignment was so sudden that the British ambassador learned about it from a newspaper. Although the princess and Townsend knew about his new job, they had reportedly been promised a few days together before his departure.

 

-- Press Coverage

 

For two years, press speculation continued. In Brussels, Townsend only said that "The word must come from somebody else". He avoided parties and being seen with women. With few duties (the sinecure was abolished after him), Townsend improved his French and horsemanship. He joined a Belgian show jumping club and rode in races around Europe.

 

Margaret was told by the Church that she would be unable to receive communion if she married a divorced man. Three quarters of Sunday Express readers opposed the relationship, and Mass-Observation recorded criticism of the "silly little fool" as a poor example for young women who emulated her. Other newspaper polls showed popular support for Margaret's personal choice, regardless of Church teaching or government.

 

97% of Daily Mirror readers supported marriage, and a Daily Express editorial stated that even if the Archbishop of Canterbury was displeased:

 

"She would best please the vast

majority of ordinary folk by finding

happiness for herself".

 

The couple were not restricted on communicating by mail and telephone. Margaret worked with friends on charity productions of Lord and Lady Algy and The Frog, and publicly dated men such as Tennant and Wallace. In January 1955, she made the first of many trips to the Caribbean, perhaps to distract, and as a reward for being apart, from Townsend.

 

The attaché secretly travelled to Britain; while the palace was aware of one visit, he reportedly made other trips for nights and weekends with the princess at Clarence House—her apartment had its own front door—and friends' homes.

 

That spring Townsend for the first time spoke to the press:

 

"I am sick of being made to hide in

my apartment like a thief, but whether

I can marry involves more people than

myself".

 

He reportedly believed that his exile from Margaret would soon end, their love was strong, and that the British people would support marrying. Townsend received a bodyguard and police guard around his apartment after the Belgian government received threats on his life, but the British government still said nothing.

 

Stating that people were more interested in the couple than the recent 1955 United Kingdom general election, on the 29th. May the Daily Express published an editorial demanding that Buckingham Palace confirm or deny the rumours.

 

The press described Margaret's 25th. birthday, the 21st. August 1955, as the day she was free to marry, and expected an announcement about Townsend soon. Three hundred journalists waited outside Balmoral, four times as many as those later following Diana, Princess of Wales. "COME ON MARGARET!", the Daily Mirror's front page said two days earlier, asking her to "Please Make up Your Mind!".

 

On the 12th. October Townsend returned from Brussels as Margaret's suitor. The royal family devised a system in which it did not host Townsend, but he and Margaret formally courted each other at dinner parties hosted by friends such as Mark Bonham Carter. A Gallup poll found that 59% of Britons approved of their marrying, with 17% opposed.

 

Women in the East End of London shouted "Go on, Marg, do what you want" at the princess. Although the couple were never seen together in public during this time, the general consensus was that they would marry. Crowds waited outside Clarence House, and a global audience read daily updates and rumours on newspaper front pages.

 

The Manchester Guardian said on the 15th. October:

 

"Nothing much else than Princess

Margaret's affairs is being talked

of in this country, Now the Nation

Waits."

 

Observers interpreted Buckingham Palace's request to the press to respect Margaret's privacy—the first time the palace discussed the princess's recent personal life—as evidence of an imminent betrothal announcement,

 

As no announcement occurred—the Daily Mirror on the 17th. October showed a photograph of Margaret's left hand with the headline "NO RING YET!"—the press wondered why. The News Chronicle wrote:

 

"Parliamentarians are frankly puzzled

by the way the affair has been handled.

If a marriage is on, why not announce it

quickly?

If there is to be no marriage, why allow

the couple to continue to meet without

a clear denial of the rumours?"

 

Why a betrothal did not occur is still unclear. Margaret may have been uncertain of her desire, having written to Prime Minister Anthony Eden in August that:

 

"It is only by seeing him in this way

that I feel I can properly decide

whether I can marry him or not".

 

Margaret may have told Townsend as early as the 12th. October that governmental and familial opposition to their marriage had not changed; it is possible that neither they nor the Queen fully understood until that year how difficult the 1772 Act made a royal marriage without the monarch's permission.

 

An influential 26th. October editorial in The Times stating that "The Queen's sister married to a divorced man (even though the innocent party) would be irrevocably disqualified from playing her part in the essential royal function" represented The Establishment's view of what it considered a possibly dangerous crisis.

 

It convinced many, who had believed that the media were exaggerating, that the princess really might defy the Church and royal standards. Leslie Weatherhead, President of the Methodist Conference, now criticized the proposed marriage.

 

Townsend recalled that:

 

"We felt mute and numbed at

the centre of this maelstrom."

 

The Queen also wanted the media circus to end. Townsend only had his RAF income and, other than a talent for writing, had no experience in other work. He wrote in his autobiography that:

 

"The princess could have married

me only if she had been prepared

to give up everything -- her position,

her prestige, her privy purse.

I simply hadn't the weight, I knew it,

to counterbalance all she would have

lost"

 

Kenneth Rose described Margaret's potential marriage as "life in a cottage on a Group Captain's salary".

 

Royal historian Hugo Vickers wrote that:

 

"Lascelles's separation plan

had worked, and the love

between them had died".

 

Margaret's authorized biographer Christopher Warwick said that:

 

"Having spent two years apart, they

were no longer as in love as they had

been. Townsend was not the love of

her life – the love of her life was her

father, King George VI, whom she

adored".

 

More than 100 journalists waited at Balmoral when Eden arrived to discuss the marriage with the Queen and Margaret on the 1st. October 1955. Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, that month prepared a secret government document on the proposed marriage.

 

According to a 1958 biography of Townsend by Norman Barrymaine and other accounts, Eden said that his government would oppose in Parliament Margaret retaining her royal status. Parliament might pass resolutions opposing the marriage, which the people would see as a disagreement between government and monarchy; Lord Salisbury, a High Anglican, might resign from the government rather than help pass a Bill of Renunciation.

 

While the government could not prevent the marriage when Margaret become a private individual after a Bill of Renunciation, she would no longer be a Counsellor of State, and would lose her civil list allowance; otherwise, taxpayers would subsidise a divorced man and the princess's new stepsons. The Church would consider any children from the marriage to be illegitimate. Eden recommended that, like Edward VIII and Wallis, Margaret and Townsend leave Great Britain for several years.

 

Papers released in 2004 to the National Archives disagree. They show that the Queen and Eden (who had been divorced and remarried himself) planned to amend the 1772 Act. Margaret would have been able to marry Townsend by removing her and any children from the marriage from the line of succession, and thus the Queen's permission would no longer be necessary. Margaret would be allowed to keep her royal title and her allowance, stay in the country, and even continue with her public duties.

 

Eden described the Queen's attitude in a letter on the subject to the Commonwealth prime ministers as:

 

"Her Majesty would not wish to stand

in the way of her sister's happiness".

 

Eden himself was sympathetic. He wrote:

 

"Exclusion from the Succession would

not entail any other change in Princess

Margaret's position as a member of the

Royal Family."

 

In the 28th. October 1955 final draft of the plan, Margaret would announce that she would marry Townsend and leave the line of succession. As prearranged by Eden, the Queen would consult with the British and Commonwealth governments, and then ask them to amend the 1772 Act. Eden would have told Parliament that it was "out of harmony with modern conditions"; Kilmuir estimated that 75% of Britons would approve of allowing the marriage.

 

He advised Eden that the 1772 Act was flawed, and might not apply to Margaret anyway. The decision not to marry was made on the 24th. October, and for the following week, Margaret was in disputes about the release and wording of her statement, which was released on the 31st.

 

It is unverified what or when she was told about proposals, drafted on the 28th., four days after the decision was made. By the early 1980's she was still protesting to biographers that the couple had been given false hope that marriage was possible, and she would have ended the relationship sooner had she been informed otherwise.

 

The Daily Mirror on the 28th. October discussed The Times's editorial with the headline "THIS CRUEL PLAN MUST BE EXPOSED". Although Margaret and Townsend had read the editorial the newspaper denounced as from "a dusty world and a forgotten age", they had earlier made their decision and written an announcement.

 

-- The End of the Relationship

 

On the 31st. October 1955, Margaret issued a statement:

 

"I would like it to be known that I have decided

not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.

I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing

my rights of succession, it might have been possible

for me to contract a civil marriage.

But mindful of the Church's teachings that Christian

marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty

to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these

considerations before others.

I have reached this decision entirely alone, and in

doing so I have been strengthened by the unfailing

support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend."

 

"Thoroughly drained, thoroughly demoralized", Margaret later said, she and Townsend wrote the statement together. She refused when Oliver Dawnay, the Queen Mother's private secretary, asked to remove the word "devotion". The written statement, signed "Margaret", was the first official confirmation of the relationship.

 

Some Britons were disbelieving or angry while others, including clergy, were proud of the princess for choosing duty and faith; newspapers were evenly divided on the decision. Mass-Observation recorded indifference or criticism of the couple among men, but great interest among women, whether for or against.

 

Kenneth Tynan, John Minton, Ronald Searle, and others signed an open letter from "the younger generation". Published in the Daily Express on 4 November, the letter said that the end of the relationship had exposed The Establishment and "our national hypocrisy".

 

Townsend recalled that:

 

"We had reached the end of the road, our

feelings for one another were unchanged,

but they had incurred for us a burden so

great that we decided together to lay it

down".

 

The Associated Press said:

 

"Margaret's statement is almost a

rededication of her life to the duties

of royalty, making unlikely any

marriage for her in the near future,"

 

The princess may have expected to never marry after the long relationship ended, because most of her eligible male friends were no longer bachelors.

 

Barrymaine agreed that Margaret intended the statement to mean that she would never marry, but wrote that Townsend probably did not accept any such vow to him by the princess, and his subsequent departure from Britain for two years was to not interfere with her life.

 

Townsend said:

 

"We both had a feeling of unimaginable

relief. We were liberated at last from this

monstrous problem."

 

After resigning from the RAF and travelling around the world for 18 months, Townsend returned in March 1958; he and Margaret met several times, but could not avoid the press ("TOGETHER AGAIN") or royal disapproval. Townsend again left Britain to write a book about his trip; Barrymaine concluded in 1958 that:

 

"None of the fundamental obstacles to

their marriage has been overcome – or

shows any prospects of being overcome".

 

Townsend said during a 1970 book tour that he and Margaret did not correspond, and they had not seen each other since a "friendly" 1958 meeting:

 

"Just like I think a lot of people

never see their old girl friends".

 

Their love letters are in the Royal Archives, and will not be available to the public until 100 years after Margaret's birth, February 2030. These are unlikely to include Margaret's letters. In 1959, she wrote to Townsend in response to him informing her of his remarriage plans, accusing him of betraying their vow not to marry anyone else, and requesting her love letters to him be destroyed.

 

He claimed he had complied with her wishes, but kept this letter and an envelope of burned shards of the vow she had sent, eventually destroying these also. He was apparently unaware Margaret had already broken the pact by her engagement to Billy Wallace, as it wasn't revealed until many years later.

 

In October 1993, a friend of Margaret revealed she had met Townsend for what turned out to be the last time before his death in 1995. She hadn't wanted to attend the reunion they'd both been invited to, in 1992, for fear it might be picked up by the press, so she asked to see him privately instead.

 

Margaret said that he looked "exactly the same, except he had grey hair". Guests said he hadn't really changed, and that they just sat chatting like old friends. They also found him disgruntled and had convinced himself that in agreeing to part, he and Margaret had set a noble example which seemed to have been in vain.

 

Marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones

 

Billy Wallace later said that:

 

"The thing with Townsend was a girlish

nonsense that got out of hand. It was

never the big thing on her part that

people claim".

 

Margaret accepted one of Wallace's many proposals to marry in 1956, but the engagement ended before an official announcement when he admitted to a romance in the Bahamas; "I had my chance and blew it with my big mouth", Wallace said.

 

Margaret did not reveal this publicly until an interview and subsequent biography with Nigel Dempster in 1977.

 

Margaret met the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones at a supper party in 1958. They became engaged in October 1959. Armstrong-Jones proposed to Margaret with a ruby engagement ring surrounded by diamonds in the shape of a rosebud. She reportedly accepted his proposal a day after learning from Townsend that he intended to marry a young Belgian woman, Marie-Luce Jamagne, who was half his age and greatly resembled Margaret.

 

Margaret's announcement of her engagement, on the 26th. February 1960, surprised the press, as she had concealed the romance from reporters.

 

Margaret married Armstrong-Jones at Westminster Abbey on the 6th. May 1960. The ceremony was the first royal wedding to be broadcast on television, and it attracted viewing figures of 300 million worldwide. 2,000 guests were invited for the wedding ceremony.

 

Margaret's wedding dress was designed by Norman Hartnell and worn with the Poltimore tiara. She had eight young bridesmaids, led by her niece, Princess Anne. The Duke of Edinburgh escorted the bride, and the best man was Dr. Roger Gilliatt. The Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher conducted the marriage service.

 

Following the ceremony, the couple made the traditional appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. The honeymoon was a six-week Caribbean cruise aboard the royal yacht Britannia. As a wedding present, Colin Tennant gave her a plot of land on his private Caribbean island, Mustique. The newlyweds moved into rooms in Kensington Palace.

 

In 1961, Margaret's husband was created the Earl of Snowdon. The couple had two children (both born by Caesarean section at Margaret's request): David, born 3rd. November 1961, and Sarah, born 1st. May 1964.

 

The marriage widened Margaret's social circle beyond the Court and aristocracy to include show business celebrities and bohemians. At the time, it was thought to reflect the breaking down of British class barriers. The Snowdons experimented with the styles and fashions of the 1960's.

 

Separation and Divorce

 

Both parties in the marriage regularly committed adultery. Antony had a series of affairs, including with long-term mistress, Ann Hills, and Lady Jacqueline Rufus-Isaacs, daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Reading. Anne De Courcy’s 2008 biography summarises the situation with a quote from a close friend: "If it moves, he'll have it."

 

Reportedly, Margaret had her first extramarital affair in 1966, with her daughter's godfather Anthony Barton, a Bordeaux wine producer. A year later she had a one-month liaison with Robin Douglas-Home, a nephew of former British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home.

 

Margaret claimed that her relationship with Douglas-Home was platonic, but her letters to him (which were later sold) were intimate. Douglas-Home, who suffered from depression, died by suicide 18 months after the split with Margaret.

 

Claims that she was romantically involved with musician Mick Jagger, actor Peter Sellers, and Australian cricketer Keith Miller are unproven. According to biographer Charlotte Breese, entertainer Leslie Hutchinson had a "brief liaison" with Margaret in 1955.

 

A 2009 biography of actor David Niven included assertions, based on information from Niven's widow and a good friend of Niven's, that he had had an affair with the princess, who was 20 years his junior. In 1975, the Princess was listed among women with whom actor Warren Beatty had had romantic relationships.

 

John Bindon, an actor from Fulham, who had spent time in prison, sold his story to the Daily Mirror, boasting of a close relationship with Margaret.

 

Beyond adultery, the marriage was accompanied by drugs, alcohol, and bizarre behaviour by both parties, such as his leaving lists of "things I hate about you" for the princess to find between the pages of books she read.

 

According to biographer Sarah Bradford, one note read:

 

"You look like a Jewish

manicurist and I hate you".

 

By the early 1970's, the Snowdons had drifted apart. In September 1973, Colin Tennant introduced Margaret to Roddy Llewellyn. Llewellyn was 17 years her junior. In 1974, she invited him as a guest to Les Jolies Eaux, the holiday home she had built on Mustique. It was the first of several visits.

 

Margaret described their relationship as "a loving friendship". Once, when Llewellyn left on an impulsive trip to Turkey, Margaret became emotionally distraught and took an overdose of sleeping tablets. She later said:

 

"I was so exhausted because

of everything that all I wanted

to do was sleep".

