Author Archives: Jotsna Jari

writer : jotsna jari

“Man has the right to deal with his oppressors by devouring their palpitating hearts.  – Jean-Paul Marat

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🌹 MARAT, JEAN-PAUL  ⬆️

MARAT, JEAN-PAUL (1743–1793), French revolutionary political journalist, physician, and leader of the Jacobin Mountain.

Jean-Paul Marat is best known to posterity for two things: first, his populist, not to say rabble-rousing, journal, L’ami du peuple (Friend of the people), which phrase he also adopted for his revolutionary sobriquet; and second, Jacques-Louis David‘s painting of his assassination, at the hands of Charlotte Corday, while lying naked in his oily bath, wherein he found slight relief from the eczema that covered his unsightly skin and exacerbated his already acerbic soul.

Born on 24 May 1743 in Boudry, Neuchâtel, and thus a francophone Prussian subject in his youth, Marat took only peripheral interest in politics prior to the convening of the Estates-General in May 1789. Medicine was his intended vocation. He began following courses in Paris in 1762 and in 1765 moved to London, where he treated venereal disease. The University of St. Andrews, Scotland, a diploma mill for higher degrees, awarded him a doctorate in 1775. Thereupon he returned to Paris and opened a general practice, not without some success. Among his clients was a noted lady, the marquise de Laubespine, and he was named physician to the Garde du Corps of the comte d’Artois, brother of King Louis XVI (and the future Charles X).

Two early writings, A Philosophical Essay on Man (1773) and Chains of Slavery (1774), were respectively philosophical and political. Denouncing tyranny, the latter gave a foretaste of what was to come. Such was the prestige of science in the late Enlightenment, however, that Marat thought to rise above minor bourgeois status rather through that route than through letters, medicine, or public affairs.

Between 1778 and 1789 he sought election to the Paris Academy of Science and besieged it with a series of experimental memoirs on fire, heat, light, color, and electricity. Certain effects he produced by means of shining a beam of sunlight through a modified microscope were neither known nor empty, but they were of minor interest at best and held nothing of the cosmic and anti-Newtonian significance he claimed for them.

Academic commissions reviewed the early submissions in correct if mildly dismissive fashion, after which the academy ignored him—for Marat made a pest of himself. Of paranoid disposition, he always attributed reverses to persecution and to plots. The chance for revenge came with the Revolution. His diatribe Les charlatans modernes (1791; The modern charlatans) excoriates his oppressors of the scientific establishment, fore-most among them Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace. It had a major influence preparing public opinion for the suppression of the Academy of Science on 8 August 1793 in the wave of hostility to privilege and authority of every sort that accompanied the Terror.

Persecuted by the Academy of Science, Marat wrote not long before his death that he had welcomed the Revolution for the opportunity to reach a proper place in the world. Marat was a vivid writer and became a polemical journalist, externalizing his own resentments to champion the poor, the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth, in short, the proletariat. The first issue of L’ami du peuple appeared in September 1789. Marat opened with praise of the prospect for a just society. Such was his suspicious nature that successive issues soon took to denouncing the infidelity, indeed the perfidy, of the institutions and persons in power: the Commune of Paris and its mayor, Jean-Sylvain Bailly; the Constituent Assembly and its early spokesman, the comte de Mirabeau; the National Guard and its commander, the marquis de Lafayette; the royal family and its prospective treachery; the Legislative Assembly and its subservience to moderates and ministers of state; and the army and its initially victorious commander, Charles-François du Périer Dumouriez. Paranoids are not ipso facto wrong, however. Such was the irreconcilability of factions that Marat’s suspicions were often accurate, as in the instances among others of the royal family, Mirabeau, and Dumouriez.

Marat owed his effect not to the cogency of his political ideas, banal in themselves, but to the brilliance of his style. His was an invective genius in a time of latent hatreds burst into the open. His inflammatory writing earned him several arrests and detentions. He frequently had to go into hiding while continuing to publish at irregular intervals. On two occasions he took refuge in London. There is no way to measure the extent of his influence in summoning the mob into the streets on the insurrectional days of October 1789, which brought the royal family from Versailles to virtual captivity in Paris; for the rising of 10 August 1792 that overthrew the monarchy; and for the massacres that followed in September. But there is no doubt that his incitement was an effective factor.

Only with election to the National Convention in September 1792 did Marat hold political office. In the struggle between the Gironde and the Jacobin Mountain that defined the first phase of that body’s history, Marat sided polemically with the latter. So vicious did his attacks become, calling for something like a dictatorship of the people, that the Girondist faction, barely dominant throughout the winter and early spring of 1792 to 1793, voted his indictment for incendiary acts. Theirs was a Pyrrhic victory. Acquitted on 14 April, Marat was borne from the courtroom on the shoulders of the crowd. His triumph led directly to the rising of 31 May that forced the expulsion of the Girondist deputies from the Convention and opened the way to the Jacobin dictatorship of the Terror. On 13 July, the eve of Bastille Day, Charlotte Corday, daughter of a devout and royalist Norman family, gained access to Marat’s dwelling and stabbed to death the incarnation of the godless Revolution.

writer : jotsna jari

         “I believe … that isms and other

         classifications are misleading and

         diminishing. What entrances me in

         art is what cannot be entrapped 

         in words.” –  Hedda Sterne 

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❤️The work & wisdom of Hedda Sterne 🔼

Hedda Sterne (August 4, 1910 – April 8, 2011) was a Romanian-born American artist who was an active member of the New York School of painters. Her work is often associated with Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism.

