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Inspired by research in optical and color theory, he juxtaposed tiny dabs of colors that, through optical blending, form a single and, he believed, more brilliantly luminous hue. He believed that this form of painting, called Divisionism at the time (a term he preferred) but now known as Pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brushstrokes. The use of dots of almost uniform size came in the second year of his work on the painting, 1885–86. To make the experience of the painting even more intense, he surrounded the canvas with a frame of painted dashes and dots, which he, in turn, enclosed with a pure white wood frame, similar to the one with which the painting is exhibited today. The very immobility of the figures and the shadows they cast makes them forever silent and enigmatic.
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First shown at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers represents a location, an activity, and a social type – the banlieue, drinking, and the déclassé – which, when mixed together, offered a volatile cocktail to its original audience. A detailed historical examination of the social signification of these subjects demonstrates that the core meaning of the work resides in its representation of time. Recuperating a durational pictorial temporality from mid-century Realism, the painting managed to suggest, for certain viewers, a critical alternative to Impressionism and to the intensifying restructuring of the cultural experience of time under modernity.
Taking cue from Dmitry Sarabyanov's seminal publications on the Stil' Modern and turn-of-the-century Russian visual culture, the present article resituates Mikhail Vrubel's oeuvre " between East and West " by demonstrating that the artist moved beyond the narrowly circumscribed nationalist agenda typically attributed to the work he produced at the Abramtsevo and Talashkino artistic colonies. In addition to indigenous sources, Vrubel also assimilated a number of external artistic influences such as Jugendstil, medieval Gothic and Renaissance ceramics, Japanese and Chinese porcelain , and Egyptian and Assyrian art. Through a close analysis of Vrubel's orientalist paintings, as well as his cycle of folkloric works such as Mikula Selyaninovich and the Volga (1896), I demonstrate that his aesthetic program crossed multiple boundaries: geographical, temporal, material, and institutional. Through a complex renegotiation of the global and the local, the past and the present, and the traditional and contemporary , Vrubel arrived at a strikingly modernist visual syntax, which paved the way for an entire generation of avant-garde artists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Naum Gabo, among others. Using Vrubel as a case study, this article thus proposes to rethink the opposing binary categories of avant-gardism and revivalism, historicism and innovation, Orientalism and Occidentalism, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, as they have been applied to the trajectory of modern Russian art—a set of ostensibly fixed dichotomies that Dmitry Sarabyanov had repeatedly and successfully challenged in his own work.
Stephen Sondheim contributed greatly to the development of the Broadway musical in the post-Rodgers and Hammerstein period by pushing the envelope of what had become comfortable in Broadway shows during the 1970s. He redefined its structural integration by his unique music, use of dramatic and psychological elements, and his treatment of fragmented time and space. His works are successful, though they initially had mixed reception for their novelty and innovations. As the rightful successor of Oscar Hammerstein II, Sondheim became and continues to be one of the leading composers in Broadway. His success in Broadway began as a lyricist (for Bernstein’s West Side Story, 1957), then as a composer—after first partnering with Hal Prince, and later, with James Lapine. Famous for the melodramatic Sweeney Todd (1979), Sondheim’s partnership with Prince ended after Merrily We Roll Along failed at the box office (1981)—which led him to collaborate with Lapine. Sunday in the Park with George (1984) and Into the Woods (1987) thus depict Sondheim’s compositional shift, adapting postmodern aesthetics in the 1980s. An analysis of selected materials from Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods examine how Sondheim achieves a balance between breadth and depth, through his postmodern aesthetic adaptations: (1) using leitmotivic minimalism to depict pointillism in Sunday in the Park, (2) developing minimalist clusters to create continuity in Into the Woods, (3) incorporating rap styles in Into the Woods, and (4) utilizing electronics in both Sunday in the Park and Into the Woods.
Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry
Electron energy loss spectroscopy elucidates the elusive darkening of zinc potassium chromate in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—18842011 •
Writing the Body; Staging the Other
The Bustle, the Body and Stillness: Re-Centering Modernities2019 •
Neo-Impressionism and the Dream of Realities: Painting, Poetry, Music, ed. Cornelia Homburg (Yale University Press/The Phillips Collection)
The Neo-Impressionist Painter: Color, Facture, and Fiction2014 •
A comparison of the style and works of Seurat and Matisse- two of the most celebrated painters of contemporary times.
RIHA Journal
Paul Signac's Decorative Propaganda of the 1890s2012 •
In the 1890s the political and artistic ambitions of the neo-impressionist artist Paul Signac were embodied by a series of decorative projects. This article contends that Signac, inspired by anarcho-communist discourse and the prospect of revolution, attempted to synthesize in these works the didactic logic of propaganda and "purely aesthetic emotion." This synthesis was epitomized by the explicit deployment of two systems, divisionism and decorative pattern. With these systems, Signac hoped to initiate contemporary viewers into the aesthetic and social harmony of an anarcho-communist future. In the interest of addressing larger audiences, particularly among workers, he imagined proletarian spaces for his work. But the didactic elements of Signac's painting met with critical resistance, and public sites he envisioned never materialized. Faced with this lack of recognition, and with a diminished revolutionary outlook in the wake of the Procès des Trente, Signac focused his painting on atemporal landscapes. This trajectory has been read as one of aesthetic liberation; this article seeks to retrieve the extent to which it was also one of constraint, tied to the frustration of Signac's political aspirations.
Historical Methods
Masterpieces and Markets: Why the Most Famous Modern Paintings Are Not by American Artists2002 •
2000 •
Art in Translation 10.2
Editorial: Michel Eugène Chevreul, Charles Henry and Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic Theories of Abstraction2018 •
Journal of Mathematics and the Arts
Visualizing pentimenti : revealing the hidden history of paintings2007 •
Special section on "Resolution" of the journal Necsus, 7(1) Spring 2018 https://necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2018_resolution/
Francesco Casetti - Antonio Somaini, "Resolution: Digital Materialities, Thresholds of Visibility"2018 •
2013 •
Henri-Edmond Cross, Peindre le bonheur, special issue of Dossier de l'art
Le néo-impressionnisme : réflexions sur la couleur2018 •
1992 •
TESORI RITROVATI. IMPRESSIONISTI E CAPOLAVORI MODERNI DA UNA RACCOLTA PRIVATA
TESORI RITROVATI. IMPRESSIONISTI E CAPOLAVORI MODERNI DA UNA RACCOLTA PRIVATATesori ritrovati. Impressionisti e capolavori moderni da una raccolta privata, catalogo della vendita Pandolfini, Milano, 29 ottobre 2019
Tesori ritrovati. Impressionisti e capolavori moderni da una raccolta privata. (Schede delle opere a cura di E. Staudacher, M. Vinardi, F. Minervini)2005 •
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