Dix Tableaux


Book Description

The story of friendship between two women in their sixties is played out over the course of ten years, each year representing another reunion for Beverly Duggins and Addie Spools, two participants in a series of annual "tableaux" sponsored by the Museum of Dix, in a small city in the South. Within human diorama settings as simple as a frontier cabin porch or the cow stall of a local dairy barn, and as elaborate as the "Spit and Curl" beauty salon (circa 1930) and the front seat of Thelma and Louise's plummeting convertible, Beverly, the lonely urban professional, and Addie, the down-home pharmacist's assistant, chart the course of each other's lives, while fending off incursions from the officiously bothersome fellow-poser Maureen. Through the ten scenes which comprise the play, the two women are forced to endure the constant in terruptions of the museum "promenaders" who "ooh" and "ah" at the lifelike presentations, offering up their comical comments, both kind and cruel. Though they see one another only one weekend a year, and in spite of their very different backgrounds, Beverly and Addie nurture a growing and abiding friendship. In the end, it becomes the strongest and most sustaining friendship of their lives.







Finances municipales


Book Description

De Detroit à Lahore, la plupart des villes du monde sont confrontées à des difficultés financières, alors même qu’elles doivent assumer des responsabilités de plus en plus complexes. Le présent ouvrage, Finances municipales : manuel à l’usage des collectivités locales, prend parti — le parti des maires et des gestionnaires municipaux. Rares sont les publications consacrées à cette question qui ciblent de façon aussi directe et pragmatique les responsables de l’action publique et le personnel financier à l’échelon local. Le contenu et les principaux messages de ce manuel ont été conçus de manière à répondre aux questions et préoccupations auxquelles les villes et les municipalités sont quotidiennement confrontées dans le cadre de la gestion de leurs finances. Le manuel Finances municipales prend position. Les auteurs de ses huit chapitres examinent les enseignements observés dans divers domaines : relations entre administrations, finances des métropoles, gestion financière, gestion des recettes, des dépenses et du patrimoine public, financements extérieurs et évaluation de la performance des finances municipales. L’ouvrage traite de sujets allant de la decentralisation à la transparence et à l’obligation de rendre compte. Il explore aussi des domaines moins balisés tels que la gestion du patrimoine, la solvabilité, la réponse aux crises financières. Le manuel Finances municipales appelle a l’ action. En plus de partager avec le lecteur un savoir très pointu sur de nombreux sujets techniques, il guide les autorités locales dans le labyrinthe des instruments existants. L’outil d’auto-évaluation des finances municipales (MFSA), décrit au chapitre 8, devrait tout particulièrement aider les municipalités à évaluer leur situation et à progresser sur la voie des réformes.




Olivier Messiaen


Book Description

When Olivier Messiaen died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a man apart; a deeply religious man whose only sources of inspiration were God and Nature and a composer whose music progressed along an entirely individual path, artistically impervious to contemporaneous events and the whims both of his contemporaries and the critics. Whilst such a view contains a large element of truth, the past ten years has seen an explosion of interest in the composer, and the work of a diverse range of scholars has painted a much richer, more complex picture of Messiaen. This volume presents some of the fruits of this research for the first time, concentrating on three broad, interrelated areas: Messiaen's relationship with fellow artists; key developments in the composer's musical language and technique; and his influences, both sacred and secular. The volume assesses Messiaen's position as a creative artist of the twentieth century in the light of the latest research. In the process, it identifies some of the key myths, confusions and exaggerations surrounding the composer which often mask equally remarkable truths. In attempting to reveal some of those truths, the essays elucidate a little of the mystery surrounding Messiaen as a man, an artist, a believer and a musician.




Soil and Stone


Book Description

The Impressionists are world renowned for their vibrant depictions of the atmospheric effects and shimmering beauty of the French countryside. These paintings, often produced in Paris, found an enthusiastic market in the city. The inhabitants of that hub of modernity had an apparently paradoxical interest in the mythologies of rural living. As the city became more and more the motive force of social change so the country was understood as the anchor of changelessness and nostalgia. The essayists in this volume examine the complex relationship between country and city. Their work draws widely on the contemporary culture exploring folklore and children's literature, anarchism and urbanism, and offers significant new insights into the work of major artists and writers including Courbet, Millet, Monet, Van Gogh and Zola.




