Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, and static "stabiles" monumental public sculptures. He didn't limit his art to sculptures; he also created paintings, jewelry, theatre sets and costumes.
Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, "Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn't be broadcast to other people."
Born into a family of artists, Calder's work first gained attention in Paris in the 1920s and was soon championed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resulting in a retrospective exhibition in 1943. Major retrospectives were also held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1964) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974).
Calder's work is in many permanent collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He produced many large public works, including ".125" (at JFK Airport, 1957), "Pittsburgh" (Carnegie International prize winner 1958, Pittsburgh International Airport) "Spirale" (UNESCO in Paris, 1958), "Flamingo" and "Universe" (both in Chicago, 1974), and "Mountains and Clouds" (Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1996).
Although primarily known for his sculpture, Calder also created paintings and prints, miniatures (such as his famous "Cirque Calder"), theater set design, jewelry design, tapestries and rugs, and political posters. He was honored by the US Postal Service with a set of five 32-cent stamps in 1998, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously in 1977, after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War.
An important Calder work is the monumental "Floating Clouds" (1952–1953) of the Aula Magna (Central University of Venezuela) of the University City of Caracas in Venezuela. This work is a Unesco World Heritage Site. Calder's clouds were specially designed to combine art and technology, making the auditorium one of the top 5 university auditoriums in the world by sound quality.
Early life.
Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in 1898 in Lawnton, Pennsylvania. His actual birthdate remains a source of confusion. According to Calder's mother, Nanette (née Lederer), Calder was born on August 22, yet his birth certificate at Philadelphia City Hall, based on a hand-written ledger, stated July 22. When Calder's family learned of the birth certificate, they asserted with certainty that city officials had made a mistake.
Calder's grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland, had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868, and is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on Philadelphia City Hall's tower. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in Philadelphia. Calder's mother was a professional portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She moved to Philadelphia, where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Calder's parents married on February 22, 1895. Alexander Calder's sister, Mrs. Margaret Calder Hayes, was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.
Four-year-old Calder posed nude for his father's sculpture "The Man Cub", a cast of which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 1902 he also completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant. In 1905 his father contracted tuberculosis, and Calder's parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year. The children were reunited with their parents in March 1906 and stayed at the Arizona ranch during that summer.
The Calder family moved from Arizona to Pasadena, California. The windowed cellar of the family home became Calder's first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire to make jewelry for his sister's dolls. On January 1, 1907, Nanette Calder took her son to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calder's miniature circus performances.
In late 1909 the family returned to Philadelphia, where Calder briefly attended Germantown Academy, then they moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. That Christmas, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as gifts for his parents. The sculptures are three-dimensional and the duck is kinetic because it rocks when gently tapped. In Croton, during his high school years, Calder was befriended by his father's painter friend Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity-powered system of mechanical trains. Calder described it, "We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes; a chunk of iron racing down the incline speeded the cars. We even lit up some cars with candle lights". After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to New York City, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Calder attended high school in nearby Yonkers. In 1912, Calder's father was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California, and began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915.
During Calder's high school years (1912–1915), the family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location, Calder's parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Near the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York, so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco.  Calder graduated with the class of 1915.
Life and career.
Alexander Calder's parents did not want him to be an artist, so he decided to study mechanical engineering. An intuitive engineer since childhood, Calder did not even know what mechanical engineering was. "I was not very sure what this term meant, but I thought I'd better adopt it", he later wrote. He enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1915. When asked why he decided to study mechanical engineering instead of art Calder said, "I wanted to be an engineer because some guy I rather liked was a mechanical engineer, that's all". At Stevens, Calder was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and excelled in mathematics. He was well-liked and the class yearbook contained the following description, "Sandy is evidently always happy, or perhaps up to some joke, for his face is always wrapped up in that same mischievous, juvenile grin. This is certainly the index to the man's character in this case, for he is one of the best natured fellows there is."
In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1918, he joined the Student's Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.
Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919. He held a variety of jobs including hydraulic engineer and draughtsman for the New York Edison Company. In June 1922, Calder took a mechanic position on the passenger ship "H. F. Alexander". While sailing from San Francisco to New York City, Calder slept on deck and awoke one early morning off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the full moon setting on opposite horizons. He described in his autobiography, "It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other."
The "H.F. Alexander" docked in San Francisco and Calder traveled to Aberdeen, Washington, where his sister and her husband, Kenneth Hayes resided. Calder took a job as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain scenery inspired him to write home to request paints and brushes. Shortly after this, Calder decided to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist.
In New York City, Calder enrolled at the Art Students League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. While a student, he worked for the "National Police Gazette" where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus action, a theme that would reappear in his later work.
In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905–1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder befriended a number of avant-garde artists, including Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Leger wrote a preface for the catalogue of Calder's first exhibition of abstract constructions held at the Galerie Percier in 1931. Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (Sandra born 1935, Mary born 1939). During World War II, Calder attempted to join the Marines as a camofleur, but was rejected. In 1955 he and Louisa traveled through India for three months, where Calder produced nine sculptures as well as some jewelry.
In 1963, Calder settled into a new workshop, overlooking the valley of the Lower Chevrière to Saché in Indre-et-Loire (France). He donated to the town a sculpture, which since 1974 has been situated in the town square. Throughout his artistic career, Calder named many of his works in French, regardless of where they were destined for eventual display.
In 1966, Calder published his "Autobiography with Pictures" with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.
Calder died unexpectedly in November 1976 of a heart attack, shortly after the opening of a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.
Artistic work.
Sculpture.
