Genre Themes Research Articles

OLEG KONSTANTINOVICH EIGES: STYLISTIC FEATURES OF PIANO SONATAS AS A SUBJECT OF MASTERING FUTURE PERFORMING MUSICIANS

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of O. K. Eiges’ style on the example of piano sonatas. The work reveals the origins of the composer’s work – the influence of K. R. Eiges and the Russian piano school, first of all A. N. Scriabin, N. K. Medtner and S. S. Prokofiev; internship in Europe and the impact of European culture; peculiarities of folklore implementation. Attention is paid to the commonality of aesthetic positions and artistic principles of O. K. Eiges and N. K. Medtner. It is noted that the originality of Eiges’ artistic style lies in relying on the traditions of the masters of the past and the modern composer’s language. The author examines such features of his “handwriting” as the originality of the figurative sphere and drama, symphonicity, polyphony, continuous development, high concentration of thematism and genre themes, block structure of the form, the form of the “second plan”, thematic “arches”, the specifics of the organization of sections of the form, features of the harmonic language, textures, bell-ringing, virtuosity, graphicity, phonocoloristic effects. The issue of “stylistic dialogue” with Prokofiev is touched upon in some works. The article highlights Eiges’ performing style as a guideline for mastering his sonatas. The question of the value of the composer’s legacy in the aspect of educational and pedagogical work is raised.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE WALT DISNEY STUDIO ON THE FORMATION OF SOVIET ANIMATION IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The article discusses the influence of Walt Disney Studios on the development of Soviet animation, which developed in the mid-20th century. The distinctive features of the artistic language of American animation are identified, and the graphic style of Walt Disney Studios is described. The historical stages of the development and formation of animation as a specific type of art in the Soviet Union are analyzed. The main principles and technological techniques for creating graphic animation are described, and the main stylistic directions and genre themes of animated films created by Soviet animators are identified. It is argued that Soviet animation, after going through a difficult path of technical difficulties and the search for an individual style, was able to enter the classics of world animation.

The Changing Perception of the Five Senses

This article examines the changing approach towards the representation of the senses in 17th-century Flemish painting. These changes are related to the cultural politics and courtly culture of the Spanish sovereigns of the Southern Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. The 1617–18 painting-series of the Five Senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens as well as the pendant paintings on the subject are analyzed in relation to the iconography of the five senses, and in regard to Flemish genre themes. In this context, the excess of objects, paintings, scientific instruments, animals, and plants in the Five Senses are read as an expansion of the iconography of the senses as well as a reference to the courtly material culture of the Archdukes. Framing the senses as part of a cultural web of artifacts, Brueghel and Rubens refer both to elite lived experience and traditional iconography. The article examines the continuity between the iconography of the senses from 1600 onwards, as developed by Georg Pencz, Frans Floris, and Maerten de Vos, and the representation of the senses in the series. In addition, the article shows how certain elements in the paintings are influenced by genre paintings of the courtly company and collector’s cabinet, by Frans Francken, Lucas van Valckenborch and Louis de Caullery. Through the synthesis of these two traditions the subject of the five senses is reinvented in a courtly context

The King's Champion: Re-Enacting Arthurian Romance at the English Coronation Banquet

Recent scholarship has emphasised the extent to which historical events are reflected in medieval romance. This paper seeks to draw attention to an instance where that relationship appears to have been inverted and a romance motif was carefully recreated at a particularly important event in the historical world. From the fourteenth century onwards, a mounted knight ceremonially rode into the English coronation banquet and issued a challenge to all assembled. The visual detail of the ritual strikingly echoes that of the romance motif of the “intruder at the feast”. This motif crops up in numerous romances, and is particularly associated with Arthurian narratives where it usually serves as a catalyst for adventure, providing the court and the king with an opportunity to justify their authority and reputation. This paper analyses the precise nature of the historical ritual and explores how the romance resonances of the ceremony at the coronation feast could be used to underpin political authority and courtly identity. In doing so, it seeks to underscore the centrality of Arthurian romance to English monarchical self-imagining and the symbolic power which could be ascribed to the genre's themes and conventions.

