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Arts, media, and entertainment: Sample biographiess
Bergman, (Ernst) Ingmar (1918– )
Swedish stage and film director. He is regarded by many as a unique auteur and one of the masters of modern cinema. His work deals with complex moral, psychological, and metaphysical problems and is often strongly pessimistic. Bergman gained an international reputation with Det sjunde inseglet/The Seventh Seal (1957) and Smultronstället/Wild Strawberries
(1957).
His understanding portrayal of women was already evident in his early films, including Sommarnattens Leende/Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). His tormented search for spiritual truth was given increasingly stark expression. He has also directed
Junfrukällan/The Virgin Spring (1959), Tystnaden/The Silence (1963), Persona (1966), Viskningar och rop/Cries and Whispers (1972), and Fanny och Alexander/Fanny and Alexander (1982). The dramatic intensity and striking imagery of his films has had a profound influence on many subsequent film-makers.
Since 1944 Bergman has had a parallel film and theatrical career, being successively director of the municipal theatres in Helsingborg, Göteborg, and Malmö, and finally of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm.
Botticelli, Sandro (1445–1510)
born Alessandro Filipepi
Florentine painter. He depicted religious and mythological subjects. He was patronized by the ruling Medici family and was deeply influenced by their neo-Platonic circle. It was for the Medicis that he painted Primavera (1478) and The Birth of Venus (c. 1482–84). From the 1490s he was influenced by the religious fanatic Savonarola, and developed a harshly expressive and emotional style, as seen in his Mystic Nativity (1500).
His work for the Medicis was designed to cater to the educated classical tastes of the day. As well as his sentimental and beautiful young Madonnas, he produced a series of inventive compositions, including tondi (circular paintings) and illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. He broke with the Medicis after their execution of Savonarola.
His real name was Alessandro di Mariano dei Filipepi. The name Botticelli ('little barrel') probably derived from 'Botticello', the nickname of his elder brother Giovanni, who seems to have taken charge of the boy. From the goldsmith's shop of his brother Antonio he seems to have gone to the studio of Fra Filippo Lippi, whom he imitated in his early work. He had his own studio when little over 20 and profited by the study of other masters, Verrocchio and Antonio Pollaiuolo especially, as may be seen in his Fortitude (1470) and Judith (about 1472).
In 1475 he entered the service of the Medicis, and his art shows the effect of the humanism and classical culture of this environment. His Adoration of the Magi (about 1477) contains a number of Medicean portraits (as well as his own), and he painted his famous allegory, Primavera, representing the seasons, for Lorenzo, son of Pierfrancesco de' Medici.
The years 1481–82 were spent in Rome, where he worked with other artists on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, to which he contributed frescoes of the Life of Moses, the Destruction of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and the Temptation of Christ by Satan. Prolific years followed in Florence, both religious and pagan subjects occupying him, including his Madonna of the Magnificat (about 1485), Pallas and the Centaur, and the famous Birth of Venus.
A change is perceptible in his work from about 1490, reflecting a religious disquiet almost certainly produced or intensified by
the influence of the religious reformer Savonarola. He seems to have consigned a number of his pagan subjects to the reformer's bonfire, and the triumph of religious enthusiasm over the sensuousness of the Renaissance can subsequently be traced in his work. He made his series of illustrations for Dante's Inferno between 1492 and 1497, The Calumny of Apelles (1495) being his last secular masterpiece. The year 1498, in which Savonarola was put to death, saw the production of his passionate Pietà, and in the great Nativity of 1500 he returned to the medieval spirit and conception. His last works express melancholy and suffering with dramatic intensity, as in the Crucifixion and the four scenes from the life of St Zenobius.
In composition and detail he shows an unrivalled poetic invention. The delicacy of his art (which imitators at various periods have vainly tried to recapture) is accompanied by a dynamic linear energy and dramatic power.
