Three Dialogues
Originally published in ''transition'' 49 in 1949, ''Three Dialogues'' represents a small part (fewer than 3000 words) of a correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit about the nature of contemporary art, with particular reference to the work of Pierre Tal-Coat, André Masson and Bram van Velde. It might more accurately be said that beneath these surface references may be found an invaluable commentary on Beckett's own struggle with expression at a particularly creative and pivotal period of his life. A frequently quoted example is the following recommendation, ostensibly for what Tal Coat's work should strive towards: "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express." A great strength of these dialogues is the wit of both participants, combined with Duthuit's persistent and intelligent challenges to Beckett's pessimism ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Transition (literary Journal)
''transition'' was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by Maria McDonald and her husband Eugene Jolas and published in Paris. They were later assisted by editors Elliot Paul (April 1927 – March 1928), Robert Sage (October 1927 – Fall 1928), and James Johnson Sweeney (June 1936 – May 1938). Origins The literary journal was intended as an outlet for experimental writing and featured modernist, surrealist and other linguistically innovative writing and also contributions by visual artists, critics, and political activists. It ran until spring 1938. A total of 27 issues were produced. It was distributed primarily through Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore run by Sylvia Beach. While it originally almost exclusively featured poetic experimentalists, it later accepted contributions from sculptors, civil rights activists, carvers, critics, and cartoonists. Editors who joined t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. It became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevatio ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Georges Duthuit
Georges Duthuit (1891–1973) was a French writer, art critic and historian. Duthuit was a key commentator on Matisse, Nicolas de Staël, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Bram van Velde. He maintained a close association with the surrealists, particularly André Masson. In 1939, he was among the intellectuals convened for George Bataille's College of Sociology. Part of his correspondences on contemporary art with Samuel Beckett form the text ''Three Dialogues Originally published in ''transition'' 49 in 1949, ''Three Dialogues'' represents a small part (fewer than 3000 words) of a correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit about the nature of contemporary art, with particular reference t ...'', originally published in the literary journal, '' transition''. Sources George Duthuit on Dumbarton Oaks website 1891 births 1973 deaths 20th-century French non-fiction writers French art historians {{France-art-historian-stub ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Contemporary Art
Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or "-ism". Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality. In vernacular English, ''modern'' and ''contemporary'' are synonyms, resulting in some conflation and confusion of the terms ''modern art'' and ''contemporary art'' by non-specialists. Scope Some define contemporary art as art produced within "our lifetime," recognising that lifetimes a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pierre Tal-Coat
Pierre Tal-Coat (real name Pierre Louis Jacob; 1905–1985) was a French artist considered to be one of the founders of Tachisme. Life and work He was born the son of a fisherman, in the village of Clohars-Carnoët, Finistère in 1905. He attended primary school from 1912 to 1914. In 1915, during World War I, his father was killed in fighting at the Argonne front. Apprenticed as a blacksmith in 1918, he began designing and sculpting and was rewarded with a national scholarship and entered the Upper primary school at Quimperlé. He started his working life as clerk to a notary in 1923 in Arzano. In 1924, he found work as a decorator at the Keraluc porcelain factory in Quimper in 1924, creating characters and landscapes of the Brittany countryside. Arriving in Paris in 1924, Tal-Coat modelled for the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, was a moulder at the Manufacture de Sèvres and met with the painter Émile Compard. In 1925 and 1926 he fulfilled his military service in Par ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson (4 January 1896 – 28 October 1987) was a French artist. Biography Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but when he was eight his father's work took the family first briefly to Lille and then to Brussels. He began his study of art at the age of eleven at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris. He fought for France during World War I and was seriously injured.McCloskey, Barbara. ''Artists of World War II''. London: Greenwood Press, 2005, , page 34. Artistic works His early works display an interest in cubism. He later became associated with surrealism, and he was one of the most enthusiastic employers of automatic drawing, making a number of automatic works in pen and ink. Masson experimented with altered states of consciousness with artists such as Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Joan Miró, Georges Bataille, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Malkine, who were ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bram Van Velde
Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van Velde (19 October 1895 – 28 December 1981) was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction. He is often seen as member of the School of Paris but his work resides somewhere between expressionism and surrealism, and evolved in the 1960s into an expressive abstract art. His paintings from the 1950s are similar to the contemporary work of Matisse, Picasso and the abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett and the poet André du Bouchet. Early life Bram van Velde was born in Zoeterwoude, near Leiden, into an intensely poor family, and this would mark him profoundly for life. His mother, Catharina von der Voorst (1867–1949) was the illegitimate daughter of a Count. His father, Willem van Velde (1868–1914) owned a small company engaged in water transportation on the Rhine. B ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dialogue
Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English) is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange. As a philosophical or didactic device, it is chiefly associated in the West with the Socratic dialogue as developed by Plato, but antecedents are also found in other traditions including Indian literature. Etymology The term dialogue stems from the Greek διάλογος (''dialogos'', conversation); its roots are διά (''dia'': through) and λόγος (''logos'': speech, reason). The first extant author who uses the term is Plato, in whose works it is closely associated with the art of dialectic. Latin took over the word as ''dialogus''. As genre Antiquity and the Middle Ages Dialogue as a genre in the Middle East and Asia dates back to ancient works, such as Sumerian disputations preserved in copies from the late third millennium BC, Rigvedic dialogue hymns and the ''Ma ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pessimism
Pessimism is a negative mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is " Is the glass half empty or half full?"; in this situation, a pessimist is said to see the glass as half empty, while an optimist is said to see the glass as half full. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all major areas of thinking. Etymology The term pessimism derives from the Latin word ''pessimus'' meaning 'the worst'. It was first used by Jesuit critics of Voltaire's 1759 novel ''Candide, ou l'Optimisme''. Voltaire was satirizing the philosophy of Leibniz who maintained that this was the 'best (optimum) of all possible worlds'. In their attacks on Voltaire, the Jesuits of the ''Revue de Trévoux'' accused him of ''pessimisme''. As a psychological disposition In the ancient world, psychological pessimism was associated with ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1949 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 – A United Nations-sponsored ceasefire brings an end to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947. The war results in a stalemate and the division of Kashmir, which still continues as of 2022. * January 2 – Luis Muñoz Marín becomes the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico. * January 11 – The first "networked" television broadcasts take place, as KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania goes on the air, connecting east coast and mid-west programming in the United States. * January 16 – Şemsettin Günaltay forms the new government of Turkey. It is the 18th government, last single party government of the Republican People's Party. * January 17 – The first VW Type 1 to arrive in the United States, a 1948 model, is brought to New York by Dutch businessman Ben Pon. Unable to interest dealers or importers in the Volkswagen, Pon sells the sample car to pay his travel expenses. Only two 1949 models are sold in Ameri ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Books By Samuel Beckett
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |