"Zog Nit Keyn Mol" Hymn of the Jewish Partisan fighters in Warsaw and elsewhere

"Zog Nit Keyn Mol is a poem by Hirsh Glik (1922-1944), music by Dmitri Pokrass. The song became the hymn of the United Partisan Organization in 1943. It spread to all the camps in Eastern Europe and later to all Jewish communities the world over."

"It is a Yiddish song considered one of the chief anthems of Holocaust survivors and is sung in memorial services around the world. The lyrics of the song were written in 1943 by Hirsh Glick, a young Jewish inmate of the Vilna Ghetto, for the Vilna Jewish United Partisan Organization (FPO).[1][2]

The title means "Never Say", and derives from the first line of the song. Glick's lyrics were set to music from a pre-war Soviet song written by Pokrass brothers, Dmitri and Daniil [ru], "Терская походная" (Terek Cossacks' March Song), also known as "То не тучи - грозовые облака" (Those aren't clouds but thunderclouds), originally from the 1937 film I, Son of Working People (story by Valentin Kataev).

Glick was inspired to write the song by news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.[2] During World War II, "Zog nit keyn mol" was adopted by a number of Jewish partisan groups operating in Eastern Europe. It became a symbol of resistance against Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust."

Zog Nit Keynmol

NEVER SAY

THE PARTISANS' SONG - SHIR HAPARTISANIM

Never say you are going on your final road,

Although leadened skies block out blue days,

Our longed-for hour will yet come

Our step will beat out - we are here!

From a land of green palm trees to the white land of snow

We arrive with our pain, with our woe,

Wherever a spurt of our blood fell,

On that spot shall spurt forth our courage and our spirit.

The morning sun will brighten our day

And yesterday will disappear with our foe.

But if the sun delays to rise at dawn,

Then let this song be a password for generations to come.

This song is written with our blood, not with lead,

It is not a song of a free bird flying overhead.

Amid crumbling walls, a people sang this song,

With grenades in their hands.

So, never say the road now ends for you,

Although skies of lead block out days of blue.

Our longed-for hour will yet come -

Our step will beat out - we are here!

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https://youtu.be/6-y12LJlFkU

Delacroix. Complex, romantic, poetic

Liberty Leading the People 

Delacroix, (4/26/1798 - 8/13/1863) the most intelligent and complex of nineteenth-century French artists, was torn by conflicts. Classic or Romantic? Racine or Shakespeare? Mozart or Beethoven? Again and again the famous diary struggles with the opposing values implied by these names, and he was never able to harmonize them into final reconciliation. It was the same in his private life: “A revolutionary in his studio,” said Victor Hugo, “he was a conservative in the drawing room.” And Baudelaire, whose analysis of his character remains the subtlest, pointed out that his temperament “contained much of the sauvage…and much of the man-of-the-world.” Curiously (or inevitably) this awareness of some basic split in his personality seems to have conditioned the approach of nearly all who have written about him. The artist formed the link between the traditions of the past and modernism, ultimately having a profound impact upon the Impressionists.

The Massacre at Chios" (1824))

Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi

The works produced during the final 15 years of Delacroix's prodigious career are exemplary of his spontaneous painterly style, whereby specific details were subordinated to over-all emotional and visual effect. His late paintings demonstrate perhaps better than his large-scale Salon works those qualities of his art that later artists such as Edouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, and Paul Gauguin admired most. While Delacroix's late works stem from his continued interest in signature subjects--animal hunts, North African motifs, the Greek War of Independence, and scenes from the works of his favorite writers--it is the assurance of his style, mastery of the painted surface, and manipulation of color that had the greatest impact on subsequent painters. With his public reputation more or less secure by 1848--although election to the Institute de France, an important honor for a 19th-century French artist, eluded him until 1857--Delacroix's late works reveal a highly introspective and self-conscious artist consumed by a desire to fine-tune his technique and stake out his place in history.

The Death of Sardanapalus" 

In "The Death of Sardanapalus," perhaps Delacroix's most notorious painting, was inspired by Byron's 1821 play Sardanapalus about a hedonistic Assyrian king who ordered all of his prized possessions destroyed with him on his funeral pyre. The artist's vision of a tangled mass of bodies amid the decadent excess of the exotic interior saturated with rich color established Delacroix's position at the vanguard of Romantic painting. Despite the largely hostile reaction to its exhibition, Delacroix remained attached to the controversial picture, retaining it in his studio until 1846. 

