Artistic Personality Research Articles

O Sponad Juliana Przybosia i Władysława Strzemińskiego

Julian Przyboś's poetic volume Sponad [From Above] with artwork by Władysław Strzemiński is not a rewarding material for an interpretation since due to the tight coupling of the two remarkably powerful artistic personalities and the two kinds of sensitivity - literary and that of an artist, an analysis of poetic works in the shape given to them by an artist must be tainted with the latter's views and must contain in itself interpretational doubleness. Thanks to graphic layouts and illustrations made by Strzemiński, the space of the poems became palpable and visible. Thus, not only individual words were extracted and emphasised, but also the "inter-words" somewhere between them, stating what was only implied or unstated. Strzemiński's layouts conceal in themselves a set fuse for a bomb which poetry, exploding with new layers of meaning, may become.

Он жив. Новелла

“When you swim against the current, do not wait for the support of it” - wrote Khlebnikov being a student. He swam against the current of the Silver Age, after his death his Word was in the contradiction with the Soviet system. And even now the futurist poet is swimming against the current, against the mainstream of contemporary culture. Khlebnikov’s poetry and his behaviour show what is Genious as such. Genious is not “a great talent”, it is not simple quantative concentration of giftidness. There is a qualitative difference between a big talent (Mayakovsky) and a genious (Khlebnikov). I use here the concept “izgib” (“the bend”) what means the natural paradoxality of the artistic personality and the artistic style. There is a lot of examples of Khlebnikov’s extraordinary behaviour. One of the most impressive was described in the memories of Yury Annenkov. At the dinner Khlebnikov took a sprat from the distant common dish and carried it to his own plate making a wet trace on the table-cloth. “Nehkoť trevozhiť” (“I didn’t want to disturb” ) -was his explanation of his stange action. Really he didn’t want to disturb -not only the guests who could bring the dish nearer to him but first of all the creative process which never stopped in his mind and his soul. The wet trace of the fish on the table-cloth can serve a symbol of artistic “bend”. In serious context we can follow this bend in the permanent Khlebnikov’s pilgrimage up to tragic death in the village of Santalovo in Novgorod region. It was a final of a bright cathartic tragedy. The “bed” has no end. It is a continious way to eternity. On the contrary Mayakovsky’s “straight” way ends as a suicide, as a self-destruction. Even in comparison with Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelshtam and Tsvetayeva Velimir Khlebnikov shows the more clear model of Genius, independent of any non-artistic values. Only prosaist Andrey Platonov is similar to him in this sense. “Velimir is sitting crossing his legs. He is alive” -this is a short poetic inscription of Daniil Khaims to the portrait of Khlebnikov. Khlebnikov is still alive. He is new and strange even for the majority of educated readers. This is a pledge of his immortality.

« Les américains chantent et font de la musique spontanément » : conversation avec Betsy Jolas

In this interview, the French composer Betsy Jolas evokes her lifelong transatlantic experience with vivacity, humor and generosity. Born in Paris to a French father of German descent— the poet Eugene Jolas, founder of the important literary review transition — and an American mother—the translator Maria Jolas—, Betsy Jolas spent her formative years during World War Two at Bennington College, Vermont, before completing her studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where she was later to teach musical analysis and composition. She has returned regularly to the United States from 1971 onwards, teaching at such prestigious institutions as Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, and Mills College ; she has been invited several times at the world-renowned Tanglewood Festival. She has been awarded many prizes and distinctions both in France and the United States, where she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Betsy Jolas is undoubtedly one of the “great witnesses” of American and French twentieth-century artistic life. Her spirited commitment to teaching, her utter originality and independence from all schools and coteries, her often trenchant views on music, her creative vitality, all bear witness to an exceptional artistic personality. A ceaseless teller of anecdotes with a wonderful sense of detail, she always captures in her vignettes the essence of the people and situations she fondly remembers throughout this interview.

