Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 7

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DriveBiography

Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra travelled through her country in the 1950s, collecting folk songs from rural musicians. She carried what she learned into radio programmes, records, her own songs and her visual art.

Parra (1917–1967) came from a family of artists; her brother Nicanor Parra became one of Chile's best-known poets. She sought out elderly singers whose songs had never been written down, and her own compositions, above all Gracias a la vida (1966), gave that tradition new life. She also made arpilleras, pictures stitched from fabric, and in 1964 became, by most accounts, the first Latin American artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Louvre palace, in its Museum of Decorative Arts. Her work laid the foundations of the Nueva Canción Chilena, the Chilean New Song movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She died in 1967.

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DriveBiography

South African singer Miriam Makeba was barred from returning home in 1960, when the government cancelled her passport. She spent 30 years in exile, using her concerts and her testimony at the United Nations to campaign against apartheid.

Apartheid was the system of legal racial segregation that ruled South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. Makeba left in 1959 to attend the Venice premiere of Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film in which she sang, then settled in New York with Harry Belafonte's help. When she tried to return for her mother's funeral in 1960, she was refused entry. In 1963 she spoke against apartheid before a United Nations committee, and her records were banned at home. In 1966 she and Belafonte shared a Grammy for their joint album, and her song Pata Pata became a worldwide hit in 1967. She returned home in 1990, after Nelson Mandela's release, and was widely known as 'Mama Africa'.

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StillnessBiography

Neşet Ertaş (1938–2012) was one of Turkey's best-loved folk musicians. From his father, Muharrem Ertaş, he learned the bozlak, a long, high-pitched and often mournful song of Central Anatolia, and he renewed it with songs of his own.

Ertaş was born in 1938 in a village in Kırşehir, into an Abdal family. The Abdals are a Central Anatolian community in which music has long been a hereditary trade, played at weddings and gatherings. As a child he travelled from village to village with his father, playing the bağlama, a long-necked lute. In 1976 a stroke left him unable to play; he went to Germany for treatment in 1979, stayed for 24 years and gave concerts for Turkish migrants across Europe. In 2002 he declined the title of State Artist, saying that all artists already served the state and a separate title felt like discrimination. He received an honorary doctorate from Istanbul Technical University in 2011 and died in İzmir in 2012.

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WonderBiography

Peruvian singer Yma Sumac had an exceptionally wide vocal range, reaching from deep low notes to very high ones. In the 1950s her recordings, set in lavish orchestral arrangements, made her an international star.

Sumac was born in Peru in 1922 as Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo. Her first album for Capitol Records, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), made with the composer Les Baxter, set Andean-inspired songs in lush Hollywood orchestration and sold in huge numbers. Publicity presented her as an Inca princess, and a baseless rumour claimed she was really a Brooklyn housewife called Amy Camus, her name spelled backwards. Estimates of her range run from about four and a half to nearly five octaves; the composer and critic Virgil Thomson put it very close to five. In 1960 she began a tour of the Soviet Union that lasted more than six months. She died in Los Angeles in 2008.

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StillnessBiography

Liliʻuokalani, the last monarch of Hawaiʻi, was also a prolific songwriter. Imprisoned in ʻIolani Palace in 1895, she wrote Kuʻu Pua i Paoakalani about the flowers a supporter brought her from her garden, wrapped in the newspapers she was forbidden to read.

Liliʻuokalani came to the throne in 1891. In January 1893 a group of American and European businessmen, backed by US troops, overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom. After a failed rising to restore her in 1895, she was arrested, forced to abdicate and held in an upstairs room of ʻIolani Palace for about eight months. Denied political news, she followed events through the newspapers wrapped around the flowers. She wrote more than 150 songs in all, including He Mele Lāhui Hawaiʻi, the kingdom's national anthem from 1866 to 1876, and Aloha ʻOe (1878), still one of Hawaiʻi's best-known songs. The United States annexed Hawaiʻi in 1898.

