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The importance of art in society
The importance of art in society
Why art is important for society
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Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
Overview
In eight quasi-connected stories, Susan Vreeland delivers a fictional lesson on aesthetics. Set amidst human sorrow and historic chaos, the narrative follows an imagined Vermeer painting from the present day through 330 years of its provenance--beginning with its willful destruction in the 1990s and concluding with its inspired creation in the 1660s:
Chapter 1. 1995(?): in Pennsylvania, math teacher Cornelius Englebrecht burns the painting in his fireplace; 1942: in Amsterdam, from the Vredenburg home, German soldier Otto Engelbrecht loots the painting, hides it, and absconds with it to America.
Chapter 2. 1940: in Amsterdam, diamond merchant Sol Vredenburg buys the painting for his daughter Hannah as a gift for her 11th birthday.
Chapter 3. 1899: in Vreeland, engineer Laurens van Luyken, having originally purchased the picture as an anniversary gift for his wife, decides to give it to his daughter Johanna, engaged to the Amsterdamer Fritz.
Chapter 4. 1803: in The Hague, French aristocrat Gerard buys the painting from a Dutch noble; wife Claudine absconds with and sells it, without the documents attesting to its authenticity.
Chapter 5. 1717-18: from the floodwaters of Delfzijl, scholar Adriaan Kuypers flees with the painting to Oling where he relinquishes it to the farmer's wife, Saskia, who sells it to a dealer in Amsterdam.
Chapter 6. 1717: in Delfzijl, Aunt Rika, wife of a slave trader, offers the painting as a bribe to her nephew Adriaan to hide the evidence of his bastard child and keep her name respectable.
Chapter 7. 1665-8: in Delft, Vermeer begins and completes the painting of his daughter Magdelena.
Chapter 8. 1675: in Delft, Vermeer dies, and after his death his daughter Magdelena sells the painting to the local baker; later, in Amsterdam in 1696, Magdelena observes a "nice family" buying the painting at auction.
Topics For Discussion
1. The plot summary reveals that much of the picture's provenance remains unknown. Why do you think Vreeland leaves blank so much of the picture's history? Where do you imagine the painting was, say, between 1803 and 1890? Why do you think Vreeland places the painting in periods of history reflecting so many atrocities? What would have been gained--or lost--from this novel had the author placed the picture in more heroic moments of hu...
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... art is very self- rewarding and gives a great sense of accomplishment. Monetarily speaking, an artist such as Vermeer must paint in order to make a living and support his family of 11 children, “And there were other debts.” (pg. 209) Overall, the book describes the soul purpose of art to provide love, sorrow, warmth, depth and happiness to the soul and heart. The monetary wing is also very important because many of the owners had to sell the painting; no matter how much they treasured the painting, they still had to sell it because of monetary problems to keep them on their “feet.”
Elevated feelings toward emotional values may be difficult to let go of. Susan Vreeland’s ravishing novel reveals the true owner, tracing proprietors from the present to the past. The painting symbolizes something that each owner is missing in his or her life, whether it was personally or monetarily. Vermeer’s painting had a great affect on all the owners because something was missing in his or her life and the painting filled that hole. The last thing humanity would want to do, is let away fragments of their life for monetary reasons. Personal emotions are stronger than monetary rationalizations.
... the visitor. Conspicuous consumption is exemplified through this painting and the museum because it was basically all created by overbuying and greed. It can be said that the single very reason anybody sees that painting hung on the wall of a misfit room in a disorganized museum is only because of one man’s extreme case of money flaunting in an age where everything needed to be big and flashy. Also this painting was created smack dab in the middle of the Gilded Age. The painting itself has no direct connection to this era but it makes an argument for why the piece is hung in the museum.
In the film it is stated that during World War II the Nazi party started to forcefully collect artworks from all around Europe in 1939. The term forcefully collect is better described as stealing. Hitler wanted these artworks to add to his personal collection. This became his hobby. His hobby took to others in the regime and eventually all high ranking officers were looting paintings for the sport of it. As it progressed collecting art became a required hobby for them.
First, the size of the painting drew me in before all. It measures at 339.1 by 199.5 cm, surrounded by a large golden frame. The size alone is enough to bring in any person passing by. Once getting close, the really wonder happened. The story told by the painting
Nash, Susan. Oxford History of Art: Norther Renaissance Art. 2nd. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 30-65. eBook.
Vinci, Lenardo Da. Portrait of Isabella d'Este. Paris, France, Louvre, 1499. Charcoal drawing on paper.
