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A literary criticism of the book "The Tragic Muse," by Henry James is presented. Topics mentioned include the conflict between the world and art presented in the book, the symbolic significance of characters in the novel, and the social aspects of painting. Also mentioned are the relation of theatre, painting, and the public and the art criticism.

This paper looks at the educational project of Belgium’s acclaimed socialist and modernist architect Renaat Braem (1910–2001). While Braem is foremost remembered as a militant opinion maker, his work as an educator and an artist has received little scrutiny. When Braem was appointed interim director at the Antwerp National Higher Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning (NHIBS) in 1962, his first action point was not to change the curriculum. He instead reconstructed the physical configuration of the school. With an eye-catching staircase painting, he accentuated an important passage in the school building: the one from the administrative offices and library to the architectural studios. Claiming a central position in the institute, the staircase functioned as a stage and an auditorium on which an ideological and educational programme was enacted in an implicit, yet very physical manner. This article not only looks atwhatthe painting represents, but also athowit represents by applying Randolph Starn’s three categories of seeing: the glance, the measured view, and the scan. This threefold reading of the painting enables us to unpack (a) Braem’s educational project based on a socialist ideology and (b) the institutional climate of the 1960s. In the institutional debates, hovering between tradition and the rationalisation of education, Braem’s staircase painting proposed a third way. It revised the existing doctrines by reconciling the rational approach with a stronger focus on the human in the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article talks about author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's canvases of Florida oranges, stating her artistic activism demonstrate how the canvas held broader implications for Reconstruction in Florida. Topics discussed include the bestselling novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Stowe that brought her renown as an ambassador for the American abolitionist movement.

Dafen Oil Painting Village, the largest oil painting village in current China, takes cultural industries like creation and wholesale of oil paintings as the pillar. As one of the urban villages in Shenzhen, Dafen Village not only has the common characteristics of urban morphology as ordinary urban villages, but also has something unique. In this paper, study of the urban morphology of Dafen Oil Painting Village is mainly fiom 3 aspects: firstly, the formation of street space in Dafen Village; secondly, analysis of the status of urban morphology of Dafen Village; thirdly, the plane layout and public space of Dafen Village. In the end, this paper put forward some suggestions about the future development of urban morphology and space layout in Dafen Village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the role of painting in human life throughout history from the 17th century through the early 21st century, and the relationship of time and meaning in painting. According to the authors, the painting has been the oldest demonstrations of human creativity. An overview of the paintings of the Spanish Cubist artist Pablo Picasso, including his painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” is provided.

In the present study, we examined the eye movement behaviour of children and adults looking at five Van Gogh paintings in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The goal of the study was to determine the role of top-down and bottom-up attentional processes in the first stages of participants’ aesthetic experience. Bottom-up processes were quantified by determining a salience map for each painting. Top-down processing was manipulated by first allowing participants to view the paintings freely, then providing background information about each painting, and then allowing them to view the paintings a second time. The salience analysis showed differences between the eye movement behaviour of children and adults, and differences between the two phases. In the children, the first five fixations during the free viewing phase were strongly related to visually salient features of the paintings—indicating a strong role for bottom-up factors. In the second phase, after children had received background information, top-down factors played a more prominent role. By contrast, adults’ observed patterns were similar in both phases, indicating that bottom-up processes did not play a major role when they viewed the paintings. In the second phase, children and adults both spent more time looking at regions that were mentioned in the background information. This effect was greater for adults than for children, confirming the notion that adults, when viewing paintings, rely much more on top-down processing than children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This cross-sectional study examines spatial and thematic patterns of murals in East Los Angeles, a barrio that has long been one of the traditional focal points for the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles, to determine how exterior wall murals mark the cultural landscape. To do this, approximately two-hundred-fifty murals were field surveyed, mapped, and photographed, with the results being subjected to content analysis. Data from secondary sources, including the neighborhood’s history and demographics, were used to contextualize the results. The results indicate that most murals are located on commercial buildings, with sub-concentrations on public-serving and residential buildings. A majority of murals in East Los Angeles convey one of three main themes: the community’s origins, its struggles, or its religious identity; these themes have changed over time in response to sociopolitical and urban contexts. By anchoring murals to the local context through the use of local elements, muralists in East Los Angeles create a specific sense of place. Although murals are an ephemeral subject, I conclude that an analysis of mural locations and themes helps to explain their aesthetic and socialization functions and demonstrates their role in the cultural landscape in East Los Angeles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the arts such as paintings, sandstone relief and drawings depicting the Indian tribes by several artists including George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Cole and George Catlin. Topics discussed include, the paintings of Bingham "The Concealed Enemy" and "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri", the elected president in the U.S. James K. Polk on his promise to push the legislation annexing the Republic of Texas and the changes of primary commodity.

The article focuses on mural making as an effective tool for public expression which includes murals depicting social issues like discrimination, pluralism and substance abuse.

The article offers information on various topics including the social aspects of painting, the modern sculpture, and the theatre productions management. Topics mentioned include the social aspects of playwriting, the importance of English language in communication, and the importance of freedom and solidarity. Also mentioned are the social aspects of dictatorship and the importance of imagination in playwriting.

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The article discusses the life stories of various current and former homeless youths in the U.S. such as Brandon Stokes, and it mentions statistics regarding homeless children in places such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program's journey2home public art project dealing with youth housing insecurity is examined, along with the A Place to Call Home youth housing project and the efforts to help young people such as Stokes improve their lives.

The article discusses the impact of arts in promoting social awareness highlighting the blessing of murals in Estrada Courts, a public housing community in Los Angeles, California that feature the painting of female muralist Norma Montoya commemorating the relevance of the art to Chicana movement.

In 2009 two Kimberley rock art paintings were reported as representing Australia's extinct marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex (Akerman 2009; Akerman and Willing 2009). The first painting was re-examined and confirmed as a representation of Thylacoleo (Woodhouse 2012). Some researchers now refer to the presence of Thylacoleo in Kimberley rock art to support further theories about northern Australian rock art and prehistoric events. This paper argues the case that both paintings represent the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus, Tasmanian tiger) and not Thylacoleo. Distinctive attributes of the thylacine, present in both paintings, are described. Thylacine paintings are common in the Kimberley and appear in a variety of shapes, sizes, postures and artistic styles. Neither painting is from the Pleistocene; the first is superimposed over earlier human figures, and, stylistically, neither belongs to the Archaic Period in the Kimberley rock art sequence. Thylacines became extinct on mainland Australia following the arrival of the dingo approximately 3500 years ago (Paddle 2000:20), while Thylacoleo is argued to have become extinct approximately 46,000 years ago (Roberts et al. 2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses aspects of the painting of Faith Ringgold titled "American People," which was featured at the Spectrum Gallery in Manhattan. She states that the painting resembles violence and interracial bloodletting wherein different races attack one another with guns, knives and bare hands. The author identifies the image as horror cartoon of bloody street fighting.

An essay is presented on armed resistance. It offers a history of the potential violence and armed resistance in the painting of Jeff Donaldson titled "Ala Shango." It notes that the painting demonstrates a mode of African American artistic practice in the difference between African and African-diasporic cultures.

The article discusses the opposition of the conservatives and Communists to the social message and social decorum that are represented by the murals of artist Thomas Hart Benton during the 1930s. Benton's artistic style and aesthetics were criticized on several grounds such as his vision of American history, his depiction of a true people's history and his use of three-dimensional rhythms of design akin to cartoons. Benton decided to transfer from New York to Kansas City in 1935.

Urban space has the potential to shape people's experience and understanding of the city and of the culture of a place. In some respects, murals and allied forms of wall art occupy the intersection of street art and public art; engaging, and sometimes, transforming the urban space in which they exist and those who use it. While murals are often conceived as a more ‘permanent’ form of painted art there has been a trend in recent years towards more deliberately transient forms of wall art such as washed-wall murals and reverse graffiti. These varying forms of public wall art are embedded within the fabric of the urban space and history. This paper will explore the intersection of public space, public art and public memory in a mural project in the Irish city of Cork. Focussing on the washed-wall murals of Cork's historic Shandon district, we explore the sympathetic and synergetic relationship of this wall art with the heritage architecture of the built environment and of the murals as an expression of and for the local community, past and present. Through the Shandon Big Wash Up murals we reflect on the function of participatory public art as an explicit act of urban citizenship which works to support community-led re-enchantment in the city through a reconnection with its past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates a transformative encounter between the Chinese artist Xu Beihong (徐悲鴻 1895-1953) and audiences in the Soviet Union during his 1933-1934 exhibitions of Chinese art in Europe. While Xu was exchanging perspectives and addressing questions about Chinese painting, a misreading of one of his paintings sparked in him a reconsideration of content and form that eventually led to the creation of some of the earliest Socialist realist ink-and-color paintings in China. This addition to his repertoire is arguably more significant to his legacy than his most popular works because of the way it heralded the coming Socialist realist evolution in guohua (國畫 national painting) and the manner in which Xu's choices would meet the ideological needs of the Communist Party well before it secured authority over the direction of China's arts. Special attention is paid to situating Xu's personal work vis-à-vis Republican and revolutionary art and explaining how the concurrent political milieu paved the way for both the prestige of his art in popular and cultural memory and the unprecedented stature of his art education methodologies in China's revolutionary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 1563 painting, "Tower of Babel," by artist Pieter Bruegel, in the context of art history of the 16th century and the role of allegory. Topics mentioned include the relationship between architecture and morality, iconography and contemporary religious and social debates at the time of Bruegel's painting, and the religious theology connecting architecture with idolatry.

