History of Art & Architecture

Parade, which premiered on May 18, 1917 at the Théâtre du Chatelet, was the result of a collaboration between Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Léonide Massine, and Erik Satie, all under the guidance of the “monstre sacré” of the Ballets Russes – Serge Diaghilev.  The ballet tells the story of a troupe of itinerant performers on the streets of Paris as they offer a preview of their show in an effort to draw an audience, an effort that ultimately fails. Even before the curtain fell, life had imitated art and audiences were voicing their derision by shouting such insults as “Métèques,” “Sales Boches,” “Trahison,” “Art munichois,” “embusqués,” and others that convey a hatred of the perceived unpatriotic German behavior of the ballet’s collaborators.  This ire was mostly directed at Pablo Picasso and seems to be due to the cubist character of several of his designs for both the décor and costumes.

While most condemned the ballet, others more attuned to the various styles at work in the larger aesthetic of the production attempted to offer explication. One such figure was Jean Cocteau himself, who, in an article for Vanity Fair, offered an explanation that seems at odds with his own subtitle “Ballet Réaliste” and his continuous urgings to the men to “Soyons Vulgaire” or “be vulgar” during the ballet’s conception.  He offers an interpretation of the ballet that hinges on Picasso and Satie’s incorporation of neoclassicism into the production. This is even more intriguing when one realizes how much Diaghilev had pushed Cocteau out of the creative and promotional processes surrounding the Ballet. Additionally, Satie worked from a scenario not entirely of Cocteau’s original intention – he worked from a version of the scenario rewritten without Cocteau’s knowledge by Picasso. Over the course of this essay, I will be exploring how this neoclassicism is represented visually, and I intend to offer an interpretation of Picasso’s rideau de scène, or overture curtain, in particular (Fig 1). I hope to relate the imagery of the curtain, which is nostalgically classicizing while remaining mildly cubist in style, to the overall scenario of the ballet. In doing so, I plan to argue that facing the negative criticism of the perceived foreign influence of Cubism, combined with negative attitudes toward foreign civilian non-combatant artists during WWI, Picasso used the framework of Cocteau’s scenario to explore the dilemma of the avant-garde (appropriately symbolized by the performers) to present a mélange of current progressive visual possibilities. However, Picasso saves his solution, just like the main act of the parade, for the unseen interior of the tent that is represented on the rideau de scène in a veiled visual language of classicism.

Beginning with a brief summary of the Ballets Russes’ place in the landscape of Parisian art and theatre, this essay will continue by recounting the process by which Parade came to be. After presenting the scenario of the ballet and its various characters and costumes, I will turn to its critical reception, particularly the anti-cubist attitudes and insults hurled at the collaborators. I will do my best to fit these into both the context of current wartime events as well as into the context of the anti-cubist criticisms of the 1910’s as described by Kenneth Silver. Finally, I will explore the nostalgic neoclassicist vein of the ballet and suggest that this was the intention of Picasso in his conception of the curtain in relation to the greater action of the ballet.

This is a preliminary presentation of unpublished Attic pottery excavated from 1980 to 2000 at Tel Dor. Attic imports begin at Dor ca. 500 b.c.e. with black-figure and black glaze drinking vessels (some with overpainting). Around 450 b.c.e. red figure replaces black figure, and the range of black-glaze types expands. The volume of red figure and black glaze is highest in the fourth century. Attic imports cease soon after ca. 300, perhaps
because of changes in local taste, allied with the collapse of the Athenian mercantile economy and changes in Ptolemaic economic policy. The range of shapes is generally restricted to symposion vessels and fine tableware in addition to perfume lekythoi. The pattern seems to reflect local preferences and cannot confirm or refute the idea of a Greek presence at Dor. A similar distribution at other sites on the Levantine littoral suggests that traders used a north-south tr littoral suggests that traders used a north-south trade route.ade route.

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Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Ohio is the current owner of 12 sections of
floor mosaic dating to the 2nd-3rd c. A.D. Purchased by the university in 1965, these mosaic
fragments were believed to be from the site of Antioch. In 2010-11, the mosaics were conserved
and installed in BGSU’s Wolfe Center. In the following year the first-named author,
organizing a symposium to celebrate the new display of the mosaics, invited R. Molholt to
be the keynote speaker. During the course of preparing their respective papers for the symposium,
she and Molholt uncovered evidence that an Antioch provenance for the mosaics
was most unlikely, and Molholt determined that the mosaic fragments were almost certainly
from the site of Zeugma. We offer here a preliminary publication of the fragments,
along with evidence to support our proposed provenance.