 

As she recovered, her ladies-in-waiting kept Lord Snowdon away from her, afraid that seeing him would distress her further.

 

In February 1976, a picture of Margaret and Llewellyn in swimsuits on Mustique was published on the front page of the News of the World. The press portrayed Margaret as a predatory older woman and Llewellyn as her toyboy lover. On the 19th. March 1976, the Snowdons publicly acknowledged that their marriage had irretrievably broken down and had decided to separate.

 

Some politicians suggested removing Margaret from the civil list. Labour MPs denounced her as "a royal parasite" and a "floozie". On the 24th. May 1978, the decree nisi for their divorce was granted. In the same month, Margaret was taken ill, and diagnosed as suffering from gastroenteritis and alcoholic hepatitis, although Warwick denied that she was ever an alcoholic.

 

On the 11th. July 1978, the Snowdons' divorce was finalized. It was the first divorce of a senior member of the British royal family since Princess Victoria Melita of Edinburgh's in 1901. On the 15th. December 1978, Snowdon married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, but he and Margaret remained close friends.

 

In 1981, Llewellyn married Tatiana Soskin, whom he had known for 10 years. Margaret remained close friends with them both.

 

Princess Margaret's Public Life

 

Among Margaret's first official engagements was launching the ocean liner Edinburgh Castle in Belfast in 1947. Subsequently, Margaret went on multiple tours of various places; in her first major tour she joined her parents and sister for a tour of South Africa in 1947. Her tour aboard Britannia to the British colonies in the Caribbean in 1955 created a sensation throughout the West Indies, and calypsos were dedicated to her.

 

As colonies of the British Commonwealth of Nations sought nationhood, Princess Margaret represented the Crown at independence ceremonies in Jamaica in 1962 and Tuvalu and Dominica in 1978. Her visit to Tuvalu was cut short by an illness, which may have been viral pneumonia, and she was flown to Australia to recuperate.

 

Other overseas tours included East Africa and Mauritius in 1956, the United States in 1965, Japan in 1969 and 1979, the United States and Canada in 1974, Australia in 1975, the Philippines in 1980, Swaziland in 1981, and China in 1987.

 

In August 1979, Louis Mountbatten, 1st. Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and members of his family were killed by a bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. That October, while on a fundraising tour of the United States on behalf of the Royal Opera House, Margaret was seated at a dinner reception in Chicago with columnist Abra Anderson and Mayor Jane Byrne.

 

Margaret told them that the royal family had been moved by the many letters of condolence from Ireland. The following day, Anderson's rival Irv Kupcinet published a claim that Margaret had referred to the Irish as "pigs". Margaret, Anderson and Byrne all issued immediate denials, but the damage was already done. The rest of the tour drew demonstrations, and Margaret's security was doubled in the face of physical threats.

 

Princess Margaret's Charity Work

 

Margaret's main interests were welfare charities, music and ballet. She was president of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and of the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Children 1st.) and Invalid Children's Aid Nationwide (also called 'I CAN').

 

She was Grand President of the St. John Ambulance Brigade and Colonel-in-Chief of Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps. She was also the president or patron of numerous organisations, such as the West Indies Olympic Association, the Girl Guides, Northern Ballet Theatre, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Scottish Ballet, Tenovus Cancer Care, the Royal College of Nursing, and the London Lighthouse (an AIDS charity that has since merged with the Terrence Higgins Trust).

 

In her capacity as president of the Royal Ballet, she played a key role in launching a fund for Dame Margot Fonteyn, who was experiencing financial troubles. With the help of the Children's Royal Variety Performance, she also organized yearly fundraisers for NSPCC.

 

Princess Margaret's Illness and Death

 

Margaret's later life was marred by illness and disability. She began smoking cigarettes in her early teens, and had continued to smoke heavily for many years thereafter. In the 1970s, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated for depression by Mark Collins, a psychiatrist from the Priory Clinic. Later on, she suffered from migraines, laryngitis, and bronchitis. On the 5th. January 1985, she had part of her left lung removed; the operation drew parallels with that of her father 34 years earlier. In 1991, she gave up smoking, though she continued to drink heavily.

 

In January 1993, Margaret was admitted to hospital for pneumonia. She experienced a mild stroke on the 23rd. February 1998 at her holiday home in Mustique. Early the following year, she suffered severe scalds to her feet in a bathroom accident, which affected her mobility in that she required support when walking and sometimes used a wheelchair.

 

Margaret was hospitalized on the 10th. January 2001, due to loss of appetite and swallowing problems after a further stroke. By March 2001, strokes had left her with partial vision and paralysis on the left side. Margaret's last public appearances were at the 101st. birthday celebrations of her mother in August 2001, and the 100th. birthday celebration of her aunt Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, that December.

 

Princess Margaret died in the King Edward VII's Hospital, London, at 06:30 (GMT) on the 9th. February 2002, at the age of 71, one day after having suffered another stroke that was followed by cardiac problems, and three days after the 50th. anniversary of her father's death.

 

Her sister's eldest son, Charles, then Prince of Wales, paid tribute to his aunt in a television broadcast. UK politicians and foreign leaders sent their condolences as well. Following her death, private memorial services were held at St. Mary Magdalene Church and Glamis Castle.

 

Margaret's coffin, draped in her personal standard, was taken from Kensington Palace to St. James's Palace before her funeral. The funeral was held on the 15th. February 2002, the 50th anniversary of her father's funeral. In line with her wishes, the ceremony was a private service at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, for family and friends.

 

Unlike most other members of the royal family, Princess Margaret was cremated, at Slough Crematorium. Her ashes were placed in the Royal Vault in St. George's Chapel before being transferred to the tomb of her parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (who died seven weeks after Margaret), in the King George VI Memorial Chapel two months later. Princess Margaret had opted to be cremated so that her remains could fit alongside her father King George VI’s grave in a vault that was made especially to hold him specifically.

 

In keeping with her rebellious reputation, the princess broke from what was typically expected of a royal family member and chose to be cremated. Princess Margaret was the first member of the royal family to be cremated since the procedure became legal.

 

A state memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey on the 19th. April 2002. Another memorial service to mark the 10th. anniversary of Margaret and the Queen Mother's death was held on the 30th. March 2012 at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, which was attended by the Queen and other members of the royal family.

 

The Legacy of Princess Margaret

 

Observers often characterized Margaret as a spoiled snob capable of cutting remarks and hauteur. Critics claimed that she even looked down on her grandmother Queen Mary because Mary was born a princess with the lower "Serene Highness" style, whereas Margaret was a "Royal Highness" by birth. Their letters, however, provide no indication of friction between them.

 

Margaret could also be charming and informal. People who came into contact with her could be perplexed by her swings between frivolity and formality. Former governess Marion Crawford wrote in her memoir:

 

"Impulsive and bright remarks she

made became headlines and, taken

out of their context, began to produce

in the public eye an oddly distorted

personality that bore little resemblance

to the Margaret we knew."

 

Margaret's acquaintance Gore Vidal, the American writer, wrote: "She was far too intelligent for her station in life". He recalled a conversation with Margaret in which, discussing her public notoriety, she said:

 

"It was inevitable, when there are

two sisters and one is the Queen,

who must be the source of honour

and all that is good, while the other

must be the focus of the most

creative malice, the evil sister".

 

As a child, Margaret enjoyed pony shows, but unlike other family members she did not express interest in hunting, shooting, and fishing in adulthood. She became interested in ballet from a very young age, and enjoyed participating in amateur plays. She directed one such play, titled The Frogs, with her aristocratic friends as cast members.

 

Actors and movie stars were among the regular visitors to her residence at Kensington Palace. In January 1981, she was the castaway in an episode of BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. There she chose Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake as her favourite piece of music. In 1984, she appeared as herself in an episode of the radio drama The Archers, becoming the first member of the royal family to take part in a BBC drama.

 

Princess Margaret's private life was for many years the subject of intense speculation by media and royalty watchers. Her house on Mustique, designed by her husband's uncle Oliver Messel, a stage designer, was her favourite holiday destination. Allegations of wild parties and drug taking also surfaced in the media.

 

Following Margaret's death, her lady-in-waiting, Lady Glenconner, said that Margaret was devoted to the Queen and tremendously supportive of her. Margaret was described by her cousin Lady Elizabeth Shakerley as:

 

"Somebody who had a wonderful

capacity for giving a lot of people

pleasure, and she was making a

very, very, very good and loyal

friend".

 

Another cousin, Lord Lichfield, said that:

 

"Margaret was pretty sad towards

the end of her life because it was

a life unfulfilled".

 

The Independent wrote in Townsend's 1995 obituary that:

 

"The immense display of popular sentiment and interest

in the relationship can now be seen to have constituted

a watershed in the nation's attitude towards divorce".

 

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church received much of the popular anger toward the end of the relationship. Randolph Churchill believed that rumours that Fisher had intervened to prevent the Princess from marrying Townsend has done incalculable harm to the Church of England.

 

A Gallup poll found that 28% agreed, and 59% disagreed, with the Church's refusal to remarry a divorced person while the other spouse was alive. Biographer Warwick suggests that Margaret's most enduring legacy is an accidental one. Perhaps unwittingly, Margaret paved the way for public acceptance of royal divorce. Her life, if not her actions, made the decisions and choices of her sister's children, three of whom divorced, easier than they otherwise would have been.

 

Eden reportedly told the Queen in Balmoral when discussing Margaret and Townsend that, regardless of outcome, the monarchy would be damaged. Harold Brooks-Baker said

 

"In my opinion, this was the turning point to

disaster for the royal family. After Princess

Margaret was denied marriage, it backfired

and more or less ruined Margaret's life.

The Queen decided that from then on,

anyone that someone in her family wanted

to marry would be more or less acceptable.

The royal family and the public now feel

that they've gone too far in the other direction".

 

Princess Margaret's Fashion and Style

 

During her lifetime, Princess Margaret was considered a fashion icon. Her fashion earned the nickname 'The Margaret Look'. The princess, dubbed a 'royal rebel' styled herself in contrast to her sister's prim and timeless style, adopting trendy mod accessories, such as brightly coloured headscarves and glamorous sunglasses.

 

Margaret developed a close relationship with atelier Christian Dior, wearing his designs throughout her life and becoming one of his most prominent customers. In 1950, he designed a cream gown worn for her 21st. birthday, which has been cited as an iconic part of fashion history. Throughout the decade, the princess was known for wearing floral-print dresses, bold-hued ballgowns and luxurious fabrics, accessorising with diamonds, pearls, and fur stoles.

 

British Vogue wrote that Margaret's style 'hit her stride' in the mid-60's, where she was photographed alongside celebrities like The Beatles, Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren. Princess Margaret was also known for her "magnificent" hats and headdresses, including a canary feather hat worn on a 1962 Jamaica visit and a peacock feather pillbox hat to the 1973 Royal Ascot.

 

Marie Claire stated that the princess "refused to compromise" on her style later in life, continuing with trends of big sleeves and strapless evening gowns.

 

In April 2007, an exhibition titled Princess Line – The Fashion Legacy of Princess Margaret opened at Kensington Palace, showcasing contemporary fashion from British designers such as Vivienne Westwood inspired by Princess Margaret's legacy of style. Christopher Bailey's Spring 2006 collection for Burberry was inspired by Margaret's look from the 1960's.

 

Princess Margaret's Finances

 

In her lifetime, Margaret's fortune was estimated to be around £20 million, with most of it being inherited from her father. She also inherited pieces of art and antiques from Queen Mary, and Dame Margaret Greville left her £20,000 in 1943.

 

In 1999, her son, Lord Linley, sold his mother's Caribbean residence Les Jolies Eaux for a reported £2.4 million. At the time of her death Margaret received £219,000 from the Civil List. Following her death, she left a £7.6 million estate to her two children, which was cut down to £4.5 million after inheritance tax.

 

In June 2006, much of Margaret's estate was auctioned by Christie's to meet the tax and, in her son's words, "normal family requirements such as educating her grandchildren", though some of the items were sold in aid of charities such as the Stroke Association.

 

Reportedly, the Queen had made it clear that the proceeds from any item that was given to her sister in an official capacity must be donated to charities.

 

A world record price of £1.24 million was set by a Fabergé clock. The Poltimore Tiara (shown in the above photograph), which Margaret wore for her wedding in 1960, sold for £926,400. The sale of her effects totalled £13,658,000.

 

The Poltimore Tiara

 

You know the photograph: Princess Margaret lying in a bath and wearing nothing but a tiara on her head. The photograph which was taken by her husband, famed photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, was not released to the public until 2006, four years after Margaret's death.

 

As flirtatious as it is shameless, the photograph consolidated her status as the eternal rebel of the British Royal House. Margaret once said about herself:

 

"Disobedience is my fun."

 

Eleven years later, the portrait was withdrawn from the public eye, but the image remains ingrained in the minds of the world, to such an extent that The Crown included a scene about it in the third season. In fact the image is still readily accessible on the Internet.

 

Despite the fact that much of what was so shocking about the image had to do with the fact that it was taken in a bath, it acquired iconic status due to the presence of the tiara: grand, resplendent and downright stunning.

 

The tiara has a lot of history. Known as the Poltimore tiara, it originally belonged to Lady Poltimore, the wife of the 2nd. Baron Poltimore. Made in 1870 by London's House of Garrard, it is the epitome of Victorian-era jewellery style: diamond scrolls evoking flora and nature.

 

Lady Poltimore wore this fantastic creation, whose support is made up of gold and silver, at the coronation of King George V in 1911.

 

The 4th. baron put it up for auction in January 1959, and it was then that Princess Margaret acquired it for £5,500.

 

It was purchased for Princess Margaret on the advice of Lord Patrick Plunkett, Deputy Master of the Household, prior to the official announcement of her engagement to Antony Armstrong-Jones.

 

Despite having access to the crown jewels (the Duchess of Cambridge, for example, wore tiaras borrowed from the Queen), the then-29-year-old princess wanted something she could call uniquely hers.

 

Sara Prentice, Creative Director of the House of Garrard, says:

 

“It's very modern. It is becoming more and

more common for women to buy for themselves,

but looking back to 1959, the truth is that she

chose it for herself. She had to charm him to

do it."

 

A year and a half later, on the 6th. May 1960, Princess Margaret wore her tiara on the most important of occasions: her wedding to Antony Armstrong-Jones at Westminster Abbey. The tiara has been part of history ever since. It is the tiara most associated with Princess Margaret.

 

Margaret's wedding was the tiara's most high-profile outing. In 1977 she wore it again for the Shah of Iran's state visit to the United Kingdom.

 

While no tiara can be considered functional, the design of the Poltimore tiara allowed for multiple uses. It could be transformed into a necklace (which Margaret did in 1960) or, if she wanted to, into 11 different brooches.

 

The tiara appears to be practically floating when worn. This is because the bracket is entwined with a brown ribbon that matched Margaret 's hair color. Thus, only the ribbon-covered portion sank into her hair, while her spectacular jewellery remained fully in view.

 

Prentice estimates that such a piece would take around six months to make.

 

The Poltimore tiara was sold in 2006 at Christie's by Margaret's children Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto in order to raise funds to cover unexpectedly high inheritance taxes. The tiara went to an Asian buyer for £926,400.

 

Since the Christie's sale of the Poltimore, the tiara's current whereabouts are unknown. A number of observers felt that the royal family should have taken the opportunity to buy the historic piece, but they didn't.

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (Spanish: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso]; 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture,[2][3] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

 

Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.[4][5][6][7]

 

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortune, making him one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

Hungarian painter, printmaker, graphic designer and animated film director, is known for his mathematically inspired works, impossible objects, optical illusions, double-meaning images and anamorphoses. The geometric art of István Orosz, with forced perspectives and optical illusions, has been compared to works by M. C. Escher.

 

Studied at the Hungarian University of Arts and Design (now Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) in Budapest as pupil of István Balogh and Ernő Rubik. After graduating in 1975 he began to deal with theatre as stage designer and animated film as animator and film director. He is known as painter, printmaker, poster designer, and illustrator as well. He likes to use visual paradox, double meaning images and illusionistic approaches while following traditional printing techniques such as woodcutting and etching. He also tries to renew the technique of anamorphosis. He is a regular participant in the major international biennials of posters and graphic art and his works has been shown in individual and group exhibitions in Hungary and abroad. Film director at the PannóniaFilm Studio in Budapest, Habil. professor at University of West Hungary in Sopron, co-founder of Hungarian Poster Association, member of Alliance Graphique International (AGI) and Hungarian Art Academie. He often uses OYTIΣ, or Utisz, (pronounced: outis) (No one) as artist's pseudonym.

 

During the last two decades - when most of the works shown here were made – the activities of the poster designer, the printmaker, the illustrator, and the film director have completed each other. Many motive, stylistic features, technical solutions appeared in all of the media and for Orosz it seemingly did not cause any problem to cross the borders of the different genres. When he was drawing a poster usually he did it with the preciseness of illustrators, when he was illustrating a book, he did it with the narrative mood of filmmakers, if he was animating films, sometimes he used the several layers approach of etchers and engravers and for prints he often chose the emblematic simplifying way of depiction of posters. If we call him only a poster designer based on his functional prints, we narrow down his field of activity, we go closer to the truth if we associate him with „postering" as a way of thinking, or if we call his many sided image depicting ourselves and our age as the poster-mirror of István Orosz. (Guy d'Obonner: Transfiguration of Poster - detail)

 

István Orosz was known as poster designer in the first part of his career. He made mainly cultural posters for theatres, movies, galleries, museums and publishing houses. At the time of the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe he drew some political posters too. His "Tovarishi Adieu" (also used with text "Tovarishi Koniec" – that means Comrades it is over) appeared in many countries and it was known as symbolic image of changes in the area.

 

Artists who design anamorphosis (anamorphosis is Greek for "re-transformation") play with perspective to create a distorted image that appears normal only when viewed from the correct angle or with the aid of curved mirrors. The technique was often used by Renaissance-era artists. Orosz tries to renew the technique of anamorphosis and his aim is to develop it as well when he gives a meaning to the distorted image, too. It is not an amorph picture any more, but a meaningful depiction that is independent from the result that appears in the mirror or viewed from a special point of view. This approach of anamorphoses is suitable for expressing more sophisticated messages.

Czechoslovakian postcard by Tisk Severogravia Decin, no. 10-521-O-9. Photo: still from Dobry vojak Svejk/The Good Soldier Svejk (Jirî Trnka, 1955).

 

Because of his brilliant puppet animations, Czech puppeteer and stop-motion film-maker Jiří Trnka (1912-1969) was called ‘the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe’. For Dobry vojak Svejk/The Good Soldier Svejk (1955), he adapted the classic anti-war satire 'Švejk' by Jaroslav Hašek.

 

Jiří Trnka was born in the city of Pilsen, Austria-Hungary (now Plzeň, Czech Republic) in 1912. From the moment he could hold a pencil, Trnka drew pictures. At secondary school, his drawing teacher was the puppeteer and man of the theater Josef Skupa. Trnka studied at Prague's School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1936 he began a wooden puppet theatre on Prague’s Wenceslas Square, which was disbanded after the outbreak of WWII. During the war, he designed stage sets and illustrated Špalíček veršů a pohádek, a collection of Czech rhymes and fairy tales by František Hrubín. In the immediate wake of World War II, Trnka founded Bratři v triku (Brothers in Tricks) with fellow animators Eduard Hofman and Jiří Brdečka. This studio, dedicated to the production of traditional, hand-drawn animation, lives on today. Their first film was Zasadil dědek řepu (Grandpa Planted a Beet), followed by the puppet film Christmassy Betlém (Bethlehem), which captures the atmosphere of a Czech folk Christmas. In 1947, Trnka made the puppet film Špalíček (The Czech Year), which told six separate folk tales of Czech life. It was a defining moment for Trnka as he won several international awards three years running across Europe. Puppet animation is a traditional Czech art form, of which Trnka became the undisputed master. Most of his films were intended for adults and many were adaptations of literary works. These included feature-length covering working-class traditions and national heroes, such as Bajaja/Prince Bayaya (1950), and Staré povesti ceské/Old Czech Legends (1953). They made him an internationally recognized artist and the winner of film festival awards at Venice and elsewhere. He was a puppet-maker, a sculptor, and a set and stage designer. All of these talents were abundantly well utilised in his highly distinctive film work.

 

To explore the classics of Czech literature, Jiří Trnka decided in 1955 to adapt to the screen the immensely popular novel Osudy dobreho vojaka Svejka za svetove valky (The Good Soldier Švejk) written by Jaroslav Hašek. This anti-war satire is the most translated novel of Czech literature. At the time, there already existed film adaptations with real actors, such as Dobrý voják Švejk/The Last Bohemian (Martin Frič, 1931), starring Saša Rašilov as Švejk. Trnka however was the first to make an animated film about the bumbling soldier who earnestly attempts to follow orders. For the construction of the puppets, Trnka was inspired by the illustrations for the original book made by Josef Lada, which in the popular imagination were closely associated with the characters of Hašek. Dobry vojak Svejk/The Good Soldier Svejk (Jirî Trnka, 1955) is divided into three episodes, which tell the grotesque adventures of Švejk during World War I. The narrator was Jan Werich. The humorous film received several awards at international festivals. Trnka's masterpiece was Sen noci svatojánské/A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Jirî Trnka, 1959), which was presented in Cannes in 1959, which made him the icon of ‘Eastern country’ animators. Cerise Howard at Senses of Cinema: “a stunningly beautiful, highly faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Several years in the making, the puppet animation is more liquid, more balletic than ever.” Trnka's last film, Ruka/The Hand (Jirî Trnka, 1965), was an unexpected and surprising break in his work thus far. It was something completely new in content and form. The Hand is a merciless political allegory, which strictly follows the story outline without developing lyrical details as usual. In 1968, he received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for illustrators, recognizing his career contribution to children's literature. Jiri Trnka died in 1969 in Prague, only 57 years old. Four months later, The Hand was banned; all copies were confiscated by the secret police, put in a safe, and the film was forbidden for screening for the next twenty years.

 

Sources: Cerise Howard (Senses of Cinema), Edgar Datko (Animation World Magazine), Daniel Yates (IMDb), Europe of Cultures, Dangerous Minds, Wikipedia, and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Oil and cement on canvas; 92.1 x 73 cm.

 

Russian painter, draughtsman and stage designer. He studied at the University of St Petersburg (later Petrograd) in 1908 and in the private studio of Savely Zeidenberg (1862–1924). In 1909–10 he attended the studio of Yan Tsyonglinsky (1850–1914) in St Petersburg, where he became acquainted with the avant-garde artists Yelena Guro (1877–1913), Mikhail Matyushin and Matvey Vol’demar (1878–1914). In 1911–12 he worked in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton in Paris, then in Switzerland (1913) before returning to St Petersburg. As a painter he was a modernist, and his work developed rapidly towards abstraction, although he did not adhere to any particular branch of it. His works of the time use various devices of stylization and decorativeness, and some of them echo the free associations of Marc Chagall, but fundamentally they remain geometrically based compositions. In 1919–20 he made a series of abstract sculptural assemblages and a great number of abstract collages.

 

Annenkov became popular as an illustrator, producing elegant drawings for a number of magazines in Petrograd in 1913–17, including Satirikon, Argus, Lukomor’ye and Solntse Rossii. He designed and illustrated many books for Moscow and Petrograd publishing houses in the 1910s and 1920s. In the early 1920s he designed a great number of book covers in the Constructivist style. He illustrated children’s books, especially for the private publishing house Raduga in Petrograd. But his most important illustrations were those for Aleksandr Blok’s revolutionary poem Dvenadtsat’ (‘The Twelve’; St Petersburg, 1918), which were successful improvisations on the poem’s themes, combining stylization and emotion. He also drew and painted a great number of portraits, especially of cultural and political figures. His monumental Portrait of the Red Army Leader L. Trotsky (1923; Moscow, Cent. Mus. Revolution), which has an urban background in Constructivist style, was particularly successful.

 

From 1913 Annenkov worked as a stage designer. He worked for the Krivoye Zerkalo (Distorting Mirror) Theatre in Petrograd (1914–15) and for the Komissarzhevsky Theatre in Moscow (1914–18). He then worked for a number of theatres in Petrograd, sometimes as designer and producer. He collaborated with Vsevolod Meyerkhold (e.g. Lev Tolstoy’s Pervyy vinokur, ‘First distiller’, Hermitage Theatre, Petrograd, 1919) and with Nikolay Yeureinov. Annenkov’s designs for Bunt mashin (‘Revolt of the machines’, Georg Kaiser adapted by Aleksey Tolstoy, Bol’shoy Dramatic Theatre, Petrograd, 1924) used a Constructivist-inspired mechanized set. Annenkov also designed a number of celebrations and pageants commemorating the Revolution of 1917, including the ambitious re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace, which took place in Uritsky (now Dvortsovaya) Square in Petrograd on 7 November 1920 and involved monumental scenery and c. 7000 performers. In 1922–4 he led the revival of the activities of the World of art group and in 1924 worked towards the establishment of the Society of easel painters. The same year he settled in Paris, where he aligned himself with the Ecole de Paris. He continued to design books, stage and film sets in France and Germany, and he exhibited at many joint Russian and French exhibitions. He also became active as an exhibition organizer himself, especially for the USA.

 

V. Rakitin From Grove Art Online

© 2009 Oxford University Press

 

Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts

 

The second president in the history of this association of renowned personalities in Munich, founded by the Free State of Bavaria in 1948 (Wikipedia), was Emil Preetorius, who served from 1953 to 1968. Preetorius (1883–1973) was a prolific illustrator, graphic designer, and stage designer. He is also known for his collection of East-Asian and Islamic art. In 1909, together with Paul Renner, he founded the Schule für Illustration und Buchgewerbe in Munich. (This just as a side note – not meaning to suggest that Preetorius has anything to do with this sign. I have no information about its date and maker.)

Siponto ,Manfredonia ,Foggia, Puglia, Italia © 2016 All rights reserved by Michele Masiero

 

FotoSketcher: lively

Nikon coolpix p 7100

 

Il Parco archeologico di Siponto, è situato a pochi chilometri dalla città di Manfredonia in Puglia.Nell’area archeologica accanto alla chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore di origine medievale, sono presenti i resti di una basilica paleocristiana del IV sec. d.C. a tre navate con abside centrale e pavimento a mosaico. Al fine di valorizzare tutta l’area archeologica, che comprende anche il restauro del complesso della chiesa di San Leonardo posto nelle vicinanze, e preservare i resti archeologici della basilica paleocristiana, il ministero dei beni culturali e la sopraintendenza archeologica della Puglia utilizzando fondi europei , ha approvato e finanziato il progetto dello scultore lombardo Edoardo Tresoldi.L’opera d’arte a carattere permanente di Edoardo Tresoldi, ricostruisce sui resti archeologici della basilica paleocristiana , i volumi in scala reale della basilica stessa sino ad una altezza di 14 metri ,utilizzando reti in metallo galvanizzato trasparenti. L’Opera d’arte,unica al mondo, ha richiesto l’utilizzo di sette tonnellate di rete metallica leggera e trasparente , e un lavoro protrattosi per circa tre mesi di una equipe di una trentina di persone tra cui archeologi, ingegneri e architetti e il gruppo di giovani creativi che collaborano con Tresoldi da diversi anni.

  

Edoardo Tresoldi

  

Scultore, pittore e scenografo, Edoardo Tresoldi ha un approccio artistico e di ricerca creativa e libera. Studia design e arti visive all'istituto d'arte di Monza. Nel 2009 si trasferisce a Roma e inizia a lavorare come pittore di scena per vari progetti cinematografici. La scenografia diventa un laboratorio di sperimentazione. Dal 2013 realizza sculture ed installazioni in rete metallica. Edoardo ha 28 anni, è di Cambiago, in provincia di Milano ed è considerato uno dei talenti della street art italiana. Si fa aiutare da una squadra in cui l’età media è 25 anni e anche i responsabili di Sovrintendenze ed Ente Paesaggistici, hanno riconosciuto il valore delle sue opere. A lui sono state affidati luoghi importanti, come le installazioni alla Vigna di Leonardo a Milano e alla Basilica di Siponto a Manfredonia.

  

.The Archaeological Park of Siponto, is located a few kilometers from the town of Manfredonia in the Puglia region. In the archaeological site next to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore of medieval origin, there are the remains of a paleoChristian basilica of the fourth century. after Christ, with three naves and central apse and mosaic floor. In order to enhance the whole archaeological area, which also includes the restoration of the complex of the church of San Leonardo nearby, and preserve the archaeological remains of an early Christian basilica, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and the archaeological superintendence of Puglia using European funds, have approved and funded the project the Lombard sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi. The work of art, unique in the world, a permanent nature by Edoardo Tresoldi, reconstructs on the archaeological ruins of the paleoChristian basilica, the full-scale real volumes of the basilica itself up to a height of 14 meters, using wire mesh galvanized transparent.The Art work required the use of seven tons of transparent metal mesh, and a job that lasted for about three months in a team of thirty people including archaeologists, engineers and architects and the group of young creatives that cooperate with Tresoldi from several years.

 

Edoardo Tresoldi

 

Sculptor, painter and stage designer, Edoardo Tresoldi has an artistic and creative research approach and free. He has studied design and visual arts at the Institute of Art of Monza. In 2009 he moved to Rome and began working as a scene painter for various film projects. The scenery becomes a testing laboratory. From 2013 makes sculptures and installations made of wire mesh. Edoardo is 28 years old, is born at Cambasio, in the province of Milan and is considered one of the talents of the Italian street art. It was helped by a team where the average age is 25 years. To him they were

  

From facebook and Dailybest

 

KAPPELMAYR, Barbara (Red.) (1995). Geïllustreerd handboek van de kunst. VG Bild-Kunst/De Hoeve, Alphen aan de Rijn. ISBN 90 6113 763 2

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Andrea Pozzo (Latinized version: Andreas Puteus; 30 November 1642 – 31 August 1709) was an Italian Jesuit brother, Baroque painter and architect, decorator, stage designer, and art theoretician.

 

Pozzo was best known for his grandiose frescoes using the technique of quadratura to create an illusion of three-dimensional space on flat surfaces. His masterpiece is the nave ceiling of the Church of Sant'Ignazio in Rome. Through his techniques, he became one of the most noteworthy figures of the Baroque period. He is also noted for the architectural plans of Ljubljana Cathedral (1700), inspired by the designs of the Jesuit churches Il Gesù and S. Ignazio in Rome.

 

Born in Trento (then under Austrian rule), he studied Humanities at the local Jesuit High School. Showing artistic inclinations he was sent by his father to work with an artist; Pozzo was then 17 years old (in 1659). Judging by aspects of his early style this initial artistic training came probably from Palma il Giovane. After three years he came under the guidance of another unidentified painter from the workshop of Andrea Sacchi who appears to have taught him the techniques of Roman High Baroque. He would later travel to Como and Milan.

 

On 25 December 1665, he entered the Jesuit Order as a lay brother. In 1668, he was assigned to the Casa Professa of San Fidele in Milan, where his festival decorations in honour of Francis Borgia recently canonised (1671) met general approval. He continued artistic training in Genoa and Venice. His early paintings attest the influence of the Lombard School: rich colour, graphic chiaroscuro. When he painted in Genoa the Life of Jesus for the Congregazione de' Mercanti, he was undoubtedly inspired by Peter Paul Rubens.

