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The paper begins by engaging with recent reviews of volume five of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, challenging the principles on which the reviews were written and questioning the assumption of personal intimacy that reviewers, critics and biographers often make in relation to Mansfield. Her role as a reviewer for the Athenaeum is then analysed, principally using reviews that were not covered by Clare Hanson in her selection of Mansfield's critical writing. Initially the paper considers Mansfield's experience as a reviewer and editor during the Rhythm period, and the significance for her of the Fauvist aesthetic of that journal. Mansfield's ruthless scrutiny of the fiction of contemporaries is examined for what it reveals about her own practice, and is then applied to two particular themes in her fiction, the depiction of children and of the secret self, here specifically in relation to tuberculosis. The opportunities that were not offered to Mansfield, perhaps because she was seen as an uneducated woman, are discussed as well as the dimension that her witty and incisive reviewing adds to our assessment of her literary achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a global sample of the 214 most prominent modern visual artists born 1850–1945. Two analytical methods are used to analyse the age at which artists produce their best works—one based on year-of-birth cohorts of modern visual artists and the other on stylistic groups. The cohort-analysis shows that the career patterns develop similarly over time for artists working in the USA and Europe; over time the artists’ peak ages first increase, reach their maximum for artists born between 1890 and 1909, and then decrease again. The study of stylistic groups shows that artists associated with Fauvism, the Nabis and Post-Impressionism experience an early peak, whereas artists associated with Surrealism, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, Pop Art, Expressionism and Cubism peak later in their careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the exhibition "Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904-1914," staged at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, Hungary in 2006.

During the social, political, and cultural conflicts of the twentieth century, Chinese art was changed or reformed more rapidly than in any other period. Besides the traditional literati arts that had been fostered continuously from the past across the century, there were Western imports such as impressionism, post-impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism, that strongly influenced Chinese art developments but, officially, it was Western realism, filtered through Russian revolutionary art, that became the mainstream charging Chinese art institutions and art societies following the Maoist revolution in 1949. However, there was another art, easily forgotten or ignored, which is in fact something more significant, more original and more Chinese in the art history of the twentieth century Mao's Mass art.

The article discusses the French modernist Fauves' use of "primitivism," deriving from African and Oceanic primitive art masks, in their art from 1905 through 1908. An overview of the influence that African and Oceanic masks had on French Fauve artists Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck's art is provided.

The article focuses on the writing of author Katherine Mansfield and her interest in children. Topics include how Mansfield portrays childhood and child artists, also known as the concept of "innocent eye," on her characters such as Kezia Burnell in the story "Prelude," the possible influence of Fauve on her works particularly the images of children and their innocent eye, and the use of "innocent eye" concept by art critic John Ruskin.

The starting point of this reflection is deeply anchored in my practical work as a drawer. Knowing my work was never about illustrating space or about depicting it, I was forced to ask myself about the nature of space my drawing was creating, as a non-figurative art form. I noticed that numerous artists and critics where asking this very same question all along the twentieth century, opposing the flatness of the picture plane to a non-illusionist painterly space. I chose to extricate some of the prominent issues about space in modern painting to show the dense and multiple definitions the notion of space endured during the last century, trying to define more clearly the status of a painterly space made by shapes, layers and matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the modernist Fauvist dynamic of the little magazine Rhythm (1911-1913) and its effect on the aesthetic development of two of its contributors, Katherine Mansfield and Frederick Goodyear. The irony of the magazine's aspiration towards brutality is considered in relation to Mansfield's 'An Indiscreet Journey' (probably written in 1915), an account of a sexual escapade into a restricted military zone in France; her sonnet addressed to her brother, who was killed in a training accident in France in 1915; and a post-war story, 'The Fly'. Frederick Goodyear's Bergsonian essay in Rhythm, with its resonant phrase nostalgie de la boue, is compared with a poem he wrote shortly before his own death in the trenches in 1917. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human urge to represent the three-dimensional world using two-dimensional pictorial representations dates back at least to Paleolithic times. Artists from ancient to modern times have struggled to understand how a few contours or color patches on a flat surface can induce mental representations of a three-dimensional scene. This article summarizes some of the recent breakthroughs in scientifically understanding how the brain sees that shed light on these struggles. These breakthroughs illustrate how various artists have intuitively understood paradoxical properties about how the brain sees, and have used that understanding to create great art. These paradoxical properties arise from how the brain forms the units of conscious visual perception; namely, representations of three-dimensional boundaries and surfaces. Boundaries and surfaces are computed in parallel cortical processing streams that obey computationally complementary properties. These streams interact at multiple levels to overcome their complementary weaknesses and to transform their complementary properties into consistent percepts. The article describes how properties of complementary consistency have guided the creation of many great works of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a problem-solving model of creativity based on constraint selection. In the model, constraints come in pairs that (a) preclude reliable solutions and (b) promote search for novel ones. The most important constraint specifies a novel goal. Other constraints—source (elements for recombination), task (how materials are used), and subject (motif, theme)—are then strategically selected to realize the goal constraint. We use Fauvism to briefly introduce the model before analyzing the constraints selected by Max Beckmann and Philip Guston in the 2 mature phases of each artist's career. The analyses are then used to support our contention that constraint selection is central to creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that early twentieth-century Paris, as the most artistically avant-garde metropolitan centre of its time, enabled a group of artists and writers from British colonies to define their own national identity. Their nationalism was not primarily political but cultural. The Scottish Colourist J. D. Fergusson, the Canadian life-writer and painter Emily Carr and the Australian artist Margaret Preston all encountered in Paris the work of the Fauvists, and through it they came to recognize the stylistic particularity of the indigenous art of their own homelands. Through the agency of the Fauvist inflection of Post-Impressionism, they were enabled to perceive the 'native', Celtic, indigenous Canadian or Aboriginal, as a powerful aesthetic, rather than as a primitive and outmoded convention. A specific focus for artistic iconoclasm, and the breaking down of the traditional genre boundaries of academicians, was the influential philosophy of Henri Bergson. To investigate his ideas in relation to the arts, John Middleton Murry created the influential journal Rhythm, with Fergusson as its art editor and, soon after it began, with Katherine Mansfield as assistant editor and contributor. Though the magazine had no explicit political affiliations, its stance was implicitly anticolonial; its watchword was taken from the Irish cultural nationalist J. M. Synge: 'Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal.' It looked for contributors, both artists and writers, who eschewed realism in favour of a pared-down aesthetic that could stimulate an intuitive response in the perceiver. Its impact was felt in New Zealand, Australia and Canada; what Carr wrote after her training in Paris expresses the paradox of discovering the local through the international: 'I was glad I had been to France. More than ever I was convinced that the old way of seeing was inadequate.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the life of the Hungarian painter Lajos Tihanyi in Paris, France. Reaction of Tihanyi to the Fauvist works of painter Bela Czobel; Respect of the people for Tihanyi; Association of the painter with writers; Influence of Tihanyi on writer Gyula Brassai; View of the painter on photography.