FROM ALSACE TO INDIA (original) (raw)
Nancy as a Center of Art Nouveau Architecture, 1895-1914
2011
The small city of Nancy, France, is arguably the center where Art Nouveau architecture had the most lasting impact. Nancy’s Art Nouveau was a divergent form of modernity that was defined by regionalism and a distinct sense of place, which its proponents championed as the key elements of an authentic architecture, allowing Nancy to challenge Paris as the dominant French artistic center in the two decades before World War I. Most of Nancy’s architects were graduates of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and grounded in the language of classicism and its associated professional standards. Much of Nancy’s Art Nouveau had a conservative character that garnered praise from the national architectural press. Nancy’s architects were also disciples of Emile Gallé, the founder of a regional association of artists, industrialists, and designers called the Ecole de Nancy, dedicated to the promotion of Art Nouveau. Nancy’s architects freely collaborated with other artists of the Ecole on their buildings, and a sense of pride in their province led them to study local flora, the and regional legends and politics, using the iconography of plants and narratives to make architecture legible to a wide public. The rooting of the work of Nancy’s architects in their region and the alliance they formed with local industry were successes that Parisian Art Nouveau architects were never able to match. Consequently, in Paris, Art Nouveau was quickly discarded, while in Nancy it was celebrated as an integral piece of regional identity and an important national achievement until 1914.
2005
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, two major schisms between the papacy and the empire erupted. The first struggle, the Investiture Controversy, lasting from 1077-1122, set the Church against the Holy Roman Emperor on the issue of the right to choose and install bishops. The second papal/imperial conflict concerned the question of papal supremacy over Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1159-1179). Because these two conflicts impacted both imperial and papal territories, the churches on imperial soil had to choose to support either the papacy, the spiritual head of the church, or the emperor, the secular lord of these imperial territories. As part of a territorial campaign to win and maintain the loyalty of Alsace, the homeland of the Hohenstaufen family, Barbarossa directly concerned himself with the affairs of several churches in the region. At the same time that Barbarossa exerted his influence on these churches, artistic programs emerged attesting to the success of the emperor’s territorial politics. The church of St. Peter and Paul at Andlau (1160) in Lower Alsace is of key importance for understanding later sculptural programs designed to please Frederick Barbarossa in the area. Three sculpted motifs at Andlau can be specifically linked to imperial ideology: the Christus Triumphans, the Traditio Legis, and Dietrich’s Rescue of Rentwin. Each of these themes had traditional associations with both the pope and the emperor and had been employed by popes during the Investiture Controversy to advocate papal supremacy over the emperor. Barbarossa and his supporters readapted these three motifs in Alsatian sculptural programs to reiterate the emperor’s traditional God-given right to authority in the sacred and secular realms.
With Count Pahlen against Napoleon: Memoirs of the Russian General Eduard von Löwenstern
"A memoir of a Russian Hussar Officer who fought 1806-15 taking part in many of the important cavalry enagements against Napoleon. These memoirs of the Russian Hussar Officer, Eduard von Löwenstern, give a wonderful insight into the Russian light cavalry of the Napoleonic Wars 1806-15. Eduard had the typical Hussar appetites for gambling, women, duelling and fighting combined with an ability to express himself with honesty in his writings. His position as Adjutant from 1810 to the talented light cavalry commander, Count Peter von der Pahlen the Younger, who was also the Chef of Eduard’s Sumy Hussar Regiment, and his adventures with Colonel Alexander Figner raiding French communications make him an important eyewitness to the 1812-15 campaigns. This is an English translation of Baron Georges von Wrangell’s 1910 edited version of Eduard von Löwenstern’s memoirs entitled Mit Graf Pahlens Reiterei gegen Napoleon: Denkwürdigkeiten des russischen Generals Eduard von Löwenstern (1790-1837). He seems to have had no fear of contracting syphilis that was spreading rapidly at the time. When his older brother Hermann Ludwig travelled to Paris and spent several months there in 1802-1803 before going on the voyage around the world, he avoided prostitutes because of the dangers of contracting syphilis."
Stained glass in the 17th century. Continuity, Invention, Twilight., 2018
Publication of the 29th International Colloquium of the Corpus Vitrearum. "Stained glass in the 17th century. Continuity, Invention, Twilight", Antwerp, 2-6 July 2018. Edited by Madeleine MANDERYCK, Isabelle LECOCQ and Yvette VANDEN BEMDEN, Antwerp/Brussels, 2018.