When Latina hips make/mark history: Music video in the “new” American studies

As a Lebanese-origin native of the Colombian Caribbean, singer/songwriter Shakira's self-description as a combination of “quibbe crudo and plátano frito” (“raw quibbe and fried plantain”) neatly reflects the trans-cultural aesthetic recipe upon which her artistic identity and media persona are based.1 Emphasizing the role of sexuality and movement in Shakira's recordings, music videos, and press coverage, I assert that Shakira's personal history, artistic production and media star text are of significance to the ongoing “worlding” of American and area studies. Grounded in the overarching concerns of feminist, media, and music criticism, this cross-media analysis questions the “commonsense” of ethno-racial identity, gender and sexuality in music video. In turn, I address the methodological and thematic gaps in existing scholarly approaches to gender, race, and sexuality in the genre, and ultimately argue for a more nuanced meta-disciplinary engagement with the location and politics of transnational studies within the Academy.

An Inquiry into the Sources of Poetic Vision: Part III: From Vulnerability to Vision

Having accounted for the way in which the circumstances and rules peculiar to the process of creation transform the mind of the artist, the connection between an artist's psychic vulnerability and his or her vision is now examined. The transformation of the artist's personality that allows extraordinary vision, including unusual access to the unconscious, also allows the artist a special approach to his own and his audience's psychic vulnerabilities. Here the artist's uninspired character, although transformed during creation, plays a more important role. The danger an artist's vulnerability poses to the art, the artist, and the culture is also considered. Finally, the role played by the poetic idea in the history of ideas is also examined.

Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (review)

Reviewed by: Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty Allen Hockley Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty. By Julie Nelson Davis. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. 296 pages. Hardcover £35.00. In Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty, Julie Nelson Davis “investigates the problem of how prints were designed to promote a particular persona for the artist known as Utamaro and how they participated in a larger discourse on gender and identity” (p. 18). Her inquiries focus on textual documents (book prefaces, rankings of print artists, and inscriptions on Utamaro's prints) and the iconography and visual qualities of his designs. She cautions against facile readings of textual references to the artist. Whether authored by Utamaro or one of his collaborators, “they function to promote ‘Utamaro’ rather than divulge him . . . these notations functioned to attract the attention of an audience interested in celebrities” (p. 19). Davis maintains that Utamaro's book and print designs functioned in a similar manner—to promote his celebrity through association with the cultural mores of the time. She argues that Utamaro was presented as someone with intimate knowledge of women in general and the Yoshiwara in particular. She also notes that many of Utamaro's designs employed a calligraphic brush line more readily associated with high art. Davis maps her thesis over a chronological presentation of Utamaro's life and career. Chapter 1 explores Utamaro's apprenticeship with Toriyama Sekien and his relationships with Tsutaya Jūzaburō and the latter's cohort in the gesaku community during the 1780s. During this period, Utamaro illustrated several editions of humorous verse (kyōkabon), now regarded as some of the finest examples of woodblock printing from the Edo period. These publications pushed him into the limelight as a supremely talented artist possessing remarkable powers of observation and brush skills not unlike those of great past masters. Uta makura, his most highly regarded shunga album and also a product of this seminal period, endowed him with a reputation as a sophisticate (tsū) with intimate knowledge of the brothel district. These associations were critical to the construction of the Utamaro persona. Davis explores how they were reiterated and redeployed throughout the remainder of the artist's career. Chapters 2 through 4 focus on Utamaro's bijinga designs, which Davis uses to show how his artistic persona was adjusted in response to ongoing political and social changes affecting floating-world culture. In chapter 2, she argues that single-sheet prints from the early 1790s, notably Utamaro's two physiognomy series and his depictions of Naniwaya Kita and Takashimaya Ohisa, extended his status from a floating-world tsū to a connoisseur of all women. In chapter 3, Davis claims that Utamaro's print series from the mid- to late 1790s, notably Twelve Hours in the Yoshiwara and Five Colors of Ink in the Northern Country, were responses to the relocation of unlicensed prostitutes to the Yoshiwara as a result of the Kansei reforms. The population of the quarter more than doubled, thus diluting its reputation. Davis maintains that Utamaro stepped in to reinvigorate the Yoshiwara's terms of exclusivity and, by extension, his own reputation. She uses the series The Story of the Chūshingura Parodied by Famous Beauties: A Set of Twelve Prints and New Patterns of Brocade Woven in the Utamaro Style to emphasize this later point. The lengthy inscriptions on prints of the latter series reassert Utamaro's primacy among bijinga designers and warn the public against imitations. Chapter 4 focuses primarily on the series The Parents' [End Page 417] Moralizing Spectacles. Davis sees these designs as yet another response to the Kansei reforms, one in which Utamaro conveyed the spirit of the reforms by drawing on Confucian teachings popularized in didactic texts such as Onna daigaku. She contends that the series was also an extension of his tsū persona. As with his earlier physiognomy series, Utamaro was presented as possessing the ability see the true moral character of his subjects. Davis admits that “Utamaro was not the first artist or author to have his reputation gilded through tactical allusions to highly valued practices and aesthetic concepts. Nor was he the first to have his image cast in the form of...

‘Where to Act, How to Move’: Unruly Action in Late Wolpe

This article challenges the view that such composers as Wolpe denied their socialist convictions and thus betrayed their utopianism for an arcane hermeticism when they created a radically modernist music. The author proposes rather that Wolpe's later music exemplifies ways in which a maturing artist could transform the predicament of a modern exile, into a chosen, self-invented, full-achieved artistic persona. Borrowing concepts from Homi Bhabha's postcolonial perspective on cultural production and signification and Hannah Arendt's theory of non-authoritarian, pluralistic, political action occurring between non-sovereign individuals, the author proposes that Wolpe developed ever more nuanced ways to let in the large world of music and that he responded conceptually and viscerally to questions of action and memory, freedom and control. Passages are cited from Piece for Two Instrumental Units and String Quartet to demonstrate Wolpe's musical enactment of antinomian actions as a cosmopolitan enterprise, modeling mutuality and mutability in terrains of incessant cultural transition.

Give and take: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Coffer for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Ezra Pound's homosocial modernism in 1914

sustained attempt to cast Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) as a prodigy of modernist sculpture.1 Ezra Pound’s mythologizing memoir of him took the lead and characterized Gaudier as the prototypical bohemian artist whose defining trait was a fierce and uncompromising individuality.2 Because Gaudier’s death in the trenches ended his short career, the fascination with his maverick reputation has been based primarily on the accounts of his life and on a select group of works within his oeuvre. Gaudier also created a number of awkward decorative and functional objects that have proved more difficult to bring into accord with the artist’s reputation.3 The Coffer for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (figs. 1–3) is a prime example of such an overlooked work and has rarely been considered worthy of sustained attention. This small marble casket – along with many of Gaudier’s other ‘decorative’ works – is frequently passed over in preference for his statuary, despite its importance as a commission from Ezra Pound. For instance, Roger Cole dismissed the Blunt Coffer ‘as a commercial piece of work which adds little to our understanding of the artist’.4 It is, I will argue, precisely its vexed status as a ‘commercial piece’ that makes it significant. An examination of this object and its place in the formulation of a modernist subculture in Britain sheds light on those traits of Gaudier’s artistic persona that, like this object, do not easily fit – namely, his irreverent and sexualized mockery of his own status as a producer of objects for others. Central to this question will be Pound, who was both patron and friend to Gaudier. In the commercial exchange of the artistic commission, Gaudier introduced in-jokes that both bound together and made fun of the players in that transaction. The Blunt Coffer resulted from a hurried commission given to Gaudier by Pound in 1914. The box was presented as a gift to the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) on the occasion of what became known as the ‘Peacock Dinner’ on 18 January 1914. In the years before World War I, Pound worked energetically to establish modernism in Britain and encouraged the development of an avantgarde subculture in London. Though still in the early stages of his own career, he acted as impresario for the new movement and sought ways to increase its momentum on multiple fronts. The ‘Peacock Dinner’ was one attempt to solidify the notion of the new generation.5 Gathering together a group of eight poets, including W. B. Yeats, F. S. Flint and Richard Aldington, Pound, with the encouragement of Blunt’s former lover Lady Gregory, organized a lavish luncheon Give and take: Henri GaudierBrzeska’s Coffer for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Ezra Pound’s homosocial modernism in 1914 David J. Getsy