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WonderArt

Batik is an Indonesian way of patterning cloth with wax. Makers draw hot wax in lines and dots wherever the dye must not reach, dye the cloth, then repeat the waxing and dyeing for each colour before boiling the wax away.

The word batik is Javanese, and the classic tool is the canting, a small copper cup with a thin spout on a bamboo handle that lets the maker draw with melted wax like a pen. Hand-drawn cloth, called batik tulis, can take weeks or months; from the mid-nineteenth century, copper stamps called cap made repeated patterns much faster. Because each dyeing colours only what the wax leaves open, the maker has to plan the whole design in advance, usually working from light colours to dark. In Java some motifs were once reserved for the royal courts, and batik accompanies life from the sling used to carry a baby to weddings and funerals. UNESCO listed Indonesian batik as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009, and 2 October is celebrated as National Batik Day.

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WonderArt

Cochineal is a red dye made from tiny scale insects that live on prickly pear cactus. The dried females yield carminic acid, and dyers add metal salts and adjust the acidity to turn it into shades from pink to deep crimson.

Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America, especially in Oaxaca, farmed cochineal for centuries before the Spanish arrived; under the Aztecs, some towns paid tribute in bags of the dye. Roughly 150,000 dried insects go into a single kilogram of dye. After the conquest, cochineal became New Spain's second most valuable export after silver, colouring European textiles from tapestries to fine clothing, as well as red paints used by artists. Synthetic dyes replaced it in the late nineteenth century, but it never disappeared: as carmine, labelled E120, it still colours foods and cosmetics, and Peru is today's largest producer.

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DriveArt

Faith Ringgold was an American artist who painted on fabric and stitched it into quilts, with handwritten stories around the image. Her story quilts put Black family life, history and dreams of freedom at the centre.

Ringgold was born in Harlem, New York, in 1930 and first became known in the 1960s for paintings about the civil rights movement. She began her story quilts around 1980; the first, Echoes of Harlem, was made with her mother, the fashion designer Willi Posey, who had grown up with the African American quilting tradition. The best known, Tar Beach (1988), shows a girl named Cassie dreaming that she flies over the George Washington Bridge from her family's rooftop; 'tar beach' was the name for the tarred roofs where Harlem families went on hot summer nights. The text around the scene tells the story in Cassie's voice. Ringgold turned it into a picture book in 1991, which won a Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration. She died in 2024, aged 93.

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WonderArt

Talavera is a tin-glazed pottery made by hand in the Mexican states of Puebla and Tlaxcala. Each piece goes through clay preparation, shaping, a first firing, glazing, hand-painting and a second firing, skills handed down in specialist workshops.

Spanish potters, many from Seville and Talavera de la Reina, brought the technique to Puebla in the sixteenth century, where it blended with local skills. Tin glaze, a white coating made opaque with tin oxide, gives Talavera its milky surface, and the painted colours fuse into it in the kiln. Blue became the favourite colour partly under the influence of Chinese porcelain that reached Mexico on the Manila galleons, the ships that sailed between the Philippines and Acapulco. Since 1997 a denomination of origin has protected the name: genuine pieces come from certified workshops, use only six colours made from natural pigments (blue, yellow, black, green, orange and mauve), and take three to four months to make. In 2019 UNESCO listed the craft, together with its Spanish counterparts, as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

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WonderArt

Chinese paper cutting, called jianzhi, turns a single sheet of paper into connected patterns cut with scissors or knives. The cut-outs decorate windows and doors at the Spring Festival and carry good wishes to weddings and birthdays.

Paper was invented in China, and the oldest surviving paper cut-outs, circles of repeating patterns from about the sixth century, were found in tombs in Xinjiang, in north-west China. Every opening has to leave enough paper to hold the rest together, so a design must also work as a structure. The most familiar pieces are the red 'window flowers' pasted up for the Spring Festival and the double-happiness character cut for weddings. Styles vary by region, from bold northern folk figures to the delicate work of southern cities such as Yangzhou. Girls traditionally learned the art at home from older women, and many cutters fold the paper to cut several layers at once. UNESCO listed Chinese paper cutting as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009.

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StillnessArt

Arabic calligraphy is the art of beautiful writing in the Arabic script. Because the letters join from right to left, calligraphers can stretch, compress and stack them, controlling every line with a pen cut from reed, called a qalam.

Arabic has 28 letters, and most change shape depending on whether they stand alone or join the letters beside them, which gives the calligrapher great freedom. In the tenth century Ibn Muqla, a vizier in Baghdad, set rules of proportion using the diamond-shaped dot made by the pen's tip as a unit of measure, and six classic styles grew from them, among them the monumental thuluth and the clear naskh used for books. Training is long: students copy a master's models stroke by stroke until they receive a licence, the ijaza, to sign their own work, a tradition that was especially strong in Ottoman Istanbul. Calligraphers cut their own reed pens and often use soot-based ink. In 2021 UNESCO listed Arabic calligraphy as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

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StillnessArt

Khachkars are Armenian memorial stones: upright slabs carved with a cross in the centre, framed by interlacing plants, geometric knots and sometimes figures. Each one is carved individually, so no two are alike.

The name joins the Armenian words khach, 'cross', and kar, 'stone'. Khachkars appear from the ninth century, and about 40,000 survive across Armenia and historic Armenian lands. They were raised to remember the dead, to mark a victory or the building of a church or bridge, or to ask for protection and salvation. Carvers work local stone, often tuff, a soft volcanic rock, or basalt, with chisels and fine points, and many set the cross above a rosette or sun disc. Some of the finest were carved around 1300 by masters such as Momik. The skills still pass from master to apprentice, and UNESCO listed khachkar art and craftsmanship as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010.

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StillnessArt

Mingei, Japanese for 'folk crafts', is a word the thinker Yanagi Sōetsu and the potters Kawai Kanjirō and Hamada Shōji coined in 1925. They argued that ordinary, useful objects made by unknown craftspeople could be as beautiful as fine art.

The word joins minshū, 'the common people', and kōgei, 'craft'. Yanagi's interest began with Korean ceramics: on a visit to Korea in 1916 he came to admire pots by anonymous potters, and in 1924 he opened a folk art museum in Seoul. Mingei turned attention from signed masterpieces to pottery, baskets, textiles, lacquer and tools shaped by repetition and daily use. In 1936 Yanagi founded the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo. His friend the English potter Bernard Leach spread the ideas in the West and translated Yanagi's essays, published in English in 1972 as The Unknown Craftsman. Historians also note that much of the collecting took place in Korea and Taiwan under Japanese rule, which ties the movement to the history of Japan's empire.

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WonderArt

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet and painter whose work ranged across poetry, essays, painting, tapestry and fold-out books. She lived between Beirut, Paris and California, and Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco became one of her lifelong subjects.

Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925 to a Muslim father from Damascus and a Greek Christian mother from Smyrna, today's İzmir. She studied philosophy in Paris and the United States and taught at a college in San Rafael, California, where she began painting in the late 1950s. Mount Tamalpais, which she could see from her home in Sausalito, appears in many of her small canvases of bold colour blocks, and her 1986 book Journey to Mount Tamalpais describes that attachment. As a writer she opposed the Vietnam War in her poetry and wrote Sitt Marie Rose (1978), a novel set in the Lebanese Civil War. Wide recognition as a painter came late, after the Documenta exhibition of 2012. She died in Paris in 2021, aged 96.

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WonderArt

A suzani is a large embroidered cloth from Central Asia, traditionally made for a bride's dowry. The design was often drawn across several joined cotton strips, which were then separated so that female relatives could embroider them, and finally sewn back together.

The name comes from the Persian word for needle, and suzanis are linked above all with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with famous centres in Bukhara, Samarkand and Shahrisabz. A girl's mother and female relatives began work on them while she was still young; the finished pieces hung on walls, covered beds and were presented to the groom on the wedding day. A professional draftswoman, called a kalamkesh, usually drew the flowers, vines and medallions on four to six strips of homespun cotton. Because the strips were embroidered separately, motifs often fail to meet exactly at the seams and colours shift from one strip to the next. Very few suzanis older than the late eighteenth century survive.

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DriveArt

Semiha Berksoy was Türkiye's first woman opera singer, and over seventy years she also acted on stage and screen, wrote and painted. Her paintings bring self-portraits, stage roles and memories together in a dramatic world of their own.

Berksoy was born in Istanbul in 1910; her mother was a painter, and she studied theatre, music and painting in the city. In 1931 she acted in İstanbul Sokaklarında, the first Turkish sound film. In 1934 she sang in Özsoy, composed by Ahmet Adnan Saygun at Atatürk's request and regarded as the first Turkish opera, at a performance in Ankara for the visiting Shah of Iran. In 1939 she sang the title role of Ariadne auf Naxos in Berlin during celebrations of Richard Strauss's 75th birthday, becoming the first Turkish opera singer to perform on a European stage. Her paintings, on canvas, cardboard or fabric, show frontal figures, often herself, surrounded by written names, dates, stage curtains and people from her life. She was named a State Artist in 1998 and died in 2004.

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DriveArt

Füreya Koral was one of the pioneers of modern studio ceramics in Türkiye. Besides vessels and sculptures, she made large ceramic wall panels for hotels, universities and other public buildings, bringing clay into spaces people use every day.

Koral was born in Istanbul in 1910 into a family of artists and writers: the painters Fahrelnissa Zeid and Aliye Berger were her mother's sisters, and the writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, known as the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, was her mother's brother. She turned to ceramics while being treated for tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium in the late 1940s, took a ceramics course in Lausanne in 1949 and held her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1951. In 1953 she opened a studio in the Harbiye district of Istanbul, which became a meeting place for artists. Her panels include work for the Marmara Hotel at Atatürk Forest Farm in Ankara (1959) and for Hacettepe University's Faculty of Medicine (1965). She died in 1997.

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StillnessArt

Ara Güler was the photojournalist who recorded twentieth-century Istanbul through its people. His pictures of fishers, workers, children, ferries, back streets and changing neighbourhoods show the city as a place where people lived, not as a postcard view.

Güler was born in Istanbul in 1928 and started as a photojournalist at the newspaper Yeni İstanbul in 1950. In 1958 he became the first Near East correspondent for the American publisher Time-Life, and his work appeared in magazines such as Paris Match, Stern and The Sunday Times. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Marc Riboud, whom he met in the 1950s, brought him into the Magnum Photos agency in the early 1960s. He called himself a photojournalist and visual historian rather than an artist, and he became known as 'the Eye of Istanbul'. He photographed figures such as Picasso, Dalí, Churchill and Hitchcock, and his pictures helped introduce the ancient city of Aphrodisias to the world. He died in 2018, leaving a vast archive.

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WonderArt

The Catalan Atlas, made in Majorca around 1375, is a world map painted on six parchment leaves. It combines accurate sea charts of the Mediterranean with astronomy, rulers, trade caravans and travellers' tales, illuminated in gold and colour.

It is usually attributed to Cresques Abraham, a Jewish mapmaker who led the Majorcan school of chartmaking, and his workshop. The first leaves hold a calendar and a picture of the cosmos; the map itself runs from the Atlantic to China. Its coastlines follow portolan charts, the practical sea charts drawn from sailors' compass bearings, and it contains the earliest known compass rose on such a chart. In West Africa it shows Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, holding a piece of gold, with a caption calling him the richest and noblest king of the region because of the gold found in his lands. The atlas was in the library of King Charles V of France by 1380 and is now kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

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WonderDesign

The Dymaxion map, designed by Buckminster Fuller, spreads the world across the 20 triangular faces of an icosahedron and unfolds them flat. In its best-known layout the continents stay whole and the cuts fall in the oceans.

Every flat map distorts the round Earth somewhere. Fuller's answer was to project the globe onto a solid with flat faces, where each face bends the shapes on it only a little, and then unfold the solid. He first showed the idea in Life magazine in 1943, using a cuboctahedron, a solid with square and triangular faces, and patented it in 1946. In 1954, working with Shoji Sadao, he switched to the twenty-sided icosahedron and published the Airocean World Map, in which the continents appear as one nearly continuous island. Because the triangles can be arranged in different ways, the map has no fixed top or bottom. For Fuller that was the point: north at the top is a habit, not a law of nature. The artist Jasper Johns painted a large version of the map in 1967.

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WonderArt

The American painter Albert Munsell described every colour with three measures: its hue, such as red or blue; its value, how light or dark it is; and its chroma, how intense it is. His system, published in 1905, is still used to match colours.

Munsell was a painter who taught art at the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston. He found everyday colour names too vague to teach with and wanted a rational system based on numbers instead. He began work in 1898 and published it as A Color Notation in 1905. His key step was to space each scale so that equal steps in the numbers look like equal differences to the human eye; measurements by the Optical Society of America in the 1940s later refined the charts. In the 1930s the US Department of Agriculture adopted the system for describing soil, and soil scientists still carry Munsell charts in the field. Dentists use it to match the colour of tooth restorations, and breweries to match the colour of beer.

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WonderArt

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born artist and naturalist, painted each stage of an insect's life, from egg to caterpillar to butterfly, on the plant it fed on. Her 1705 book on the insects of Suriname joined close observation with art.

Merian was born in Frankfurt in 1647 into a family of engravers and was raising silkworms by the age of 13. In 1679 she published the first volume of a book showing how caterpillars transform. Many people then believed insects were born from mud or rotting matter, and illustrators usually drew dead specimens in tidy rows; her careful drawings of each life stage helped show that insects follow a fixed life cycle. In 1699, aged 52, she sold 255 of her own paintings to fund a voyage to the Dutch colony of Suriname with her daughter Dorothea. For nearly two years she collected and raised insects there, relying on enslaved Africans and Indigenous people for help and knowledge, until illness, possibly malaria, sent her home. Her Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) became a landmark of natural history.

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WonderBiography

In 1988 Belgian-American mathematician Ingrid Daubechies published the wavelets now named after her: small wave-like patterns that split a signal into its broad outline and its fine detail. Wavelets like hers help compress images, clean up noisy data and store fingerprints.

Fourier analysis, the classic tool for signals, shows which frequencies a sound or picture contains but not where they occur. Wavelets can also show where a sudden change or sharp edge happens. Working at the Courant Institute in New York in 1986–87, Daubechies found wavelets that are exact, confined to a short stretch of the signal and quick to compute, which let wavelets move from theory into everyday digital processing. Related wavelets she co-designed are used in the JPEG 2000 image standard, and the FBI's fingerprint archive relies on wavelet compression. She has also used these methods to study paintings by Van Gogh and to support the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. In 2011 she became the first woman to lead the International Mathematical Union, and in 2023 the first woman to win the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

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WonderArt

In the late 1800s, photographers learned to split movement into a rapid series of still pictures, a technique called chronophotography, and scientists could at last measure how people and animals walk, run and fly. Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey were its pioneers.

In June 1878, at Leland Stanford's farm in Palo Alto, California, Eadweard Muybridge set up a row of cameras that fired one after another as a horse galloped past. His pictures of the mare Sallie Gardner settled a long debate: a galloping horse does lift all four hooves off the ground at once, but with its legs tucked beneath it, not stretched out fore and aft as painters had shown. In 1882 the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey built a rifle-shaped camera that took twelve pictures a second, and he developed ways of recording successive phases of a movement on a single plate, so a walking man or a flying bird became one layered image. From 1880 Muybridge projected his sequences as moving pictures with his zoopraxiscope, and both men's work fed into the birth of cinema.

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