Romare Bearden: Collages of African American Life

In the late 20th century, Romare Bearden's colorful collages, featuring fractured images of figures in a swirl of colorful, frenetic energy, came to be viewed as a poetic distillation of the African American experience. As a black American Bearden lived through a time of wrenching change, and the art for which he is best known today was profoundly influenced by the social forces at play during the mid-20th century and by his response to them.

Bearden was a founding member of Spiral, a group of progressive black artists in New York City. In the early 1960s, the consortium sought ways to explore the role of the artist in relation to the cultural and social events then under way and to contribute directly to the rising call for civil rights. One of Bearden's ideas was that Spiral should create a large collaborative project, speaking in one unified voice. To that end he brought together a collection of images cut from magazines and other sources, many highlighting African Americans and the civil rights struggle, for use in a monumental collage. As a collaborative project, the idea ultimately went nowhere, but Bearden began using the images himself. From this root developed the style and methods that would define his artistic vocabulary for the rest of his life.

Collage had a long history in 20th-century Western art before Bearden first experimented with it. The late cutouts of Henri Matisse, for example, were among the most popular and influential works of the post-World War II school of Paris. Papier collé, the technique of using paper elements that are cut and pasted to create forms, had earlier been a very important technique for Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in their development of synthetic cubism. Bearden knew the work of these masters well, and indeed, much of his work makes good use of the essential tools of synthetic cubism. Another notable influence on Bearden's development was the German American artist George Grosz, Bearden's teacher at the Art Students League of New York in the 1930s. Grosz's work is notable for its vivid figurative imagery and stark social commentary, both of which were present in Bearden's early collages.

Although Bearden had become a respected figure on the American art scene by the 1960s, his trajectory as an artist followed a path very similar to that of many of his contemporaries, both black and white. Respect and prosperity were not necessarily intertwined, and by necessity he continued to work a day job at New York's Department of Social Services until 1969. His first significant works, produced in the 1930s, fit easily within the definition of social realism, as he depicted the plight of (mostly black) urban workers during the difficult times of the Great Depression. He spent the war years in military service and then, under benefits of the GI Bill of Rights, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950. His first postwar paintings deal mostly with literary or religious themes, whether scenes from the life of Christ, Homer's Iliad, or the works of the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Stylistically, Bearden's use of broad, flat color areas in the paintings of the 1940s seems to foreshadow his later collages, but essentially these works show a talented, maturing artist internalizing the accumulated lessons of Western painting. Returning to New York City from Paris, Bearden found an art world dominated by abstract expressionism, and his works turned toward a gentle and sensuous form of lyrical abstraction. In fact his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s owe a distinct debt to the St. Petersburg-born painter Nicolas de Staël, whose work Bearden admired.

All of these influences, coupled with Bearden's own reaction to the civil rights struggle, inspired him to revive his idea for the collaborative project. Collage became his primary medium, and Bearden began to reassert himself as a figurative and, more importantly, African American artist who was concerned with social realities. As his work became widely exhibited and reproduced, he received broader public recognition.

Bearden's first important series of collaged images were exhibited at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York City in 1964 and then in Washington, D.C., at the Corcoran Gallery in 1965. This first group, known as Projections, included photostatic enlargements of relatively small collage works. The subject matter was drawn from autobiographical sources--memories of the rural south, of time spent in Pittsburgh's Hill District, and from his life in urban Harlem. The small original collages contained some color, but they were enlarged in black and white, tuning them to a plaintive note. The fractured images, featuring distorted faces, African masks, and prominent eyes, harbored a compacted energy that could scarcely be contained within the pictures' borders. In their day, at the height of the civil rights struggle, they were recognized as timely and powerful images reflective of both the tensions and aspirations emanating from the soul of black America. Thus it was through his collages that Bearden established himself as one of the leading visionaries of the African American consciousness in a rapidly changing world.

In later years exuberant color infused his collages, which became more upbeat as he explored musical themes, jazz in particular, and other topics important to African American culture. By the time of his death in 1988, Bearden was widely recognized as the most important African American artist of his time. In 2003 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized the largest retrospective exhibition of Bearden's work to date. After closing in the nation's capital in January 2004, the show traveled to San Francisco, Dallas, New York City, and Atlanta.

Interesting Facts About Puppets and Puppetry

Puppets and rich traditions of puppetry have been a facet of world cultural expression in an astonishing number of variations. Puppets can be as simple as a sock drawn over the hand and painted with a face, or as complicated as the moving dragons, operated simultaneously by many puppeteers, used in street processions in China. Their purposes can be as diverse as ritual celebration, children's play, slapstick comedy, or high art.

Although their origins are lost in history, elaborate puppets have been preserved in India and China going back some 4,000 years. Early performance themes included religious subjects and mythology, and in many cases inanimate puppets instead of actors were used for dramatic narratives because of a prohibition on humans engaging in dramatic personification. Thus, early styles of puppetry have influenced many later performance traditions, making stylized marionette-like movements a feature of classical Chinese opera, Burmese dance, and other later theatrical arts. In Japan, Bunraku, utilizing an elaborate form of rod puppet with multiple operators, gained immense popularity in the 18th century, temporarily displacing the traditional No and Kabuki theater as the most popular entertainment forms. Human actors only regained their predominance by adopting certain styles and forms of their puppet competitors.

One of the most developed forms of narrative puppetry is the wayang kulit tradition of Java and other Indonesian islands. Performances are regularly presented on holidays, religious festivals, and ceremonial occasions such as weddings and circumcisions. By tradition performances begin in the evening and continue until dawn, featuring intricate shadow puppets that represent highly stylized human and animal forms, with backlighting to cast the puppets' images onto a translucent screen. At their finest, wayang kulit puppets are extraordinary works of art made of elaborately painted and gilded buffalo hide. Small village productions, while no less traditional, often feature simpler puppets made from cardboard and other, more humble materials.

The Javanese puppeteer, known as the dalang, must be an accomplished entertainer as well as a dedicated artist performing a ceremonial function. Although the traditional plays are not scripted and can vary from performance to performance, the stories themselves are descended from the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; both the characters and the plotlines are thus already well known to the audience.

Puppetry has at times ascended to the level of high art in Europe as well--Franz Josef Haydn's 1773 opera Philemon and Baucis, for example, was originally written for the puppet theater--but it has more often been a staple of popular and children's entertainment. In the English-speaking world, the dominant player in traditional puppet theater is Punch (or Mr. Punch), who finds his roots in the Italian commedia dell'arte character Pulcinella. The first recorded mention of the character in England was by the noted diarist Samuel Pepys, who described a 1662 performance in London. Punch is traditionally a racy and irreverent rascal with a big red nose and a potbelly. Despite his acid sense of humor and the traditional story in which he kills his wife, Judy, and outwits the hangman, he remains a popular hero, the underdog who always outfoxes the authorities. Our word slapstick is derived from a noisemaking device of the early Punch and Judy shows.

Puppets in all their forms are still with us and retain their popularity, including the amiable and educational Muppets of television's Sesame Street, the ventriloquists' dummies who always seem smarter than their sidekicks and masters, and older, more classical forms of puppetry, such as the Japanese Bunraku, which in 1985 found a new home with the opening of the National Bunraku Theater in Osaka.

Interesting Facts About Oscar Peterson

Combining an unmatched technical ability at the piano with a remarkable feel for the instrument, Oscar Peterson rose from a humble childhood in Montreal, Canada, to become one of the world's most famous and highly respected jazz musicians. Described as "the maharaja of the piano" by Duke Ellington, Peterson's career spans the development of jazz from the origin of the genre to its emergence as a modern art form.

Born into a musical family, Oscar Peterson was the fourth of five children who were all taught music from an early age by their father, a railway porter who moved to Canada from the West Indies. Peterson studied both trumpet and piano until a bout with tuberculosis at age six forced him to spend more than a year in the hospital and left him unable to continue playing the trumpet. Instead, he devoted himself to his piano studies with a ferocity that would come to characterize his playing, often practicing more than 12 hours a day. Of Peterson's several teachers, the most influential was Hungarian concert pianist Paul de Marky, who helped his young student develop a formidable technique. Despite his classical training, however, Peterson was captivated by jazz and would often slip downstairs after everyone was asleep to listen quietly to Duke Ellington and Count Basie on the radio. When his father played a record by Art Tatum, whose astounding technical ability Peterson would be one of the few to match, Peterson could not believe that only one person was making all that sound and asked his father, "Who are those guys?"