The Relationship Between Personality Types and Career Choice of Secondary School Students In Delta State

The study was carried out to investigate the Relationship between Personality Types and Career Choice of Secondary School Students in Nigeria. The researchers formulated one research question and one hypothesis to guide the study. The researchers employed two sampling techniques, cluster and random sampling methods to draw a sample size of six hundred and sixteen (616) senior secondary two students. The two instruments used for the study were Students' Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) and Students' Career Choice Questionnaire (SCCQ). The first instrument has a coefficient of .89 while the second has a coefficient of .81. Both have content validity and language appropriateness. The chi-square statistical analysis was used to analyze the data. The hypothesis was tested at 0.5 level of significance. The results showed that there were significant relationships between the Artistic, Social Enterprising and investigative personality types on one hand and career choice on the other. However, no significant relationship were found between the realistic and conventional personality types and career choice. Based on the findings it was recommended, among others, that practising counsellors should give priority to career guidance in schools so as to enable students align their personality types with intended careers and also that emphasis should be placed on the importance of psychological testing in counsellor-training programmes in Nigeria's institutions. The Nigerian Journal of Guidance Counselling Vol. 10 (1) 2005: pp. 1-11

Reflections on Liszt (review)

Reflections on Liszt. By Alan Walker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. [xii, 277 p. ISBN 0-801-44366-6. $39.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index. Few scholars can be given more credit for reinvigorating a critical investigation of the life and music of Franz Liszt than Alan Walker. For almost forty years he has been the most vocal exponent of a more nuanced -even sympathetic-consideration of the composer and pianist. When the final volume of his three-part Franz Liszt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987-1996) appeared, it brought to conclusion an immense project that encompassed more than 1,600 compellingly detailed pages, incorporating overlooked and entirely unknown primary-source material that radically altered the inherited notions of just who and what Liszt was to himself and his contemporaries. Walker's account has become the starting point for today's Liszt scholars from walks of life who previously had to rely on the fulsome yet highly problematic studies by Lina Ramann (Franz Liszt. Als Kunstler und Mensch [Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1880-1894]) and Peter Raabe (Franz Liszt. 2d rev. ed. [Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1968]) for biographical and analytical insight. But even Walker's comprehensive treatment of Liszt and his world was far from exhaustive, with the author admitting as much in the prologue to his new Reflections on Liszt: were some things that could be mentioned only in passing, and others not at all (p. xiii). Like Liszt, who seemed irresistibly drawn to his compositions long after they were published, Walker revises and expands upon material previously published in Music & Letters, the Musical Quarterly, and the Hungarian Quarterly to help flesh out his picture of one of the nineteenth century's most cosmopolitan characters; he similarly draws judiciously from passages first penned for his massive biography. Indeed, the overlap in tone and content makes this collection of ten essays and an epilogue most effective when read in tandem with Walker's earlier three volumes. Although some of these revisions-which at times simply consist of longer quotations or more music examples-add little to the overall argument (as in chapters 1-4 and 10), there is much new material here. Walker is at his most comfortable as a story-teller, and his vignettes of Carl Tausig, Hans von Bulow, and Walter Bache in chapter 5 shed much light on the state of the virtuoso world in the second half of the century, a world which Liszt had helped make possible during his concert years in the 1830s and 1840s. Although Liszt still hovers in the background of Walker's narratives, pulling strings for or coming to the aid of his students whenever possible, he remains an essentially peripheral character. That being said, however, readers might be tempted to interpret each of Walker's three excellent character studies as projections of an individual facet of Liszt's own artistic personality: Tausig is sketched as the pianist's (p. 78), Bulow the thinking man's (p. 87), and Bache the pianist of missionary zeal (pp. 108, 115).As Walker argued indefatigably throughout his biography, Liszt's life can be read as a perennial struggle to balance his chief vocations as musical executant, savant, and evangelist (see, for example, p. 254), and Tausig, Bulow, and Bache eagerly extended the ideals of their master into the next generation. Chapters 7-9 further develop these three pursuits by examining Liszt's lieder, his role as editor, and his posthumously-published (1983 in their complete form) Technical Studies, respectively. With the exception of, say, Ich mochte hingehn and Die Lorelei, which have been sparring for years with the opening measures of Tristan und Isolde for the right to lay claim to the eponymous sonority, most of Liszt's almost eighty songs have suffered serious neglect from both scholars and performers. Walker hears many of Liszt's essays in musical poetry as anticipating Mahler, with affective tonal ambiguities, clever enharmonic modulations, and thoughtful moments of word painting enriching the German song landscape considerably. …