The article discusses the aspects of political partisanship in the murals on outdoor walls of Belfast, Northern Ireland that depict sectarianism in the city during the country's Troubles of 1969 through 1994, through referencing the author's experience touring the city. An overview of the sectarian nature of Belfast, including in regard to the division between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods and Northern Irish peoples' attitudes on this topic, is provided.

The Secret of England's Greatness is a portrait by Thomas Jones Barker of Queen Victoria meeting an African envoy and presenting him with a copy of the Bible. Painted around 1863, it has become an icon of British imperialism in this period and of the justification of colonial expansion in terms of the transmission of the values of the Bible. As such, the portrait appears confident and unambiguous: the secret of England's greatness is unravelled and the truth is exposed. This article seeks to disturb the apparent absence of mystery in this painted encounter and to examine what remains concealed in the meeting between the white sovereign and the black emissary. Moving from Barker's painting to William Mulready's The Toyseller, which was completed in the same years and depicts a black pedlar trying to sell a wooden toy to a white mother and child, the article uncovers, within the language of painting and its surrounding discourses, a different kind of disturbing and exhilarating secret, concerned with racial identity and mid-Victorian desire. Working from a reading of the surface of the paintings to related representations of blackness in nineteenth-century science and culture, the article considers how The Toyseller negotiates the proximity of the figures of the black pedlar and the white mother and child and the significance of the compositional gap between them and suggests that Mulready's painting visualizes many of the issues that were at the heart of British imperialism in the middle of the nineteenth century, following the abolition of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on the architecture and paintings in Argentina. Topics include the importance of invention and innovation for the production of architecture, the return and revival of modernism and ideas of post-modernism, and how Argentinians view their culture and landscape. Also mentioned are the possible enhancement of the character of Córdoba City.

In this paper, I argue that Plato's conversance with art is insubstantial and exclusionary. Art warrants not only subjects in virtue of utility, morality, and pleasure, but also subjects in virtue of feeling, impression, spirituality, and art itself. I will begin by providing Plato's view and then provide my threefold objection, utilizing examples from art history and the history of aesthetic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an analysis of the popular oil painting "Big Bo" by James Rosenquist. The painting's depiction of the face of black musician Big Bo McGee is discussed, the connection between "Big Bo" and another Rosenquist painting "Painting for the American Negro" is explored, and the impact of the Civil Rights movement on art by Rosenquist and other American artists is examined. Generational differences in social aspects of colors like pink in mid-20th-century U.S. are analyzed and social conflict between the pink color of Rosenquist's painting and the black color of McGee's skin is described.

A translated version of the original Chinese article "Why Study Chinese Architecture?," by Liang Sicheng, which appeared within the volume 7, number 1, October 1944 issue of the journal "Zhongguo yingzao xueshe huikan (Bulletin of the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture," is presented. The impact that Western civilization has on China, including on Chinese arts, painting, music, calligraphy and architecture, is discussed. The relationship between Chinese architecture and Chinese cultural history are also discussed.

The article discusses the social and psychological aspects of Lithuanian painting, including in regard to the impact that photography has on painting. The influence that self-understanding has on art, including in regard to the depiction of women's identity and the impact of photography on subjectivity in painting, is discussed.

The article features Indian painter Maqbool FIda Husain. It states that Husain migrated to Bombay, India and made a living through painting street canvasses. It mentions that Hindu politicians of the right wing defined him as a Muslim enemy during the mid-1900s. It adds that American collectors Chester and Davida Herwitz donated his works to the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Massachusetts.