An Admonition against "Rousing Love": The Meaning of the Enigmatic Refrain in Song of Songs

Abstract This article examines and evaluates eight different interpretations put forward by modern scholars to explain the meaning of the adjuration refrain in Song of Songs (2:7, 3:5, 8:4). While most of these positions can be judged unlikely due to their unsupported presuppositions or their dissonance with the immediate context and general themes in the Song, reading the refrain as an admonition not to disturb lovers indulging their passions best aligns with the context, literary structure, genre themes, as well as the grammar and syntax in these verses. Indeed, this interpretation readjusts the theology of sexuality in American Christianity, counterbalancing the NT focus on husband-wife roles and responsibilities with a portrait of passion as God's good gift to be celebrated and indulged in the proper context.

It's not all about video‐conferencing

PurposeThis paper seeks to present the issue of e‐learning development in a public university in Bolivia, together with challenges that could support the work of a sustainable development of practice and educational technologies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents the first phase of an interpretative case study. It comprises data sources found in observations, interviews, and documents, which the authors have analysed according to three genre themes associated with e‐learning – people, spaces, and technologies.FindingsThe paper identifies a set of challenges that is aimed at directing further development and research on sustainable e‐learning approaches in developing regions.Originality/valueThe paper offers a practitioner perspective on e‐learning development at a university in a developing country.

The Dutch Guardroom Scene of the Golden Age: A Definition

This study aims at defining a particular genre formula known to contemporaries as a Cortegaerdje — a guardroom scene. It was created and developed by a group of so-called minor masters in the Dutch Golden Age. The purpose is to reach an optimal agreement between a certain visual formula and this contemporary title or its variants. This is done through a systematic comparison with various martial and other relevant genre themes and assigning each its designated contemporary title. The guardroom scene is a genre painting depicting an interior of a temporary nature, hosting soldiers and their camp followers passing the time in various activities. It is free of any violent action, and it usually appears respectable and in some cases even merry. It might, however, include the results of violent actions, such as beseeching hostages and booty. The guardroom scene usually does not revolve around a clear subject matter, but is a collection of motifs, anecdotes, and notions. The guardroom scene gave the middle-class man, nesting safely at home, a restrained drama devoid of violence while touching his social sensitivity.

Just Another Day: Dutch Genre Themes in Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills

This article considers the parallels that exist between Dutch genre painting of the seventeenth century and early work by American photographer Cindy Sherman. Through direct comparison of specific examples of works by Jan Steen, Frans van Mieris and Dirck Hals to several Untitled Film Stills by Sherman, a number of meaningful connections become evident. Beyond the striking similarities that occur in terms of theatrical presentation and visual presence, these works also share a relationship of mutual respect between artists and audiences that is enacted through the modes of popular culture, didactic potentialities and deliberately ambiguous narrative structures that leave interpretation open-ended. These images attest to a sense of affinity between artist and viewer, who partake in a shared culture of daily experience and vernacular sources.

Julie Peakman, Mighty lewd books: the development of pornography in eighteenth-century England, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xii, 263, illus., £25.00 (hardback 1-4039-1500-8)