At age 14 Peterson's sister, who had been one of his first piano teachers, entered him in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) amateur piano competition, which he won and which lead to regular performances on CBC radio shows. In an early interview Peterson described his developing style as more swing than jazz and said he preferred the more "organized" format of that music. His playing, like Tatum's, was characterized by a strong left hand pounding out the rhythm on the bass notes with the right hand carrying the melody. When he later combined this method with the influence of bebop, his distinctive style--one to which he would remain faithful throughout his career--was born.

In the mid-1940s Peterson began playing as the featured soloist with the formerly all-white Johnny Holmes Orchestra and started his recording career on the RCA Victor label, mostly in the trio format (piano, bass, and either drums or guitar) that would become his trademark. A 1947 Montreal performance of Peterson's trio that was broadcast live on the radio was heard by the American jazz impresario Norman Granz, who was in a taxi on his way to the airport. Granz immediately turned around and went to the club, which marked the beginning of a relationship that would introduce Peterson's music to the world.

Granz, who would later found the influential Verve record label, was the producer of a musical series called Jazz at the Philharmonic. He brought Peterson with him to New York City to appear as a surprise guest at one of the concerts held at Carnegie Hall, where Peterson played a duet with the bassist Ray Brown. That performance launched Peterson's career in the United States and began a musical relationship with Brown that would span more than 40 years and 240 albums. Peterson became the touring pianist for Jazz at the Philharmonic, traveling the globe with the group in what became a kind of concert jam band for some of jazz's top names, until 1952. Much of the group's work was recorded for Granz's Verve label.

Peterson made many other recordings for the label, first as a duo with Brown and later in various trio formats. The best known of these, which lasted from 1953 to 1958, featured Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis and were celebrated for their complex arrangements and the musical competition among the three men. Peterson, whose popularity was at its apex, was voted best pianist by readers of Down Beat magazine for five straight years beginning in 1950. When Ellis left the trio, his eventual replacement was drummer Ed Thigpen, who played with Peterson and Brown until 1965. Peterson, along with Brown and several others, opened a school of contemporary music in Toronto, Canada, in 1960, beginning a lifelong commitment to teaching that continued until his death, despite the failure of the school just three years later. In the late 1960s Peterson made several solo recordings and tours, giving his listeners an unhindered opportunity to appreciate his ability with and feel for the instrument.

Peterson continued to tour and record as a solo artist and with various trios and groups from the 1970s through the early 1990s, developing his own compositions during this time as well. In 1990 the famous trio with Brown and Ellis reunited to tour and record several albums. While performing at New York City's Blue Note jazz club in 1993, Peterson noticed that he was having trouble playing notes with his left hand. Although he went on to complete the performance, he learned later that he had suffered a stroke. Depressed over losing much of the use of his left hand, Peterson did not perform again for nearly two years. With the support of his family and musical peers, however, he completed an intensive physical therapy program and eventually returned to the stage, his technique diminished, but his playing undeniably that of a jazz legend. Oscar Peterson died on Dec. 23, 2007, at the age of 82.

Interesting Facts About Oriental Rugs

The term Oriental rug is a broad one used to describe woven and knotted coverings for walls, floors, or tables that are produced over a large area of Asia and the Middle East. Although India and China have extensive histories of rug production, and these wares come under the general heading of " Oriental rugs," the term generally denotes products of the Islamic world, from Afghanistan and Iran, across the Middle East to Turkey, and even into North Africa. While we refer to this broad range of carpets with the word Oriental, in the Roman Empire such works were known as "Babylonian" rugs. In 18th-century England Oriental floor coverings were known as "Turkey work," and in colonial America a broad range of rugs came to be known as "Smyrna carpets," reflecting the sometimes circuitous exportation routes as much as the source of the wares.

Carpet weaving is a very ancient art. Highly developed traditions are known to have been practiced by the Assyrians and Babylonians from very early times, and their wares were widely distributed throughout the ancient world. The oldest preserved rug, employing the Turkish knot and dating from approximately the 4th century B.C., was found in 1949 in a Scythian burial site at Pazyryk, in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The so-called Pazyryk rug, now housed in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, provides valuable corroborative evidence for what is known about the well-developed art of rug-making at this early date from written sources. The rug, with a border featuring five stripes containing geometric and animal motifs, is stylistically reminiscent of mosaic patterns known from 7th-century-B.C. Nineveh and demonstrates the cultural reach of the Assyrian empire at its peak. 

Oriental rugs were prized possessions and symbols of luxury in ancient times, just as they are at the beginning of the 21st century. Depictions created during the reign of Ramses II in Egypt, in the 13th century B.C., show what appear to be rugs in an Assyrian style. Centuries later, as we know from ancient sources, "Babylonian" rugs were widely used as table coverings in the Roman world, and the Athenian historian. Xenophon cites as an example of Persian opulence the fact that rugs were used to cover even floors. Evidence from a host of European paintings---such as the Dutch master Jan Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Jug in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City---shows that Oriental rugs were still frequently used as table coverings in 17th-century Europe, since they remained far too precious to be considered for use on the floor.

Asia Minor took the preeminent role in carpet making in the early years of the 2d millennium A.D. and has been a leading center for the trade ever since. Owing to Turkey's geographical proximity and extensive trade contacts, its carpets have been particularly prominent in Europe and the West since the Renaissance. Under the Mughal (Mogul) Dynasty in the 16th and 17th centuries, India experienced its own golden age, during which glorious carpets were produced. However, in the history of what are now known as Oriental rugs, Persian rugs have long represented the "gold standard" in terms of both art and the marketplace.

After the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 B.C., Persia became the most noted textile center in Asia, beginning a tradition that would last for over 2,000 years. Indeed, many historians agree that the Oriental rug reached its highest peak of artistry during the reign of the Safavid dynasty, which ruled Iran from 1501 until 1736.

Rugs produced under the Safavid court were often based on classic designs and emblems, but individual weavers were free to improvise, creating a broad range of individualistic and idiosyncratic designs. Where many modern rugs, created expressly for Western markets, feature standard designs and conform to a preordained symmetry, a particularly alluring feature of classic older rugs is their uniqueness and irregularity.

The Ardabil mosque carpet, created in Tabriz, Iran, dated 1539-1540 and now housed at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, is a classic of the Safavid era and represents many of the most important design elements of the period. In this fine rug delicate arabesques and intricate decorative patterns of vines intersect one another to create complex patterns suggesting overlapping layers. In other carpets of the time, such as an important "hunting" carpet preserved in the Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, multiple hunting scenes produce elaborate patterns of human figures, animals, and floral motifs. The Vienna example's central medallion and corners even depict fantastic creatures such as phoenixes and dragons.

Although well-preserved classic carpets from centuries past are extremely rare commodities, the production of fine rugs continues throughout Asia and the Middle East, supplying a vast worldwide market. For the collector or connoisseur, however, just as for contemporary rug makers, the great rugs of the past provide a necessary background for understanding quality craftsmanship.

Multiple Approaches to the Graphic Novel

Tales told in pictures and set in sequential frames have traditionally been associated with the superheroes and "funny papers" aimed primarily at young audiences. Some authors, however, choose to pen illustrated novels in order to address adults, precisely because the drawings, which may help convey matters difficult to express in words alone, have a different psychological impact from that of words. Graphic novels, as such books are commonly known, employ the techniques developed by comic book artists, advancing their stories through visual images and cinematic narrative, although unlike comic books their subject matter may be nonfictional and entirely serious.

One early version of the technique was used by the award-winning graphic artist Lynd Ward in the first half of the 20th century. Ward experimented with stories conveyed exclusively by images; the pictures do not illustrate a story---they are the story. His first and most famous novel without words, Gods' Man, consists of 139 images, printed from wood engravings on one side of the page only. Although it was first released the same week as the stock market crash in 1929, this novel of a struggling young artist proved very popular and went through several editions. Calling his novels "pictorial narratives," Ward produced five additional volumes from woodcuts---Madman's Drum (1930), Wild Pilgrimage (1932), Prelude to a Million Years (1933), Song without Words (1936), and Vertigo (1937). 

Ward's near-contemporary Will Eisner is best known as the cofounder in the late 1930s of a comic art shop and as the creator and illustrator of the popular vigilante comic book hero, "The Spirit." Experimenting with the sequential novel form for adult readers, Eisner's goal was to achieve not realism but believability. (He purportedly coined the term graphic novel to avoid classifying his first illustrated novel, A Contract with God, as a comic book.) His graphic novels draw on his memories of growing up in an immigrant neighborhood in lower Manhattan in the 1920s and 1930s, his observations of modern life, and his experiences in wartime Korea and Vietnam gathering material for instructional comics for the U.S. Army. Eisner also experimented with silent panels---advancing a tale without dialogue---to draw the reader into the story.