 

Pozzo's artistic activity was related to the Jesuit Order's enormous artistic needs; many Jesuit churches had been built in recent decades and were devoid of painted decoration. He was frequently employed by the Jesuits to decorate churches and buildings such as their churches of Modena, Bologna and Arezzo. In 1676, he decorated the interior of San Francis Xavier church in Mondovì. In this church one can already see his later illusionistic techniques: fake gilding, bronze-coloured statues, marbled columns and a trompe-l'œil dome on a flat ceiling, peopled with foreshortened figures in architectural settings. This was his first large fresco.

 

In Turin (1678) Pozzo painted the ceiling of the Jesuit church of SS. Martiri. The frescoes gradually deteriorated through water infiltration. They were replaced in 1844 by new paintings by Luigi Vacca. Only fragments of the original frescoes survive.

 

In 1681, Pozzo was called to Rome by Giovanni Paolo Oliva, Superior General of the Jesuits. Among others, Pozzo worked for Livio Odescalchi, the powerful nephew of the pope, Innocent XI. Initially he was used as a stage designer for biblical pageants, but his illusionistic paintings in perspective for these stages soon gave him a reputation as a virtuoso in wall and ceiling decorations.

 

His first Roman frescoes were in the corridor linking the Church of the Gesù to the rooms where St. Ignatius had lived. His trompe-l'œil architecture and paintings depicting the Saint's life for the Camere di San Ignazio (1681–1686), blended well with already existing paintings by Giacomo Borgognone.

 

The St Ignatius' Church

 

His masterpiece, the illusory perspectives in frescoes of the dome, the apse and the ceiling of Rome's Jesuit church of Sant'Ignazio were painted between 1685–1694 and are emblematic of the dramatic conceits of High Roman Baroque. For several generations, they set the standard for the decoration of Late Baroque ceiling frescos throughout Catholic Europe. Compare this work to Gaulli's masterpiece in the other major Jesuit church in Rome, Il Gesù.

 

The church of Sant'Ignazio had remained unfinished with bare ceilings even after its consecration in 1642. Disputes with the original donors, the Ludovisi, had prevented the completion of the planned dome. Pozzo proposed to resolve this by creating the illusion of a dome, when viewed from inside, by painting on canvas. It was impressive to viewers, but controversial; some feared the canvas would soon darken.

 

On the flat ceiling he painted an allegory of the Apotheosis of S. Ignatius, in breathtaking perspective. The painting, 17 m in diameter, is devised to make an observer, looking from a spot marked by a metal plate set into the floor of the nave, seem to see a lofty vaulted roof decorated by statues, while in fact the ceiling is flat. The painting celebrates the apostolic goals of Jesuit missionaries, eager to expand the reach of Roman Catholicism in other continents. The Counter-Reformation also encouraged a militant Catholicism. For example, rather than placing the usual evangelists or scholarly pillars of doctrine in the pendentives, Pozzo depicted the victorious warriors of the old testament: Judith and Holofernes; David and Goliath; Jael and Sisera; and Samson and the Philistines. It is said that when completed, some said "Sant'Ignazio [sic] was a good place to buy meat, since four new butchers are now there."

 

In the nave fresco, light comes from God the Father to the Son who transmits it to St. Ignatius, whence it breaks into four rays leading to the four continents. Pozzo explained that he illustrated the words of Christ in Luke: I am come to send fire on the earth, and the words of Ignatius: Go and set everything aflame. A further ray illuminates the name of Jesus. The attention to movement within a large canvas with deep perspective in the scene, including a heavenly assembly whirling above, and the presence space-enlarging illusory architecture offered an example which was copied in several Italian, Austrian, German and Central European churches of the Jesuit order.

 

The architecture of the trompe-l'œil dome seems to erase and raise the ceiling with such a realistic impression that it is difficult to distinguish what is real or not. Andrea Pozzo painted this ceiling and trompe-l'oeil dome on a canvas, 17 m wide. The paintings in the apse depict scenes from the life of St. Ignatius, St Francis Xavier and St Francis Borgia.

 

In 1695 he was given the prestigious commission, after winning a competition against Sebastiano Cipriani and Giovanni Battista Origone, for an altar in the St. Ignatius chapel in the left transept of the Church of the Gesù. This grandiose altar above the tomb of the saint, built with rare marbles and precious metals, shows the Trinity, while four lapis lazuli columns (these are now copies) enclose the colossal statue of the saint by Pierre Legros. It was the coordinated work of more than 100 sculptors and craftsmen, among them Pierre Legros, Bernardino Ludovisi, Il Lorenzone and Jean-Baptiste Théodon. Andrea Pozzo also designed the altar in the Chapel of St Francesco Borgia in the same church.

 

In 1697 he was asked to build similar Baroque altars with scenes from the life of St Ignatius in the apse of the Sant'Ignazio church in Rome. These altars house the relics of St. Aloysius Gonzaga and of St. John Berchmans.

 

Meanwhile he continued painting frescoes and illusory domes in Turin, Mondovì, Modena, Montepulciano and Arezzo. In 1681 he was asked by Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany to paint his self-portrait for the ducal collection (now in the Uffizi in Florence). This oil on canvas has become a most original self-portrait. It shows the painter in a diagonal pose, showing with his right index finger his illusionist easel painting (a trompe-l'œil dome, perhaps of the Badia church in Arezzo) while his left hand rests on three books (probably alluding to his not-yet published treatises on perspective). The painting was sent to the duke in 1688. He also painted scenes from the life of St Stanislaus Kostka in the saint's rooms of the Jesuit novitiate of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale in Rome.

 

In 1694 Andrea Pozzo had explained his illusory techniques in a letter to Anton Florian, Prince of Liechtenstein and ambassador of Emperor Leopold I to the Papal Court in Rome. Recommended by Prince Liechtenstein to the emperor, Andrea Pozzo, on the invitation of Leopold I, moved in 1702 (1703?) to Vienna. There he worked for the sovereign, the court, Prince Johann Adam von Liechtenstein, and various religious orders and churches, such as the frescoes and the trompe-l'œil dome in the Jesuit Church. Some of his tasks were of a decorative, occasional character (church and theatre scenery), and these were soon destroyed.

 

His most significant surviving work in Vienna is the monumental ceiling fresco of the Hercules Hall of the Liechtenstein garden palace (1707), an Admittance of Hercules to Olympus, which, according to the sources, was very admired by contemporaries. Through illusionistic effects, the architectural painting starts unfolding at the border of the ceiling, while the ceiling seems to open up into a heavenly realm filled with Olympian gods.

 

Some of his Viennese altarpieces have also survived (Vienna's Jesuit church). His compositions of altarpieces and illusory ceiling frescoes had a strong influence on the Baroque art in Vienna. He also had many followers in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and Poland. His canvases show him to be a far less compelling a painter at close inspection.

 

Pozzo died in Vienna in 1709 at a moment when he intended to return to Italy to design a new Jesuit church in Venice. He was buried with great honours in one of his best realisations, the Jesuit church in Vienna. Agostino Collaceroni was also a pupil.

 

Pozzo's brother, Giuseppe Pozzo, a Discalced Carmelite friar in Venice, was also a painter. He decorated the high altar of the church of the Scalzi in that city during the last years of the 17th century.

 

Pozzo published his artistic ideas in a noted theoretical work, entitled Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum (2 volumes, 1693, 1698) illustrated with 118 engravings, dedicated to emperor Leopold I. In it he offered instruction in painting architectural perspectives and stage-sets. The work was one of the earliest manuals on perspective for artists and architects and went into many editions, even into the 19th century, and has been translated from the original Latin and Italian into numerous languages such as French, German, English and, Chinese thanks to Pozzo's Jesuit connection.

 

There are a few architectural designs in Pozzo's book Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, indicating that he did not make any designs before 1690. These designs were not realized, but the design for the S. Apollinare church in Rome was used for the Jesuit church of San Francesco Saverio (1700–1702) in Trento. The interior of this church was equally designed by Pozzo.

 

Between 1701 and 1702, Pozzo designed the Jesuit churches of San Bernardo and Chiesa del Gesù in Montepulciano, but his plans for the last church were only partly realized (Wikipedia).

Tower of London Poppies ~ Friday October 3rd 2014.

 

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red ~ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ~ Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red is a 2014 work of installation art placed in the moat of the Tower of London, England, commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. The artist is Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper. The work's title is taken from the first line of a poem by an unknown World War I soldier, which begins: "The blood swept lands and seas of red, / Where angels dare to tread / ...

Form ~ The work consists of a sea of ceramic red poppies, being added progressively by volunteers. All the poppies have been individually hand-made in a ceramics factory in Derbyshire. It is intended that there will eventually be 888,246 of these, representing one estimate of the number of British and Colonial military fatalities in World War I. The sea of flowers is arranged to resemble a pool of blood which appears to be pouring out of a bastion window (the "Weeping Window"). The first poppy was planted on 17 July 2014, and the work was unveiled on 5 August (the centenary of Britain's entry into the war). It is planned to remain on display until 11 November 2014 (Armistice Day). Members of the public are invited to purchase the ceramic poppies, with a share of the proceeds going to service charities.

 

At around sunset each day between 1 September and 10 November, the names of one hundred World War I service personnel, nominated by members of the public to appear on a Roll of Honour, were read aloud by a Yeoman Warder, followed by the Last Post bugle call.

 

Official visits and public reactions ~ William and Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge on the day of its opening and by the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh on 16 October.By 6 November four million people had seen the memorial, and the huge visitor demand saw Prime Minister David Cameron and other politicians join calls to try and extend the period which the installation remained at the Tower so that more visitors were able to pay their respects. Tower officials have resisted such calls, stating that the transience of the installation is a key part of the artistic concept,[11] and that the poppies would be removed as planned and distributed to their purchasers. On 8 November it was announced that the Wave segment – a steel construction with poppies around the Tower entrance – would remain in place until the end of the month, and that the Wave and the Weeping Window segments (both made by the Theatre Royal, Plymouth) would be taken on a tour of the UK lasting until 2018, and would then go on permanent display at the Imperial War Museums in London and Manchester.

 

Critical reaction ~ Although the installation has struck a chord with the public, it has received negative reactions from some press critics. A.A. Gill of The Sunday Times called it "impressive" but "curiously bland". The Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones described it as having a "false nobility" and being a "prettified and toothless" memorial. Tom Piper has responded that "... it is a remarkably good thing that it is so accessible. We should not be trying to create something that is difficult to understand.

Boris Kustodijev (Russian 1878-1927)

Oil on canvas

EKM VM 416

Kadriorg Museum

Tallinn, Estonia

 

Boris Mikhaylovich Kustodiev (Russian: Бори́с Миха́йлович Кусто́диев; 7 March [O.S. 23 February] 1878 – 28 May 1927) was a Russian painter and stage designer.

 

Boris Kustodiev was born in Astrakhan into the family of a professor of philosophy, history of literature, and logic at the local theological seminary.

 

His father died young, and all financial and material burdens fell on his mother's shoulders. The Kustodiev family rented a small wing in a rich merchant's house.

 

It was there that the boy's first impressions were formed of the way of life of the provincial merchant class. The artist later wrote, "The whole tenor of the rich and plentiful merchant way of life was there right under my nose... It was like something out of an Ostrovsky play."

 

The artist retained these childhood observations for years, recreating them later in oils and water-colours.

 

Between 1893 and 1896, Kustodiev studied in theological seminary and took private art lessons in Astrakhan from Pavel Vlasov, a pupil of Vasily Perov.

 

Subsequently, from 1896 to 1903, he attended Ilya Repin’s studio at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Concurrently, he took classes in sculpture under Dmitry Stelletsky and in etching under Vasiliy Mate.

 

He first exhibited in 1896.

 

"I have great hopes for Kustodiev," wrote Repin. "He is a talented artist and a thoughtful and serious man with a deep love of art; he is making a careful study of nature..."

 

When Repin was commissioned to paint a large-scale canvas to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the State Council, he invited Kustodiev to be his assistant. The painting was extremely complex and involved a great deal of hard work.

 

Together with his teacher, the young artist made portrait studies for the painting, and then executed the right-hand side of the final work.

 

Also at this time, Kustodiev made a series of portraits of contemporaries whom he felt to be his spiritual comrades. These included the artist Ivan Bilibin (1901, Russian Museum), Moldovtsev (1901, Krasnodar Regional Art Museum), and the engraver Mate (1902, Russian Museum).

 

Working on these portraits considerably helped the artist, forcing him to make a close study of his model and to penetrate the complex world of the human soul

 

In 1903, he married Julia Proshinskaya (1880–1942).

 

He visited France and Spain on a grant from the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1904. Also in 1904, he attended the private studio of René Ménard in Paris.

 

After that he traveled to Spain, then, in 1907, to Italy, and in 1909 he visited Austria and Germany, and again France and Italy.

 

During these years he painted many portraits and genre pieces. However, no matter where Kustodiev happened to be – in sunny Seville or in the park at Versailles – he felt the irresistible pull of his motherland.

 

After five months in France he returned to Russia, writing with evident joy to his friend Mate that he was back once more "in our blessed Russian land".

 

The Russian Revolution of 1905, which shook the foundations of society, evoked a vivid response in the artist's soul.

 

He contributed to the satirical journals Zhupel (Bugbear) and Adskaya Pochta (Hell’s Mail).

 

At that time, he first met the artists of Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), the group of innovative Russian artists. He joined their association in 1910 and subsequently took part in all their exhibitions.

 

In 1905, Kustodiev first turned to book illustrating, a genre in which he worked throughout his entire life. He illustrated many works of classical Russian literature, including Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, The Carriage, and The Overcoat; Mikhail Lermontov's The Lay of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Oprichnik and the Stouthearted Merchant Kalashnikov; and Leo Tolstoy's How the Devil Stole the Peasant's Hunk of Bread and The Candle.

 

In 1909, he was elected into Imperial Academy of Arts. He continued to work intensively, but a grave illness—tuberculosis of the spine—required urgent attention.

 

On the advice of his doctors he went to Switzerland, where he spent a year undergoing treatment in a private clinic.

 

He pined for his distant homeland, and Russian themes continued to provide the basic material for the works he painted during that year. In 1918, he painted The Merchant's Wife, which became the most famous of his paintings.

 

In 1916, he became paraplegic. "Now my whole world is my room", he wrote.

 

His ability to remain joyful and lively despite his paralysis amazed others. His colourful paintings and joyful genre pieces do not reveal his physical suffering, and on the contrary give the impression of a carefree and cheerful life.

 

In the first years after the Russian Revolution of 1917 the artist worked with great inspiration in various fields. Contemporary themes became the basis for his work, being embodied in drawings for calendars and book covers, and in illustrations and sketches of street decorations, as well as some portraits (Portrait of Countess Grabowska).

 

His covers for the journals The Red Cornfield and Red Panorama attracted attention because of their vividness and the sharpness of their subject matter.

 

Kustodiev also worked in lithography, illustrating works by Nekrasov. His illustrations for Leskov's stories . . . were landmarks in the history of Russian book designing, so well did they correspond to the literary images.

 

The artist was also interested in designing stage scenery. He first started work in the theatre in 1911, when he designed the sets for Alexander Ostrovsky . . . Such was his success that further orders came pouring in. In 1913, he designed the sets and costumes for The Death of Pazukhin at the Moscow Art Theatre.

 

His talent in this sphere was especially apparent in his work for Ostrovsky's plays; It's a Family Affair, A Stroke of Luck, Wolves and Sheep, and The Storm. The milieu of Ostrovsky's plays—provincial life and the world of the merchant class—was close to Kustodiev's own genre paintings, and he worked easily and quickly on the stage sets.

 

In 1923, Kustodiev joined the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. He continued to paint, make engravings, illustrate books, and design for the theater up until his death of tuberculosis on 28 May 1927, in Leningrad.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Kustodiev

Siponto Manfredonia Foggia Puglia Italia © 2016 All rights reserved by Michele Masiero

 

FotoSketcher: lively

Nikon coolpix p 7100

 

Il Parco archeologico di Siponto, è situato a pochi chilometri dalla città di Manfredonia in Puglia.