Dylan, Bob (1941– )
adopted name of Robert Allen Zimmerman
US singer and songwriter. His lyrics provided catchphrases for a generation and influenced innumerable songwriters. He began in the folk-music tradition. His early songs, as on his albums The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) and The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964), were associated with the US civil-rights movement and anti-war protest. From 1965 he worked in his own unique rock style, as on the albums Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966). His prolific folk-rock output continued into the 21st century.
Dylan began by performing folk music in Minneapolis, Minnesota, taking his stage name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He was strongly influenced by the folk singer Woody Guthrie, and moved to New York City in 1960 in order to meet him. Dylan's early songs range from the simple, preachy 'Blowin' in the Wind' (1962) to brooding complaints about social injustice like 'The Ballad of Hollis Brown' (1963). When he first used an electric rock band in 1965, he was criticized by purists, but the albums that immediately followed are often cited as his best work, with songs of spite ('Like a Rolling Stone') and surrealistic imagery ('Visions of Johanna') delivered in his characteristically nasal voice. The film Don't Look Back (1967) documented his 1965 British tour. Of Dylan's 1970s albums, Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Desire (1976) were the strongest.
Slow Train Coming (1979) was his first album as a born-again Christian, a phase that lasted several years and alienated all but the die-hard fans. Oh, Mercy (1989) was seen as a partial return to his old form, but Under the Red Sky (1990) did not bear this out. However, The Bootleg Years (1991), a collection of 58 previously unreleased items from past years, reasserted his reputation. In 1992 he released Good As I Been to You, which consisted of traditional tunes and was his first completely solo acoustic album since Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). His later studio albums included Time Out of Mind (1997) and Love and Theft (2001). His song 'Things Have Changed' won the 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Song, for the film Wonder Boys (2000).
Graham, Martha (1894–1991)
US dancer, choreographer, teacher, and director. The greatest exponent of modern dance in the USA, she developed a distinctive vocabulary of movement, the Graham Technique, now taught worldwide. Her pioneering technique, designed to express inner emotion and intention through dance forms, represented the first real alternative to classical ballet.
Graham founded her own dance school in 1927 and started a company with students from the school 1929. She created over 170 works, including Appalachian Spring (1944; score by Aaron Copland), Clytemnestra (1958; the first full-length modern dance work), and Lucifer (1975). She danced in most of the pieces she choreographed until her retirement from performance in the 1960s. Graham had a major influence on such choreographers in the contemporary dance movement as Robert Cohan, Glen Tetley, Merce Cunningham, Norman Morrice, Paul Taylor, and Robert North.
Joyce, James (Augustine Aloysius) (1882–1941)
Irish writer. His originality lies in evolving a literary form to express the complexity of the human mind, and he revolutionized the form of the English novel with his linguistic technique which had a far-reaching influence on many modern authors. His works include the short story collection Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Ulysses, which records the events of a single day in Dublin, experiments with language and parody, imitating and sometimes mocking different styles of writing. It combines direct narrative with the unspoken and unconscious reactions of the characters, which is sometimes known as the stream of consciousness technique. Banned at first for obscenity in the USA and the UK, it made a great impact and is generally regarded as Joyce's masterpiece. He is known as a major figure in the artistic movement of modernism.
Joyce was born in Dublin, one of a large and poor family, and educated at University College, Dublin. He showed strong literary
tendencies very early in life and after graduating wrote a few stories but was unable to make a living. He travelled to Italy, where he taught English, accompanied by Nora Barnacle (1883–1951; his wife from 1931). In 1909 he returned to Dublin. Until this point, Joyce's only published work was a book of lyrics called Chamber Music (1907); his other verse appeared in Pomes Penyeach (1927). Dubliners was published after a nine-year delay caused by wrangling with publishers over their demands for excisions, while the partly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialized by Ezra Pound in The Egoist (1914–15). At this time Joyce was under 'free arrest' in Austria, but was later allowed to go to neutral Switzerland where he lived in Zürich until the end of World War I. There he formed a company of Irish players who performed his drama Exiles (1918), modelled on Ibsen's work. In Zürich, Joyce's eyesight began to fail, and a few years after the war he moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in 1922. Finnegans Wake, a story about a Dublin publican and his family, continued Joyce's experiments with language. Having worked in poverty for much of his life, and after enduring numerous eye operations, Joyce returned to Zürich in 1940, but died soon afterwards.