This work significantly develops our understanding of obscene and erotic literature and its development as a genre during the eighteenth century in Britain. It is particularly valuable to have the analysis of the production and distribution of obscene materials. Although mechanisms by which obscene literature circulated through the provinces are mentioned, the concentration of the trade in London means that the metropolis forms the chief focus. A number of persistent trends were already in place by the early eighteenth century. Peakman notes the connection between the production and marketing of risque works and of informative manuals about sex which was to persist well into the twentieth century, as well as the persistent recycling and recirculation of material which became so characteristic. Peakman also analyses various genre themes and their relationship to popular and scientific understandings of the body and reproductive physiology of the period. The motif of the eroticized landscape and what one might call botanical or horticultural porn is particularly suggestive. Was this perhaps a uniquely English (nation of gardeners, pastoral trope already well-established in mainstream literature) phenomenon? A rather different resort to fruit and flowers encoded sexual information in later works of sex education, while 1920s Lawrentian sexualizing of the landscape was satirized by Stella Gibbons' 1932 Cold Comfort Farm: Mr Mybug's ‘God! Those buds had an urgent, phallic, look.’ Peakman indicates the associations of erotic literature with the foreign, specifically Italy and France, as well as with the more generally exotic. Many significant early texts were simply translations and adaptations of continental originals. If the notion of Italy as the decadent site of bloody and perverse happenings where anything might go looks back to Renaissance drama, the increasing importance of France would result in French standing as a metonym for obscenity in early twentieth century “French postcards” and advertisements for “French lessons”. A particularly illuminating discovery is that the archetypal vice anglais, flagellation, did not appear as a particular motif in British erotic writing until fairly late in the eighteenth century: although there is some evidence for its existence as an erotic preference and speciality in literary texts and in the paraphernalia confiscated during raids on brothels. Peakman argues for the influence of the flagellation scenes common within the salacious revelations of anti-Catholic polemic (derived from French anti-clerical literature, but given a specifically British twist). By the end of the eighteenth century highly formulaic “fladge” texts, detached from this particular framework of lecherous priests, naive novices and conniving mothers superior and set instead within a stylized but recognizable secular British context, were deploying various tropes already made familiar by studies of Victorian pornography. There is a sub-textual suggestion of a move within pornographic texts from the relatively genial, if unthinkingly male in its preconceptions, bawdry of the early part of the century to increasing interest in relations of dominance and submission, abuse of power, and erotic pain. This therefore pushes Donald Thomas's suggestion, in A long time burning (1969), of a shift in Victorian pornography into scenarios of “greater … unreality” and increased sadism, rather further back in time, to indicate that development was already well under way by the end of the eighteenth century. This is one of several places where one might have liked a bit more contextualization and engagement with other recent works on the development of sexual attitudes and behaviour during the eighteenth century, for example the suggestions of Randolph Trumbach, in Sex and the gender revolution. Volume one: heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London (1998) and Tim Hitchcock in English sexualities, 1700–1800 (1997), concerning increased male anxiety and growing emphasis on penetrative heterosexual sex. Sara Toulalan's work on late-seventeenth-century erotica tends to push back the “origin story” even earlier than Peakman claims. It would also have been intriguing to relate changing tropes within pornography, and its increasing production and dissemination, to the rise of exactly contemporary fears around onanism. What was the dialectical relationship between the insistence that solitary sex was dangerous, and the growing amount of “one-handed literature”? In spite of these cavils, this is an extremely useful beginning exploration of a still under-investigated area: as Peakman makes clear, there are considerable problems of sources and methodology to be taken into account.

Max Weber's Jewish Paintings

I A history of Jewish American art has yet to be written. Although there were a few nineteenth-century Jewish artists, such a history would really begin with the early twentieth century. Its range would include artists who work or have worked exclusively with Jewish themes and those who never manifested an interest in such subject matter. Many artists, such as Ben Shahn, Abraham Rattner, and Leonard Baskin, occupy a middle ground. They are mainstream figures who, from time to time, have explored Jewish imagery or whose works have been affected in some way by their Jewish heritage (but very few studies have been made of their Jewish works). 1 No single pattern seems to govern the ways in which these, and other, artists responded to their heritage other than that they would not forsake it or be subsumed by it. In any such history, Max Weber, one of the most famous and highly esteemed early twentieth-century modernists, would occupy a significant place. He was among the very first, if not the first, to create a recognized body of work based on Jewish experiences. As a "mainstream" modernist, he created paintings and sculptures between 1909, when he returned from a four-year stay in Paris, and 1920 that have been carefully studied and are central to the history of American modern art. 2 But the work he created during the remainder of his career is less well known, particularly his Jewish paintings, which date with rare exception to the years after 1918. Yet during the 1920s and 1930s and on into the 1940s he was the major and most visible painter to use these themes and the artist whose Jewish works were most written about in the mainstream press. 3 [End Page 341] Altogether, he created perhaps as many as 60 paintings, prints and at least one sculpture devoted to Jewish subjects. 4 As a body they form a consistent vision of how Weber chose to remember the Jewish past while living in America. Weber did not find his subject matter in the Bible, preferring instead to work within a very circumscribed range of genre themes: portraits of rabbis, occasionally with their wives, and scenes of men studying or discussing the holy books either at home or in study halls. Sometimes the men stand and talk, or they pray. On one occasion they dance. A unique work, dating from 1913, includes ceremonial objects. There is surprisingly little variation over a 40-odd year period which lasted until his death in 1961--no images of lighting the Sabbath candles, of Passover celebrations, of obvious shtetl or ghetto scenes. Although born in eastern Europe and raised in an Orthodox family, Weber chose primarily to paint--and to recall--bearded Jews at study and at prayer, a particular aspect of east European life that in America was and is covered by a sentimental haze, but an aspect that still helps define a set of root Jewish experiences and that serves as a connection to a past now more imagined than real for many. The current interest in klezmer music, for example, is part of the same desire to maintain, restore, or reconstruct connections to those root experiences. Unfortunately, in all of the letters and memorabilia that Weber retained during his lifetime and which are now housed in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, there do not seem to be any documents that help explain why he began to paint Jewish scenes around 1918 and why he chose from his memories and from his contemporary experiences such a circumscribed range of subjects. Even his daughter, Joy Weber, who still plays an active role in her father's posthumous career, is at a loss to explain his turn to this subject matter except to say that he remained a committed Jew his entire life. 5 This lack of information is particularly unfortunate since he was a significant and seemingly assimilated modernist (but who observed dietary laws) living at a time when...