Nell’area archeologica accanto alla chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore di origine medievale, sono presenti i resti di una basilica paleocristiana del IV sec. d.C. a tre navate con abside centrale e pavimento a mosaico. Al fine di valorizzare tutta l’area archeologica, che comprende anche il restauro del complesso della chiesa di San Leonardo posto nelle vicinanze, e preservare i resti archeologici della basilica paleocristiana, il ministero dei beni culturali e la sopraintendenza archeologica della Puglia utilizzando fondi europei , ha approvato e finanziato il progetto dello scultore lombardo Edoardo Tresoldi.L’opera d’arte a carattere permanente di Edoardo Tresoldi, ricostruisce sui resti archeologici della basilica paleocristiana , i volumi in scala reale della basilica stessa sino ad una altezza di 14 metri ,utilizzando reti in metallo galvanizzato trasparenti. L’Opera d’arte,unica al mondo, ha richiesto l’utilizzo di sette tonnellate di rete metallica leggera e trasparente , e un lavoro protrattosi per circa tre mesi di una equipe di una trentina di persone tra cui archeologi, ingegneri e architetti e il gruppo di giovani creativi che collaborano con Tresoldi da diversi anni.

 

Edoardo Tresoldi

Scultore, pittore e scenografo, Edoardo Tresoldi ha un approccio artistico e di ricerca creativa e libera. Studia design e arti visive all'istituto d'arte di Monza. Nel 2009 si trasferisce a Roma e inizia a lavorare come pittore di scena per vari progetti cinematografici. La scenografia diventa un laboratorio di sperimentazione. Dal 2013 realizza sculture ed installazioni in rete metallica. Edoardo ha 28 anni, è di Cambiago, in provincia di Milano ed è considerato uno dei talenti della street art italiana. Si fa aiutare da una squadra in cui l’età media è 25 anni e anche i responsabili di Sovrintendenze ed Ente Paesaggistici, hanno riconosciuto il valore delle sue opere. A lui sono state affidati luoghi importanti, come le installazioni alla Vigna di Leonardo a Milano e alla Basilica di Siponto a Manfredonia.

  

.The Archaeological Park of Siponto, is located a few kilometers from the town of Manfredonia in the Puglia region. In the archaeological site next to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore of medieval origin, there are the remains of a paleoChristian basilica of the fourth century. after Christ, with three naves and central apse and mosaic floor. In order to enhance the whole archaeological area, which also includes the restoration of the complex of the church of San Leonardo nearby, and preserve the archaeological remains of an early Christian basilica, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and the archaeological superintendence of Puglia using European funds, have approved and funded the project the Lombard sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi. The work of art, unique in the world, a permanent nature by Edoardo Tresoldi, reconstructs on the archaeological ruins of the paleoChristian basilica, the full-scale real volumes of the basilica itself up to a height of 14 meters, using wire mesh galvanized transparent.The Art work required the use of seven tons of transparent metal mesh, and a job that lasted for about three months in a team of thirty people including archaeologists, engineers and architects and the group of young creatives that cooperate with Tresoldi from several years.

 

Edoardo Tresoldi

 

Sculptor, painter and stage designer, Edoardo Tresoldi has an artistic and creative research approach and free. He has studied design and visual arts at the Institute of Art of Monza. In 2009 he moved to Rome and began working as a scene painter for various film projects. The scenery becomes a testing laboratory. From 2013 makes sculptures and installations made of wire mesh. Edoardo is 28 years old, is born at Cambasio, in the province of Milan and is considered one of the talents of the Italian street art. It was helped by a team where the average age is 25 years. To him they were

  

From facebook and Dailybest

Lance Wood Hart (American 1891-1941)

Oil on canvas

Portland Art Museum

 

About the Artist

As a teenager and young adult, Lance Wood Hart was recognized for his accomplishments as an actor, stage designer, and artist. After attending the Art Institute of Chicago Hart decided to focus on painting, and returned to his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, leaving only briefly for duty with the U.S. Army Ambulance Corps in World War I and a period of study at the Royal Academy in Sweden in the 1920s. In this period Hart befriended and offered encouragement to Robert Motherwell, a young artist also from Aberdeen, who went on to become a leading Abstract Expressionist. Hart spent the last years of his life in Eugene, teaching painting and drawing at the University of Oregon.

[Artist biography reproduced with permission of Katharine Harmon, author of The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History]

 

portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=1...

 

Statua ( In rete metallica ) di Edoardo Tresoldi

Statue (made of wire mesh) by Edoardo Tresoldi

  

Siponto Manfredonia Foggia Puglia Italia © 2016 All rights reserved by Michele Masiero

 

FotoSketcher: lively

Nikon coolpix p 7100

  

Il Parco archeologico di Siponto, è situato a pochi chilometri dalla città di Manfredonia in Puglia.

Nell’area archeologica accanto alla chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore di origine medievale, sono presenti i resti di una basilica paleocristiana del IV sec. d.C. a tre navate con abside centrale e pavimento a mosaico. Al fine di valorizzare tutta l’area archeologica, che comprende anche il restauro del complesso della chiesa di San Leonardo posto nelle vicinanze, e preservare i resti archeologici della basilica paleocristiana, il ministero dei beni culturali e la sopraintendenza archeologica della Puglia utilizzando fondi europei , ha approvato e finanziato il progetto dello scultore lombardo Edoardo Tresoldi.

L’opera d’arte a carattere permanente di Edoardo Tresoldi, ricostruisce sui resti archeologici della basilica

paleocristiana , i volumi in scala reale della basilica stessa sino ad una altezza di 14 metri ,utilizzando reti in metallo galvanizzato trasparenti. L’Opera d’arte,unica al mondo, ha richiesto l’utilizzo di sette tonnellate di rete metallica leggera e trasparente , e un lavoro protrattosi per circa tre mesi di una equipe di una trentina di persone tra cui archeologi, ingegneri e architetti e il gruppo di giovani creativi che collaborano con Tresoldi da diversi anni.

 

Edoardo Tresoldi

 

Scultore, pittore e scenografo, Edoardo Tresoldi ha un approccio artistico e di ricerca creativa e libera. Studia design e arti visive all'istituto d'arte di Monza. Nel 2009 si trasferisce a Roma e inizia a lavorare come pittore di scena per vari progetti cinematografici. La scenografia diventa un laboratorio di sperimentazione. Dal 2013 realizza sculture ed installazioni in rete metallica. Edoardo ha 28 anni, è di Cambiago, in provincia di Milano ed è considerato uno dei talenti della street art italiana. Si fa aiutare da una squadra in cui l’età media è 25 anni e anche i responsabili di Sovrintendenze ed Ente Paesaggistici, hanno riconosciuto il valore delle sue opere. A lui sono state affidati luoghi importanti, come le installazioni alla Vigna di Leonardo a Milano e alla Basilica di Siponto a Manfredonia.

  

.The Archaeological Park of Siponto, is located a few kilometers from the town of Manfredonia in the Puglia region. In the archaeological site next to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore of medieval origin, there are the remains of a paleoChristian basilica of the fourth century. after Christ, with three naves and central apse and mosaic floor. In order to enhance the whole archaeological area, which also includes the restoration of the complex of the church of San Leonardo nearby, and preserve the archaeological remains of an early Christian basilica, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and the archaeological superintendence of Puglia using European funds, have approved and funded the project the Lombard sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi. The work of art, unique in the world, a permanent nature by Edoardo Tresoldi, reconstructs on the archaeological ruins of the paleoChristian basilica, the full-scale real volumes of the basilica itself up to a height of 14 meters, using wire mesh galvanized transparent.The Art work required the use of seven tons of transparent metal mesh, and a job that lasted for about three months in a team of thirty people including archaeologists, engineers and architects and the group of young creatives that cooperate with Tresoldi from several years.

  

Edoardo Tresoldi

  

Sculptor, painter and stage designer, Edoardo Tresoldi has an artistic and creative research approach and free. He has studied design and visual arts at the Institute of Art of Monza. In 2009 he moved to Rome and began working as a scene painter for various film projects. The scenery becomes a testing laboratory. From 2013 makes sculptures and installations made of wire mesh. Edoardo is 28 years old, is born at Cambasio, in the province of Milan and is considered one of the talents of the Italian street art. It was helped by a team where the average age is 25 years. To him they were

  

From facebook and Dailybest

   

The art installation "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red" at the Tower of London, marks one hundred years since the first full day of Britain's involvement in the First World War. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies will progressively fill the Tower's famous moat over the summer. Each poppy represents a British military fatality during the war.

 

The poppies will encircle the iconic landmark, creating not only a spectacular display visible from all around the Tower but also a location for personal reflection. The scale of the installation intends to reflect the magnitude of such an important centenary creating a powerful visual commemoration.

(further information and pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)

Volkstheater - People's Theatre

The Volkstheater (2008)

The Volkstheater is one of the most important Schauspielbühnen (drama stages) of Vienna. It was founded in 1889 by the poet Ludwig Anzengruber and the industrialist Felix Fischer by the Association of the German folk theater (Volkstheater), to create an alternative to the Imperial Hofburg Theatre, the latter one the representation of everyday life, the folksy and comedic elements keeping away from its stage boards. The first president of the club was the famous stool manufacturer Franz Thonet. The founders intended in addition to folk plays mainly classical and modern dramas being performed and to provide a broad class of population access to the theater. Therefore the famous Theaterarchitektenduo (duo of theater architects) Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer the neo-Renaissance building with the representative column loggia have given a large auditorium with little boxes and many exits to the outside, by which this building in the style of historicism became a model for the entire monarchy. The auditorium with the ceiling painting by Eduard Veith, showing the coronation of the Austrian poets Ferdinand Raimund, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy and Ludwig Anzengruber, is one of the last in its original state preserved audiences in Vienna and was with 1900 seats formerly the largest in the entire German-speaking world. Today, the capacity of the theater is 970 places and it is the second largest theater stage in Vienna. According to safety regulations, which were adopted after the Ring Theatre fire in Vienna in 1881, the Volkstheater was the first exclusively electrically lit theater house.

History

On 14 September 1889 opened the theater its doors with Ludwig Anzengruber's drama "The stain on the honor". The bourgeoisie and the aristocracy of money (Geldadel) called the new theater "their house" and thus defied the exclusively reserved for the aristocracy Court Theatre, whose artistic director initially even harbored takeover plans. When the popular theater was run down and broke, he then wanted to buy it cheap. But the people theater celebrated one success after another. Just one year after the opening had to be enlarged the stage area. In 1907 were added a further extension with additional foyer and 1911 more stage side rooms.

In the 1920s, the Volkstheater experienced under the theater directors Alfred Bernau and Rudolf Beer artistic highlights. Spectacular repertoires, prominent actors, directors and stage designers of that time continued the success story of the theater. From 1938 to 1945, the theater became part of the Nazi leisure program "Strength through Joy" of the German Labor Front under Walter Bruno Iltz. In the years 1938/1939 was rebuilt the theater and removed the sculptural decoration on the facade. For a visit of Adolf Hitler even a reception and break room was extra set up, the so-called leaders room (Führerzimmer). In 1944 the dome and foyers were destroyed in an attack, a year later the building was restored but for the time being it was decided not to reconstruct the dome and the facade decoration. Only in the course of a general renovation in the early 1980s the dome was restored. On 10 May 1945, the theater was reopened. After the war, the director and actor Günther Haenel became director of the theater. His game plan focused mainly socio-critical issues.

In the following two decades (1950s and 1960s) dominated on the initiative Leon Epps' contemporary plays and bold interpretations of classics the theater program and the popular theater became famous with Raimund and Nestroy interpretations under the direction of Gustav Manker. Manker became at the beginnings of the 1970s director of the theater and celebrated breakthroughs with the discovery of modern Austrian dramatic literature.

In 1954, the play series "People's Theatre in the districts" was launched. Individual productions of popular theater are presented in external venues in the districts of Vienna. Among these secondary venues since 2005 the "Hundsturm (dogs tower)" as a smaller stage is included in which experimental theater works are staged. But also in the main building of the popular theater are additional venues located, like the "Red Bar" (in the buffet room on the first floor), the "Black Salon", the "White Salon" and the "Reception Room" (formerly "Führerzimmer"). Since 2009/10 in Bellaria Cinema at Museum Street behind the People's Theatre the production "Go West ? - Young authors write for the popular theater" has its home.

The auditorium (2009)

On both sides of the main house in the Neustiftgasse watch "the good spirits of the Viennese popular theater". In the nearby small Weghuberpark sits theater buffoonery poet Ferdinand Raimund suspended in reverie on a marble bench, surrounded by the feminine genius of fantasy. This sculpture was created by the Austrian sculptor Franz Vogl 1898. At the corner of Burggasse/Museum Street a bust of the famous Austrian actress Johanna "Hansi" Niese (by Josef Müllner, 1952) reminds of the triumph of comedic presentation at the beginning of the century.

Source: Wiener Zeitung

Oil on canvas.

 

Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin, Ukrainian painter, sculptor, and architect remembered for his visionary “Monument to the Third International” in Moscow, 1920.

 

Tatlin was educated at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1910. Late in 1913 he went to Paris, where he visited Pablo Picasso, whose reliefs in sheet iron, wood, and cardboard made a deep impression on him. Returning to Moscow, Tatlin created constructions that he called “painting reliefs,” which he exhibited at a Futurist exhibition held in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in February 1915. He became the leader of a group of Moscow artists who tried to apply engineering techniques to the construction of sculpture. This developed into a movement known as Constructivism.

 

This type of avant-garde art continued for a brief period after the Russian Revolution of 1917, during which time Tatlin created his most famous work—the “Monument to the Third International,” which was one of the first buildings conceived entirely in abstract terms. It was commissioned in 1919 by the department of fine arts and exhibited in the form of a model 22 feet (6.7 m) high at the exhibition of the VIII Congress of the Soviets in December 1920. A striking design, it consisted of a leaning spiral iron framework supporting a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube, each of which could be rotated at different speeds. The monument’s interior would have contained halls for lectures, conferences, and other activities. The monument was to be the world’s tallest structure—more than 1,300 feet (396 m) tall—but it was never built owing to the Soviet government’s disapproval of non-figurative art.

 

About 1927 Tatlin began experimentation with a glider that resembled a giant insect. The glider, which he called Letatlin, never flew, but it engaged his interest throughout his later life. After 1933 he worked largely as a stage designer.

Rosenberg Lev Samoylovich called Bakst was a painter and a stage designer of Belorussian birth. Born into a middle class Jewish family, Bakst was educated in St Peterburg, attending the Academy of Arts. Bakst traveled regularly to Europe and North Africa and studied in Paris with a number of notable artists at the Academie Julian. With Alexander Benois and Serge Diaghlev he was a founder of the WORLD OF ART group in 1898. In 1906 he became a drawing teacher at the Yelizaveta Zvantseva's private school in St Peterburg.

 

Bakst realized his greatest artistic success in the theatre. In 1909 he collaborated with Diaghilev in the founding of Ballets Russes, where he acted as artistic director, and his stages designs rapidly brought him international fame. Between 1909 and 1921 his name became inseparable from the Ballets Russes. He also designed for other celebrities, included the artist producers Vera Komissarzhervskaya in 1906, Ida Rubinstein between 1911 to 1924. He settled in Paris in 1912, having being exiled from St Peterburg where, as a Jew he was unable to obtain a residence permit.

 

Bakst was arguably the most accomplish painter, as well as designer, in the World of Art group. His early preferences were for Realist painters and Old Masters, such as Rembrandt and Velazquez. The animated line and relaxed postures in his portraiture also suggest the influence of his close friend Valentin Serov. Through Benois and his circle Bakst was attracted to "retrospectivism" and Orientalism, and motifs from ancient Greece and Egypt became signatures in his easel paintings and theoretical work. The Benois circle also introduced him to Symbolism and Art Nouveau.

