Author, Lecturer, Broadcaster & Cultural Arts Expert;
President of Art Collage JANG/J Music/J Art/J Books & Media.
Author of over 40 books published on Amazon, including The Crimson Horror series and The Great and Immortal Painters’ Stories series.
Dedicated to sharing insights into art, culture, literature, and creative expression through writing, lectures, media, and content creation.
Following
the last week, I am going to start my 77th lecture.
Today's
lecture is “Atmospheric”, the fourth topic of “New Age Music”, which is a
summary of the contents of “77. New Age Music: 4. Atmospheric” introduced on February
25th, 2017.
“Atmospheric”
is composed of individual's voluntary will to appreciate music, and refers to
the form of listening to individual music and the target music to obtain
emotional stability by making the acoustic environment beautiful. In the
creation of such an environment, acoustic elements that can feel the natural
environment of the sounds of nature such as the sounds of birds and wind are
also included.
It is different from the “Ambient”, targeting a large number of
unspecified listeners in any given spaces, in that the “Atmospheric” composes
the listening environments and acoustic elements by individual's voluntary
will.
This genre can be viewed as connecting the flow of “Easy Listening”
genre, which gained great popularity from the 1950s to the 1960s. Some also
refer to the music genre as Progressive Music and the music genre is dominated
by keyboardist musicians. The musicians in Atmospheric genre have nothing to do
with avant-garde, and can be seen as a connection of the trend of pop, rock,
world music, jazz or classical music.
Unlike the other genres of New Age music,
it is the music that generally creates a soft and pleasant atmosphere, and also
referred to as “Contemporary Instrumental.” It pursues a sound allowing
listeners to feel nature like the sounds of birds or waves along with the
splendid tones of advanced electronic instruments.
Representative
artists in this genre include Davol, Chris Spheeris, G.E.N.E, 2002, Mike
Oldfield, Suzanne Ciani and Yanni.
Open Book, Davol
Maya, Chris Spheeris
Fluting Paradise, G.E.N.E.
Across an Ocean of Dreams, 2002
Platinum, Mike Oldfield
Music For Denali, Suzanne Ciani
Keys to Imagination, Yanni
You can
also review this lecture from following media.
“Savage Messiah” is a 1972
British biographical film about the life of French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska,
made by Russ-Arts and distributed by MGM.
The film was directed and produced by
Ken Russell, along with a screenplay by Christopher Logue, based on the book
"Savage Messiah" by Harold Stanley Ede. Much of the content of Ede's
book came from letters exchanged between Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and his lover
Sophie Brzeska.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French
artist and sculptor, born on October 4, 1891 and died on June 5, 1915, who
developed direct carving in a rough-hewn, primitive style.
Self portrait, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Henri Gaudier was born in
Saint-Jean-de-Braye near Orléans. In 1910, he moved to London to become an
artist, despite not having a formal art training.
At this time, he moved there
with a Polish writer Sophie Brzeska, whom he had met at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
in Paris, and with whom he began an intense relationship, adding her surname to
his although they never married. At the age of 18, Gaudier met
Sophie Brzeska, who was twice his age.
Sophie Brzeska, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Several books about Gaudier's work have
been written, but only the book“Savage Messiah” by H. S. Ede deals with their
relationship. Brzeska’s relationship with Gaudier was similar to a
co-dependency because both suffered from obvious mental problems. Henri was
devoted to Sophie and even added her surname to his, but Sophie was often
disregarded and cold to Henri's romantic attitude.
Boy with a Coney, marble, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Brzeska is often excluded
from the accounts of Gaudier's life, and even the book "Savage
Messiah", which deals with their relationship, focuses on Gaudier and
gives little attention to Brzeska. However, the 1972 film made by Ken Russell
based on this book changed the focus to the relationship between Sophie and
Henri Gaudier.
After his death, Sophie Brzeska became insane and eventually
died in an asylum in 1925.
Movie
Review
“A Striking Portrait of
Creative Energy”
“This is the sort of
revolutionary creativity that the UK film Council should perhaps be funding”
“Offbeat drama about the
sculptor Henry Gaudier and his lover”
“Worth seeing again”
“A fine film on the nature
of art by Ken Russel”
“A love story of artists
and a love letter to art”
Interesting
stories about the film
1. In this film, a sequence
featuring producer and director Ken Russell was shot, but later discarded.
2. In order to save production
costs, copies of uncopyrighted Soviet recordings of Claude Debussy and
Alexander Scriabin were made.
3. The Polish folk song that Sophie
(Dorothy Tutin) sings at the posh dinner party was composed by Tutin.
4. Scott Antony only appeared in
two other movies besides this film.
On every Thursday,
I am introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the
title “Interesting
Art Stories”.
The 39th story for
this week is “Composition
II with Red Blue and Yellow”by Piet Mondrian.
Piet Mondrian
“Composition
II with Red Blue and Yellow” is Piet Mondrian's 1930 painting, which greatly
contributed to expressing the visual language of abstract concepts despite the
use of a relatively small canvas. The thick and black lines representing the
borders of various geometric figures are one of the important elements defining
the characteristics of the work. This work is a product of
the Dutch De Stijl movement, and Mondrian is one of its leading artists.
Born
in the Netherlands in 1872, Mondrian is known to have always had an interest in
art. His uncle Fritz Mondrian, who was a professional painter, helped him move
to Amsterdam, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under the master
August Allebé for three years, and he transformed his interests from a simple
hobby to an artist's passion.
Fritz Mondrian
Portrait of Johannes Luden, August Allebé (1868)
Moving to Paris in 1910, he began to discover his
potential, where he was introduced to Cubism, a major influence to his work. He
said “of all the abstraction artists, I felt only the Cubists had found the
right path", showing a favor on Cubism, but he still found this style too
realistic and began to immerse himself in more abstract concepts.
Then,
Mondrian, who visited the Netherlands, was scheduled to stay there for a while,
but due to the outbreak of World War 1, he stayed an extended period of five
years. Faced with an unexpected situation, he met many important figures in the
art field in the Netherlands during this time, which gave birth to De Stijl.
In
particular, an encounter with fellow Dutch artist Bart van der Leck provided
the basis for Mondrian to exchange ideas in this field. Mondrian got from van
der Leck the concept of painting flat areas of pure color, a solution to his
coloring problem, and van der Leck adopted Mondrian's concept of crossed
vertical and horizontal lines as a basis for composition.
Metz & Co. showroom with wall hangings (left and rear walls), Bart van der Leck
Shortly after the
formation of this Mondrian and van der Leck's partnership, Theo van Doesburg, a
painter who frequently wrote about art for many periodicals and who is
considered the propagandist of the De Stijl movement, contacted them. He
invited Mondrian and van der Leck to join his initiative to launch an artistic
review periodical, resulting in the journal entitled “De Stijl.”
Neo-Plasticism: Composition VII, Theo van Doesburg (1917)
De Stijl, Vol.1, no.1, Delft (Oct. 1917)
They involved not only
painters but also architects in the movement, but the movement was confined to
the Netherlands due to the war. However, the direction of pursuit of the
artists involved in this movement was not the same, for example, not all De
Stijl artists produced works that mimicked Mondrian. They were individual
artists and architects who applied similar but distinct techniques to their
work to achieve similar theoretical goal, and Mondrian attempted to define the
ambition of De Stijl artists in his personal artistic manifesto,
“Neo-Plasticist in Painting (1917)”.
The creation of the essence of life itself
through abstraction depends on straight lines and primary colors what Mondrian
refers to as the universal means of expression, and this essence of life can be
illustrated by transcending the particular to express the universal.
Also, Mondrian's art had a
spiritual quality to it, and he practiced Theosophy rooted in mystic, oriental
interpretation, and Nieuwe Beelding, a word used in the teachings of Theosophy,
appears in Mondrian's work. The Nieuwe Beelding is
translated as Neo-Plasticism, a term used to describe his art in Mondrian's
personal essays.
The logo for the Theosophical Society
Mondrian conducted various
De Stijl practices in this work, but he did not consider it a success, and
Mondrian, who continued to develop and refine his work, found some satisfaction
with his final works before his death.
Although De Stijl was a movement confined
to Dutch region, many people credit the movement, and in particular Mondrian,
played an important role in expressing abstract concepts and defining this term
in the art field today.