🔺Hedda Sterne, an artist whose association with the Abstract Expressionists became fixed forever when she appeared prominently in a now-famous 1951 Life magazine photograph of the movement’s leading lights.

Hedda Sterne, top, ‘rising like a feather in a cap’, the only woman in a portrait of New York School painters, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, in the 15 January 1951 edition of Life magazine.

🔺 Grace Glueck wrote :- 

Hedda Sterne views her widely varied works more as “in flux” than as definitive statements. She has maintained a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism … Although she never developed a signature style, Ms. Sterne’s explorations have produced a small universe of evocative images.

🔺 In 2006, the art historian Josef Helfenstein wrote :-

Her independence reflected an immense artistic and personal integrity. The astonishing variety of Sterne’s work, spanning from her initial appropriation of surrealist techniques, to her investigation of conceptual painting, and her unprecedented installations in the 1960s, exemplify her adventurous spirit. Yet, the heterogeneity of her styles, and her complete disinterest in the commercially driven art world, have contributed to her exclusion from the canon. 

Sterne’s art is, indeed, a manifesto in favor of the untamable forces of the mind and the continually changing flux of life. 

It is wonderful to see Ms. Sterne finally coming out from behind the famous photograph and being seriously considered as a painter. 

❤️ Works :-

                          Untitled, 1941

Sterne believed that “art is essentially an act of freedom,” a sentiment that is embodied in her Surrealist works. Surrealists sought to liberate themselves from the strictures society placed on the conscious mind, letting free association, chance, and dreams play central roles in artmaking. With that came a blurring of the real and the surreal, the individual and the universal, fact and mystery. Sterne’s collage takes familiar elements – the woman’s hand, an eye, a garment – and combines them to elide any possibility of a metanarrative or truth. The image is unsettling, evocative of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, which he deemed “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”

Hedda Sterne,Untitled,oil on canvas,1962… Sold for $100,000, a record for the artist- 03 December, 2020 .

                  NY, NY No. X,   1948

NY, NY No. X 1948 is an oil painting by the Romanian-American artist Hedda Sterne. It shows a semi-abstract mass of lines and planes that appear to depict rooftops, walls, fences, ladders, fire escapes, towers, wood panels and other constructions against a bright blue background, the colour of the New York sky of the painting’s title. The blue and brown tones are punctuated by three small vertical bright red strips and several black and white strips, like pedestrian crossings viewed from above. The painting is one of a number of ‘New York, New York’ paintings and is characteristic of Sterne’s work of the late 1940s, when she was exploring her urban environment.

🤎 Born in Romania, Sterne fled Europe in 1941 and moved to New York.

She stated :-

When I came here, I became totally enthralled visually with the United States so I became like a premature pop artist. I started painting my kitchen, the kitchen stove, the bathroom appliances, everything where we lived. Then I went out and I painted Ford cars and the elevators. And then I went to the country and I started painting industrial machines, and then I painted roads. I became visual when I came here.
(Quoted in Krannert Art Museum 2006, p.16.)

writer : jotsna jari

“Creativity is a drug  I can not live without this.”   – Cecil B. DeMille

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❤️ Cecil B. DeMille  ⬆️

(August 12, 1881 – January 21, 1959)

He was an American film director, producer and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he made 70 features, both silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of the American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. His films were distinguished by their epic scale and by his cinematic showmanship. His silent films included social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, and historical pageants. 

🔺Overview :- 

Cecil Blount DeMille was a founder of the Hollywood motion-picture industry, one of the most commercially successful producer-directors of his time, and one of the most influential filmmakers in history. Between 1914 and 1956, he made seventy feature films; all but seven were profitable. Cecil B. DeMille is synonymous with religious epics: The King of Kings, Samson and Delilah, and The Ten Commandments (1956). He blended spectacle, sex, and spellbinding narrative to convey a message of faith.

It was DeMille who created the image of the omnipotent director, megaphone in hand, wearing boots and a visored cap. DeMille gave Hollywood numerous stars: Wallace Reid, Gloria Swanson, William (“Hopalong Cassidy”) Boyd, Claudette Colbert, Robert Preston, Jean Arthur, and Charlton Heston.

DeMille created the posts of studio story editor, art director, and concept artist. He was one of the first to use theatrical lighting on a movie set. In the late 1920s, when Hollywood converted to sound films, DeMille defied the sound experts, liberating the camera from a confining booth, and implementing the microphone boom.

DeMille’s authority extended beyond the confines of his studio. He was a power in aviation, banking, politics, and real estate. In the 1930s, his fame as a filmmaker was surpassed by his fame as a radio star.

He was a founder of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an institution from which he eventually won two awards. In 1953 his film The Greatest Show on Earth won the Award for Best Picture of 1952; and he was presented with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.

DeMille’s influence on world culture is incalculable, but there are estimates and milestones. His biography of Jesus Christ, The King of Kings, was a silent film, but because of a unique distribution arrangement, it was eventually seen by 800 million viewers. Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments (1956) are still listed with the top ten all-time box-office champions. They continue to generate revenue and provoke thought.

                 Advertisement (1919)

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