Ulysses relates the mental and physical history of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, scholar-philosopher, during a single day in Dublin. Bloom's day is paralleled to the wanderings of Odysseus in the Homeric epic. Joyce claimed to have discovered the literary device of the interior monologue, used in Ulysses, from Edouard Dujardin's forgotten work Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888). The device was used by Marcel Proust and Dorothy Richardson, among other writers. The device of parody is at work throughout the work; Joyce parodies the conventions of different literary genres as Bloom's day progresses. In Finnegan's Wake the word-coining which is a feature of Ulysses was pushed to its limits; punning language and allegory are used to explore various levels of meaning. This difficult but engrossing work breaks with many literary conventions, creating a continuous entity (the opening words run on from the last words of the book) which can be entered at any point. It also breaks with the basic convention of using a single language throughout – in its merging of different languages it has been hailed as an extreme example of modernism. Its evasion of conventional form and its linguistic obscurities make the work so complex that few readers can follow the meaning without the assistance of a commentary.
Le Corbusier (1887–1965)
adopted name of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret
Swiss-born French architect. He was an early and influential exponent of the Modern Movement and one of the most innovative of 20th-century architects. His distinct brand of Functionalism first appears in his town-planning proposals of the early 1920s, which advocate 'vertical garden cities' with zoning of living and working areas and traffic separation as solutions to urban growth and chaos. From the 1940s several of his designs for multistorey villas were realized, notably his Unité d'Habitation, Marseille, (1947–52), using his Modulor system of standard-sized units mathematically calculated according to the proportions of the human figure.
His white-stuccoed, cubist-style villas of the 1920s were designed as 'machines for living in', making the most of space and light through open-plan interiors, use of pilotis (stilts carrying the building), and roof gardens. He moved on to a more
expressive mode (anticipating Brutalism) with rough, unfinished exteriors, as in the Ministry of Education, Rio de Janeiro, 1936–45, designed with Lucio Costa (1902–98) and Oscar Niemeyer. In the reconstruction period after World War II, Le Corbusier's urbanization theories were highly influential, disseminated through the work of the urban planning body CIAM, although only in the gridlike layout of the new city of Chandigarh, India, 1951–56, was he able to see his visions of urban zoning fully realized. His sculptural design for the church of Notre-Dame du Haut du Ronchamp 1950–54, worked out in the minutest detail, is a supreme example of aesthetic Functionalism.
Le Corbusier was originally a painter and engraver, but turned his attention to the problems of contemporary industrial society. His books Vers une Architecture/Towards a New Architecture 1923 and Le Modulor 1948 have had worldwide significance for town planning and building design.
Osborne, John James (1929–1994)
English dramatist. He became one of the first Angry Young Men (anti-establishment writers of the 1950s) of British theatre with his debut play, Look Back in Anger (1956). Other plays include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1960), Inadmissible Evidence (1964), and A Patriot for Me (1965).
Early success
Osborne was born in London. Look Back in Anger, which appeared when he was in his late 20s, quickly made him a celebrity, and brought a new energy and urgency into British drama. Its central character's self-pitying rages against the 'system' caught exactly the mood of a generation disillusioned by the gulf between their expectations and the drab reality of a post-war Britain in decline. The play paved the way for the fertile generation of playwrights that included Harold Pinter, John Arden, Robert Bolt, Edward Bond, and Arnold Wesker.
Osborne's plays are first and foremost character studies, although they also reflect broader social issues. Other works include Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), West of Suez (1971), Watch It Come Down (1976), and Too Young to Fight, Too Old to Forget (1985). With Déjà-Vu (1992) he returned unsuccessfully to Jimmy Porter, the hero of the epoch-making Look Back in Anger.
Cinema
Osborne also had a successful career in films. Forming a film company with the director Tony Richardson, he made highly acclaimed versions of Look Back in Anger, starring Richard Burton, and The Entertainer, starring Laurence Olivier. His adaptations for cinema include Tom Jones (1963), which brought him an Academy Award for best screenplay, Hedda Gabler (1972), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973).
Non-fiction
In his two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991), his opinions about his mother and others to whom he took exception are uninhibitedly vitriolic. The same passion, scintillating intelligence and righteous indignation characterizes Damn you, England (1994), a collection of occasional writings.
Petrarch (1304–1374)
born Francesco Petrarca
Italian poet, humanist, and leader of the revival of classical learning. His Il canzoniere/Songbook (also known as Rime Sparse/Scattered Lyrics) contains madrigals, songs, and sonnets in praise of his idealized love, 'Laura', whom he first saw in 1327 (she was a married woman and refused to become his mistress). These were Petrarch's greatest contributions to Italian literature; they shaped the lyric poetry of the Renaissance and greatly influenced French and English love poetry. Although he did not invent the sonnet form, he was its finest early practitioner and the 'Petrarchan sonnet' was admired as an ideal model by later poets.
Petrarch was anxious to restore the glories of Rome and Roman pre-eminence in world affairs; he urged the rulers of his day to imitate the heroes of Roman history and wanted the papal court to return from Avignon to Rome. A passionate believer in the power of ancient literature to restore antique virtue, culture, and social order to a degraded age, he inspired the new feeling in Italy and Europe towards study of the classics and more than anyone else directed young scholars towards ancient learning. He was a friend of the poet Boccaccio, and supported the political reformer Cola di Rienzi's attempt to establish an ancient Roman-style republic in 1347.
His Italian poetry includes the Trionfi/Triumphs (allegorical processions, of 'triumphs' of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity). Among his works written in Latin are the epic poem Africa, De viris illustribus/On Illustrious Men, Bucolicum carmen/Bucolic Songs, De remediis utriusque fortunae/Remedies Against Good and Evil, and the treatises De otio religiosorum/On the Virtue of Religious Life and De vita solitaria/On the Solitary Life. The Secretum meum/My Secret is a spiritual biography in the form of a dialogue between the poet and St Augustine. Petrarch was born in Arezzo and in 1312 went with his parents to Avignon. He began to study law at Montpellier, and subsequently at Bologna, but found the profession repugnant to his poetic temperament, and to his passionate admiration for classical literature, in which Cicero and Virgil were his chief models. In 1326 he returned to Avignon and took minor orders, but his interests and way of life continued to be secular. After 1333 he travelled widely, but from 1337 onwards he spent prolonged periods in studious seclusion at Vaucluse, near Avignon. Here he conceived the project of his poem, Africa, written in Latin, on the subject of Scipio Africanus Major. In 1341 he was crowned poet laureate in Rome. His later years were spent in Milan, Venice, and finally Arquà, near Padua. He held many benefices, enjoying their income, and was the correspondent of popes and kings, as well as a wide circle of scholars throughout Europe.
Talbot, William Henry Fox (1800–1877)
English pioneer of photography. He invented the paper-based calotype process, patented in 1841, which was the first negative/positive method. Talbot made photograms several years before Louis Daguerre's invention was announced.
In 1851 he made instantaneous photographs called 'sun pictures' and in 1852 photo engravings. The Pencil of Nature (1844–46) by Talbot was the first book illustrated with photographs to be published.
Talbot was born in Melbury, Dorset, and studied at Cambridge. He was elected Liberal member of Parliament for Chippenham in 1833. During a trip to Italy he tried to capture the images obtained in a camera obscura and by 1835 had succeeded in fixing outlines of objects laid on sensitized paper. Images of his home, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, followed.
In Talbot's calotype process, writing paper was coated successively with solutions of silver nitrate and potassium iodide, forming silver iodide. The iodized paper was made more sensitive by brushing with solutions of gallic acid and silver nitrate, and then it was exposed (either moist or dry). The latent image was developed with an application of gallo-silver nitrate solution, and when the image became visible, the paper was warmed for one to two minutes. It was fixed with a solution of potassium bromide (later replaced by sodium hyposulphite). Calotypes did not have the sharp definition of daguerreotypes and were generally considered inferior.