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red is a 2014 work of installation art placed in the moat of the Tower of London, England, commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. The artist is Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper.The work's title is taken from the first line of a poem by an unknown World War I soldier, which begins: "The blood swept lands and seas of red,Where angels dare to tread...

Tower of London

 

Evolving installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies will progressively fill the Tower’s famous moat.

Roberto Montenegro. The First Lady, 1942. Oil on cardboard. 10-­‐3/4 x 14-1/8 in. Collection of Andrés Blaisten. Reproduced with the kind permission of Fundación Andrés Blaisten.

 

Mexican painter, printmaker, illustrator and stage designer. In 1903 he began studying painting in Guadalajara under Félix Bernardelli, an Italian who had established a school of painting and music there, and he produced his first illustrations for Revista moderna, a magazine that promoted the Latin American modernist movement and for which his cousin, the poet Amado Nervo, wrote. In 1905 he enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, where Diego Rivera was also studying, and won a grant to study in Europe. After two years in Madrid, Montenegro moved in 1907 to Paris, where he continued his studies and had his first contact with Cubism, meeting Picasso, Braque and Gris.

 

After a short stay in Mexico, Montenegro returned to Paris. At the outbreak of World War I he moved to Barcelona and from there to Mallorca, where he lived as a fisherman for the next four years. During his stay in Europe he assimilated various influences, in particular from Symbolism, from Art Nouveau (especially Aubrey Beardsley) and from William Blake.

 

On his return to Mexico, Montenegro worked closely with José Vasconcelos, Secretary of State for Public Education during the presidency of Alvaro Obregón in the early 1920s, faithfully following his innovative ideas on murals and accompanying him on journeys in Mexico and abroad. He was put in charge of the Departamento de Artes Plásticas in 1921 and was invited by Vasconcelos to ‘decorate’ the walls of the former convent, the Colegio Máximo de S Pedro y S Pablo in Mexico City. The first of these works, executed in 1922, consisted of the mural Tree of Life , relating the origin and destiny of man, and two designs for richly ornamented stained-glass windows influenced by popular art: Guadalajara Tap-dance and The Parakeet-seller. They were followed by two further murals in the same building: the Festival of the Holy Cross (1923–4), representing the popular festival of 3 May celebrated by bricklayers and stonemasons, and Resurrection (1931–3), with a geometric composition bearing a slight Cubist influence. Further murals followed, including Spanish America (1924; Mexico City, Bib. Ibero-Amer. & B.A.), an allegory of the historical and spiritual union of Latin America in the form of a map, and The Story, also known as Aladdin’s Lamp (1926; Mexico City, Cent. Escolar Benito Juárez), a formally designed painting with Oriental figures similar in style to a mural made for Vasconcelos’s private offices.

 

Although Montenegro claimed to be a ‘subrealist’ rather than a Surrealist, in his easel paintings he mixed reality and fantasy; two such works, which fall well within the bounds of Surrealism, were shown in 1940 at the International Exhibition of Surrealism held at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City. In his later work Montenegro evolved an abstract style, although he never lost his interest in popular, pre-Hispanic and colonial art. He was also a fine portrait painter, and from the 1940s to the 1960s he produced a splendid series of self-portraits in which he is shown reflected in a convex mirror, thus combining elements of Mannerism and popular art. He illustrated books, made incursions into stage design, working for both the ballet and the theatre, and in 1934 created the Museo de Arte Popular in the recently inaugurated Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, becoming its first director.

 

Leonor Morales

From Grove Art Online

 

© 2009 Oxford University Press

The tomb of Giovanni Battista Gisleni, an Italian Baroque architect and stage designer who worked for the Polish royal court during the years 1630-1668, is probably the most macabre funeral monument in the basilica. It is set between a wooden booth and a stone half-column on the right side of the counterfaçade. The memorial was designed and installed by the architect himself in 1670 two years before his death.

The upper part of the monument is a stone plaque with a long inscription and the portrait of the deceased in a tondo which was painted by a Flemish portraitist, Jacob Ferdinand Voet. There is a painted canopy supported by angels on the wall. The lower part is more interesting: a skeleton is peeping through a window behind an iron grill. The sinister, shrouded figure is facing towards the viewer with his bony hands clutched on his breast. The stone frame of the window is decorated with a coat-of-arms and two bronze medallions. The left one shows a tree with its branches cut but sprouting new shoots and containing a caterpillar spinning its cocoon, while the right one shows the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a moth. These are the symbols of death and resurrection. The inscriptions convey the same message: In nidulo meo moriar ("in my nest I die" i.e. in the city of Rome) and Ut phoenix multiplicabo dies ("as a phoenix I multiply my days"). There are two enigmatic inscriptions on the upper and lower part of the monument: Neque hic vivus and Neque illic mortuus ("Neither living here, nor dead there").

On this tomb the skeleton is not the personification of Death as in other Baroque tombs but a representation of the deceased (the transi image) on his way towards the resurrection and due to this "death became a symbol for life"

 

КОНСТАНТИН КОРОВИН, НИКОЛАЙ КЛОДТ ФОН ЮРГЕНСБУРГ - Киты (Скалы на берегу моря)

☆

Location: State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

 

Source: rusmuseumvrm.ru/data/collections/painting/19_20/zh-5714/i...

 

Decorative panel for the Russian Peripherys pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris (1900) for the Siberian Division.

 

Rus: Декоративное панно, выполненное для павильона Русских окраин на Всемирной выставке в Париже (1900) для Сибирского отдела.

 

NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH CLODT von JURGENSBURG (1865 - 1918) was a Russian painter of landscape and, later in his life, theatre stage-designer.

Nikolai Klodt was born in Saint Petersburg to an artistic family. The sculptor Peter Clodt von Jurgensburg was his grandfather. Two of his uncles, Mikhail Petrovich and Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodts, were well-known painters too. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture which he graduated in 1886. Among his tutors were Vladimir Makovsky and Evgraf Sorokin.

In the late 1880s—early 1890s Klodt read fine arts at the Anatoly Gunst Art College. He spent most of the decade on the road, and his works of this period were strongly influenced by his travels to the Russian North, and along the Volga River.

In 1900 Klodt took part in organising and designing of the Russian pavilion for the Paris World Fair, mostly in collaboration with Konstantin Korovin, who played the major part in the exposition (and was later awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government).

In 1901 Klodt, now under the strong influence of impressionism, started to work as stage designer, for the leading theatres of St Petersburg and Moscow. With Korovin he created the stage design for the ballet The Little Humpbacked Horse by Cesare Pugni at the Bolshoi Theatre, in 1901. In 1903, working with set designs by Alexandre Benois, he decorated the scene of Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung for Mariinsky Theatre.

Klodt regularly took part in the expositions of the leading Russian art groups, including Peredvizhniki (1894), the Moscow Art Society (1889, 1892–1895, 1897), The Exposition of the Thirty Six (Выставка 36-ти художников, 1901, 1902) and the Union of Russian Artists (1903–1917). His major works are exposed at the Tretyakov Gallery and Russian Museum, as well as the regional museums, in Plyos, Kostroma, and Vologda. Nikolai Klodt died on 23 September 1918 in Moscow and is interred in Vagankovo Cemetery.

Oil on canvas; 71.5 x 57.5 cm.

 

Russian painter, draughtsman and stage designer. He studied at the University of St Petersburg (later Petrograd) in 1908 and in the private studio of Savely Zeidenberg (1862–1924). In 1909–10 he attended the studio of Yan Tsyonglinsky (1850–1914) in St Petersburg, where he became acquainted with the avant-garde artists Yelena Guro (1877–1913), Mikhail Matyushin and Matvey Vol’demar (1878–1914). In 1911–12 he worked in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton in Paris, then in Switzerland (1913) before returning to St Petersburg. As a painter he was a modernist, and his work developed rapidly towards abstraction, although he did not adhere to any particular branch of it. His works of the time use various devices of stylization and decorativeness, and some of them echo the free associations of Marc Chagall, but fundamentally they remain geometrically based compositions. In 1919–20 he made a series of abstract sculptural assemblages and a great number of abstract collages.

 

Annenkov became popular as an illustrator, producing elegant drawings for a number of magazines in Petrograd in 1913–17, including Satirikon, Argus, Lukomor’ye and Solntse Rossii. He designed and illustrated many books for Moscow and Petrograd publishing houses in the 1910s and 1920s. In the early 1920s he designed a great number of book covers in the Constructivist style. He illustrated children’s books, especially for the private publishing house Raduga in Petrograd. But his most important illustrations were those for Aleksandr Blok’s revolutionary poem Dvenadtsat’ (‘The Twelve’; St Petersburg, 1918), which were successful improvisations on the poem’s themes, combining stylization and emotion. He also drew and painted a great number of portraits, especially of cultural and political figures. His monumental Portrait of the Red Army Leader L. Trotsky (1923; Moscow, Cent. Mus. Revolution), which has an urban background in Constructivist style, was particularly successful.

 

From 1913 Annenkov worked as a stage designer. He worked for the Krivoye Zerkalo (Distorting Mirror) Theatre in Petrograd (1914–15) and for the Komissarzhevsky Theatre in Moscow (1914–18). He then worked for a number of theatres in Petrograd, sometimes as designer and producer. He collaborated with Vsevolod Meyerkhold (e.g. Lev Tolstoy’s Pervyy vinokur, ‘First distiller’, Hermitage Theatre, Petrograd, 1919) and with Nikolay Yeureinov. Annenkov’s designs for Bunt mashin (‘Revolt of the machines’, Georg Kaiser adapted by Aleksey Tolstoy, Bol’shoy Dramatic Theatre, Petrograd, 1924) used a Constructivist-inspired mechanized set. Annenkov also designed a number of celebrations and pageants commemorating the Revolution of 1917, including the ambitious re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace, which took place in Uritsky (now Dvortsovaya) Square in Petrograd on 7 November 1920 and involved monumental scenery and c. 7000 performers. In 1922–4 he led the revival of the activities of the World of art group and in 1924 worked towards the establishment of the Society of easel painters. The same year he settled in Paris, where he aligned himself with the Ecole de Paris. He continued to design books, stage and film sets in France and Germany, and he exhibited at many joint Russian and French exhibitions. He also became active as an exhibition organizer himself, especially for the USA.

 

V. Rakitin From Grove Art Online

© 2009 Oxford University Press

1952 SCHWINN HORNET

 

THE POPULAR SCHWINN HORNET...

 

It's a Schwinn for me... I've compared them all and for my money, Schwinn's the best!"

 

America's Favorite Bicycle

 

What a combination! Trim dashing lines, superior Schwinn workmanship, and a complete line-up of equipment including streamlined tank with built-in horn, powerful Rocket-Ray headlight, sturdy luggage carrier, and truss rods. No wonder more kids choose the Schwinn Hornet than any other bicycle... and the low price will amaze you. Full guaranteed As-long-As-You-Own-It. Ask to see the "Hornet" at your Schwinn dealers. 26 inch model No. D-19.

 

Antique Center of Red Bank

226 West Front Street, Red Bank, NJ 07701

Phone: (732) 842-4336

 

We pride ourselves as a family of dealers dedicated to providing those hard to find treasures, collectibles, jewelry and furnishings. The Red Bank Antique Center has been the destination for designers, collectors, movie & stage designers and dealers for over 40 years. The center was started in 1964 by the Johnson family as a permanent antique show with 12 dealers. Today it has grown to over 100 dealers in two building in the heart of the Red Bank Historical District located 1/2 mile from the shoreline of the Navesink River. Operated by Guy Johnson, we have grown to be the largest antique district in New Jersey.

Oil on canvas; 100 x 210 cm.

 

Mexican painter, printmaker, illustrator and stage designer. In 1903 he began studying painting in Guadalajara under Félix Bernardelli, an Italian who had established a school of painting and music there, and he produced his first illustrations for Revista moderna, a magazine that promoted the Latin American modernist movement and for which his cousin, the poet Amado Nervo, wrote. In 1905 he enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, where Diego Rivera was also studying, and won a grant to study in Europe. After two years in Madrid, Montenegro moved in 1907 to Paris, where he continued his studies and had his first contact with Cubism, meeting Picasso, Braque and Gris.

 

After a short stay in Mexico, Montenegro returned to Paris. At the outbreak of World War I he moved to Barcelona and from there to Mallorca, where he lived as a fisherman for the next four years. During his stay in Europe he assimilated various influences, in particular from Symbolism, from Art Nouveau (especially Aubrey Beardsley) and from William Blake.

 

On his return to Mexico, Montenegro worked closely with José Vasconcelos, Secretary of State for Public Education during the presidency of Alvaro Obregón in the early 1920s, faithfully following his innovative ideas on murals and accompanying him on journeys in Mexico and abroad. He was put in charge of the Departamento de Artes Plásticas in 1921 and was invited by Vasconcelos to ‘decorate’ the walls of the former convent, the Colegio Máximo de S Pedro y S Pablo in Mexico City. The first of these works, executed in 1922, consisted of the mural Tree of Life , relating the origin and destiny of man, and two designs for richly ornamented stained-glass windows influenced by popular art: Guadalajara Tap-dance and The Parakeet-seller. They were followed by two further murals in the same building: the Festival of the Holy Cross (1923–4), representing the popular festival of 3 May celebrated by bricklayers and stonemasons, and Resurrection (1931–3), with a geometric composition bearing a slight Cubist influence. Further murals followed, including Spanish America (1924; Mexico City, Bib. Ibero-Amer. & B.A.), an allegory of the historical and spiritual union of Latin America in the form of a map, and The Story, also known as Aladdin’s Lamp (1926; Mexico City, Cent. Escolar Benito Juárez), a formally designed painting with Oriental figures similar in style to a mural made for Vasconcelos’s private offices.

 

Although Montenegro claimed to be a ‘subrealist’ rather than a Surrealist, in his easel paintings he mixed reality and fantasy; two such works, which fall well within the bounds of Surrealism, were shown in 1940 at the International Exhibition of Surrealism held at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City. In his later work Montenegro evolved an abstract style, although he never lost his interest in popular, pre-Hispanic and colonial art. He was also a fine portrait painter, and from the 1940s to the 1960s he produced a splendid series of self-portraits in which he is shown reflected in a convex mirror, thus combining elements of Mannerism and popular art. He illustrated books, made incursions into stage design, working for both the ballet and the theatre, and in 1934 created the Museo de Arte Popular in the recently inaugurated Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, becoming its first director.

 

Leonor Morales

From Grove Art Online

 

© 2009 Oxford University Press

The Gardens of Diana Panneau for the Contemporary Art Showrooms, St. Petersburg. 1902. Colored indian ink, whitening, watercolor, pencil on paper on board. 37,7 x 61,9 cm. State Tretiakov Gallery. Moscow. Rusia.

 

Russian painter, mainly in watercolour, art historian and stage designer. Born in St Petersburg of French and Italian descent, son of Nikolai Benois, architect to the Imperial Palaces in Peterhof. Briefly attended a part-time course in stage design at the Academy of Arts 1887, but otherwise self-taught as an artist. Studied law at the University of St Petersburg 1890-4, and while still a student formed a circle with a number of friends, including Diaghilev, Somov and Bakst, for the purpose of studying art. This later developed into the World of Art (Mir Iskusstva), which held exhibitions and published a journal of the same name, 1898-1904. Travelled widely in Europe and was influenced by the art of the eighteenth century. Became very active and influential as a stage designer, including sets and costumes for Le Pavillon d'Armide 1907 and (for Diaghilev) Petrushka 1911 and Le Rossignol 1914. Edited the periodical Khudozhestvennye sokrovishcha Rossii (Art Treasures of Russia) 1901-3, and wrote several books on art and volumes of memoirs. Curator of Painting at the Hermitage 1918-25, then moved in 1926 to Paris, where he continued to paint and design for the theatre. Died in Paris.