Ceramics offer insights into human behaviors, technologies, and economies in a way that is currently unmatched by any other class of artifact. The term ceramics, which comes from the Greek adjective κεραμικός or keramikos, meaning “[made] of pottery,” refers to materials made of fired clay. Clay pottery was used in the storing, preparing, cooking, and serving of food and drink. Pots were also used in personal and ritual contexts because of their functional and symbolic properties, from holding perfumes and makeup to performing ritual libations or burials. Wet clay is an elastic material that was worked or molded into a variety of other forms to make decorative tiles, game pieces, or sculpture of various scales. Ceramic was used to facilitate many commercial activities, notably overland and sea trade, and also to make industrial structures, including kilns and other ovens, roofing materials, and water systems. Ceramic had many other practical purposes and was used to make loom weights and lamps. Objects made of fired clay are breakable, but their material is nearly indestructible—they do not, under normal circumstances, decompose, and fired clay is not easily recycled. Therefore, ceramic objects are ubiquitous in archaeological sites that post-date pottery’s invention in the later Neolithic era (from c. 6400 BCE). Pottery especially comprises an important part of the field of Levantine archaeology. Pottery is sorted according to its technological properties, its form (morphology), its function, and its style and decoration, which are sometimes culturally indicative. Careful study of these characteristics has led to increasingly refined typologies (classification of types) of individual vessels, which allow for the understanding of a change in a pot’s appearance, use, or form over space and time. Indeed, one of pottery’s most exploited archaeological functions is chronological. A refined pottery typology can be used to create diagnostic groupings of pots, which are called assemblages or corpora. Assemblages help identify different human activities and, to some extent, different people within specific contexts. Mineral and chemical analyses, including petrography, X-ray fluorescence, and neutron activation analysis, among others, have aided in the sourcing of clays used in a variety of objects. The sourcing of clays contributes to the understanding of local, regional, and long-distance trade in raw clay and finished ceramics. Another emerging field in ceramics is mathematical-form analysis. These different approaches to the study of ceramics contribute invaluable information about everyday life.

The proem to Herodotus's history of the Greek-Persian wars relates the long-standing conflict between Europe and Asia from the points of view of the Greeks' chief antagonists, the Persians and Phoenicians. However humorous or fantastical these accounts may be, their stories, as voiced by a Greek, reveal a great deal about the perceived differences between Greeks and others. The conflict is framed in political, not absolute, terms correlative to historical events, not in terms of innate qualities of the participants. It is this perspective that informs the argument of The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art.

This chapter considers one element in the problematic relationship between ancient artistic conventions and modern interpretations of them. The scholarly understanding of ethnicity has increasingly been framed in nuanced terms, yet historians still sometimes see ethnicity as fixed in relation to Greek art. I here survey several examples of the unstable nature of ethnicity and representation in Greek art, before turning to the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus to show how interpretation of that work's visual conventions in ethnic terms that are believed to be particular to Greek art and Hellenic audiences is problematic, in several respects that miss or misconstrue its expression of Sidonian identity. This chapter closes by underscoring the value of ethnic-ity as a heuristic tool that goes beyond identifying the costume or action of figures shown in ancient art. Ethnicity allows us to ask with sensitivity who is represented by a work of art. Revisiting the topic of representation and ethnicity in an expressly theoretical context has strengthened my conviction that art history has much to offer to the larger enterprise of interpreting classical antiquity. 1 It is with art historical methodologies in mind that I offer a necessarily brief reconsideration of ethnicity, naturalism, and representation, to help refine our expectations of what images can tell us and how imagery contributed to the expression and construction of identity. In juxtaposing representation and ethnicity, we gain valuable insights into the largest source of data that we possess, material culture. I believe that representational strategies in ancient art have striking

Chapter 1: In/Complete: An Introduction to the Theories of Miniaturization and Fragmentation
S. Rebecca Martin and Stephanie Langin-Hooper
Chapter 2: Breaking Bodies and Biographies: Figurines of the Playa de los Muertos Tradition
Rosemary Joyce
Chapter 3: Tiny and Fragmented Votive Offerings from Classical Antiquity
Jessica Faye Hughes
Chapter 4: Divinity In Part or In Full? Representations of Tanit in Texts and Art
S. Rebecca Martin
Chapter 5: Style as a Fragment of the Ancient World
Marian H. Feldman
Chapter 6: Stronger at the Broken Places: Affect in Hellenistic Babylonian Miniatures with Separately-Made and Attached Limbs
Stephanie Langin-Hooper
Chapter 7: Tiny Bodies for Intimate Worlds. Human Figurines in Iberian Iron Age Sanctuaries
Mireia López-Bertran and Jaime Vives-Ferrándiz
Chapter 8: Incomplete: The Uneasy Powers of Holes, Cut Surfaces, and Neolithic Pit-Houses
Doug Bailey
Chapter 9: A Response: Scaling the Walls of Persepolis toward an Imaginal Social/Material Landscape
Margaret Cool Root

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Please note that because of the lag between research and publication, I missed this important reference: "From Ugarit to Madaba: Philological and Historical Functions of the marzēaḥ" by Estēe Dvorjetski (https://academic.oup.com/jss/article-abstract/61/1/17/2472176).