Rewriting 'Les Mystères de Paris'


Book Description

Key works of popular fiction are often rewritten to capitalize on their success. But what are the implications of this rewriting process? Such is the question addressed by this detailed study of several rewritings of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842-43), produced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in response to the phenomenal success of Sue’s archetypal urban mystery. Pursuing a compelling analogy between city and text, and exploring the resonance of the palimpsest trope to both, Amy Wigelsworth argues that the mystères urbains are exemplary rewritings, which shed new light on contemporary reading and writing practices, and emerge as early avatars of a genre still widely consumed and enjoyed in the 21st century.




Rivals and Conspirators


Book Description

Once the State-run Salon in Paris closed, an array of independent Salons mushroomed starting with the French Artists Salon and Women’s Salon in 1881 followed by the Independent Artists’ Salon, National Salon of Fine Arts and Autumn Salon. Offering an unparalleled choice of art identities and alliances, together with undreamed-of opportunities for sales, commissions, prizes and art criticism, these great Salons guaranteed the centripetal and centrifugal power of Paris as the “modern art centre”. Lured by the prospect of being exhibited annually in Salons the size of Biennales today, a huge number and national diversity of artists, from the Australian Rupert Bunny to the Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, flocked to Paris. Yet by no means were these Salons equal in power, nor did they work consensually to forge this “modern art centre”. Formed on the basis of their different cultural politics, constantly they rivalled one another for State acquisitions and commissions, exhibition places and spaces, awards, and every other means of enhancing their legitimacy. By no means were the avant-garde salons those that most succeeded. Instead, as this culturo-political history demonstrates, the French Artists’ and National Fine Art Salons were the most successful, with the genderist French Artists' Salon being the most powerful and “official”. Despite the renown today of Neo-Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Cubism and Orphism, the most powerful artists in this “modern art centre” were not Sonia Delaunay, Émile Gallé, Paul Signac, Henri Matisse or even Picasso but such Academicians as Léon Bonnat, William Bouguereau, Fernand Cormon, Edouard Detaille, Gabriel Ferrier, Jean-Paul Laurens, Luc-Oliver Merson and Aimé Morot, who exhibited at the “official” Salon supported by the machinery of the State. In its exposure of the rivalry, conflict and struggle between the Salons and their artists, this is an unprecedented history of dissension. It also exposes how, just below the welcoming internationalist veneer of this “modern art centre”, intense persecutionist paranoia lay festering. Whenever France’s “civilizing mission” seemed culturally, commercially or colonially threatened, it erupted in waves of nationalist xenophobia turning artistic rivalry into bitter enmity. In exposing how rivals became transmuted into conspirators, ultimately this book reveals a paradox resonant in histories that celebrate the international triumph of French modern art: that this magnetic “centre”, which began by welcoming international modernists, ended by attacking them for undermining its cultural supremacy, contaminating its “civilizing mission” and politically persecuting the very modernist culture for which it has received historical renown.




Embellishing the Liturgy


Book Description

After the imposition of Gregorian chant upon most of Europe by the authority of the Carolingian kings and emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries, a large number of repertories arose in connection with the new chant and its liturgy. Of these repertories, the tropes, together with the sequences, represent the main creative activity of European musicians in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Because they were not an absolutely official part of the liturgy, as was Gregorian chant, they reflect local traditions, particularly in terms of melody, and more so than the new pieces that were composed at the time. In addition, the earlier layers of tropes represent, in many cases, a survival of the pre local pre Gregorian melodic traditions. This volume provides an introduction to the study of tropes in the form of an extensive anthology of major studies and a comprehensive bibliography and constitutes a classic reference resource for the study of one of the most important musico-liturgical genres of the central middle ages.





Book Description




Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino in Art Collections and in the History of Collecting


Book Description

Raphael’s artworks, paintings, altarpieces, drawings, tapestries, cartoons, prints, ceramics and all other artifacts derived from his works, including copies and forgeries, have been the object of an often-frantic search from his death in 1520 onwards. France, Spain, Germany, England, and Italy were the main destinations for such artworks between the 16th and the 18th centuries, while the market spread overseas from the 19th century onwards. This book is the first full exploration of this phenomenon and of the mechanisms of transmission of Raphael’s artifax through inheritance, sales, swaps and shady transactions. It includes essays in English, French and Italian by some of the most knowledgeable scholars on Raphael, museum curators and experts in the history of collecting, and is a landmark in scholarship on Raphael and art collecting.