 

Published in:

Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.48

"Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

 

Don’t miss our evolving installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies will progressively fill the Tower’s famous moat." poppies.hrp.org.uk/

 

Oil on canvas; 95.2 x 95.2 cm.

 

By the time László Moholy-Nagy turned towards painting after graduating from law school and developed his own abstract style influenced by Malewitsch and El Lissitzky, it was inevitable that he would become one of the most important artists of Constructivism. He soon exposed himself in Hungary as the founder of the artist group "Ma", but left his home country after the failure of the revolution.

He moved to Berlin In 1920 where Gropius noticed him and invited him to join the "Bauhaus" in 1923. There Moholy-Nagy ran the metal class but also worked in all other areas of design in which he was equally influential. The artist published his ideas in the series of Bauhaus books, for example "Malerei, Fotografie, Film" (1925). Moholy-Nagy wanted an "experimental, functional artist […] who considers art as a laboratory for new forms of expression which were then supposed to be employed in all areas of modern life" (Karin Thomas).

 

The expectations of the age of technology and his new media led Moholy-Nagy to a functional use of Abstraction, which he managed to show in all areas of design and which guided him through different phases of experimenting. His varied oeuvre ranges from painting, photography, film, design and stage design to experiments with photograms which considerably influenced the development of light art and kinetic art. László Moholy-Nagy left the "Bauhaus" in 1928 together with Gropius and worked in Berlin as a stage designer, exhibition organiser, typographer and film producer. He emigrated to the USA in 1937 and ran the "New Bauhaus" in Chicago. Moholy-Nagy opened his own art institute, the "School of Design", in Chicago in 1938 and enlarged it in the following years by adding the faculties economics, psychology and information theory.

 

László Moholy-Nagy became severely ill and died one year later, in 1946.

Hungarian painter, printmaker, graphic designer and animated film director, is known for his mathematically inspired works, impossible objects, optical illusions, double-meaning images and anamorphoses. The geometric art of István Orosz, with forced perspectives and optical illusions, has been compared to works by M. C. Escher.

 

Studied at the Hungarian University of Arts and Design (now Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) in Budapest as pupil of István Balogh and Ernő Rubik. After graduating in 1975 he began to deal with theatre as stage designer and animated film as animator and film director. He is known as painter, printmaker, poster designer, and illustrator as well. He likes to use visual paradox, double meaning images and illusionistic approaches while following traditional printing techniques such as woodcutting and etching. He also tries to renew the technique of anamorphosis. He is a regular participant in the major international biennials of posters and graphic art and his works has been shown in individual and group exhibitions in Hungary and abroad. Film director at the PannóniaFilm Studio in Budapest, Habil. professor at University of West Hungary in Sopron, co-founder of Hungarian Poster Association, member of Alliance Graphique International (AGI) and Hungarian Art Academie. He often uses OYTIΣ, or Utisz, (pronounced: outis) (No one) as artist's pseudonym.

 

During the last two decades - when most of the works shown here were made – the activities of the poster designer, the printmaker, the illustrator, and the film director have completed each other. Many motive, stylistic features, technical solutions appeared in all of the media and for Orosz it seemingly did not cause any problem to cross the borders of the different genres. When he was drawing a poster usually he did it with the preciseness of illustrators, when he was illustrating a book, he did it with the narrative mood of filmmakers, if he was animating films, sometimes he used the several layers approach of etchers and engravers and for prints he often chose the emblematic simplifying way of depiction of posters. If we call him only a poster designer based on his functional prints, we narrow down his field of activity, we go closer to the truth if we associate him with „postering" as a way of thinking, or if we call his many sided image depicting ourselves and our age as the poster-mirror of István Orosz. (Guy d'Obonner: Transfiguration of Poster - detail)

 

István Orosz was known as poster designer in the first part of his career. He made mainly cultural posters for theatres, movies, galleries, museums and publishing houses. At the time of the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe he drew some political posters too. His "Tovarishi Adieu" (also used with text "Tovarishi Koniec" – that means Comrades it is over) appeared in many countries and it was known as symbolic image of changes in the area.

 

Artists who design anamorphosis (anamorphosis is Greek for "re-transformation") play with perspective to create a distorted image that appears normal only when viewed from the correct angle or with the aid of curved mirrors. The technique was often used by Renaissance-era artists. Orosz tries to renew the technique of anamorphosis and his aim is to develop it as well when he gives a meaning to the distorted image, too. It is not an amorph picture any more, but a meaningful depiction that is independent from the result that appears in the mirror or viewed from a special point of view. This approach of anamorphoses is suitable for expressing more sophisticated messages.

This Helsinki streetcar was advertising and upcoming production of Leoš Janáček's opera The Cunning Little Vixen, also known (by whom?) as Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears.

 

About the Finnish National Opera:

 

The Finnish National Opera (Finnish: Suomen Kansallisooppera; Swedish: Finlands Nationalopera) is a Finnish opera company based in Helsinki. Its home base is the Opera House on Töölönlahti bay in Töölö, which opened in 1993, and is state-owned through Senate Properties. The Opera House features two auditoriums, the main auditorium with 1,350, seats and a smaller studio auditorium with 300-500 seats.

 

Regular opera performances began in Finland in 1873 with the founding of the Finnish Opera by Kaarlo Bergbom.

 

Prior to that, opera had been performed in Finland sporadically by touring companies, and on occasion by Finnish amateurs, the first such production being The Barber of Seville in 1849.

 

However, the Finnish Opera company soon plunged into a financial crisis and folded in 1879. During its six year's of operation, Bergbom’s opera company had given 450 performances of a total of 26 operas, and the company had managed to demonstrate that opera can be sung in Finnish too.

 

After the disbandment of the Finnish Opera, the opera audiences of Helsinki had to confine themselves to performances of visiting opera companies and occasional opera productions at the Finnish National Theatre.

 

The reincarnation of the Finnish opera institution took place about 30 years later. A group of notable social and cultural figures, led by the international star soprano Aino Ackté, founded the Domestic Opera in 1911.

 

From the very beginning, the opera decided to engage both foreign and Finnish artists. A few years later the Domestic Opera was renamed the Finnish Opera in 1914.

 

In 1956, the Finnish Opera was, in turn, taken over by the Foundation of the Finnish National Opera, and acquired its present name.

 

Between 1918 and 1993 the home of the opera was the Alexander Theater, which had been assigned to the company on a permanent basis. The home was inaugurated with an opening performance of Verdi’s Aida.

 

When the first dedicated opera house in Finland was finally completed and inaugurated in 1993, the old opera house was given back its original name, the Alexander Theater, after the Tsar Alexander II.

 

The Finnish National Opera has some 30 permanently engaged solo singers, a professional choir of 60 singers and its own orchestra of 120 members. The Ballet has 90 dancers from 17 countries. All together, the opera has a staff of 735.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_National_Opera

 

About The Cunning Little Vixen:

 

The Cunning Little Vixen (Czech: Příhody lišky Bystroušky, lit. 'Adventures of the vixen known as Sharp-Ears', and, until the 1970s, generally referred to in English as Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears) is a Czech language opera by Leoš Janáček, composed 1921 to 1923.

 

Its libretto was adapted by the composer from a serialized novella (daily comic) by Rudolf Těsnohlídek and Stanislav Lolek, which was first published in the newspaper Lidové noviny.

 

The opera incorporates Moravian folk music and rhythms as it recounts the life of a clever (i.e. sharp-eared, in a pun) fox and accompanying wildlife, as well as a few humans, and their small adventures while traversing their lifecycles.

 

Described as a comic opera, it has nonetheless been noted to contain a serious theme. Interpretations of the work remain varied, ranging from children's entertainment to a tragedy.

  

Title translation difficulty:

 

Broken down from the original Czech, the title is

 

Příhody = Tales (or Adventures),

 

lišky = of Vixen (i.e. genitive case, one fox, female),

 

Bystroušky = Sharp-Ears (double meaning: pointed [ears], clever, sly).

 

There is no mention in the Czech of a diminutive ("little"), although this idea is included in both the German (Das schlaue Füchslein) and recent (since 1980s) English versions of the opera's name.

 

It was probably the German name, used for the 1965 Felsenstein film, that established the English "cunning little", ignoring the important double meaning in "Sharp-Ears."

 

The first three audio recordings, all from the Czech company Supraphon (Neumann 1957, Gregor 1972, Neumann 1980) used, naturally, the original Czech name. Then Decca recorded the opera with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1981, and this widely circulated release made The Cunning Little Vixen the international, if inaccurate, standard.

 

When Janáček discovered Těsnohlídek's comic-strip-inspired story and decided to turn it into an opera, he began work by meeting with the author and beginning a study of animals.

 

With this understanding of the characters involved, his own 70 years of life experience, and an undying, unrequited love for the much younger, married Kamila Stösslová, he began work on the opera.

 

He transformed the originally comedic cartoon into a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death by including the death of the vixen. As with other operas by older composers, this late opera shows a deep understanding of life leading to a return to simplicity.

 

It was given its premiere performance on 6 November 1924 in National Theatre Brno conducted by František Neumann, with Ota Zítek as director and Eduard Milén as stage designer.

 

The opera received its Italian premiere at La Scala in 1958 with Mariella Adani in the title role.

 

The work was first staged in England in 1961 by the Sadler's Wells Opera Company (now the English National Opera) under the direction of Colin Graham, with conductor Colin Davis, and with scenery and costume designs by Barry Kay.

 

In 1981, the New York City Opera mounted a production in English based on images created by Maurice Sendak and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas in his company debut.

 

It starred soprano Gianna Rolandi as Vixen Sharp-Ears and baritone Richard Cross as the Forester.

 

Glyndebourne Festival Opera staged it in 2012, directed by Melly Still, and a revival is included in the Glyndebourne Festival for 2016 with Christopher Purves as the Forester and Elena Tsallagova as the Vixen, conductor Jakub Hrůša and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

 

In May 2014 the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst performed an innovative version directed by Yuval Sharon. This production returned the opera to its roots by utilizing animation and hand drawn video sets by the artists Bill Barminski and Christopher Louie of Walter Robot Studios. The production featured the use of hole-in-the-wall carnival cutouts to place the singers heads on the animated bodies of the animal characters.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cunning_Little_Vixen

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies will progressively fill the Tower’s famous moat.

Oil on canvas; 80 x 100 cm.

 

Italian painter, illustrator and stage designer. He began his training in Faenza in the workshop of the Italian painter and ceramicist Mario Ortolani (1901-55). After living briefly in Bologna (1927) and Paris (1928) he settled in Rome in 1929, first exhibiting his work at the Venice Biennale in the following year. His paintings at this time, such as Nude (Susanna after her Bath) (1929; Faenza, Pin. Com.), were characterized by an emphasis on tonal relationships and on the influence of the Scuola Romana. In 1934 he began to work with growing success as an illustrator for the journals Quadrivio and Italia letteraria. The contacts he established with Paris were intensified with his move there in 1947, resulting in three one-man shows at the Galerie Rive Gauche (in 1950, 1953 and 1957), and in his paintings he evolved a cautious balance between the representation and the disassembling of the image. Some of his best-known series of paintings date from this time, including his Cathedrals (e.g. Cathedral with Still-life and Dog, 1960; Rome, Vatican, Col. A. Relig. Mod.), pictures of town squares populated by acrobats and musicians, and later female nudes and a series entitled Mermaids.

Roberto Montenegro 'The Double' 1938, Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

 

Mexican painter, printmaker, illustrator and stage designer. In 1903 he began studying painting in Guadalajara under Félix Bernardelli, an Italian who had established a school of painting and music there, and he produced his first illustrations for Revista moderna, a magazine that promoted the Latin American modernist movement and for which his cousin, the poet Amado Nervo, wrote. In 1905 he enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, where Diego Rivera was also studying, and won a grant to study in Europe. After two years in Madrid, Montenegro moved in 1907 to Paris, where he continued his studies and had his first contact with Cubism, meeting Picasso, Braque and Gris.

 

After a short stay in Mexico, Montenegro returned to Paris. At the outbreak of World War I he moved to Barcelona and from there to Mallorca, where he lived as a fisherman for the next four years. During his stay in Europe he assimilated various influences, in particular from Symbolism, from Art Nouveau (especially Aubrey Beardsley) and from William Blake.

 

On his return to Mexico, Montenegro worked closely with José Vasconcelos, Secretary of State for Public Education during the presidency of Alvaro Obregón in the early 1920s, faithfully following his innovative ideas on murals and accompanying him on journeys in Mexico and abroad. He was put in charge of the Departamento de Artes Plásticas in 1921 and was invited by Vasconcelos to ‘decorate’ the walls of the former convent, the Colegio Máximo de S Pedro y S Pablo in Mexico City. The first of these works, executed in 1922, consisted of the mural Tree of Life , relating the origin and destiny of man, and two designs for richly ornamented stained-glass windows influenced by popular art: Guadalajara Tap-dance and The Parakeet-seller. They were followed by two further murals in the same building: the Festival of the Holy Cross (1923–4), representing the popular festival of 3 May celebrated by bricklayers and stonemasons, and Resurrection (1931–3), with a geometric composition bearing a slight Cubist influence. Further murals followed, including Spanish America (1924; Mexico City, Bib. Ibero-Amer. & B.A.), an allegory of the historical and spiritual union of Latin America in the form of a map, and The Story, also known as Aladdin’s Lamp (1926; Mexico City, Cent. Escolar Benito Juárez), a formally designed painting with Oriental figures similar in style to a mural made for Vasconcelos’s private offices.

 

Although Montenegro claimed to be a ‘subrealist’ rather than a Surrealist, in his easel paintings he mixed reality and fantasy; two such works, which fall well within the bounds of Surrealism, were shown in 1940 at the International Exhibition of Surrealism held at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City. In his later work Montenegro evolved an abstract style, although he never lost his interest in popular, pre-Hispanic and colonial art. He was also a fine portrait painter, and from the 1940s to the 1960s he produced a splendid series of self-portraits in which he is shown reflected in a convex mirror, thus combining elements of Mannerism and popular art. He illustrated books, made incursions into stage design, working for both the ballet and the theatre, and in 1934 created the Museo de Arte Popular in the recently inaugurated Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, becoming its first director.

 

Leonor Morales

From Grove Art Online

 

© 2009 Oxford University Press

MVW 2012 Miss United Kingdom

 

When Britain first, at heaven's command,

Arose from out the azure main,

This was the charter of the land,

And Guardian Angels sang this strain

 

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

 

• Dress, hair and shoes by Saby Clary from Utopia

• Photo: Asia Rae (thank you sweety ♥)

 

Time is now come to say thank you to all that make possible my dream.

I was so blessed to be inside this Pageant, to get to know 29 amazing women, to get to be close to people that influences the Second life Fasion Industry.

It was so greatfull to come to the final show, i could not be more proud and happy then i was.

So now i want to pay tribute to all those that have been the reason why I've walked this path.

In no particular order, because all have been important in their own ways to gave me the courage and the strenght to carry on:

 

→ Cherie Parker

→ Giz Seom

→ Mami Jewel

→ Saby Clary

→ Yula Finesmith

→ Dahriel

→ Enzo Champagne

→ Mimmi Boa

→ Kali Birman

→ Arya Mannonen

→ Tatanka Kaligawa

→ MVW 2012 National Candidates** - for let me learn and improve, to the humble lesson of giveng and be happy just to be there, for all classy and fashion and style lessons, wish you all the best ♥

→ MVW 2012 Staff . Frolic Mills, Blackbarbie Bravin, Persia Bravin, Ponchituti Boucher, Clarilynn Ohare, Kay Fairey (please excuse me if i forgot someone) - for always be there with pacience and care to makes us shine

→ MVW 2012 Stage Designers, For creating the most amazing sets and give us the motif to be professional and make the shows fashion in motion.