Turner as Draughtsman, by Andrew Wilton

Reviewed by: Turner as Draughtsman Leo Costello (bio) Turner as Draughtsman, by Andrew Wilton; pp. xii + 167. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, £55.00, $99.95. These days, a volume focused on drawings is likely to be either a catalogue intended for the expert or the connoisseur or a coffee-table book of some attractive watercolors, neither of which is expected to carry much interpretive force. Still less might we expect a book about J. M. W. Turner and drawing to yield significant insight about the artist. Long valued as a masterful painter, Turner's perceived deficiencies in drawing have been cited since his own lifetime. And yet in Turner as Draughtsman, Andrew Wilton seeks, and largely achieves, to make an important contribution to our overall understanding of Turner's work. Indeed, Wilton argues that a complete sense of Turner's accomplishment in painting must include an awareness of the importance of drawing. Wilton notes at the outset that the question of Turner and drawing has been a vexed one. Turner's value to modernism seemed to lie in the proto-abstract quality of some of his late, largely unfinished oils. The apparent irrelevance of drawing in these works distanced him from the discredited academicism that modernism rejected and seemed to presage the painterly, gestural work of someone like Jackson Pollock. In the last twenty years, however, a revisionist account, led by John Gage and Eric Shanes, has rejected this approach as insufficient and stressed a premodern Turner, one concerned with decidedly non-modern issues like academic practice, literary reference, and subject matter. To argue that drawing was important to Turner is to align him with these concerns, and this is the camp into which Wilton firmly places himself. In part, therefore, this is a book that seeks to establish Turner within the artistic milieu of his lifetime, and this Wilton does quite effectively with reference to two periods in particular. The first of these, his apprenticeship and early career in the 1790s, is fairly well-studied already. But by considering the evidence with a focus on Turner's interest and engagement with drawing, Wilton brings together various bits of information that are usually presented in fragmentary form to weave a more nuanced account of the artist's interests and development in these years. His chapter on Turner as a collector of drawings, for instance, offers an important new aspect of his artistic personality. Wilton also situates the role of Turner's sketching within his broader ambitions in these years more comprehensively and subtly than has yet been achieved. He places Turner in relation to a number of masters and contemporaries including Thomas Malton, Philippe de Loutherbourg, Canaletto, Thomas Girtin, and even the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Writing with the easy authority of someone who has spent many years with [End Page 527] Turner's sketchbooks at the Tate, where the vast majority of them are housed, Wilton is able to evoke Turner's incorporation of these influences into a personal style in which drawings became a vital means of negotiating contact with the visible phenomena of the world. Wilton's descriptive language is at its evocative best in places like his discussion of Turner's incorporation of previous models during his Midland Tour of 1794, into a style that recorded both what he saw and also his growing sense of delight in the pervasive life energy of the world around him: "Drawings of Lichfield Cathedral, or a mill near Llangollen, combine indications of both architecture and foliage, where long curved lines, confidently placed on the page, alternate with shorter, scalloped ones and still smaller interlocking curves that evoke the mass of foliage by nestling inside of each other" (64). Wilton gets at the heart not only of Turner's practice, but of the developing nineteenth-century practice of landscape painting as a whole. More unfamiliar, and contentious, is Wilton's discussion of Turner's late-1820s and early-1830s figure paintings in the context of sentimental imagery and poetry being made then for the Annuals, popular periodicals. Here, Wilton argues that what has made many of these pictures seem awkward—then and now—is Turner's failed attempt to bring...

PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS OF MARTIAL ARTISTS

This study used the MMPI-2 to explore the personalities of yellow-belt and black-belt martial artists. A total of 40 participants completed the MMPI-2 and a demographic questionnaire. Black-belt females tended to be less defensive than were other martial artists, but also displayed more paranoia and more anger than average. Females of both ranks reported a higher degree of anxiety and health concerns than did males in the study, and black-belt females also reported more family problems than did other groups. Finally, black belts in general reported more health concerns than did yellow belts.

The Artists of 1805: The Theatrical Collaboration of Andersen, Bournonville, and Hartmann

There is a Danish saying that, having said A, you must continue on to B and C and so forth. In the year 2005 the saying would more likely go, Having said 'A,' you must also say 'B'?and 'H.' Cer tainly the great artists generation of 1805?Hans Christian Ander sen, August Bournonville, and Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann? represents the three leading artists of nineteenth-century Danish literature, choreography, music, and theatre culture, thanks to their individual artistic personalities and joint theatrical productions. Among themselves they often exchanged brief but meaning ful comments. An example of this can found in a letter written by Andersen to Bournonville on March 30, 1841, in which the poet praises the balletmaster with these telling words: You are a poet and I put much store in this little word. For his part, Bournonville wrote to Andersen on January 31, 1862, 'You interest, amuse, and touch. Yes, you convince and strengthen, more one cannot desire from a poet. In a poem dedicated to Hartmann, Andersen wrote on May 14, 1836, We endorse you and your music after our hearts!

Resident Artist: A Profile of Artist Michal (Miki) Kehati, Yemenite / Israeli Citizen of the World

Michal (Miki) Kehati's paintings, collages, and prints, with their dense layering of images and bold, frenetic designs, are born of a profound engagement with her Yemenite heritage, the rich artistic traditions of her forebears, and a thoroughly contemporary sensibility. Coming from a traditional background where "the women were always cooking and talking in the kitchen and the men worked with tools and materials," she seems consciously to have chosen the "man's path." "My family came to Israel from Yemen," says Kehati, "and we settled in and around Jerusalem, city of diversity—of population, of architecture, with so many periods and influences, and with its special perfume of antiquity, lying on the ancient spice road from orient to occident." Kehati was born and raised in Israel; the significance of that "we" lies in how her art mirrors that journey, with its upheavals of immigration and resettlement. In addition to the influence of her grandparents and parents, who were craftspeople, artists, and, most importantly, independent thinkers, she credits the late Dan Zaif, the "brilliant, free-spirited, high school director and mentor" who first taught her art history, and the studio classes she took as a youth at the Israel Museum with encouraging her development as a serious artist. Kehati speaks proudly of her late mother, Yona Kehati, an interior designer who was a commander in the army in the 1950s, when this was not common for women. After her own mandatory army service, Miki, disenchanted with Israeli politics of the early 1980s, left for New York. She attended the Art Students' League, waitressed, cleaned houses, and worked in art galleries. Over the course of three years, step by step, she put together a portfolio and finally achieved her goal of attending the prestigious School of Visual Arts. [End Page 224] The stylistic influence of such prominent New York artists as Richard Serra, Jackie Windsor, Bryan Hunt, and Dennis Oppenheim might not be evident in her work, but Kehati says of them that their charisma and personality helped her shape her own distinctive artistic persona. After ten years in New York, she returned to Jerusalem "as one enriched and eager for new expression." The body of work she has been making since then displays a sophisticated and assured integration of her Yemenite/Israeli background with her chosen citizenship in the international art world. Click for larger view Figure 1 "Rumye in her house" (2006) Mixed media on paper, 8.5" × 11.52"

