Paris, 1925: Art Dèco gazzled the World / L'Art Déco abbagliò il mondo

Art Déco Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes - Esposizione internazionale delle arti decorativi ed industriali moderni, tenutasi a Parigi nel 1925 - e per quest'ultimo motivo noto anche come Stile 1925 - viene considerato un fenomeno del gusto che interessò sostanzialmente il secondo ed il terzo decennio del secolo XX: riguardò le arti decorative, le arti visive, l'architettura, la moda.

L'Expo parigina del 1925 vide trionfare, fra i molti espositori stranieri, la speciale raffinatezza francese in varie categorie merceologiche, dall'ebanisteria agli accessori di moda: Parigi restava il centro internazionale del buon gusto anche negli anni critici seguiti alla prima guerra mondiale.

Salvador Dali: "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams"!

• "I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality".

• "If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it".

• "We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art".

Maki Horanai, 1977 | Magic realism painter

Born in Japan, Maki Horanai 洞内麻希 moved to Australia from Japan in 2005 and has had 18 solo exhibitions in various cities throughout Australia.

She grew up in small seaside villages in Hokkaido, northern Japan, where she often sat or played along the beach.

Maki's early influences were the ocean, the shore, the birds and islands she saw both in reality and in her imagination.

She began painting in high school and continued through college and graduate school where she was strongly influenced by the colors and themes of western and eastern art.

Trish Biddle | Art Déco painter

American artist Trish Biddle studied at the Dallas Institute of Art, before beginning her career as an illustrator and textile designer.

Trish Biddle is published internationally, and is collected around the world.

Her process of drawing, painting and designing eventually melded onto canvases, creating romantic images and her unmistakable Art Déco figurative paintings.

5 Masterpieces at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, 1875

In Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, Renoir’s language is wholly impressionistic: in a setting lacking a visible horizon, the flowers and shrubs are created with tiny dabs of colour, providing a constant interweaving of textures around the two small figures.

The woman, whose parasol shades her from the sun, stands close to the man as he leans down, perhaps to pick a flower, hinting at an intimate relationship.

Contrary to what one may think, this canvas was not painted in the countryside but in the garden of Renoir’s new studio in Montmartre.

His friend George Rivière recalled: "As soon as Renoir entered the house, he was charmed by the view of this garden, which looked like a beautiful abandoned park".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, 1875 | Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Lionel Walden | Seascape painter

A famous painter of seascapes and marine scenes, Lionel Walden (1861-1933) was born in Connecticut.

He first became interested in art in Minnesota, where the family moved when his father became rector of an Episcopal Church there.

As a young man Walden moved to Paris where he studied with E. A. Carolus-Duran.

Andrew Tischler, 1983 | Realist painter

Australian painter Andrew Tischler enjoys a thriving art career in his chosen field of realism painting, capturing the magnificence of some of the world’s most harsh, beautiful and imposing landscapes such as the Kimberley, Pilbara, Murray River Region, Great Ocean Rd, Flinders Ranges and the USA.

Ghiannis Ritsos | Moonlight sonata / Sonata al chiaro di luna, 1956

Jeremy Mann

A spring evening.

A large room in an old house. A woman of a certain age, dressed in black, is speaking to a young man. They have not turned on the lights.

Through both windows the moonlight shines relentlessly.

I forgot to mention that the Woman in Black has published two or three interesting volume of poetry with a religious flavor.

So, the Woman in Black is speaking to the Young Man:

Claude Monet and the Sea

Claude Monet | The Jetty a Le Havre, 1868

Claude Monet | The Manneporte (Étretat), 1883 | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Monet spent most of February 1883 at Étretat, a fishing village and resort on the Normandy coast.

He painted twenty views of the beach and the three extraordinary rock formations in the area: the Porte d'Aval, the Porte d'Amont, and the Manneporte.

René Magritte | The “Renoir” period, 1940-1947

- "For the period I call 'Surrealism in full sunlight', I am trying to join together two mutually exclusive things: one, a feeling of levity, intoxication, happiness, which depends on a certain mood and on an atmosphere that certain Impressionists, or rather, Impressionism in general, have managed to render in painting.

Without Impressionism, I do not believe we would know this feeling of real objects perceived through colours and nuances, and free of all classical reminiscences... and, two, a feeling of the mysterious quality of objects" - René Magritte.

Mahatma Gandhi: "Occhio per occhio ed il mondo diventa cieco"!

• Sii il cambiamento che vuoi vedere nel mondo.

• Be the change you wish to see in the world.

• Occhio per occhio e il mondo diventa cieco.

• An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

• Le pagine della storia del mondo sono tutte lordate dai sanguinosi racconti delle guerre di religione. Solo con la purezza e le buone azioni dei seguaci si può difendere la religione, mai con la contrapposizione a chi professa altre fedi.

Igor Zenin

Truong Buu Giam, 1948 | Abstract impressionism painter

Vietnamese-born American painter Truong Buu Giam was born on Christmas Eve, in the province of Bên Tre, South Vietnam.

His parents felt grateful on the birth of their fifth child.

They named the infant Buu Giam with a fateful meaning: Preserving the Precious and the Beautiful.

Already in elementary school, his teachers loved to have him come to the chalkboard and draw pictures so other children could copy.

Robert Lyn Nelson, 1955 | Magic realism painter

Robert Lyn Nelson is an American artist known for his paintings of marine wildlife, particularly those in his "Two Worlds" style, which simultaneously shows life above and below the surface of the sea.

Artistic career

Nelson moved to Hawaii when he was eighteen years old.

According to Nelson, the turning point in his life and his career occurred when he encountered a group of whales while surfing off Lahaina, Hawaii.

"In learning to ride the waves, I also learned to respect the ocean...to feel its pulse with all five of my senses, and to feel its spirit at an extra-sensory level. It was a blend of magic and realism that I wanted to communicate in my paintings", says Nelson.

Gabriele D'Annunzio | Voglio un amore doloroso / I want a slow painful love

Voglio un amore doloroso, lento,

che lento sia come una lenta morte,

e senza fine (voglio che più forte

sie della morte) e senza mutamento.

Voglio che senza tregua in un tormento

occulto sien le nostre anime assorte;

e un mare sia presso a le nostre porte,

solo, che pianga in un silenzio intento.

Francesca Strino | Iside e Osiride Resurrezione

Shaun Smith | Ocean Waves

Shaun Smith is a playful water photographer who sees the bright side in the smallest things in life.

Like many surfers before him, Shaun started bringing a camera in the water to shoot his friends and document his own rides, as a way to relive the fun.

Growing up on the coast of California, Shaun started swimming age two, took to bodyboarding at seven and hasn’t stopped since.

"I love the feeling of getting barreled. There's really nothing else like it".

Starting at the Wedge and staring down barrels, Shaun found his style in the mini-waves movement, capturing in ripples the universal beauty of undulating water.

Shaun Smith is obsessed with listening to the call of the ocean, using the lens to record the mood of the sea, the dance of the waves in the wind, like the lonely but not lonely soul of the sea.

Candace Lovely, 1953 | Impressionist painter

Candace Whittemore Lovely is an American painter known for her paintings of contemporary American life, including landscapes of treasured locales and people at play in idyllic locations. She lives and works in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

In 1991, Lovely painted the official portrait of former First Lady Barbara Bush that now hangs in the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

She has been called "the grand dame of Boston painters".

Charles William Wyllie (1853-1923)

Charles William Wyllie was a British painter of landscape and marinescape.

Born in London he was the son of William Morison Wyllie and brother of William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931).

While his brother William established a strong reputation as a marine painter and etcher, Charles moved away from straightforward representations of the British coastline and developed an interest in painting allegorical and mythological subjects beside the sea.

Mikhail Lermontov | Demon, 1829 | Chapter I

Demon / Демон is a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, written in several versions in the years 1829-1839.

It is considered a masterpiece of European Romantic poetry.

Lermontov began work on the poem when he was just 14 or 15, but completed it only during his Caucasus exile. Lermontov wrote six major variations of the poem, and the final version was not published until 1842, after his death.

The poem is set in Lermontov's beloved Caucasus Mountains. It opens with the eponymous protagonist wandering the earth, hopeless and troubled. He dwells in infinite isolation, his immortality and unlimited power a worthless burden. Then he spies the beautiful Georgian Princess Tamara, dancing for her wedding, and in the desert of his soul wells an indescribable emotion.

The Demon, acting as a brutal and powerful tyrant, destroys his rival: at his instigation, robbers come to despoil the wedding and kill Tamara's betrothed. The Demon courts Tamara, and Tamara knows fear, yet in him she sees not a demon nor an angel but a tortured soul.

Eventually she yields to his embrace, but his kiss is fatal.

And though she is taken to Heaven, the Demon is left again "Alone in all the universe, Abandoned, without love or hope!..."

Tamara and the Demon | Konstantin Makovsky, 1889

Georges Maroniez | Marine / Genre painter

Georges Philibert Charles Maroniez (1865, Douai - 1933, Paris) was a French painter, specializing in landscapes with figures.

Education and first works

Maroniez was the son of an industrialist who owned a sugar refinery in Montigny-en-Ostrevent. He displayed artistic talent at an early age, but - although not discouraged - was expected to pursue a more professional career.

Accordingly, he studied law, and afterwards served as a magistrate in, successively, Boulogne-sur-Mer (1891), Avesnes-sur-Helpe (1894) and Cambrai (1897).

Richard Diebenkorn | Abstract / Expressionist painter

Richard Diebenkorn, Lyrical painter, Dies at 71

By Michael Kimmelman, New York Times newspaper, March 31, 1993

Richard Diebenkorn 1922-1993, one of the premier American painters🎨 of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life, died yesterday at his home in Berkeley. He was 70.

The cause was respiratory failure after a long illness, said his dealer, Lawrence Rubin of M. Knoedler and Company in Manhattan.