→ Last but not least: Roderich Mckenan for always be there for me in the laugh and in the tears ♥.

 

**

1. Giuls Scarpulla MISS ARGENTINA

2. rissa Friller MISS AUSTRALIA

3. Sylphia Constantine MISS BELGIUM

4. Sazzy Oh MISS CANADA

5. Laetitia Vella MISS COSTA RICA

6. Nala Kurka MISS ESTONIA

7. Annough Lykin MISS FINLAND

8. Lauren Mureaux MISS FRANCE

9. Falbala Fairey MISS GERMANY

10. Calypso Oliphaunt MISS GREECE

11. Mariella Spitteler MISS HAITI

12. Aphrodite Brianna MISS ICELAND

13. Saleena Hax MISS IRELAND

14. Anna Sapphire MISS ITALY

15. tyako Coage MISS JAPAN

16. skylei Caproni MISS MEXICO

17. Vivienne Darcy MISS MONACO

18. Draakje Dailey MISS NETHERLANDS

19. Shantal Gravois MISS NICARAGUA

20. Mely Gibbs MISS PANAMA

21. Dagda Burner MISS PHILIPPINES

22. Rusalka Callisto MISS RUSSIA

23. Carley Benazzi MISS SOUTH AFRICA

24. Caoimhe Lionheart MISS SOUTH KOREA

25. Shena Neox MISS SPAIN

26. DiamondGem Destiny MISS THAILAND

27. Xandrah Sciavo MISS TURKEY

28. Paulinha Lefevre MISS UNITED KINGDOM

29. Michela Benazzi MISS UNITED STATES

30. AnnaG Pfeffer MISS VENEZUELA

Panel; 49 x 60 cm.

 

Swedish painter, draughtsman, tapestry and stage designer. After studying under various artists in Tumba and elsewhere, in 1922–3 he attended the Konsthögskolan in Stockholm and in 1922 visited Berne, Nuremberg and Berlin. His early works, such as Jeårj (1923; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.), were loosely painted and naive in appearance and drew on vernacular art. In 1924 he visited Paris and Italy, and in 1924–5 he helped decorate the cinema in Malmö, one of numerous early decorative projects. In 1925 he was a founder-member of the Fri Konst group of artists, which included Carl Alexandersson (1897–1941), Sven Hempel (1896–1944) and others. The following year the membership was expanded to nine by the addition of such artists as Gustav Alexanderson (b 1901) to form the Nio Unga (Nine Young Men) group. Erixson travelled extensively around Europe in the late 1920s, and in 1932, after the dissolution of Nio Unga, he was a founder-member of Färg och Form (Colour and Form) with whom he exhibited thereafter. His painting of this period retained the earlier naivety but became more expressive, as in Dance Hall at Telemarken (1931; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.). After travels in Spain and Morocco in 1935–6 Erixson designed two large tapestry cartoons for the Konserthus in Göteborg, which were executed by the Gobelins. In 1938–40 he executed two large frescoes for the chapel at Skogskyrkogardens crematorium in Stockholm. From 1942–3 he produced painted glass windows for the St Gertrud chapel at Malmö crematorium, and in 1943 he became a professor at the Konstakademi in Stockholm. Erixson produced numerous theatrical set designs in the 1940s and 1950s, such as those for Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1944), and Shakespeare’s Richard III (1946) and Romeo and Juliet (1953), which were performed at the Dramaten theatre in Stockholm. He continued to paint interior scenes, townscapes and landscapes in this period, such as Autumn in Tattby (1944; Göteborg, Kstmus.), which still showed the influence of folk art. His later work was of much the same style though the details were pared away as in the powerful Memory of Nacka Hospital (1965; see 1969–70 exh. cat.). He was also involved in further decorative projects, producing cartoons, painted windows and theatre designs. Together with Bror Hjorth, Erixson was influential in revitalizing the folk art tradition in Sweden.

 

Grove Art excerpts - Electronic ©2003, Oxford Art Online

 

The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre in the Australian city of Sydney. It was conceived and largely built by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, finally opening in 1973 after a long gestation starting with his competition-winning design in 1957.

The Sydney Opera House was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 28 June 2007. It is one of the 20th century's most distinctive buildings and one of the most famous performing arts centres in the world.

The Sydney Opera House is situated on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbour, close to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It sits at the northeastern tip of the Sydney central business district (the CBD), surrounded on three sides by the harbour (Sydney Cove and Farm Cove) and neighboured by the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Contrary to its name, the building houses multiple performance venues. As one of the busiest performing arts centres in the world, hosting over 1,500 performances each year attended by some 1.2 million people, the Sydney Opera House provides a venue for many performing arts companies including the four key resident companies Opera Australia, The Australian Ballet, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and presents a wide range of productions on its own account. It is also one of the most popular visitor attractions in Australia, with more than seven million people visiting the site each year, 300,000 of whom take a guided tour.

The Sydney Opera House is administered by the Sydney Opera House Trust, under the New South Wales Ministry of the Arts.

The Sydney Opera House is a modern expressionist design, with a series of large precast concrete "shells", each composed of sections of a sphere of 75.2 metres (246 ft 8.6 in) radius, forming the roofs of the structure, set on a monumental podium. The building covers 1.8 hectares (4.4 acres) of land and is 183 m (600 ft) long and 120 m (394 ft) wide at its widest point. It is supported on 588 concrete piers sunk as much as 25 m (82 ft) below sea level.

Although the roof structures of the Sydney Opera House are commonly referred to as "shells" (as they are in this article), they are in fact not shells in a strictly structural sense, but are instead precast concrete panels supported by precast concrete ribs. The shells are covered in a subtle chevron pattern with 1,056,006 glossy white- and matte-cream-coloured Swedish-made tiles from Höganäs AB though, from a distance, the shells appear a uniform white.

Apart from the tile of the shells and the glass curtain walls of the foyer spaces, the building's exterior is largely clad with aggregate panels composed of pink granite quarried at Tarana. Significant interior surface treatments also include off-form concrete, Australian white birch plywood supplied from Wauchope in northern New South Wales, and brush box glulam

Of the two larger spaces, the Concert Hall is located within the western group of shells, and the Opera Theatre within the eastern group. The scale of the shells was chosen to reflect the internal height requirements, with low entrance spaces, rising over the seating areas and up to the high stage towers. The smaller venues (the Drama Theatre, the Playhouse, and The Studio) are located within the podium, beneath the Concert Hall. A smaller group of shells set to the western side of the Monumental Steps houses the Bennelong Restaurant. The podium is surrounded by substantial open public spaces, of which the large stone-paved forecourt area with the adjacent monumental steps is also regularly used as a performance space.

Performance venues and facilities

The Opera House houses the following performance venues:

The Concert Hall, with 2,679 seats, is the home of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and used by a large number of other concert presenters. It contains the Sydney Opera House Grand Organ, the largest mechanical tracker action organ in the world, with over 10,000 pipes.[citation needed]

The Opera Theatre, a proscenium theatre with 1,507 seats, is the Sydney home of Opera Australia and The Australian Ballet.

The Drama Theatre, a proscenium theatre with 544 seats, is used by the Sydney Theatre Company and other dance and theatrical presenters.

The Playhouse, an end-stage theatre with 398 seats.

The Studio, a flexible space with a maximum capacity of 400 people, depending on configuration.

The Utzon Room, a small multi-purpose venue, seating up to 210.

The Forecourt, a flexible open-air venue with a wide range of configuration options, including the possibility of utilising the Monumental Steps as audience seating, used for a range of community events and major outdoor performances. The Forecourt will be closed to visitors and performances 2011–2014 to construct a new entrance tunnel to a rebuilt loading dock for the Opera Theatre.

Other areas (for example the northern and western foyers) are also used for performances on an occasional basis. Venues at the Sydney Opera House are also used for conferences, ceremonies, and social functions.

Planning for the Sydney Opera House began in the late 1940s, when Eugene Goossens, the Director of the NSW State Conservatorium of Music, lobbied for a suitable venue for large theatrical productions. The normal venue for such productions, the Sydney Town Hall, was not considered large enough. By 1954, Goossens succeeded in gaining the support of NSW Premier Joseph Cahill, who called for designs for a dedicated opera house. It was also Goossens who insisted that Bennelong Point be the site for the Opera House. Cahill had wanted it to be on or near Wynyard Railway Station in the northwest of the CBD.

A design competition was launched by Cahill on 13 September 1955 and received 233 entries, representing architects from 32 countries. The criteria specified a large hall seating 3,000 and a small hall for 1,200 people, each to be designed for different uses, including full-scale operas, orchestral and choral concerts, mass meetings, lectures, ballet performances and other presentations. The winner, announced in 1957, was Jørn Utzon, a Danish architect. According to legend the Utzon design was rescued from a final cut of 30 "rejects" by the noted Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. The prize was £5,000. Utzon visited Sydney in 1957 to help supervise the project. His office moved to Sydney in February 1963.

Design and construction

The Fort Macquarie Tram Depot, occupying the site at the time of these plans, was demolished in 1958 and formal construction of the Opera House began in March 1959. The project was built in three stages. Stage I (1959–1963) consisted of building the upper podium. Stage II (1963–1967) saw the construction of the outer shells. Stage III (1967–1973) consisted of the interior design and construction.

Stage I: Podium

Stage I commenced on 2 March 1959 by the construction firm Civil & Civic, monitored by the engineers Ove Arup and Partners. The government had pushed for work to begin early, fearing that funding, or public opinion, might turn against them. However, Utzon had still not completed the final designs. Major structural issues still remained unresolved. By 23 January 1961, work was running 47 weeks behind, mainly because of unexpected difficulties (inclement weather, unexpected difficulty diverting stormwater, construction beginning before proper construction drawings had been prepared, changes of original contract documents). Work on the podium was finally completed in February 1963. The forced early start led to significant later problems, not least of which was the fact that the podium columns were not strong enough to support the roof structure, and had to be re-built.

Stage II: Roof

The shells of the competition entry were originally of undefined geometry, but, early in the design process, the "shells" were perceived as a series of parabolas supported by precast concrete ribs. However, engineers Ove Arup and Partners were unable to find an acceptable solution to constructing them. The formwork for using in-situ concrete would have been prohibitively expensive, but, because there was no repetition in any of the roof forms, the construction of precast concrete for each individual section would possibly have been even more expensive.

From 1957 to 1963, the design team went through at least twelve iterations of the form of the shells trying to find an economically acceptable form (including schemes with parabolas, circular ribs and ellipsoids) before a workable solution was completed. The design work on the shells involved one of the earliest uses of computers in structural analysis, in order to understand the complex forces to which the shells would be subjected. In mid-1961, the design team found a solution to the problem: the shells all being created as sections from a sphere. This solution allows arches of varying length to be cast in a common mould, and a number of arch segments of common length to be placed adjacent to one another, to form a spherical section. With whom exactly this solution originated has been the subject of some controversy. It was originally credited to Utzon. Ove Arup's letter to Ashworth, a member of the Sydney Opera House Executive Committee, states: "Utzon came up with an idea of making all the shells of uniform curvature throughout in both directions." Peter Jones, the author of Ove Arup's biography, states that "the architect and his supporters alike claimed to recall the precise eureka moment...; the engineers and some of their associates, with equal conviction, recall discussion in both central London and at Ove's house."

He goes on to claim that "the existing evidence shows that Arup's canvassed several possibilities for the geometry of the shells, from parabolas to ellipsoids and spheres." Yuzo Mikami, a member of the design team, presents an opposite view in his book on the project, Utzon's Sphere. It is unlikely that the truth will ever be categorically known, but there is a clear consensus that the design team worked very well indeed for the first part of the project and that Utzon, Arup, and Ronald Jenkins (partner of Ove Arup and Partners responsible for the Opera House project) all played a very significant part in the design development.

The shells were constructed by Hornibrook Group Pty Ltd, who were also responsible for construction in Stage III. Hornibrook manufactured the 2400 precast ribs and 4000 roof panels in an on-site factory and also developed the construction processes. The achievement of this solution avoided the need for expensive formwork construction by allowing the use of precast units (it also allowed the roof tiles to be prefabricated in sheets on the ground, instead of being stuck on individually at height). Ove Arup and Partners' site engineer supervised the construction of the shells, which used an innovative adjustable steel-trussed "erection arch" to support the different roofs before completion. On 6 April 1962, it was estimated that the Opera House would be completed between August 1964 and March 1965.

Stage III: Interiors

The Concert Hall and Grand Organ

Stage III, the interiors, started with Utzon moving his entire office to Sydney in February 1963. However, there was a change of government in 1965, and the new Robert Askin government declared the project under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works. This ultimately led to Utzon's resignation in 1966.

The cost of the project so far, even in October 1966, was still only $22.9 million, less than a quarter of the final $102 million cost. However, the projected costs for the design were at this stage much more significant.

The second stage of construction was progressing toward completion when Utzon resigned. His position was principally taken over by Peter Hall, who became largely responsible for the interior design. Other persons appointed that same year to replace Utzon were E. H. Farmer as government architect, D. S. Littlemore and Lionel Todd.

Following Utzon's resignation, the acoustic advisor, Lothar Cremer, confirmed to the Sydney Opera House Executive Committee (SOHEC) that Utzon's original acoustic design only allowed for 2000 seats in the main hall and further stated that increasing the number of seats to 3000 as specified in the brief would be disastrous for the acoustics. According to Peter Jones, the stage designer, Martin Carr, criticised the "shape, height and width of the stage, the physical facilities for artists, the location of the dressing rooms, the widths of doors and lifts, and the location of lighting switchboards.

Significant changes to Utzon's design

The major hall, which was originally to be a multipurpose opera/concert hall, became solely a concert hall, called the Concert Hall. The minor hall, originally for stage productions only, had the added function of opera and ballet to deal with and is called the Opera Theatre. As a result, the Opera Theatre is inadequate to stage large-scale opera and ballet. A theatre, a cinema and a library were also added. These were later changed to two live drama theatres and a smaller theatre "in the round". These now comprise the Drama Theatre, the Playhouse, and the Studio, respectively. These changes were primarily because of inadequacies in the original competition brief, which did not make it adequately clear how the Opera House was to be used. The layout of the interiors was changed, and the stage machinery, already designed and fitted inside the major hall, was pulled out and largely thrown away.

Externally, the cladding to the podium and the paving (the podium was originally not to be clad down to the water, but to be left open).

The construction of the glass walls (Utzon was planning to use a system of prefabricated plywood mullions, but a different system was designed to deal with the glass).

Utzon's plywood corridor designs, and his acoustic and seating designs for the interior of both major halls, were scrapped completely. His design for the Concert Hall was rejected as it only seated 2000, which was considered insufficient. Utzon employed the acoustic consultant Lothar Cremer, and his designs for the major halls were later modelled and found to be very good. The subsequent Todd, Hall and Littlemore versions of both major halls have some problems with acoustics, particularly for the performing musicians. The orchestra pit in the Opera Theatre is cramped and dangerous to musicians' hearing. The Concert Hall has a very high roof, leading to a lack of early reflections onstage—perspex rings (the "acoustic clouds") hanging over the stage were added shortly before opening in an (unsuccessful) attempt to address this problem.

Completion and cost

The Opera House was formally completed in 1973, having cost $102 million. H.R. "Sam" Hoare, the Hornibrook director in charge of the project, provided the following approximations in 1973: Stage I: podium Civil & Civic Pty Ltd approximately $5.5m. Stage II: roof shells M.R. Hornibrook (NSW) Pty Ltd approximately $12.5m. Stage III: completion The Hornibrook Group $56.5m. Separate contracts: stage equipment, stage lighting and organ $9.0m. Fees and other costs $16.5m.

The original cost estimate in 1957 was £3,500,000 ($7 million). The original completion date set by the government was 26 January 1963 (Australia Day). Thus, the project was completed ten years late and over-budget by more than fourteen times.