We'll always have Paris

-Howard Koch

"You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

from :

On this website you can slide the slider from the 2013 vision of the street to the 1914 version. See how the streets have changed, or not. One striking thing about the 1914 pictures is how prevalent advertising was on the buildings. The advent of the mass produced print and the start of what we know of as graphic design was started with the Gutenberg press in 1450 which turned into the Humanist or Old Style to what was much later evolved into what we now recognise as graphic design, something distinctly different from fine art in the late 19th century which was recognised with the help of Henry Cole.2

What we now have is a plethora of advertising constantly bombarding us. In the present day we go through life besieged by images, sounds and text made to appeal to our highly attuned consumerist instincts. They are constantly changing, moving, flitting by before we even have time to take in their total impact. We slowly become so desensitised to the world of publicity that it fades into the background as a part of the environment. Only when something appeals to our own individualized interest do we pay attention in a conscious manner to the image presented. The act of looking is never a static one, our eyes are always searching, and moving. Only in the silent contemplation and stillness afforded by the art of old can we truly appreciate what lies before us. But in the fast world pushed faster by modern technology and the human omnipresent need to grow and break boundaries, our unending discontent with the status quo ,these moments will only be fewer and further apart. Though we are in an active mode while looking, we are static compared to the fast pace of publicity. This cycle is only broken when we turn the page, the ad is dropped, we throw the newspaper away, hopefully in the recycling bin!, or we change the channel. Advertising are all geared toward one person, the future buyer, promising to make them into a new and better person. They feed on our desires and insecurities on how others will view ourselves— that somehow think more highly of us in the first five seconds in which we have to make an impression. 

But buildings, cities, fashions and trends constantly change though people's wants and desires out of life do not.  Paris has in some ways changes drastically but it is still 'a movable feast'

 3

4.

These dreamy images remind me of Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen and Ernest Hemingway, especially as I'm reading A Movable Feast. So I leave you with this and maybe the wish to visit Paris in the springtime.

Back 100 years: Modern Art

There was posted a to celebrate its centennial recent virtual tour of the 1913 exhibition of the Avant-Garde Movement in America. It was the The International Exhibition of Modern Art exhibition and shocked the country with its 'bold destruction and reinvention of visual art’s established forms'. To celebrate its centennial the Art Institute of Chicago has recreated its viewing experience. You can walk around the museum and step back in time 100 years, though it is in black and white, how fitting. To quote the MoMa curator, Leah Dickerman,

“It’s this moment in time, 100 years ago, in which the foundations of cultural practice were totally reordered in as great a way as we have seen. And that this marks a reordering of the rules of art-making — it’s as big as we’ve seen since the Renaissance.”



We are now used to the Modern movement, if fact we are now post post Modernism. In the modern world we are used to being bombarded by images daily that we have lost the relationship between what we see and its meaning, a deeper meaning that needs contemplation to digest. 

For a long time society as a whole viewed the art world as a single unit to judge and shift to accommodate their changing styles. Artists were expected to cater to public taste and created movements that reacted and shifted along with the society’s general mode of existence. After the outbreak of WW1 society and thus reality were irrevocably changed. The very foundations of western existence were rocked and shifted. In the field of art alone abstract art and Surrealism struggled to give reason and definition to the horrors of war, to explain and have others perceive the chaos, as seen through the eyes of the Surrealists, Dadaists, Expressionists, Fauvists, and Cubists. This created a chasm between the image and its meaning. No longer could the spectator rely on the realistic pictorial symbols before him, and draw their meaning based on his own experiences of the same. In traditional art the spectator was the centre of the  world, while in new modern art there were many different viewpoints around the object depicted. This fragmentation that comes between our inclination to draw conclusions and the incomplete information we are given causes a new way of responding to what we perceive as factual. After the introduction of movements like Surrealism, Cubism and Dadaism, the artists shifted the focus from the expected realistic portrayal of objects and instead to distorting these objects to convey their individual feelings and messages. To the audience for the most part this shift was confusing, because of their lack of understanding of each artists’ individual approach to the subject matter. 



The exhibition that we can now see can give an insight into the huge shift that the art world was just on the brink of. Impressionism was followed by war, and which led to the Surrealist, the Dadaists and the Cubists, breaking further the norms of art. But compare the art in this exhibit to the norm, like Sargent, and appreciate how far we've come in only 100 years. Truly a new Renaissance. 

two sides of the same room from the virtual tour

Van Gogh's "Mountains at Saint-Remy with Dark Cottage"

See the rest of the exhibition at http://extras.artic.edu/armoryshow

the original post introducing this show at http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/virtual_tour_of_the_armory_show.html

Enjoy 1913