In 1832, Delacroix accompanied the Count de Mornay, King Louis-Philippe's envoy to the Sultan of Morocco, to Spain and North Africa. While them, Delacroix kept a journal of notes and sketches that was to provide an important source of inspiration for the rest of his career. From Meknes, in Morocco, Delacroix wrote, "At every step there are ready-made pictures." Moroccans, he felt, preserved the noble bearing of ancient Romans and Greeks, vestigial traces of which otherwise were apparent only in classical sculpture. Using his Moroccan sketches and detailed notes as a guide, Delacroix strove to capture this natural grace in his painted figures. Late in his career, he produced a number of paintings stemming from memory, filtered through his active imagination, of this sojourn in Morocco.

The Lion Hunt

For a government commission to paint a subject of his own choosing, Delacroix produced the monumental "Lion Hunt," an image that combined the artist's imaginative invention with his observations recorded at the Paris zoo in the company of animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. It was Delacroix's last major grand-scale composition submitted for public exhibition during his lifetime. As such, it represents the culmination of the artist's preoccupation with Orientalist subjects, hunts and battles, and animals. 

While reaction to the "Lion Hunt" was mixed, the retrospective exhibition as a whole represented a triumph for the artist.After achieving renown at the Salon, Delacroix received important government commissions to paint murals decorating the interiors of public buildings.

Beginning in the 1840s, Delacroix spent more time in the country and at the seashore, staying either at his house at Champrosay, in Normandy, or with Sand and Chopin at Nohant, where he dedicated himself to landscapes.

 Captivated by gardens and the study of flowers, Delacroix devoted 1848 and 1849 almost exclusively to a series of flower portraits, exhibiting two of these pictures at the Paris Salon of 1849: "Basket of Fruit in a Flower Garden" and "Basket of Flowers Overturned in a Park." In response to these pictures, one critic wrote: "Delacroix has caught the secrets of flowers and their casualness, subsequently translating them for us with that impulsive energy he is known for."

In 1855, the French government bestowed upon Delacroix the honor of a full retrospective in the fine arts building at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Delacroix's arch rival, Ingres, was given a space of equal size, thus setting the scene for a direct comparison of the two artists' works. 

Delacroix's election to the Institute de France in 1857 after seven previous attempts crowned the honors accorded to the artist during the last decade of his life.

Happy Birthday to Odilon Redon

 

April 20, 1840. Odilon Redon (born Bertrand-Jean Redon (April 20, 1840 - July 6, 1916) was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.

When the novelist and critic Joris-Karl Huysmans concluded in 1883 that the work of Odilon Redon was ‘difficult to define’, he made a more precise assessment than such expressions of critical reserve usually permit. This is because difficulty of definition is at once central to Redon’s style, and his preferred subject. Attempting in his journal to explain his aims as an artist, Redon stressed the provisionality of his pictures. Though he was a skilled draughtsman, finish was not his priority. Instead, what he hoped to achieve was a sense of ongoing process, of continuity and possibility. ‘My drawings,’ he writes, ‘inspire without defining themselves. They determine nothing. They take us, just like music, to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.’ Redon hints that his pictures escape definition not only because they are abstruse, but because they are depictions of processes that are also depictions in progress.

The Legacy of Odilon Redon

Redon's far-reaching influence falls into two categories corresponding to the two main threads in his oeuvre: his extraordinarily vivid and colorful late paintings and pastels, and his earlier noirs. For the Nabis, it was Redon's free and expressive use of color that would have the most impact. Maurice Denis credited Redon with advancing the spiritual evolution of his own art, while Pierre Bonnard said of Redon, "All of our generation fell under his charm and received his advice." Later, Henri Matisse acknowledged the influence of Redon's pastels on his own colorful Fauvist palette.

But the impact of Redon's noirs on modern art was perhaps even more profound, for in them we find his greatest originality and inventiveness. The Surrealists were particularly taken with the dreamlike quality of those charcoals and lithographs, and André Breton, their de-facto leader, was a particularly great admirer. A key part of Redon's influence was the suggestiveness of his art - rather than describing things for us, the viewer participates actively in interpreting the work. 

The inventor of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp, noted, "If I am to tell what my own departure has been, I should say that it was the art of Odilon Redon." Redon's influence even extends beyond the visual arts, including the work of the composer Toru Takemitsu.

The Art Story

 

Leonardo Da Vinci . Painter, sculptor, scientist

Possibly the world’s most famous artwork, the Mona Lisa draws thousands of visitors to the Louvre Museum each day, many of whom are compelled by the sitter’s mysterious gaze and enigmatic smile.

 The seemingly ordinary portrait of a young woman dressed modestly in a thin veil, somber colors, and no jewelry might also confound its viewers, who may wonder what all the fuss is about. The painting’s simplicity belies Leonardo’s talent for realism. The subject’s softly modeled face shows his skillful handling of sfumato, an artistic technique that uses subtle gradations of light and shadow, rather than line, to model form. The delicately painted veil, the finely wrought tresses, and the careful rendering of folded fabric reveal Leonardo’s tireless patience in recreating his studied observations. Moreover, the sitter’s perplexing expression only adds to her realism. Her smile might be engaging or it might be mocking—viewers can’t quite figure it out because, like a human, she is a complex figure, embodying contrary characteristics simultaneously.

Leonardo’s pen-and-ink drawing Vitruvian Man comes from one of the many notebooks that he kept on hand during his mature years. It is accompanied by notes, written in mirror script, on the ideal human proportions that the Roman architect Vitruvius laid out in a book on architecture from the 1st century BCE. The drawing illustrates Vitruvius’s theory that the ideal human could fit within a circle and a square, two irreconcilable shapes. Leonardo resolved the concept by drawing a male figure in two superimposed positions—one with his arms outstretched to fit in a square and another with his legs and arms spread in a circle. The work shows not only Leonardo’s effort to understand significant texts but also his desire to expand on them. He was not the first to illustrate Vitruvius’s concepts, but his drawing later became the most iconic, partly because its combination of mathematics, philosophy, and art seemed a fitting symbol of the Renaissance. The drawing is now housed in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, where it is not typically on display but kept in a climate-controlled archive.

Long regarded as a self-portrait, the red chalk drawing of an old man with long wavy hair and a beard has been reproduced to such an extent that it defines how most people think of Leonardo’s appearance. Yet some scholars argue that the figure, with its craggy features, furrowed brow, and downcast eyes, appears much older than the age Leonardo ever reached; Leonardo died at age 67. They propose that the drawing may be one of his grotesque drawings, sketches he habitually made in his notebooks of people with eccentric features. Whomever the portrait represents, it is a departure from Leonardo’s often captivating subjects, yet he managed to imbue the figure with the nobility and wisdom of a mature age.

Head of a Woman, a small brush drawing with pigment, depicts a young woman with her head tilted and her eyes downcast. Her posture recalls the Virgin Mary in Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, suggesting that the drawing may have served as a model. The drawing’s nickname, La scapigliata, translates to “disheveled” and refers to the young woman’s wayward strands of hair. The loosely sketched tendrils and shoulders contrast with the highly finished face, where Leonardo gently modeled the woman’s delicate features, from her heavy eyelids to her tender lips. It reveals Leonardo’s fluid means of working, utilizing both expressive drawing to create form and controlled layering to provide detail.

The Last Supper. Too famous to need any exposition 

One of the great Renaissance painters, Leonardo da Vinci continually tested artistic traditions and techniques. He created innovative compositions, investigated anatomy to accurately represent the human body, considered the human psyche to illustrate character, and experimented with methods of representing space and three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface. The result of his inexhaustible curiosity is many unfinished projects but also some of the most lifelike, complex, and tender representations of human nature. His experiments influenced the art of his successors and often became the standard of representation in subsequent centuries. At his death in 1519, Leonardo left many notebooks filled with jottings and sketches but very few finished works. Some of his pieces were completed by assistants, but others were lost, destroyed, or overpainted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/leon/hd_leon.htm

Robert Delaunay, Born on this day in 1885.

 

Robert Delaunay, Born on this day in 1885.

"Painting is by nature a luminous language." -- Robert Delaunay, artist and co-founder of the Orphism art movement, born on this day in 1885. 

Red Eiffel Tower, painted in 1911 to celebrate his engagement to fellow artist, Sonia Terk, (later Sonia Delaunay)

The Orphism movement was noted for is use of strong colors and geometric shape. But Delaunay's later work was more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. 

Influenced by neo-Impressionism and Signac's pointillism, he created forms using mosaic shaped squares of color. He would leave small areas blank to create a sense of space and light; his influence on painters such as Kandinsky was immense. 
His work developed into proto-Cubism in which complex geometric shapes were fragmented. These dynamic canvases celebrated urban life as evidence by Delaunay's often repeated motif of the Eiffel Tower. 

Delaunay wrote that the "breaking up of form by light creates colored planes... [that] are the structure of the picture... nature is no longer a subject for description but a pretext." Eventually, he abandoned "images or reality that come to corrupt the order of color" - thus turning to complete abstraction.

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-delaunay-robert.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Delaunay

Eadweard J. Muybridge, photographer, eccentric original, murderer

April 09, 1830. Eadweard J. Muybridge (9 April 1830 - 8 May 1904) was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip. In this image: In Feb 22, 1996, The U.S. Postal Service released  a 32-cent stamps honoring pioneers of communication. The stamps honored those who paved the way to improving modern mass communications. Photo: USPS.

https://smarthistory.org/eadweard-muybridge-the-horse-in-motion

But all did not go not well with his private life.   Muybridge married the 21-year-old Flora Stone in 1872. He was 42, twice her age. They had a baby boy, Floredo Helios Muybridge, two years later. But Muybridge thought Floredo might not have been his son. He discovered a series of letters between his wife and drama critic Major Harry Larkyns, according to Stanford Magazine. She even sent a picture of Floredo to Larkyns with the caption “Little Harry.”

In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover. When Muybridge was put on trial in 1875, he pleaded insanity, but then changed his defense to “justifiable homicide,” or killing without bad intent.  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge 

This argument most likely wouldn’t have held up in US court today, but murder laws were much more subjective in the 19th century California. Thus, the jury let him go.
 
Three years later, Muybridge’s photos were ready to show the world, and the genius of his work allowed this murder to slip into oblivion. 
 
Arthur Shimamura, a psychologist at the University of California ­­­– Berkley, told Stanford Magazine that the photographer was well known for his “risky deeds and emotional explosions.” Muybridge changed his name multiple times from his original name, Edward James Muggeridge, further suggesting that he was unstable.

Photography of Motion
http://americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/ 
Murder your wife and get a Google doodle and a Post Office Stamp? 
On the other hand, his wife's lover (wife was 22 years younger than Eadweard), was a critic for the SF Post; I am sure that murdering a critic has crossed the minds of many an artist. Justifiable homicide? Or maybe just unbalanced? Still he escaped the long arm of the law:

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/09/nation/la-na-nn-eadweard-j-muybridges-google-doodle-20120409

https://www.themarginalian.org/tag/eadweard-muybridge/

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/05/26/river-of-shadows-rebecca-solnit-muybridge/

Gustave Moreau. Symbolist painter par excellence.

 

 

Gustave Moreau, French painter of dream world fantasies.  He was admired by Proust,  and influenced Andre Breton, the high priest of Surrealism. He was born in Paris in 1826 and died there, almost to the day 72 years later.  In 1859 he met Alexandrine Dureaux, his "best and only amie." they never married, never lived together but were devoted to each other for 31 years.  When she died at the age of 54, he was distraught.  After her death, his work became more colorful and mysterious. 

For Gustave Moreau (b. 1826), as for da Vinci and Poussin, artists he liked to refer to, painting was a cosa mentale. It does not seek to recreate on canvas an observation of nature but first and foremost addresses the spirit, and comes from the innermost depths of the artist. Moreau wanted to create a body of work where, in his own words, the soul could find: all the aspirations of dreams, tenderness, love, enthusiasm and religious ascent towards the higher spheres, where everything in it is elevated, inspiring, moral and beneficent; where all is imaginative and impulsive soaring off into sacred, unknown, mysterious lands. Moreau’s painting is meant to inspire dreams rather than thought. It seeks to transport the viewer into another world.

 

Leonid Pasternak. Russian Post Impressionist painter & the father of Boris Pasternak.

 

Marushka the cat - transfixed by what's beyond the window

Jews in Tiberius 

Sitting next to each other but worlds apart. 

Leonid Osipovich Pasternak (born Yitzhok-Leib, or Isaak Iosifovich, Pasternak; Russian: Леони́д О́сипович Пастерна́к, 3 April 1862 (N.S.) – 31 May 1945) was a Russian post-impressionist painter. He was the father of the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak.

Leonid Pasternak was one of the first Russian painters who labeled himself an Impressionist. In Russia in the 1880s and 1890s such a proclamation was novel enough to draw attention to an artist. Leonid also was a member of the Peredvizhniki and Union of Russian Artists movements. He was a friend of Leo Tolstoy, for months lived in Yasnaya Polyana, and painted many portraits of the great writer, also illustrating his novels War and Peace and Resurrection. He left Russian in 1921 for Paris and from then, moved to England. He never returned to Russia.

Boris Pasternak, future novelist, already looking intense. With his brother Alexander. Painted in 1905 by their father Leonid, who was born in Odesa on this day in 1862.