Onoufrios, the famous XVI’s century iconographer, creator of the “Berati School”: studying the technique and materials used in wall paintings of inscribed churches

The study of the materials and techniques employed for wall painting, complementing the information from historical and aesthetic data, contributes to the integrated knowledge of the iconographer and his period. In the 16th century, regarding the iconography in the former Byzantine area, besides the School of Crete and Francos Catelanos and his school, a third artistic personality who also created his own school, Onoufrios, appeared in central Albania and expanded his activity as a painter to northern Greece as well as nearby areas, such as Ohrid. Inscriptions documenting the works of Onoufrios are found in some of the churches that he decorated with wall paintings: “St. Apostles” (1547) Kastoria Greece, “St. Nicolas” Shelcan Albania, “St. Paraskevi” (1554), Valsh Albania, while are attributed to him the church of “St. Theodores” in Berati, Albania (before 1547) and others. He is one of the best icon painters of the whole Balkan region, and the best painter that has ever worked in Albanian territory. Onoufrios managed to combine the local painting tradition with the best tradition of the eastern (Paleologian) and western (Italian) schools, resulting in a realistic and natural depiction. He is the creator of the “Berati School” that expanded to other parts of the peninsula. His individual character can be distinguished in the work of his students: his son Nikolaos (who inherited his style in painting), Onoufrios from Cyprus, etc. Based on careful observations, we extracted number of paint samples from wall paintings of three of the above mentioned churches. Ground and paint layers were examined using micro-FTIR, Optical Microscopy, TXRF and SEM-EDS, to characterize materials and methods used by the artist to create these works. Our findings in each church are discussed and compared with the others in order to understand how and with what material and resources the painter worked and how he developed his technique. The presence of calcium carbonate as the main component in all FTIR measurements points to a fresco technique. Pigments like red and yellow ochre, carbon black, green earth, calcium carbonate are used in all cases. The use of gypsum in the plaster construction is characteristic. The deterioration of the wall paintings due to environmental effects – different in every church – is also examined.

A Profile of Artist Michal (Miki) Kehati, Yemenite / Israeli Citizen of the World

A Profile of Artist Michal (Miki) Kehati, Yemenite / Israeli Citizen of the World