O. G. Rejlander's Photographs of Street Urchins

0. G. Rejlander's series of street urchin photographs constitutes one of the major themes in his work. While these images derive from contemporary experience, they are also related to traditions in the fine arts, the work of preceding photographers, and images in popular culture. Examination of these photographs, their sources, context and critical reception demonstrates how Rejlander synthesized life and art to produce artistic images with popular appeal. Oscar Gustav Rejlander was one of the first generation of English art photographers. Born in Sweden and trained as a painter and lithographer in Rome, he moved permanently to England in 1841. Initially advertising himself as an artist, he became interested in photography in 1852-3 and by 1855 devoted most of his energy to the new medium. He exhibited regularly in British and international photographic exhibitions between 1855 and his death in January 1875, winning a total of nine medals. While some of his photographs, notably The Two Ways of Life, were controversial, reviewers and fellow photographers generally praised his work and respected Rejlander's efforts to apply the rules and aesthetics of the traditional fine arts to the photographic medium. During his lifetime he was honoured as the father of art photography. Rejlander's photographic subjects include portraits, landscapes, high art compositions and genre. Although he is best known in the twentieth century for his high art images, he actually made very few of this type and all were done in the early years of his career. Genre photographs were by far the most numerous and, more importantly, were the ones for which Rejlander was famous in his lifetime. While this significant category as a whole deserves attention, this study focuses on only one of Rejlander's major genre themes the street urchin. Fifteen photographs of street urchins have survived. One is dated 1859, one can be dated through external evidence to 1871 and the remainder, judging from exhibition catalogues and reviews, were done during the 1860s. With the exception of the earliest one which was taken in Wolverhampton, the rest were made in London. The photographs show a variety of occupations and activities a young costermonger (street vendor), crossing sweeper, shoe-black, organgrinder, newspaper vendor, match and fuzee (cigar light) sellers, beggars, a Ragged Schoolboy, two children playing a game similar to jacks, and a homeless waif. The models in all the photographs but one are young boys. Rejlander presented his subjects in a strongly anecdotal fashion; each photograph is an isolated and clearly defined incident of life in the streets. He took a predominantly humorous interpretative tone, emphasizing the pathetic only in the image of the homeless waif and one photograph of a sleeping shoe-black. Although Rejlander never explained his fascination with street urchins, it is nonetheless possible to suggest several reasons for his interest. First, urchins were picturesque in appearance and Rejlander, like many nineteenth-century photographers and painters, was drawn to the picturesque. Second, the urchins' behaviour lent itself readily to a humorous interpretation and Rejlander preferred to depict scenes from everyday life that were either amusing in themselves or that could be used to illuminate the foibles of human nature through a humorous interpretation. Third, it is possible that Rejlander viewed street urchins as representatives of a peculiarly British type. He may have agreed with a late eighteenth-century writer that: