Arts, Volume 6, Issue 2 (June 2017) – 6 articles

Gerald Chukwuma is a prolific Nigerian artist whose creative adaptation and use of media tend to deviate from common practice. This essay draws on his several avant-garde works on display at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Library and at the administrative building of the University of Nigeria Nsukka. These artworks are referred to as ‘paintaglio’ in this essay owing to the convergence of painting, and engraving (or intaglio) processes. This study therefore identifies, critically interprets and analyzes Chukwuma’s artistic inclinations—style, spirit, forms, materials, and techniques. This is in order to lay bare the formal and conceptual properties that foreground the artist’s recent paintaglio experiments. The study relies on personal interviews, literature, and images of Chukwuma’s works as data. Such experimental works which clearly express influences of ‘natural synthesis’ ideology are here examined against the backdrop of their epistemic themes. Full article

Elizabeth Durack (1915–2000) was a prolific Australian artist. She spent much of her life in Western Australia. Her subject of choice was most often aboriginal life. The book, Elizabeth Durack, Art & Life, Selected Writings (2016, edited by Perpetua Durack Clancy, Brisbane: Connor Court, 276 pp., A$29.95) presents a chronological selection of her writings in nine chapters, one decade per chapter. There are personal letters and extracts from her diaries, along with some published and unpublished essays. The style is frank, sometimes irreverent, and she rails against political correctness. In her 80th year, Elizabeth was gripped with a manic burst of creativity. She produced a remarkable suite of works in the thrall of her new muse, Eddie Burrup. The book throws light on her relationship with Eddie Burrup and the unfolding controversy. The presenting of art works of a white woman as those of an aboriginal man caused grief for some of the local artocrats. The first 80 years of Elizabeth Durack can be regarded as a long art apprenticeship and at the culmination of which she graduated to be Eddie Burrup. In this guise and in the twilight of her life, she produced the masterworks of her career, scores of remarkable paintings. The Eddie Burrup suite of paintings are big and bold, fresh and expansive, and uniquely Australian. They reveal Australia’s ancient landscape as a playground for the spirits and totems of the land. This book reveals some of the story of Elizabeth Durack and Eddie Burrup. Full article

In the second half of the 19th century, new methods for quarrying and processing natural stone were developed. In the Nordic countries Sweden, Norway, and Finland, this technological progress went hand in hand with a systematic geological mapping and large-scale exploitation of natural stone deposits. As a result, new constructions were developed, changing the building practice in these countries. With the end of historicism, a new architecture arose that, particularly in Norway and Finland, acquired a national-romantic character. This paper examines the interaction between geological exploration, commercial development, technical inventions, and the development of national-romantic architecture. Full article

With the understanding that art and technology are continuing to experience an historic and rapidly intensifying rapprochement—but with the understanding as well that accounts thereof have tended to be constrained by scientific/engineering rigor on the one hand, or have tended to swing to the opposite extreme—it is the goal of this special issue of Arts to provide an opportunity for artists, humanists, scientists, and engineers to consider this development from the broader perspective which it deserves, while at the same time retaining a focus on what must surely be the emerging core of our subject: the state of the art in mechatronics and computation is such that we can now begin to speak comfortably of the machine as artist—and we can begin to hope, as well, that an aesthetic sensitivity on the part of the machine might help lead to a friendlier and more sensitive machine intelligence in general. Full article

This article explores the exhibitions of Picasso’s works in the first two decades of his artistic career, as well as the dealers and collectors who came into contact with them. It describes the relationship between Picasso and his first dealers, Pere Manyach, Berthe Weill, Clovis Sagot, Père Soulier, Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Georg Caspari, L. W. Guthier, Hans Goltz, Heinrich Thannhauser, Otto Feldmann, Alfred Flechtheim, Emil Richter, Gottfried Tanner, Michael Brenner, R. J. Coady, Léonce Rosenberg, Paul Rosenberg, etc.; as well as his first collectors, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Olivier Sainsère, Joachim Gasquet, Wilhelm Uhde, Herman Rupf, Vincenc Kramář, Frank Stoop, Hugo Perls, Edwin Suermondt, Dr. Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, Princess Mechtilde Lichnowsky, Henry Simms, Ludwig and Rosy Fischer, Professor Wilhelm Kreis, Adolf Erblösch, Justin K. Thannhauser, Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, Ivan A. Morosov, etc. It also identifies all important Picasso expositions in this time period and how those dealers and collectors were involved in their arrangement. The information provided here has been excerpted from an exhaustive study of the critical literature on Pablo Picasso, as well as from published exhibition catalogues. Full article

To ancient men, goats, and all that was related to them, were associated with a burning sexuality, even with lasciviousness and lust, and connected with the deities Venus and Bacchus. In this case, this connection occurs through mythological creatures, like fauns and satyrs, all of them representations of an unbridled sexuality. On the other hand, goats were also considered as whimsical and unstable animals, whose behavior was very changeable, and in some contexts, as a symbol of Christ. This paper will show how many of these symbols are repeated in the representations of this animal in Picasso’s works. Full article