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(0)Stan Neumann
Description
In the second half of the 16th century, the countryside around Venice witnessed the arrival of a totally new type of housing, a cross between farmhouse and palazzo, called the villa. When creating villas, Andrea Palladio brought together grand architecture with habitation and daily usage in trying to marry beauty with utility. Around 1560 in Maser, the Barbaro brothers asked Andrea Palladio to build a country house and the painter Paolo Veronese to...
Description
Adalberto Libera was a pioneer of architectural modernity and a die-hard fascist. Unlike the Nazis, Mussolini made an alliance with the modern movement, which became for architecture, the official style of fascism. In 1937, the regime launched one of its most ambitious projects - the E 42. The idea was to create a new monumental city embodying the new Imperial Rome, for the International Exhibition of 1942. Libera won the competition for the Reception...
Description
In 1871 a huge fire ravaged Chicago. It was a unique opportunity for a generation of young American architects to break away from European forms and think up the new shapes of a typically American style of architecture. The Chicago Auditorium Building (1887-1889) is considered as the main work of Adler & Sullivan. It is a mixed program which houses a monumental auditorium with excellent acoustics, offices and a hotel facing the lake. At the time,...
Description
"In 1861, Charles Garnier's project was selected for its "rare and superior qualities in the beautiful distribution of the plans, the monumental and characteristic aspect of the facades and sections." The Palais Garnier is a building of exceptional opulence. The style is monumental and considered typically Beaux-Arts, with its use of axial symmetry, exterior ornamentation, polychrome columns, marble friezes, and lavish statuary. During the Second...
Description
"At the end of the 18th century, Claude Nicolas Ledoux built a monumental new salt factory for the King of France. It was an aesthetic revolution, an innovative industrial site and the structuring core for an ideal city that never came into being. When resources for the salt mine at Franche-Comté were dwindling, Ledoux channeled the brine down to a river valley adjacent to the Chaux forest where his innovative and self-contained salt factory could...
Description
"The Alhambra is a palace, or rather a group of two palaces, built for two consecutive XIVth century caliphs, Yusuf 1st (1333-1353) and Mohammed V (1353-1391). The two palaces are hemmed into an older fortress (X century), crowning a 700 meter-long rocky peak. Here, refinement is everywhere - the porcelain mosaics on the floor, the plasterwork sculpted on the walls, the woodwork sculpted and painted on the ceiling- everything is set out in geometric,...
Description
In 1968, Bernd and Hilla Becher set out to photograph industrial buildings such as water towers, silos, and blast furnaces. Their goal was to return photography to the documentary nature of its origins and free it of "Expressionist meanderings," as German artists of the New Objectivity movement had done with other visual arts. The Dusseldorf school - the Bechers and their students - was to radically impact photography with its strict, dispassionate...
9) Pictorialism
Description
Fifty years after it was invented, photography once again sought to rival painting. The Pictorialist photographers at the turn of the 20th century reproduced the subjectivity and timeless themes of earlier visual arts by experimenting with soft focus, special lenses, printing effects, and by drawing, engraving, or painting directly onto prints. Providing an overview of the movement and its influences, this program studies the works and the methods...
10) Found images
Description
To create "Pictures from the Street" Joachim Schmid sifted through torn photos that had been thrown away, then patched them together to produce entirely new images, thus bringing the practices of "found art" to photography. By contrast, in "From an Ethnographic Museum" Hannah Höch made montages by combining museum-quality prints with snapshots - still a form of found photography, but with much more altering and reinterpretation of the materials....
Description
Walk in the street trying not to blink. Each time you blink, snap a photo. These instructions by Vito Acconci, the basis of his series "Blink," characterize the methods and philosophies of the Conceptualist Photography movement that began in the 1960s. Aided by his low-tech amateur camera, Acconci meant to deconstruct the notion of artistic subjectivity while suggesting that the open shutter replaces his closed eyes. Using works by Acconci and others,...
Description
Here Comes the New Photographer!, by Walter Graeff, was published in conjunction with Stuttgart's influential 1929 "Film und Foto exhibition" and became the handbook for a new breed of artists evolving out of the Constructivist and Bauhaus schools. New Vision photography was based on the idea that modern, urban people see the world in a different way, both figuratively and literally, and was steeped in industrial motifs. This program examines the...
Description
Nothing proves the truth of Surrealism like photography, wrote Salvador Dali in 1925. Using works by Dali, Man Ray, Dora Maar, and others, this program illustrates the philosophies of Surrealist photographers as well as the techniques they used to express a particular artistic vision. The video explains how the camera was wielded as a tool for revealing an inherent connection between real and surreal; and for revealing that, when captured on film,...
Description
"Otto Wagner designed one of the first office blocks of the 20th century, radically departing from the style of architecture traditionally associated with bank. Built between 1903 and 1906, the Vienna Savings Bank covered an entire block. While the glass and steel design was more functional than other buildings designed at that time, Wagner also expressed beauty with a flow of movement throughout the bank."
Description
With an overview of its pioneers - called "the primitives of photography" by Felix Nadar - this program explores the brief golden era between the time that photography was invented and the time it became an industry. The transformation of the camera from mere recording device to new artistic medium is seen in works that feature deliberate composition as well as in staged photos and composite prints. The technical processes by which photographers enhanced...
Description
Some art scholars would see it as a kind of Holy Grail experience - an invitation from the Louvre to come and scrutinize works by Leonardo, including the Mona Lisa, La Belle Ferronnière (also referred to as Portrait of an Unknown Woman) and Saint John the Baptist . This film observes just such a gathering, made up of some of the world's leading experts on the life and career of the great Renaissance figure. The guests are given access to major works...
Description
Following his move to Rome, Raphael soon cornered the market in Vatican commissions-but the frescoes and tapestries that display his gifts on a grand scale are not his only legacy. Portraits focusing on intimate relationships are among Raphael's finest creations. Inviting some of the world's leading art experts to scrutinize its Raphael collection, the Louvre allowed them to come into close contact with The Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, the...
Description
The artist who created the fete galante painting style achieved wide recognition during his lifetime, and yet virtually all of Antoine Watteau's major works are cloaked in mystery, raising unanswered questions as to their origins, provenances, and meanings. Should his Pilgrimage to Cythera be interpreted as an arrival or a departure? Why, and for whom, was the no less innovative Pierrot (or Gilles) brought into being? Is the air of melancholy that...
Description
Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne had already been disfigured by attempts at repairs when the controversial decision was made in 2009 to once again attempt a clean-up and refurbishing. Complicating the decision was the fact that da Vinci had never finished the painting, but returned to it year after year to modify it. Could a restoration remain true to da Vinci's intentions? Might the masterpiece be further damaged by trying to...
Description
A staggering number of paintings were once thought to be Rembrandts, but of the 800 or so works attributed to the Dutch master during the 19th century, only about 300 remain authenticated. Interestingly, the 1800s were also a period in which France dominated Rembrandt collecting and research. In the 20th century, expertise shifted to Holland, Great Britain, and the U.S., leaving French holdings isolated and neglected for a time. The Louvre, however,...