More recently, Art Spiegelman, cofounder of the publishing house Raw Books and Graphics, used graphic novels to tell his family history. Maus and Maus II relate the story of his father's imprisonment in Auschwitz (called Mauschwitz in the novel) and his later struggle to come to terms with the horror of the Holocaust. The novels depict Jews as mice, Poles as pigs, and Germans as cats, thus giving the stories an aura of myth or allegory and allowing the reader some distance from the real-life brutality of the concentration camps. The books include stories within the main story and are interspersed with maps of Poland, layouts of the camp, diagrams of the crematoria, and family pictures. The drawings are never left to stand alone but are always accompanied by narrative, dialogue, and commentary. Spiegelman was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for Maus, which naturally improved the general public's recognition of the graphic novel as a valid literary form.

In a similar vein, Marjane Satrapi examines the fall of the shah of Iran, the Islamic Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War in her autobiography Persepolis. Seen through the eyes of a child, her story of a society in flux is revealed through the child's interactions with her extended family and her classmates. The well-received and award winning book was eventually made into a film of the same name, which won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize and the British Film Institute’s Sutherland Trophy in 2007. The film also received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations in 2008.

Another award winner was Ben Katchor, who was given a MacArthur fellowship in 2000 for his creative use of the graphic storytelling medium. The artist and author of weekly strips such as Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer and The Jew of New York, Katchor creates a timeless New York City landscape within which he places characters who voice the concerns of the contemporary age. 

Other graphic writers following a similar route to Katchor have focused on the minutia of everyday life and have had their work translated into film. Daniel Clowes's Ghost World, a coming-of-age tale about two teenaged girls during their postgraduation summer, was released in 2000 as an independent film and won critical praise. More recently, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, which uncovers the humor and humanity in life's most mundane moments, was shown on the HBO (Home Box Office) cable channel after winning the Grand Jury award at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.

Graphic novels are currently a multimillion-dollar market, which is expanding rapidly as it gains acceptance in mainstream publishing houses. Will Eisner once said in an interview that his goal was to have his books carried by the major bookstores, alongside other serious novels. With major bookstore chains now devoting whole sections of their floor space to the graphic novel, one can safely say that Eisner's dream has come true.

Miles Goes Electric: In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and the Birth of Fusion

By 1968 the trumpeter Miles Davis had been at the top of the jazz world for more than 20 years. His experience ranged from his days as a sideman with bebop innovators such as Charlie Parker, to his own innovations in launching the "cool jazz" movement and creating the modal jazz masterpiece Kind of Blue. His quintet at the time, which many would say was his greatest, included Ron Carter on bass, Herbie Hancock on piano, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, and the teenage prodigy Tony Williams on drums. Because they had been together for nearly five years, a long time for a jazz group of that caliber, Davis was growing restless and searching for new sounds. Since his arrival on the music scene in the 1940s, the sound of popular music had gone through major changes, including the introduction of electric instruments, which the trumpeter was thinking of using in his own music. After Davis heard the music of Jimi Hendrix, a guitarist, singer, and composer noted for his unique instrumental technique, the two musicians met and spent some time discussing music; Davis later acknowledged Hendrix's influence on his own musical thinking.

Davis's desire to change his sound eventually necessitated alterations in the quintet. Ron Carter was the first to leave after he refused to switch over to electric bass; he was replaced by Dave Holland, a classically trained British bass player. Concurrently, Davis was exposed to the electric piano in a jazz composition when he heard Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, a piece coauthored by former band member Cannonball Adderley and the Austrian-born keyboardist Joe Zawinul. Thus when Davis returned to the studio in early 1969 to record what became In a Silent Way, his band contained three electric keyboardists/pianists--Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Zawinul (who doubled on electric organ), the Englishman John McLaughlin on electric guitar, Holland on bass, and former quintet members Williams and Shorter.

Davis ran the Silent Way sessions much as he had for the groundbreaking Kind of Blue album a decade earlier--none of the musicians saw the music until the day of recording. This technique lent an immediacy to the album's improvisations that would have been lacking had the pieces been rehearsed. The use of electric instruments was not the only innovation on the album; Davis and his new producer Teo Macero began to explore the use of recording studio technology on the sound and structure of the music. The two compositions on the record, Shh/Peaceful and In a Silent Way/It's About That Time, were constructed by splicing together different sections of live takes to create the desired sound. In a Silent Way marked the end of Davis's purely acoustic music and the creation of an entirely new genre of jazz-rock, also known as fusion. In later years Davis sought to explain this musical shift by noting that "musicians have to play the instruments that best reflect the times we're in, play the technology that will give you what you want to hear. All these purists are walking around talking about how electrical instruments will ruin music. Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play."

After several months of touring with Holland, Shorter, Corea, and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, Davis was back in the studio for three days in August to record the double album Bitches Brew (1969). The album built on the techniques used on In a Silent Way but with more extensive use of studio effects--such as delays, reverbs and tape loops, and the overdubbing of additional instruments (up to 12 musicians played on each track)--and the addition of two basses, percussion, and bass clarinet. The resulting music was more influenced by contemporary rock and funk, and it in turn influenced musicians of those genres, bringing Davis's music to a whole new audience. With jazz record sales decreasing, Miles and his group played to half-empty jazz clubs, prompting the new president of Columbia Records, Clive Davis, to suggest that Davis contact the promoter Bill Graham, who put him on bills with rock bands such as the Grateful Dead. Bitches Brew sold well, launching the fusion movement. As with his previous innovations, the principal beneficiaries of fusion were Davis's own sidemen; Corea, Shorter, Hancock, Zawinul, McLaughlin, Williams, and others soon became stars in their own right. Davis was accused by many jazz critics of selling out his music to appeal to white audiences, but his music on fusion albums such as Bitches Brew and A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1970) and the funk-inspired On the Corner (1972) was by no means easy listening; all three works were infused with dense, dark textures and improvisations difficult for even musicians to understand. Although much of the music that came out of the fusion revolution is forgotten today, In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew remain classics of the genre and continue to influence many forms of contemporary music.

Miles Davis' Kind of Blue: Modal Masterpiece

By the end of 1958, the trumpeter Miles Davis was at the peak of his creative powers and was considered by some to be the most influential musician in jazz. It had been almost a decade since his Birth of the Cool sessions had changed the course of jazz music, launching the "West Coast" style and the careers of many of the musicians involved in the recording. In the intervening years, Davis had survived a nearly fatal heroin addiction. He had also put together what many regard as the greatest jazz group of all time--his sextet with Jimmy Cobb on drums, John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley on saxophones, Paul Chambers on bass, and Bill Evans on piano. By March 1959, when Davis assembled the group to record in Columbia Records' studio in a converted church on Manhattan's East 30th Street, Evans had already left the band to go solo. But he was persuaded to return for the sessions that would become arguably the best-known jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue. 
 

Evans, the only white member of the band, had perhaps the greatest impact of anyone other than Davis on the direction the music would take. Davis later denied claims made by Evans and others that the pianist was responsible for co-writing the music on the album. He acknowledged, however, that he had "planned that album around the piano playing of Bill Evans." And he credited Evans with having introduced him to Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand and Orchestra and Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 4, both of which Davis would cite as having a direct impact on Kind of Blue. In addition to these European influences, Davis was inspired by gospel music he had heard as a youth in an Arkansas church. He also tried a new type of improvisation based on modes, rather than chord changes, that he had begun experimenting with in 1958 on his Milestones album. Davis described the modal form as "seven notes off each scale, each note. It's a scale off each note, you know, a minor note." Based on ancient Greek theory, modes give the musician access to a scale for each note of the key in which a song is based. According to Davis, when improvising in this way, "you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about [chord] changes . . . you can do more with the musical line." Improvisation based on modes, rather than chords, created limitless possibilities for the soloist, who was freed from following the chord changes of a song and could play virtually anything.

The musicians involved in the sessions (with the exception of Evans's replacement on piano, Wynton Kelly, who played on "Freddie Freeloader," one of the album's five tracks) had been playing together for about two years. But there were no rehearsals for the Kind of Blue recordings. In fact, no one but Davis knew what music was to be played until after the musicians showed up at the studio. As Evans explained in the album's liner notes, "Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played." Remarkably, the very first completed performance of each song played by the group was the one chosen for inclusion on the record, achieving what Evans describes as "something close to pure spontaneity in these performances."

Kind of Blue had a far-reaching impact, eventually becoming one of the most popular albums in jazz history and selling well more than 1 million copies. The modal form of improvisation soon replaced chord-based bebop and its descendants, becoming the dominant sound of jazz. Classic recordings by John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, and others contributed to the lasting impact of the music. The spontaneity and musical freedom embodied in Kind of Blue also led to even more experimental music, including the free jazz movement pioneered by the saxophonist Ornette Coleman and others. The album has even been cited having influenced musicians far removed from the jazz idiom, such as the rock-guitar legend Duane Allman.

Davis, however, while acknowledging that others consider Kind of Blue to be a masterpiece, always contended that he failed to achieve the sound he was aiming for on the album. Indeed, his tireless quest for novel sounds would lead him to new innovations. Before another decade had passed, he would change the shape of jazz again with his use of electronic and acoustic instruments on In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.

Miles Davis and the Birth of the Cool

The trumpeter Miles Davis is arguably one of the best-known figures in the history of jazz. He is admired as much for his style and cultural impact as for the significance of his musical contributions. From his early days as a sideman with "bebop" innovators such as Charlie "Bird" Parker to his later use of electronic instruments, Davis constantly pushed the envelope of what constituted jazz. In doing so, he made a lasting impact on the listening public. However, it was his influence on the musicians he worked with and those that followed that is most important.

Davis's most significant contributions to jazz as an art form are commonly considered to be represented by three periods. The first, and the focus of this essay, is the late-1940s-early-1950s nine-piece-band, or nonet, recordings. These have since become known as the Birth of the Cool sessions. The name was given to the 12 songs by a record executive when they were issued as an album in 1957. The title refers to the commonly held belief that these recordings gave birth to a new style of jazz. This form is often referred to as "cool" or West Coast jazz. Although the style was associated with the laid-back atmosphere of California, the Birth of the Cool sessions were the product of a group of New York musicians. They were lead by Davis and the arranger Gil Evans.

Evans had been writing arrangements for Claude Thornhill's big band. He met Davis while trying to obtain permission to arrange Davis's compositions for Thornhill. Davis agreed, but requested that he be allowed to look at other scores Evans had arranged. Evans's apartment in Manhattan's West 50s soon became a meeting place for young musicians and writers. Davis and saxophone player Gerry Mulligan, who would write three of the songs recorded on Birth of the Cool, were regulars. Also regulars were the saxaphonist Lee Konitz, drummer Max Roach, pianist John Lewis, and bass player Joe Shulman. Out of their late-night talks came the idea, as Davis would later describe it, of "wanting to sound like Thornhill's band . . . but the difference was that we wanted it as small as possible." In order to achieve this sound, they settled on a nine-piece band. The instrumentation--trumpet, trombone, tuba, alto and baritone saxophones, French horn, piano, bass, and drum--was unlike that of any previous jazz group. According to Davis, "I wanted the instruments to sound like human voices, and they did." The group was together for only a brief time. There was a two-week residency at the Royal Roost club in 1948. They performed for one week at another club the following year. They assembled for three recording sessions between January 1949 and March 1950. Those sessions were later assembled into the Birth of the Cool album.

The Birth of the Cool proved to be so influential because, in large part, much of the audience that had followed big band and swing music was alienated by the jazz music of the time. By 1950 jazz had evolved into the fiery, passionate yet introverted, technically brilliant style of bebop that was practiced by players such as Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Bebop was unlike the carefully orchestrated big band and swing arrangements. It was created improvisationally, with the chord structures of the songs providing a mere outline for the flights of fancy created by the musicians as they were playing. No two performances of the same song were ever the same. Many people found the music difficult to follow. As Davis later explained, "Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren't a fast listener, you couldn't catch the humor or the feeling in their music . . . [the] sound wasn't sweet, and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street. . . . Birth of the Cool was different because you could hear everything and hum it also." The music captured in the three recording sessions from which Birth of the Cool was derived was unlike either bebop or big band. It did, however, owe its sound to both. The nonet combined the "sweet" voicings and arrangements of big band jazz with the improvisational genius of bebop. By removing the fiery harshness associated with bebop, the group created a sound that would have far-reaching effects on the jazz world.

The most immediate evidence of the impact of Birth of the Cool can be seen in the careers of the musicians involved in the nonet. Mulligan went on to further influence the "cool" jazz style with his work with Chet Baker and his pianoless quartet groups. Mulligan also toured for many years with his own nonet. Konitz also became identified with the style. His later work continued to be heavily influenced by the music he played with Davis. Lewis later founded the Modern Jazz Quartet, whose music was known for its use of improvisation in more formally arranged pieces, often influenced by European classical music.

Prior to the 1950s Davis had been primarily known as a sideman in other bands. With Birth of the Cool, he became a leader in every sense of the word. According to Mulligan, "He [Davis] took the initiative and put the theories to work. He called the rehearsals, hired the halls, called the players, and generally cracked the whip." Davis remained a leader for the rest of his incredible career. It included at least two other groundbreaking periods: the creation of modal jazz with the album Kind of Blue, and the fusion of electric rock and jazz with In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.

Madonna and Child

A traditional subject in Western art is Saint Luke, the patron saint of artists, painting the Madonna and Child---the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. A noted example is the 15th-century masterpiece by the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, St. Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child, now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. According to legend Saint Luke was the first to paint a portrait of the Virgin Mary, and, ever since, images of the Madonna and Child have been a staple of Christian art. Surviving representations in the Roman catacombs can be dated to as early as the 3d century.

Tradition has it that Saint Luke's original portrait was brought to Constantinople from Jerusalem by Constantine's mother, Saint Helen. In one version of the story, the original was destroyed after the city's fall to the Turks in 1453, while other traditions identify the portrait from Saint Luke's hand as, alternately, a painting in St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice or an image in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Farther to the north the so-called Our Lady of Vladimir, Russia's holiest object, now in Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery, has been revered for centuries as an original by Saint Luke. Our Lady of Czestochowa, or the Black Madonna, has shared the same adulation in Poland.

Modern scholarship has placed the creation of all these works well past the time of the 1st-century evangelist, but they are all rooted in Byzantine traditions of depicting the Madonna and Child. In stark contrast to later Western practices, which emphasized the artist's freedom of expression and interpretation, the Eastern Christian artists were bound by strict rules, thus creating familiar, stylized images that remained consistent in type and iconography for centuries. Icons, as these objects of veneration are called, function as sacred objects and are thus revered, similarly to relics, for their mystical powers quite apart from their value as works of art. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Russia became a primary center for the production of icons.

In the late Middle Ages, Italian painting was firmly rooted in Byzantine traditions as well, and many of the great masterpieces of early Italian art, such as Cimabue's Maesta (Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels) (c. 1270; Musée du Louvre, Paris), show a clear debt to established forms. In the following centuries, however, emerging humanism completely changed both the purpose of depicting the Madonna and Child and the way the image was envisioned in Western art.

No artist is more closely associated with the Madonna and Child than Raphael, the great master of the Italian High Renaissance. The very term Madonna and Child, with its Italian derivation (ma donna means "my lady"), brings to mind the particularly Italian form of the image, with Raphael as its prototypical creator.

The Alba Madonna, now located in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is one of Raphael's many treatments of the subject. In the painting the Virgin Mary, seated on the ground in an idyllic landscape, holds the Christ Child, who reaches for a cross from the hand of the baby John the Baptist, as if in anticipation of his future role. The small group forms a perfectly balanced pyramidal mass within the tondo; its serenity and harmony define the High Renaissance ideal of beauty. The religious story and the message are clearly stated, but, unlike in Byzantine images of the Madonna and Child, Raphael's "vocabulary" is that of the world in which the artist lived. Mary, with her flowing robes and elegant gesture, is maternal in her protective, gentle, and loving attitude toward the child. The child projects a divine nature in his quiet nobility, yet is also quintessentially human, his nude body and dependence on his mother showing clearly that he has much in common with his earthly peers. The viewer relates to the scene in human terms, rather than as one would relate to a stylized, mystical, and sacred icon.

Although religious imagery has long since been displaced as the dominant subject matter in contemporary art, depictions of the Madonna and Child continue to be produced and to break new aesthetic ground in our own times. Among 20th-century artists known for Christian images is the French painter Georges Rouault, who produced numerous versions of the Madonna and Child. More recently The Holy Virgin Mary, a 1996 painting by Chris Ofili, a British-born artist of Nigerian heritage (and a practicing Roman Catholic), became the center of controversy when exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999. The painting, depicting a black Mary (albeit without child), incorporated nontraditional multimedia components (including elephant dung and pornographic images), pitting the museum against New York City's mayor and much of the Roman Catholic establishment in a noisy debate.

Lee Bontecou: An Artist Lost and Found

In the 1960s Lee Bontecou was one of the brightest stars of the American art world. Her assemblages-- reliefs constructed of canvas and various other materials stretched over welded steel frames and held together with wire--brought a new vitality to American sculpture. Her usage of everyday materials and resources that otherwise would have been considered junk shared a sensibility with the contemporary Italian movement known as arte povera ("poor art"), but the roughness and brutality of her somber forms and colors seemed rooted in the aggressive power and confidence of American abstract expressionism. In the years since, Bontecou has followed a course very different from that of the typical artist, and therefore her first major retrospective exhibition (Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective), which opened in October 2003 at the University of California's Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, was entirely different in nature from the usual retrospective.

After 1971 Bontecou ceased showing new work, and, although her sculptures of the 1960s continued to be widely respected, she all but disappeared as a vital presence in the contemporary art world. Her withdrawal, in fact, became something of a modern legend. Why would an artist of such extraordinary talent, at the peak of her career, leave it all behind? More puzzling still was the widely held assumption that she had quit working altogether. Had she lost her inspiration? Or had the most prominent female artist to have created work that could compete on equal terms with that of the leading male artists of her generation simply retreated into motherhood and a quiet family life?

The Hammer exhibition, along with Bontecou's sudden willingness to speak with a few curators and journalists, finally provided some insight into some of these questions. Examining the statements the artist has made, there appears to be no simple answer as to why she kept such a low profile for so long. Never one to socialize heavily with other artists, Bontecou had little interest in the goings on of the art world even in the 1960s, and the endemic competitiveness and quest for fame and fortune were simply not among her priorities. Moreover, she felt no affinity with either pop art or minimalism, the movements dominating American art in her heyday. There is no clearer expression of her withdrawal than what the artist herself told Calvin Tomkins, a columnist for The New Yorker, in 2003: "I needed a rest. I wanted to explore and expand. I just didn't want to have to make things, and finish things, and show them every two years."

Although Bontecou may have turned her back on the art world, we now know that she most decidedly did not turn her back on art itself. For 20 years, from 1971 until 1991, she taught in the art department at Brooklyn College, practically in the backyard of the New York City gallery scene. This revelation seems to have caught most of the art world totally by surprise. Most important, she has worked continuously on her drawings and sculptures and is still active today. Her isolation, and the self-imposed lack of pressure to exhibit, apparently freed her to develop her work in her own way, under her own rules, to suit herself alone.

As the word retrospective implies, it is a chance to "look back" over the artist's career, and in general parlance it has come to mean a chance to look back over and reevaluate that with which we are already somewhat familiar. Lee Bontecou's retrospective, in contrast, gave the world its very first glimpse of the work of 30 years. Rather than offering the opportunity to review her oeuvre, this exhibition gave us the rare chance to discover it whole. After a long gestation period in near total isolation, we were suddenly allowed to absorb a large body of work in its entirety, all at once.

And what exactly has this extraordinary artist been doing for over 30 years? Bontecou still produces both drawings and sculptures, and, as before, the sculptures develop separately from the drawings. (Now some of the sculptures are suspended from the ceiling rather than projecting from the walls.) The anthropomorphic forms, which began appearing in her work in the late 1960s, are still there; but in contrast to the flowers and fish of the earlier work, they appear now, as often as not, in the form of floating eyeballs or winglike shapes. The new sculptures are still obsessive in their detail, yet their elements are lighter, more colorful, and certainly less menacing than the gaping black voids that characterized her early reliefs. Bontecou does not insist on a dogmatic interpretation of any of her work; she leaves the viewer to take from it what he or she finds there, with little overt guidance.

James Rosenquist and the Imagery of Pop Art

The defining element of pop art, a movement that reached its zenith in the early 1960s, is its use of imagery derived from popular culture. Perhaps no other artist of the period was as well versed in the culture of the time as was James Rosenquist, who in the 1950s earned his living as a billboard painter. Working first in the Midwest and then in New York City, he was creating the very sorts of images that would later become a staple for him and his colleagues. An examination of the impact of Rosenquist's early experience as a billboard painter on his interpretation of pop art's iconography can help to explain how he evolved into one of the genre's most abstract painters.

Both the process of painting billboards and their overtly commercial subject matter have informed all of Rosenquist's later paintings to some degree. Scale itself, for example, has always been a fundamental aspect of his work, and Rosenquist has probably painted more billboard-sized paintings than any other artist. In fact it was his 86-foot- (26-meter-) long painting F-111 (1964-1965; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) that overwhelmed and captivated the art world, firmly establishing Rosenquist at the forefront of the vibrant pop art movement. He has since painted numerous works on an equally ambitious scale.

To understand Rosenquist's approach to images, it helps to imagine what it is like to be a billboard painter standing on a scaffold: painting up close, on so vast a surface, the painter can deal with only the human-scale portion a few feet ahead--one small section divorced from the overall composition. Even in the case of a resolutely figurative image, like a 20-foot- (6-meter-) tall face, the small piece he or she is working on may appear abstract to the painter, consisting perhaps of a swooping contour defining a jaw and a straighter edge forming a shirt collar just below. Yet the artist must focus on this one element, which may occupy his or her entire field of vision, making it all that matters for that moment.

When one understands the billboard artist's perspective, it comes as no surprise that Rosenquist's paintings often juxtapose isolated and disconnected images or parts of images, sometimes with widely varying scales from one element to the next. He might include an oversized comb, a bowl of spaghetti, soda bottles, pencils, a 1960s car, miscellaneous body parts, or even a portrait of a well-known person. Such subjects, of course, have nothing to do with one another and, as a result, crowd in on one another and jostle for our attention, much like the barrage of images and experiences from the world around us. In the end, what Rosenquist offers the viewer is sensory overload, a kaleidoscopic assault on his or her concentration. On seeing so many images and unrelated objects, the only option open to the viewer is to focus on one small part of the painting at a time.

Because popular culture, in the form of media images, commercial products, and general lifestyle concepts, is so fundamental to the genre, most pop artists approach their subjects in a distinctly head-on fashion. When Wayne Thiebaud paints a delicatessen case full of pastries, or when Tom Wesselmann paints a reclining nude, no commentary is necessary; we understand exactly what we are looking at. Likewise, Andy Warhol's subjects, be they commercial objects such as Brillo boxes or Campbell's soup cans, media images, or even a car crash, are bluntly presented in immediately recognizable forms.

Rosenquist, on the other hand, seems to have a much more ambivalent attitude toward his subject matter. Although his paintings are suffused with recognizable images, the objects he depicts usually seem secondary to the overall impact of the painting. A hand, a face, a car, or a comb may appear prominently, but one never has the sense that the painting is really "about" any of these things. They are merely the objects the artist has chosen to focus on in a particular quadrant of the canvas, and no single part or image feels more important or more central to an overall theme of the painting than any other part. Rosenquist also differed from his contemporaries in technique; whereas Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, for example, both exaggerated the mechanical aspects of art production--Warhol, through his reproductive silk-screen technique, and Lichtenstein, through his use of dots mimicking crude printing--Rosenquist gloried in the pure painterliness of his work, with the surface receiving as much emphasis as the subject.

A comparison of Rosenquist's painting of Marilyn Monroe with one done by Warhol illustrates the difference in approach. Warhol's image, repeated in many variations, uses vivid 1960s colors and an obviously mechanical process for applying them, but Marilyn herself is presented in a straightforward portrait pose. Rosenquist's Marilyn Monroe I (1962; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) incorporates several portions of the face in various parts of the canvas. Some are upside down; some show us a recognizable mouth, eye, or nose. Yet nowhere do we see a face that we would instantly recognize as that of the famous actress. What we really get from Rosenquist is an impression of Marilyn Monroe rather than a portrait, an impression relayed through quick and partial images, which, taken together, are almost abstract. Indeed, perhaps our most obvious clues to the "sitter's" identity are the block letters ARILY woven through the center of the canvas.

Because popular images form the bedrock of pop art, it is hardly surprising that abstraction, per se, has never figured prominently in the oeuvre of the major pop artists. It is true that Roy Lichtenstein has often painted "abstract paintings," but in his case many of these works are of a specific genre: objectified pop art renditions of abstract subjects. In effect, he takes an abstract image--a brushstroke, for example--and uses it as his subject matter in much the way a still life painter might use a vase of flowers on a tabletop. Rosenquist, however, appears to have pushed in the more unexpected, or even seemingly contradictory, direction, veering much closer to actual abstraction than the concept of pop art would seem to encourage.

Rosenquist's experimentation with the idea of abstraction is much more evident in his later works. While his classic 1960s paintings usually present individual images in clearly defined and easily differentiated spaces--overlapping blocks or squares--the later paintings often have a much more complex organization. For example, in paintings such as Flowers, Fish and Females for the Four Seasons (1984; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), Rosenquist began overlapping images in striated patterns--two images in alternating stripes or spikes over a large area, making both difficult to read. Combined with the artist's tendency to present small objects on such a disorientingly vast scale that we sometimes find even common things difficult to recognize, the result is to create, wholly from the tools of realistic depiction, an image that one reads in almost the same way as one would encounter an image that is straightforwardly abstract. It is for this reason that Rosenquist's work stands out in the chiefly representational genre of pop art.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ex-Photographer

Long before he took up the camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson, like many other acclaimed photographers, was first attracted to drawing and painting as means of portraying the world around him. As a young child he had visited the studio of his uncle, Louis Cartier-Bresson, a painter whose early promise was ended by his death in World War I. This brief introduction to the art of painting ignited in Henri a lifelong passion.