In his portrait of an unidentified man (Vienna, 1529), Barthel Beham portrays the sitter paused in the midst of a math problem. As has been discovered, the numbers and symbols belong to the vocabulary of numerical calculation. This finding first raises the question of why a patron would want to be shown doing computation with Arabic numerals in a portrait. In 1529, numerical calculation was a commercial tool, not a field with humanistic/social cachet such as geometry. Further, the depicted computation does not make sense: the symbols and numbers are arranged in the form of a problem without actually being one. Yet the patron either did not notice or care. This article argues that the incomplete computation is not only a reflection of the contemporary status of mathematics using Arabic numbers, but also provides a way of understanding how the painting functioned as a portrait in the social milieu of the sixteenth-century Munich court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses three iconic images associated with Kansas in the 19th century, which include the paintings "Drouthy Kansas" by Henry Worrall, "The Spirit of Kansas" by Mary Bartlett Pillsbury Weston and "American Woman and Her Political Peers" by Henrietta Briggs-Wall. An overview of the appearance of the aforementioned paintings at the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893 (World's Fair) in Chicago, Illinois is provided. The paintings' themes of historic violence, women's political rights and immigration to Kansas are discussed. The relationship between the Woman's Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU) and the "American Woman and Her Political Peers" painting is also discussed.

An essay is presented which focuses on the history and sociological aspects of the development of the the binational community art project named ''Border Metamorphosis'' at the border of Calexico, California and Mexicali, Mexico. The author discusses the project as an example of the ways in which communities inhabit the U.S.-Mexico border. The author explores the aspects of gender morphing and Chicana/Mexicana leadership in the development of the project.

The article discusses the influence of the Chinese painter Guo Xi's landscape paintings on early modern Japanese garden design. An overview of the role that space played within Guo Xi's paintings is provided. The distances portrayed within the Chinese landscape paintings, including what are referred to as high distance, deep distance and level distance, are discussed. An overview of the Chinese influence on Japanese gardens, including in the 16th century rock garden at Daisen-in, Japan, is also provided.

This study aimed to evaluate the impact of teaching and learning of Environmental Education activities through mural painting appreciation in enhancing students' knowledge and awareness to the environment. Teaching and learning of Environmental Education activities performed in class for an hour per week for four times whereas mural painting activity with the theme of marine ecosystems conducted outside the classroom for a month. The design of this study was quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test non-equivalent groups with repeated measurements. This study involved 128 form two students from two ordinary secondary schools in Gombak district, Selangor. One school has been selected as the control group whereas another one as the experimental group represented by 64 students respectively. Respondents who participated in this study will be tested with four types of instruments i.e. pre-test, post-test 1, post-test 2 and post-test 3. Each instrument consists of 20 knowledge questions with 4 options answer and 18 awareness statements which measures attitude in the form of 5-Likert scale. The results indicated that the experimental group showed an increase in knowledge and awareness on environment but not to the control group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to uncover the hidden and lived experiences of graffiti artists in contemporary Irish society. It strives to give a face to those artists who are often depicted as masked or hooded villains. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six artists ranging in ages from 18-38 years old. Over participant observation was also used to witness a mural being undertaken by one artist and to gain a more in-depth understanding of what it means to be a graffiti artist. The findings concur with previously studies undertaken, while significant stand-alone results in relation to Irish graffiti culture are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional Chinese painting of beautiful women is a kind of painting with people as the main body. With a history of two thousand years, it has been the precious cultural heritage of Chinese people. On the basis of typical paintings of this kind from different periods in history, a review is made of their painters, content, styles and collections, so that modem painters will better understand them and learn something from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of isometric systems as representations of shadows cast by sunlight, is developed a study of their ensuing patterns of common sense and intimation of apollonian clarity as synthetic beauty. This paper seeks to show the visionary modernist examples of the embracing of the aesthetic with the utopian and totalitarian social ramifications, collectivity, and the triumph of architecture over art. There are interesting and fascinating ideas around the descriptions of space, the orientation of trajectories and their function in creating ideal understanding. The Trimetric projections in the manuals of the Industrial Revolutions, along with the Projection 'felt magnitudes' theories of Monge and Poncelet, into the Kandinsky of 'Point, Line and Plane' and Mondrian's visionary writing and painting, will serve as a backdrop to a discussion of a predisposition in societies for the 'tabula rasa' of radical aesthetics. The paper is a discourse that rests on indisputable axioms in descriptive geometry and most importantly on their cultural ramifications and political expressions. The territory is vast. However, succinct examples and excerpts from criticism and historic research will indicate the seeds of contemporary post-modern sensibilities as an aversion to the grandiosity of modernist emancipation. Jaques Derrida's exhibition "Memories of a Blind Man" Art Intenational 14 (1991) in the Pompidou Centre is the source of these ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the work of Cree artist Kent Monkman, with a particular focus on the Native presence in his scenic paintings of the American West. An overview of the history of European and American landscape painting, including its omission of Native peoples and its display of the U.S. as an uninhabited wilderness, is provided. The role that Monkman's paintings play in subverting the history of landscape painting, including in rejecting the regulation of geography and gender, is discussed. Monkman's paintings' rejection of the representation of a colonizing power in the viewer's gaze is also discussed.

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]