Talbot patented an enlarger in 1843. In the decade to 1851, he took out some patents that contained previously published claims, but in 1852 he cleared the way for amateurs to use processes developed in other countries. Talbot was also a mathematician and classical scholar, and was one of the first to decipher the cuneiform inscriptions of Nineveh, Assyria.
A museum of his work was opened at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, in 1975.
Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1872–1958)
English composer. His style was late-Romantic tonal/modal, and his works contain many references to the English countryside through the use of folk themes. Among his works are the orchestral Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910); the opera Sir John in Love (1929), featuring the Elizabethan song 'Greensleeves'; and nine symphonies (1909–57).
Vaughan Williams was born at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, the son of a clergyman. He was educated at Charterhouse School in 1887–90, and Trinity College, Cambridge, 1892–95. The years in between were devoted to study at the Royal College of Music in London, where he returned for another year after Cambridge. He learnt the piano and organ but was always determined to be a composer. On leaving the Royal College of Music in 1896 he became organist at South Lambeth Church in London and saved enough money to gain further experience by study abroad, first at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, under Max Bruch, and in 1909 with Maurice Ravel in Paris. In 1901 he completed a PhD at Cambridge.
In 1904 he joined the Folk-Song Society (established in 1898) and began to take an active interest in the recovery and study of old country tunes, collecting some in Norfolk. His first public success was with Toward the Unknown Region at the Leeds Festival in 1907 and this was followed in 1909 by his first great and characteristic compositions, the Wasps overture, the song cycle On Wenlock Edge, and A Sea Symphony (the first to use a chorus throughout). From 1906 he was editor of the English Hymnal, and this resulted in one of his best-loved works, the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis for strings, (1910). (The sense of religious wonder evoked by this music was later enhanced in such biblically-inspired works as the masque Job (1931) and the opera The Pilgrim's Progress (1925–51)).
In World War I he served in the army in Macedonia and France. After the war he was appointed professor of composition at the Royal College of Music. The English pastoral tradition was revived in his 3rd symphony, the Pastoral (1921), and in the
next few years he produced a series of sacred works such as the Mass in G minor, Sancta Civitas, and Benedicite. His two best-known symphonies, nos. 4 and 5, were composed between 1934 and 1943. The last four symphonies continued the composer's spiritual quest, already begun in The Pilgrim's Progress. Although Vaughan Williams's compositions are usually considered as pastoral, through the use of folk melodies, he was aware of contemporary musical developments and often included more dissonance in his later works, though in a colouristic, watered-down way.
Works include:
Opera and drama
The Pilgrim's Progress (after Bunyan, begun 1925, premiered 1951); masque Job (on Blake's illustrations, 1931); incidental music for Aristophanes' Wasps (1909); film music, including Scott of the Antarctic (1948).
Choral
Mass in G minor, Anglican services; (with orchestra) Toward the Unknown Region (Whitman), A Sea Symphony (no. 1) (Whitman, 1903–09), Five Mystical Songs (Herbert, 1911), Flos Campi (Song of Solomon, 1925), Five Tudor Portraits (Skelton, 1935), Serenade to Music for 16 solo voices and orchestra (from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, 1938).
Orchestral
In the Fen Country, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for strings (1910), A London Symphony (no. 2, 1912–13), A Pastoral Symphony (no. 3, 1921), symphonies nos. 4–9 (1937, 1943, 1947, 1952, 1955, 1957), Five Variants of 'Dives and Lazarus' for strings and harps (1939); The Lark Ascending (after Meredith) for violin and orchestra (1914), concerto for oboe and strings (1944), tuba concerto (1954).
Chamber and songs
On Wenlock Edge (Housman) for tenor, string quartet, and piano (1909); many songs, including Songs of Travel (Stevenson, 1901–04); ten William Blake songs for high voice and oboe; folk-song arrangements.
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