Cartier-Bresson began his career by studying painting as a young man under the noted French artist André Lhote. Some works from this early period survive, including a view of Lhote's studio painted in 1927. In this canvas (now in a private collection in Paris), a nude woman reclines on a bed in a mostly empty room. The overall geometry of the composition reflects the cubist influence of Lhote, while mysterious objects--a lonely seashell in the foreground, a screen dominating the background, and a schematic depiction of a staircase that seems to lead nowhere--show a distinct awareness of surrealism, an important movement that was still in its infancy when Cartier-Bresson took up his paintbrush.

In the early 1930s, however, Cartier-Bresson's career went in an unexpected direction when, on a 1931 trip to Africa, he took his first photographs. His use of a Leica 35mm camera after 1932 offered him mobility and spontaneity in his search for images. Cartier-Bresson always strove to capture the "decisive moment," the instant that preserved the distilled meaning or essence of a particular event. In the decades that followed, his photographs became famous for the stories they told, with his unerring eye documenting both public dramas and private moments around the world over much of the 20th century. Indeed, his style and methods informed the young art of photojournalism.

Cartier-Bresson's first exhibition of photographs was held in 1933 in New York City's Julian Levy Gallery, a venue that did much to introduce surrealism to America. The Museum of Modern Art, also in New York, presented a retrospective exhibition of his photographs in 1946, and since that time he has been widely regarded as one of the world's most important living photographers.

Although Cartier-Bresson had left the painter's easel behind, he continued to maintain a presence in the art world. He counted many of the leading artists of his generation among his friends, and the subjects of his portraits include such eminent painters as Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Max Ernst, and Georges Rouault, as well as the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Alberto Giacometti. Indeed Henri Matisse, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, will largely be remembered just as Cartier-Bresson captured him on film, as an elderly man surrounded by birdcages in his Vence, France, studio.

Having reached the pinnacle of success in his chosen field, Cartier-Bresson then did what few others have had the courage to do: He returned to his first passion, drawing. After making the decision in the early 1970s to devote his remaining energies to drawing, Cartier-Bresson has used the intervening 30 years to produce a large body of work, which serves to document the seriousness of his purpose.

Photography and drawing are, however, fundamentally different media necessitating radically different approaches. As a photographer, Cartier-Bresson traveled the world, seemingly seeking "prey" that he then captured in the instantaneous click of a shutter. Drawing, on the other hand, requires patience and prolonged observation in one place. To hone his skills, he spent months in the mid-1970s frequenting Paris's museum of natural history, the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, sketching specimens from the collection. A notable example of the series of drawings that he completed there is housed in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, which also is in Paris. Rather than capturing the interactions of an instant or making a subtle social observation, as he had done for years in his photographs, Cartier-Bresson dwells in this intimate work on the timeless bones of long-dead ancient beasts, allowing his eye to linger and study them both as material objects and abstract forms in three-dimensional space.

While photographs describe reality in sharp contours with objective precision, Cartier-Bresson's drawings use an agitated line to build images stroke by stroke. For example, in his 1979 portrait of the French poet Yves Bonnefoy (also in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne), a network of fluidly drawn pencil lines coalesces to form the features of the subject with an economy of detail. The sparseness of the composition focuses attention on Bonnefoy's eyes, as if drawing the viewer directly into the sitter's thoughts through the medium of the artist.

In addition to his incisive portraits, favored themes for Cartier-Bresson's drawings include the French landscape, the streets of Paris, and the female nude. This latter subject, which has consumed much of his attention in later years, was rarely a focus of Cartier-Bresson's camera.

Gordon Parks - Film Director

In 1969, 57-year-old Gordon Parks became the first African American to direct a film for a major Hollywood studio. The film was an adaptation of his autobiography, The Learning Tree. At the time of the book's publication Parks was best known as a photographer. To ensure that he would direct the film, Parks made it a condition of the agreement to sell the film rights to the book. He then went on to direct several other movies, both inside and outside Hollywood. One of these, Shaft (1971), launched the "blaxploitation" genre. Other films included a sequel, Shaft's Big Score (1972); The Super Cops (1974); and the biopic Leadbelly (1976). His legacy of work also includes nearly 20 books and numerous musical compositions. With so much artistic output, it is understandable that Parks's film legacy might be overlooked. Its impact, however, is nevertheless undeniable.

Parks was born in Kansas in 1912. He dropped out of high school at age 16. He then worked at a series of jobs, eventually finding work as a fashion photographer for Vogue and Glamour magazines. In 1948 Parks began to work for Life magazine. He continued to take photographs for the publication until 1972. During a 1961 assignment in Brazil, he befriended a sick boy named Flavio, about whom he made his first film, a 12-minute documentary short. Other documentaries, including the 1966 Emmy Award-winner Diary of a Harlem Family, followed. Parks's real debut as a filmmaker, however, came with The Learning Tree.

Given the filmmaker's background, it is not surprising that The Learning Tree endures primarily for its striking cinematography. It was one of the first films entered into the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 1989. Although it was not a financial success, it did well enough to assure Parks of more work as a director, especially since he was able to complete The Learning Tree well ahead of the studio's schedule. Remarkably, he was also the film's writer, producer, and score composer. The Learning Tree was not the first film to depict American life from the perspective of a black person, but it was the first to be written, directed, and produced by an African American.

Parks's next film ensured his place in Hollywood history. Shaft, the story of an iconoclastic black New York City private eye, was a surprise box-office smash. Hollywood film studios were in dire financial straits at the time. Its success drew attention to the fact that there was an untapped audience of African American moviegoers hungry to see their own heroes depicted on the big screen. Largely because of the many films that followed it as Hollywood attempted to cash in on this new type of cinema, Shaft is remembered as a "blaxploitation" film. But many of the characteristics of that genre, in particular the "exploitation" elements, are absent from Shaft. The movie can be seen as part of a long line of Hollywood private eye genre films. It reveals a strong hero upholding his own code of ethics outside a corrupt system. The difference between Shaft and the major studio-produced films that preceded it is that the hero is black, while the corrupt individuals he is fighting are primarily white. Among the criticisms leveled against Shaft was that the main character represented the white stereotype of the aggressive, sexually potent black male. But Parks himself has attempted to downplay the film's significance. "It's just a Saturday night fun picture which people go to see because they want to see the black guy winning," he said.

In addition to directing one of several Shaft sequels, Shaft's Big Score, Parks went on to show that he was not just a "black" director. He directed the 1974 action film The Super Cops, which was based on the true story of two white New York City policemen known as Batman and Robin. The Super Cops featured a mostly white cast. 

The 1976 film Leadbelly, the story of the influential folk musician, was the last film Parks directed for a major studio. The film received critical acclaim but fell victim to studio politics when new executives at Paramount refused to premiere it in New York City. Parks objected, accusing the studio of marketing it as a "blaxploitation" movie. In addition to sharing the visual beauty of Parks's other work, Leadbelly shares many of its common themes. Like Shaft and Newt, the Parks character in The Learning Tree, the hero of Leadbelly faces racism and discrimination in many forms, yet he refuses to succumb to either. At the end of the film, despite being imprisoned for murder and forced to work on a chain gang, Leadbelly insists, "You ain't broke my mind, you ain't broke my body, and you ain't broke my spirit."

Although Parks rejected further work in Hollywood following the commercial failure of Leadbelly, he continued to make films, mostly documentaries for public television, as well as a 1984 television movie based on a slave narrative, Solomon Northup's Odyssey. His directorial career opened doors for many who followed, and in 1997 he was honored by the Directors Guild of America, one of countless awards he received for his outstanding body of work. Gordon Parks died on March 7, 2006, in New York City; he was 93 years old.

Gilbert, Sullivan, and 14 Operas

Anyone who is a fan of comic opera knows the names of Gilbert and Sullivan. The collaboration between dramatist William Gilbert's and composer Arthur Sullivan began with Thespis (1871) and continued for 25 years, by which time they had written 14 comic operas (operettas) that became known as Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Creating delightful concoctions of many different styles, they drew upon, among other things, the traditional forms of opera, opera buffa, and English folklore. ( H.M.S. Pinafore is a good example of the latter, with its sailors' chantey, hornpipe dance, patriotic anthem, and unaccompanied glee).