Letters

Letters To theEditor: Imuch enjoyed Ken Lomax's splendidly crafted and informativepiece, "AChronicle of theBattleship Oregon." The article stirredup thedust in mymemory binwhen Lomax remindedme that theOregon had been towed offforscrap in 1942.1was a ten year-old living in Sheridan at the time,with an Oregonian route and a plan toput aside enough money fora new fielder's glove. Early in 1943,1 believe itwas, posters showed up on the town streetsand at the local theater tellingme that, in exchange forbuying aWar Bond for $18.75, I could have a piece of the Battleship Oregon. Dad ? one of those for whom theOregon had been "a sentimental symbol of civic pride" as you put it ? was so excited over the prospect ofhaving a piece of the ship thathis enthusiasm was contagious ? and there went my plans for a new glove. FormyWar Bond purchase I got a piece ofwood, about two inches square and one inch thick,bearing a stamp that said it was from theBattleship Oregon. I kept itforyears onmy dresser. Itmight stillbe banging around in the bottom of some sack or box in the attic! Even while being deflowered, theold battle ship still managed to serve in WWII. Again, my compliments on a fine piece. Charles Burgess Burien,Washington To theEditor: In support ofhis argument thatC.E.S. Wood "confessed" towriting Chief Joesph's surrender speech himself,George Venn offersas "proof" the following sentence extracted from one of Wood's letters:"I took itfor my own benefit as a literary item" ("Soldier toAdvocate," OHQ Spring 2005,757257). The contextofthat sentence,however, shows it to be anything but a "confession": "Neither General Miles nor anyone else knows Joseph's surrender speech accurately exceptmyself. No one was interested to take itdown. Oscar Long, Miles' regimental adjutant,was there to take it down but did not. No one was told to take it down. Iwas not told.The speeches of Indians were not considered of importance. I took itfor my own benefit as a literaryitem,and Ihave told you I at request gave itto theAdjutant General of theArmy in Washington for thearchives and itdisappeared." This, of course, leads to a conclusion much different fromVenn's: thatC.E.S. Wood recorded the speech not as an assigned duty,but from a personal awareness of its importance; that it was, in fact,a record of Joseph'swords and not a product of, as Venn states, Wood's "observa tions and fictions." Mark Highberger, publisher Bear Creek Press Wallowa, Oregon George Venn replies: When Wood wrote McWhorter in 1936, "I took it [the speech] formy own benefit as a literary item," Wood revealed? for the first and only time ? that he adopted an artistic persona ? not a literalistic one ? to create the surrender speech. Years ofwitnesses implicitly confirm that revelation. In 1878,Duncan Mc Donald, a Nez Perce who interviewed post-war refugees inCanada, wrote thatChief Joseph's speech at thepre-war Lapwaii Council was "the only speech Joseph, Sr., evermade during the year of 1877." In thirteenpublished versions of the speech,Wood himself revised time, place, speaker, and text.By 1939,those conflicting re visions causedWood towrite, "Joseph's speech of surrender nowhere appears correctly and I myself am partly responsible forthis." Except for variants on the last sentence ? perhapsWood's direct quote of Joseph ? no eyewitnesses ever published the speech.Haruo Aoki's article in the fall 1989 Idaho Yesterdays expresses the skepti cism of contemporary scholars and historians: Letters 333 "Any citation of the long textas an example of American Indian oratory isunwarranted and is an outcome of citingonly the lastand unreliable accounts of C. E. S.Wood." After researching this controversy fornine years, I stand bymy statementson pp. 64-65 ofmy article: except for his confession toMcWhorter, Wood disguised his art as artifact. To theEditor: I take no great pleasure in knowing that others sharemy frustrationas to the scarcityof records regarding early cooperative societies, as expressed in a letterfromErnest Haycox, Jr., printed in the Winter 2004 issue. So Iam pleased to report that the incorporation papers for the Nehalem Valley Cooperative Colony do, indeed, still exist, and may be examined in the State Archives in Salem, under FileNo. 3319. The date...

In Search of Artistic Personality: the case of Robert Campin

In Search of Artistic Personality: the case of Robert Campin

DIFFERENTIATED EDUCATION IN SCHOOL OF PEDAGOGICAL PROFESSIONALISM AS ONE OF WAYS OF PREPARING BEGINNING TEACHERS PEDAGOGICAL PROCESS MANAGEMENT

For the formation of the artistic personality of the teacher there must be clone a systematical work on the perfection of his personal professional significant features. This problem can be sold by means of the organization of the teaching activity of the teachers — beginners at school of the pedagogical professionalism during the involvement into the active pedagogical activity, into the different kids of different training. The active forms and methods of teaching have great possibilities in the process of solving this problem.

Reconsidering Romney

Two hundred years after his death, George Romney (1734-1802) offers a fascinating case study of the vicissitudes of fame and reputation, the impact of the art market and collecting on the art-historical canon, changing ideas about artistic creativity and practice, and the particular interpretive problems posed by society portraiture. Long relegated to the margins of late eighteenth-century art, Romney has recently reemerged as a multifaceted artistic personality whose innovative paintings and drawings encapsulate the complexities of Enlightenment thought and straddle the line between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. The exhibition George Romney 1734-1802: British Art's Forgotten Genius, organized to mark the bicentenary of Romney's death, provides a useful springboard for reevaluating Romney's artistic career and critical reputation.