Editor (with Spencer Tucker), author of 33 short articles, sole compiler/editor, Vol. 5 (Documents Volume). Named Booklist, Editors’ Choice: Reference Sources, 2014. The version here is two files: Vols. 1-2, and Vols. 3-5. Offering exhaustive coverage, detailed analyses, and the latest historical interpretations of events, this expansive, five-volume encyclopedia is the most comprehensive and detailed reference source on the First World War available today. • Provides comprehensive coverage of the causes of the war that allows readers to fully understand the complex origins of such a monumental conflict • Supplies detailed analyses and explanations of the events before, during, and after World War I, such as how the results of the war set the stage for the global Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as detailed biographical data on key military and civilian individuals during World War I • Includes a chronologically organized document volume that enables students to examine the sources of historical information firsthand • Covers all key battles, land and sea, and their impacts, as well as the critical technological developments that affected the war's outcomes
A STAINED GLASS MASTERPIECE IN VICTORIAN GLASGOW STEPEHEN ADAM'S CELEBRATION OF INDUSTRIAL LABOR
pp. 221-236) 3 PREFATORY NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Burgh Halls of Maryhill -a district in the north-western section of Glasgow 1 --are adorned by twenty stained glass panels of extraordinary power, beauty, and originality. Created some time between 1877 and 1881 by the barely thirty-year old Stephen Adam in collaboration with David Small, his partner in the studio he opened in Glasgow in 1870, these panels are unique among stained glass works of the time in that they depict the workers of the then independent burgh not for the most part in the practice of traditional trades (baker, weaver, flesher, cooper, hammerman, etc.) (see Pt. II, 2, Figs. 1-3), not clad in traditional, biblical or classical costume --as, for instance, in the contemporary windows of the Trades Hall in Aberdeen, also by Stephen Adam --but realistically, as workers dressed in modern working clothes and engaged in the tasks required by the many small modern workshops that had opened in Maryhill, even as vast industrial complexes, such as the Tennant chemical works, employing over a thousand workers in the 1840s, were set up in adjacent burghs on the north side of Scotland's then continuously expanding industrial metropolis. The style is also simpler and starker than was common in stained glass art at the time, with exceptionally strong leadlines, larger than usual glass pieces, and a similarly 4 unusual color palette highlighting the composition and producing an effect of both sober, meticulous realism and neo-classical idealism. Salvaged and kept in storage for many years as the Burgh Halls fell into disrepair following the drastic twentieth-century decline of industry in Glasgow, and partly restored only recently to their original site after the Halls' rehabilitation as a community and conference centre 2 (see Part III:3, fig. 7), the panels have lately attracted the attention and admiration of a small number of scholars and writers --notably Michael Donnelly, Iain Galbraith, Ian Mitchell, and Gordon R. Urquhart. "The finest collection of secular stained glass in Scotland" (Urquhart 3 ) rarely figures, however, even in books and articles devoted to nineteenth-century stained glass. I have written this essay with the aim of bringing Stephen Adam's panels to the attention of amateurs of the arts beyond Glasgow and Scotland and especially in the United States, and thus lending what modest support I can to the pioneering studies of Donnelly, Galbraith, Mitchell, and Urquhart. However, as the history of stained glass and the main esthetic issues that arose concerning it in Adam's time are a relatively unstudied and unfamiliar topic among non-specialists (including, until quite recently, the writer of these lines), I have devoted a substantial part of my study to questions of context. Part I reflects my puzzlement, on discovering Adam's panels, at my own general ignorance of and 5 even indifference to the art of stained glass, despite a longstanding interest in and enjoyment of other visual arts. Why is stained glass so little known and poorly understood? In Part II I have attempted to acquaint the reader with the conditions in which Adam's work was produced: the revival of stained glass in the nineteenth century and the lively debates, in which Adam himself participated, about what authentic stained glass is, what it should and should not be. Part III is devoted to the work of the Adam studio and to the panels themselves and their unusual, perhaps even unique style. Three appendices fill out this section. The first, by Ian R. Mitchell, a revised version of a section on the Maryhill panels in his highly readable and richly informed 2013 book A Glasgow Mosaic: Cultural Icons of the City (Edinburgh: Luath Press) describes and explains the real historical background of the various activities reflected in the panels; the second, an article
Building the Cities of Empire: Urban Planning in the Cities of Italy's Fascist Empire
Sociology and Empire
Sponsored by the International Institute at the University of Michigan and published by Duke University Press, this series is centered around cultural and historical studies of power, politics, and the state-a fi eld that cuts across the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, po liti cal science, and cultural studies. Th e focus on the relationship between state and culture refers both to a methodological approach-the study of politics and the state using culturalist methods-and a substantive one that treats signifying practices as an essential dimension of politics. Th e dialectic of politics, culture, and history fi gures prominently in all the books selected for the series.
Stained glass in the 17th century. Continuity, Invention, Twilight.
Stained glass in the 17th century. Continuity, Invention, Twilight, 2018
Publication of the 29th International Colloquium of the Corpus Vitrearum. "Stained glass in the 17th century. Continuity, Invention, Twilight", Antwerp, 2-6 July 2018. Edited by Madeleine MANDERYCK, Isabelle LECOCQ and Yvette VANDEN BEMDEN, Antwerp/Brussels, 2018.
My Contributions: Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874-1965), 1:138-143; Clay, Lucius Dubignon (1897-1978), 1:147-148; Jiang Jieshi (1887-1975), 1:379-381; (with Richard G. Stone) Juin, Alphonse Pierre (1888-1967), 1:393-394; Kenney, George Churchill (1889-1977), 1:397-398; (with Spencer C. Tucker) King, Ernest Joseph (1878-1956), 1:400-402; Mao Zedong (1893-1976), 2:483-485; McNamara, Robert Strange (1916-2009), 2:501-504; (with Spencer C. Tucker) Ridgway, Matthew Bunker (1895-1993), 2:638-640; Sims, William Sowden (1858-1936), 2:696-698; Vandenberg, Hoyt Sanford (1899-1954), 2:785-786. This insightful encyclopedia examines the most influential commanders who have shaped military history and the course of world events from ancient times to the present. • Profiles 500 military commanders who had a major impact on history in A–Z entries written in plain, easily understood language • Provides critical analyses of the individuals themselves, off the field, as well as their significant contributions to military history―and in some cases, world history • Includes more than 40 sidebars that provide interesting facts and insight into various military leaders as well as extensive references for further reading