The operas satirize British society in Gilbert and Sullivan's day--even when the action takes place in faraway lands or times. One should think of the characters not as Japanese ( The Mikado) or 18th-century Italian ( The Gondoliers), but as very distinctly British. Part of the satire may be lost on contemporary audiences, but the appeal of the charming scores and witty librettos is ageless.

Gerry Mulligan: Jazz Past, Present, and Future

Gerry Mulligan is one of the most widely recognized jazz musicians of our time and certainly the best known on his instrument, the baritone saxophone. He is probably most associated with the style of music he helped create, West Coast jazz, but ironically, except for a brief period in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, Mulligan always lived and worked in New York City.

Born in 1927, Mulligan grew up in several cities before his family settled in Philadelphia, where he studied piano and clarinet before moving on to the saxophone. From an early age he knew what he wanted to do with his life; as he later told an interviewer, "it was conditioned in me from childhood to have a band, to play with bands, to write for bands." The young Mulligan showed a talent for writing and arranging music, and in the mid-1940s, while still in high school, he began writing charts for the WCAU-CBS radio orchestra led by Johnny Warrington. Arranging for Warrington and touring with other jazz orchestras led Mulligan to New York City, where he landed the prestigious job of staff arranger for the drummer Gene Krupa's band in 1946. It was during this time that Mulligan refined his saxophone playing, focusing on the baritone, an instrument on which he faced less competition from other players in New York's blooming jazz scene.

Mulligan's development as a musician, writer, and arranger became evident in his work with the trumpeter Miles Davis's nine-piece group, which is captured on the seminal album Birth of the Cool (1950). The project is considered to be the starting point for what became known as "cool," or West Coast, jazz despite the fact that the album was recorded in New York City. The nonet featured the unusual instrumentation of trombone, two saxophones, tuba, and French horn, in addition to Davis's trumpet and the rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums. The influential album, which combined the exciting improvisational style of bebop with the more formal, laid-back arrangements of big band jazz, featured Mulligan's baritone work as well as three of his compositions, Jeru, Venus de Milo, and Rocker. He also arranged the songs Godchild and Darn that Dream.

Despite his success, the ultracompetitive New York scene made it difficult for Mulligan to earn a decent living, so in 1951 he headed west to California, where he did some arrangement work for Stan Kenton's band. While at a jam session, he met the trumpeter Chet Baker, with whom he went on to found what became known as the "pianoless quartet." Heretofore unheard of in jazz, the group featured the horns of Baker and Mulligan along with bass and drums, allowing the soloists the extra freedom of not having to work with the chords of the standard piano-based rhythm section. Although they only worked together for a year before Mulligan was sent to prison on drug charges, the Baker-Mulligan group became hugely influential, launching the West Coast jazz craze that he had helped start with Birth of the Cool. After his release from prison in 1954, Mulligan continued to tour and record for the remainder of the 1950s with different versions of the pianoless quartet, which at times included Bob Brookmeyer (valve trombone), Zoot Sims (tenor saxophone), and Art Farmer (trumpet).

In 1960 Mulligan combined the concepts of the nonet and the pianoless quartet into the Concert Jazz Band, featuring five reed and six brass instruments along with the pianoless rhythm section. Ever expanding his horizons, Mulligan occasionally played piano with the group, which toured Europe and North America and recorded several classic albums for the Verve label.

Mulligan kept touring and recording after the breakup of the Concert Jazz Band in the late 1960s, occasionally re-forming his classic groups and always developing his writing, playing, and arranging. Continuing to work until his death from cancer, Mulligan died on Jan. 20, 1996. The piano player and fellow West Coast legend Dave Brubeck, with whom Mulligan often played in the late 1960s and early 1970s, summed up Mulligan's talent and influence by saying, "when you listen to Gerry Mulligan, you hear the past, the present, and the future."

Change Ringing: The Mathematic Music of Church Bells

When one imagines a classic European cathedral, the mental picture is rarely complete without the musical accompaniment of resonant church bells. Yet many early church bells are incapable of producing conventional music. Enter change ringing, a mathematic art that gave cathedral bells their own unique form of musical expression and inspired a host of devoted followers who continue this hybrid auditory science even today.

The origins of change ringing lie in the construction of church bells for English cathedrals during the Reformation era of the early 17th century. During this time period a relatively novel method of hanging massive brass church bells gained popularity: one that involved mounting the bells on large wooden wheels. Bells hung from these wheels were so precisely balanced that even small children could ring them simply by pulling on an attached rope, despite the fact that the bells themselves ranged in weight from several hundred to several thousand pounds.

The great drawback of this engineering feat is that wheel-hung bells consistently take roughly two full seconds to complete a 360-degree swing, limiting how frequently a given note can be repeated and making it impossible for an array of such bells to play conventional melodic music. Change ringing arose as a form of music that could accommodate the limitations imposed by the massive size of the wheel-hung church bells.

Most wheeled church bells are hung in groups of 3 to 12 bells, arranged in order of tone from the highest, or treble bell, to the lowest, or tenor bell. Rung in order these bells sound out a simple musical scale in a precise rhythm. Change the order the bells are rung, however, and a fascinating array of mathematic---and musical--- permutations becomes possible. These permutations are the basis of change ringing.

Change ringing is guided by a strict set of rules and jargon, one of the earliest versions of which was set out by Fabian Stedman in 1668 in his treatise Tintinnalogia. In simplest terms, an entire set of bells is rung in order from treble to tenor, called a "round," and these rounds are repeated with slight variations, called "changes." According to the rules of change ringing, no bell may move more than one place in the order between rounds. Thus, if in the first round the bells are rung in order (1-2-3-4-5), the third bell could be rung second or fourth in the next round (1-3-2-4-5 or 1-2-4-3-5) but the third bell could not be rung first or fifth (3-1-2-4-5 or 1-2-4-5-3). This "no more than one place" rule is enforced each round, explicitly setting out a progression that is the hallmark of change ringing. As the rounds advance, the mathematic permutations governing the change-ringing exercise grow more numerous and complex. 

A full permutation of changes for a seven-bell array requires 5,040 rounds, without break, which requires roughly three-and-a-half hours to complete. This is the minimum number of rounds necessary for a standard change-ringing exercise, known as a "peal." Any change ringing that includes less than 5,040 rounds is referred to as merely a "touch." The first complete peal is said to have been completed in England in 1715. The first American peal is often attributed to the legendary showman P. T. Barnum, who staged the event at Christ Church Cathedral in Philadelphia in 1850.

Despite its comparative age, change ringing remains a widely pursued musical pastime even today. Though still largely an English phenomenon, change-ringing societies continue the practice in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and a host of other countries. This timeless combination of mathematics and music seems never to go out of style.

Artists and the Camera Obscura

Long before the idea was conceived to permanently record optical images through chemical processes--the essence of photography--the means were available to produce the images themselves. The camera obscura is a simple optical device that had been available for hundreds of years. It could project an image of the world onto a wall or screen, much as a modern camera captures an image before storing it digitally or on film. The name camera obscura, Latin for "dark room," is a simple description of the first such device. A pinhole in the side of a dark room is used to project a precise image of the outside scene on the inside wall opposite the hole.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) described the phenomenon as early as the 4th century B.C. Chinese and Muslim scholars developed models more than a thousand years ago. In the late 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) wrote about the camera obscura in one of his notebooks. There is no evidence that Leonardo actually used the device in creating his own drawings and paintings. But he clearly described its possible application to art. It was thus inevitable that other artists would experiment with this simple technology to bring real-life images onto a two-dimensional surface. Human vision analyzes optical phenomena through complex mental processes. It involves the mind as well as the eye. The camera obscura could reproduce the building blocks, the pure optical effects, with a degree of realism that was until then unimaginable.

The most obvious limitation to the early camera obscura was that the projected image was extremely faint. Only the brightest objects, such as the sun itself, could produce a crisp image. Therefore, the most common early usage was for astronomical observations. In particular, scientists could study eclipses and other solar phenomena without risking damage to the eyes.

A significant advance occurred in the 16th century with the addition of a convex lens in place of the simple pinhole. The lens made it possible to concentrate more light into the image. This made it brighter, sharper, and easier to read. Eventually, this facilitated the creation of the camera obscura as a smaller, more portable box. By the 18th century many uses were found for the camera obscura. One was making exact copies, sometimes enlarged or reduced, of maps and other similar objects.

Since the advent of modernism and the rise of abstraction in painting during the early 20th century, we have come to think of realism as but one mode of art, one option among many in choosing an approach to painting or drawing. Before the invention of photography in the 19th century, a stated goal of much Western art was to present and preserve a lifelike image of the world. Indeed, it was generally assumed for centuries that the most important goal in any pictorial representation was that the object depicted be as similar to the object itself as possible. The camera obscura was able to produce a precise two-dimensional image of an actual three-dimensional object or scene. It introduced an entirely new set of possibilities.

It is hardly surprising to learn that artists experimented with optical technology. Although clear information is rare as to which artists used the device and to what extent, many famous painters are associated with the camera obscura. The British painter Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) owned one. And the camera obscura that once belonged to the Italian master Antonio Canal (1697-1768), better known as Canaletto, is now preserved in the Museo Correr in Venice. An intriguing 1770 drawing of Windsor Castle by Thomas Sandby, now in the collection of Queen Elizabeth II, is inscribed "drawn in a camera T. S." The inscription indicates a certain pride in the achievement.

Of all the artists who may have used a camera obscura, none has attracted more attention than the 17th-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer (1632-1675). In examining Vermeer's Girl with the Red Hat (1665-1666; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), the viewer is taken with the reflected highlights that are similar to "circles of confusion." Such effects are common in photography but alien to human vision. 

When a camera is slightly out of focus, a reflected highlight appears, not in the shape of the reflective surface, as the naked eye would see it, but rather as a round ball of light, a so-called circle of confusion. In another Vermeer painting, The Letter Reader (ca. 1657; Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden), the contrast between the blurriness of the carpet on the table in the foreground and the sharper focus of the woman in the middle distance exactly mimics the effect produced by a modern camera.

It is unlikely, however, that Vermeer used the camera obscura to create these paintings. The limited technology of the period would have made it difficult to paint such a masterly work from the image of an unwieldy camera obscura. The authors of the catalogue to the 2001 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Vermeer and the Delft School made an important observation. It is far more likely that Vermeer studied the distinctive qualities produced through a camera obscura and used these discoveries as he would any other visual experience. The master painter most likely added them to his pictorial vocabulary and utilized them in his own way within his work.

Allegory and the Unicorn Tapestries

The unicorn tapestries are among the world's best-known works of handwoven patterned fabric. Usually on display at the Cloisters, the branch of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to medieval art, they are rich in detail and allegory. Composed of seven fabric panels, they were created both for warmth and to inspire storytelling. They are among the finest examples of the ancient art of tapestry--and perhaps the most enigmatic.

Thought to have been designed in France and woven in Brussels between 1495 and 1505, the unicorn tapestries were created primarily from wool, using silk and metallic thread. They present scenes of a hunt for the unicorn, a mythological creature usually depicted as a large white horse with a long horn growing out of the center of its head. All seven panels have sustained some damage, and only fragments of the fifth remain. Yet they have such realistic detail that observers have identified most of the plant life shown. Some of the flora is shown in the landscape and garden settings, while other examples are evident in the millefleurs background. To the medieval viewer the plants appearing in the tapestries would have represented not only cures for human ills but also symbols of deeper truths.

Speculation concerning the commissioning and narrative meaning of the tapestries falls into two main camps. One theory holds that the initials A and a reversed E joined by a bow, an emblem of Anne of Brittany (twice the queen of France), indicates their connection with Anne and her husband Louis XII. The same theory suggests that in the sixth tapestry the lovers are Anne and Louis. Another hypothesis links the A and E to Antoinette of Ambroise, the wife of Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld. The initials F and R have been sewn into the sky of the third tapestry, and an inventory of records for 1680 showed the tapestries as belonging to La Rochefoucauld. In 1793, during the French Revolution, the tapestries were taken from the family's chateau in Verteuil (peasants apparently used them to protect produce), but they were recovered in the 1850s. The tapestries were purchased by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in 1922 and were donated to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1937.

Another focus of discussion concerning the tapestries is the nature and meaning of the allegorical tale they tell. Do they represent a tale of courtly love, or do they depict the life of Christ? This question has been asked of another allegory, the Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, in the Bible. The surface story of the Song chronicles the sometimes stormy relationship between man and woman, and some scholars say its meaning is just that. Others say that the Song concerns the relationship of Christ to the church. The debate over the tapestries runs a similar course. Although the surface theme of the unicorn tapestries is the struggle between the mythical unicorn and those pursuing it, the symbolism could suggest that the tapestries were created either to celebrate courtship, matrimony, and fertility or to depict the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.

The Start of the Hunt introduces the hunters but not the unicorn. Hunting with trained dogs in the late Middle Ages was an activity of the nobility, and hunters in the tapestries are dressed in fine clothing, a clue to their rank.

In the second tapestry, The Unicorn Is Found, the unicorn uses his magical horn to remove a snake's venom from the water. It is here that the theory regarding Christian symbolism begins, with the unicorn seen as a symbol of Christ saving all from the poison of Satan. 

In the third tapestry, The Unicorn Leaps out of the Stream, the hunters, their faces distorted into expressions of cruelty, could symbolize the persecutors of Christ. In the fourth tapestry, The Unicorn at Bay, the unicorn becomes savage. New on the scene is a man with a horn, who may symbolize the archangel Gabriel.

The Unicorn Is Captured by the Maiden, the fifth tapestry, is now in fragments. The remaining pieces show a young female figure and a unicorn within the confines of a walled garden; dogs are attacking the unicorn and blood can be seen running down its side. Tradition says that the unicorn can be trapped only by a virgin, and an enclosed garden was a medieval symbol of chastity. But the apple tree at the tapestry's center could be a reminder of the fall of Adam and Eve, suggesting that the unicorn symbolizes Christ and the tapestry narrative the redemption of humankind after the fall.

The sixth tapestry, The Unicorn Is Killed and Brought to the Castle, centers on the slain unicorn, who is looked upon in distress. The seventh tapestry, The Unicorn in Captivity, is the most famous of the tapestries. Here the unicorn has come back to life but is chained to a wooden gate. The risen unicorn could represent the risen Christ, but there remains the problem of the symbolism of the unicorn in chains. One theory is that the unicorn symbolizes a bridegroom secured by his lover. Another holds that the unicorn (as Christ) is forever linked to humankind.

As with the Song of Songs, the ultimate meaning of the tapestries--whose total number, seven, is a symbol of completion and perfection--continues to elude us. But this very uncertainty has preserved the story of the unicorn and stimulated interest in discovering its true meaning, perhaps as its creator intended.

Manga--A Cultural Phenomenon

Manga, a unique style of comic books created in Japan with millions of devotees worldwide, are populated with characters that are instantly recognizable for their simple lines; wide, round eyes; and "big hair." Literally translated from the Japanese as "whimsical pictures," manga began as a childhood diversion, later developing into an extremely lucrative business that produces dozens of high-circulation magazines, anime (" animation"), and video games, and they have become an integral part of Japanese society.

The contemporary version of manga dates from 1947 when Osamu Tezuka, a 19-year-old medical student, combined the rudiments of a centuries-old Japanese art form with a story based on the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island. Tezuka's New Treasure Island sold 400,000 copies, pioneering a genre that transcends the boundaries of age, interest, and gender. Often referred to as the "father (or god) of manga," Tezuka is also credited with creating the distinctive look of manga characters, which can be seen in his most famous creation, Astro Boy, created in 1952.

Manga are usually published in newsprint-style magazines of 250 to 850 pages, each magazine featuring a number of serial stories. An individual story will take up about 30 or 40 pages, often ending in a cliff-hanger to keep the reader anxiously awaiting the next installment. A popular serial may run for years--Tezuka was still authoring Astro Boy in 1989, the year of his death (and 37 years after the serial's creation). Long-running serials usually are collected in book form to allow new readers to catch up on past events.

Like the Japanese language, manga are drawn and read from right to left. Experts point out that even in printed form, manga art tends to be cinematic and that the arrangement of manga frames, or koma, is highly sophisticated, making for a seamless presentation of the narrative. The stories themselves tend to be based on the development of character, in contrast to plot-driven American comics. It has been noted that manga characters, again unlike most of their American counterparts, grow and develop, that they display an admirable work ethic, and that they are not as focused on battling evil as are American comic-book heroes. Another interesting contrast with American comics is that the facts of one story featuring a character or group of characters are not necessarily consistent with the facts in another story featuring the same characters. Thus two characters may be best chums in one story and total strangers in the next.

The biggest contrast between manga and other comic books is, however, simply the size of the industry and its integration into Japanese society. The Japanese respect manga as an art form and a legitimate category of popular literature. Although the vast majority of manga are targeted specifically toward young boys and girls, they also include work drawn for teenagers and adults, covering literary genres as diverse as science fiction, melodrama, historical fiction, and horror stories. They are also used in travelogues and as teaching tools in manuals and educational materials. Japan even boasts manga cafes where devotees can sip coffee and catch up on the latest tales.