Timothy Brook’s remarkable book blends art with the emergence of global trade in the seventeenth century. Using six paintings of Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, the writer examines the impact of changing international relations, particularly in the realm of trade, on art. The title chapter of the book discusses the painting called Officer and the Laughing Girl and analyzes how the painting opens up window to the global trade connections of the seventeenth century. According to the author, a painting is different from a photograph in that the former is a deliberate attempt of the painter to not
Cyberbullying has become a widespread problem. The more people have been using the internet, the more the number of cyberbullying incidents increase. According to document A, 25.1% of girls and 16.6% of boys reported being bullied in their lifetime. In addition to this, document A also
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, located in the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the most recognizable paintings of the 19th century, a painting made by Frenchman Georges Seurat. Finished in 1886, it has gained much of its recognition over the time of its completion; the pop culture of today has played a pivotal role into the popularity of it. An example of that is being apart in one of the most recognizable scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where one of the main characters is solely staring at the painting until he can’t even recognize the artwork. This painting also gets much attention because it was an early example of the style of pointillism, at the time; pointillism was becoming a new way of expressing one self with the new technique. It also brought upon about the way we saw paintings, and what we gained from the artwork as whole. In all this painting has become an icon in the art scene, due to the technique it used, and how much of an impact it has had in today culture.
Philip, Lotte Brand. The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan Van Eyck. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1971. Print.
The article Artists Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History (1980) by Griselda Pollock is a forty page essay where Pollock (1980), argues and explains her views on the crucial question, "how art history works" (Pollock, 1980, p.57). She emphasizes that there should be changes to the practice of art history and uses Van Gogh as a major example in her study. Her thesis is to prove that the meaning behind artworks should not be restricted only to the artist who creates it, but also to realize what kind of economical, financial, social situation the artist may have been in to influence the subject that is used. (Pollock, 1980, pg. 57) She explains her views through this thesis and further develops this idea by engaging in scholarly debates with art historians and researcher, and objecting to how they claim there is a general state of how art is read. She structures her paragraphs in ways that allows her to present different kinds of evidences from a variety sources while using a formal yet persuasive tone of voice to get her point across to the reader.
According to Josef Skvorecký’s “Eine Kleine Jazzmusik” preamble, his story is set in Czechoslovakia in the 1940’s when Aryans tried to suppress Jazz music. Throughout the story, a band by the name of “The masked Rhythm Bandits” fought against the Aryans through Jazz. This was an example of symbolic fighting through music during that time period in Czech history. This first passage from his story starts at the bottom of page 232 and continues onto page 233. It states, “The more he doted on his Jazz trumpet, the closer he was drawn to Suzy. And Suzy, our sweet Suzy, was in turn drawn closer to the band and discovered within herself a pleasant, agreeable husky contralto voice and a genius for rhythm and syncopation… My heart beats to...
First, Emily Dickinson poems are often under scrutiny since she was never married. As a poet who wrote so intently about love but was never married, she had to have had some form of inspiration. The fact that she wrote several love poems but never married may have caused more people to look into her personal life and see what drove the women to write such poems. Early Dickinson biographers identified George Gould as a suitor who may have been briefly engaged to the poet in the 1850s (Emily Dickinson's Love Life). Her lady friendships, notably with schoolmate and sometime later sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert and with their mutual friend Catherine Scott Turner Anthon, have also drawn interest with anyone observing Dickinson’s life, who argue whether their friendships represent just a normal kind of friendship or maybe something more resembling that of a sexual relationship (Emily Dickinson's Love Life). Biographers have attempted to find the main source for her intensity in her love poems, but no biographer has been able to identify specifically who the inspiration was for Dickinson's love poems (http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/ED303/emilybio.htm...
One of America’s musical styles has become one of the major music genres worldwide and it is jazz music. The genre was developed around the late 1800s to the early 1900s, and originated from African Americans in New Orleans and Louisiana (Issitt 1). Within Jazz there are many different categories such as Dixieland, swing, cool jazz, hard bop, jazz-rock, fusion, and many more (Philipp 3). In addition, “Jazz as a whole is frequently regarded as one of the United States’ greatest cultural achievements” (Issitt 2). However, Jazz was not only a source of entertainment, or a great accomplishment, but also a reliever of pain; and it encouraged people to explore deep into their minds and the world around them.
Poets such as Elizabeth and Robert Browning, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and William Shakespeare all helped mold the style of Emily Dickinson’s poetry (“Emily Dickinson” 3). However, unlike these famous poets, Dickinson opted to write her own style of poetry and experimented with new ways to write poems. Unlike her predecessors and contemporaries, Dickinson did not write her poetry in iambic pentameter; instead, she modeled her poetical format under something known as hymn form. Hymn form, which is also known as common meter, was used in the majority of Emily Dickinson’s poems. She modeled her poetry after the New England Congregationalist hymnologist, Isaac Watts (Leiter 334). Dickinson’s application of hymn form is what makes her poetry so avant-garde, but scholars are confused as to why she used it in the first place. Linguistic scholar Cristanne Miller suggests that Watts may have attracted Dickinson with his frequent use of irregular rhymes and harsh-sounding phrases (Leiter 334). Some feminist scholars have claimed that Dickinson’s refusal to use iambic pentameter in her poetry suggests that she was “deliberately rejecting the established norms of patriarchal literature” (Leiter 334).
This oil painting is set in the 1800’s according to the author’s time period that he was alive. The context of the painting has the setting take place on a train with three people in the viewer’s perspective: a seated lady