In 1926, at the suggestion of a Serbian toy merchant in Paris, Calder began to make mechanical toys. At the urging of fellow sculptor Jose de Creeft, he submitted them to the Salon des Humoristes. Calder began to create his "Cirque Calder", a miniature circus fashioned from wire, cloth, string, rubber, cork, and other found objects. Designed to be transportable (it grew to fill five large suitcases), the circus was presented on both sides of the Atlantic. Soon, his "Cirque Calder" (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde. He also invented wire sculpture, or "drawing in space", and in 1929 had his first solo show of these sculptures in Paris at Galerie Billiet. "Hi! (Two Acrobats)" in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an early example of the artist's wire sculpture. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he was impressed by the environment-as-installation, "shocked" him into fully embracing abstract art, toward which he had already been tending.
It was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, actuated by motors and cranks, that would become his signature artworks. Calder's kinetic sculptures are regarded as being amongst the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of gesture and immateriality as aesthetic factors.
Dating from 1931, Calder's sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by motors were christened "mobiles" by Marcel Duchamp, a French pun meaning both "motion" and "motive". However, Calder found that the motorized works sometimes became monotonous in their prescribed movements. His solution, arrived at by 1932, was hanging sculptures that derived their motion from touch or air currents. They were followed in 1934 by outdoor pieces which were set in motion by the open air. The wind mobiles featured abstract shapes delicately balanced on pivoting rods that moved with the slightest current of air, allowing for a natural shifting play of forms and spatial relationships. Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. In 1935–1936, he produced a number of works made largely of carved wood. At Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937), the Spanish pavilion included Calder's sculpture "Mercury Fountain".
Calder's mobiles carry cultural significance and can been seen in literary works of fiction. "The Calder Game" features Alexander Calder's Red Mobile as a crucial part of plot of the young adult mystery written by Blue Balliett and illustrated by Brett Helquist.
Although Calder's sculptures are not explicitly representational, many of his themes, symbols and shapes are related to the cosmos or suggestive of nature. During World War II, Calder continued to sculpt, adapting to a scarcity of aluminium during the war by returning to carved wood in a new open form of sculpture called "constellations". Postwar, Calder began to cut shapes from sheet metal into evocative forms and hand-paint them in his characteristically pure hues of black, red, blue, and white. Calder created a small group of works from around this period with a hanging base-plate, for example "Lily of Force" (1945), "Baby Flat Top" (1946), and "Red is Dominant" (1947). He also made works such as "Seven Horizontal Discs" (1946), which, like "Lily of Force" (1945) and "Baby Flat Top" (1946), he was able to dismantle and send by mail despite the stringent size restrictions imposed by the postal service at the time. His 1946 show at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris, composed mainly of hanging and standing mobiles, made a huge impact, as did the essay for the catalogue by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1951, Calder devised a new kind of sculpture, related structurally to his constellations. These "towers", affixed to the wall with a nail, consist of wire struts and beams that jut from the wall, with moving objects suspended from their armatures.
While not denying Calder's power as a sculptor, an alternate view of the history of twentieth-century art cites Calder's turning away in the early 1930s from his motor-powered works in favor of the wind-driven mobile as marking a decisive moment in Modernism's abandonment of its earlier commitment to the "machine" as a critical and potentially expressive new element in human affairs. According to this viewpoint, the mobile also marked an abandonment of Modernism's larger goal of a rapprochement with science and engineering, and with unfortunate long-term implications for contemporary art.
Monumental sculptures.
In 1934, Calder made his first outdoor works in his Roxbury, Connecticut, studio, using the same techniques and materials as his smaller works. Exhibited outside, Calder's initial standing mobiles moved elegantly in the breeze, bobbing and swirling in natural, spontaneous rhythms. The first few outdoor works were too delicate for strong winds, which forced Calder to rethink his fabrication process. By 1936 he changed his working methods and began to create smaller-scale maquettes that he then enlarged to monumental size. The small maquette, the first step in the production of a monumental sculpture, was considered by Calder a sculpture in its own right. Larger works used the classic enlargement techniques of traditional sculptors, including his father and grandfather. Drawing his designs on craft paper, he enlarged them using a grid. His large-scale works were created according to his exact specifications, while also allowing him the liberty to adjust or correct a shape or line if necessary.
In the 1950s Calder concentrated more on producing monumental sculptures (his "agrandissements" period), and public commissions increasingly came his way in the 1960s. Notable examples are ".125" (1957) for JFK Airport in New York, "Spirale" (1958) for UNESCO in Paris, and "Trois disques", commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture, at 25.7 meters high, was "El Sol Rojo", constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City. Many of his public artworks were commissioned by renowned architects; for example, I.M. Pei commissioned "La Grande Voile", a 25-ton, 40-foot high stabile sculpture for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966.
Most of Calder's monumental stationery and mobile sculptures were made after 1962 at Etablissements Biémont in Tours, France. He would create a model of his work, the engineering department would scale it up under Calder's direction, and technicians would complete the actual metalwork — all under Calder's watchful eye. Stabiles were made in steel plate, then painted. An exception was "Trois disques", in stainless steel at 24 meters tall, commissioned by International Nickel Company of Canada.
In 1958, Calder asked Jean Prouvé to construct the steel base of "Spirale" in France, a monumental mobile for the UNESCO site in Paris, while the top was fabricated in Connecticut.
In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental "stabile" sculpture "La Grande Vitesse" in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first civic sculpture in the United States to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1971 Calder created his "Bent Propeller" which was installed at the entrance of the World Trade Center's North Tower in New York City. When Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets. The sculpture stood in front of 7 World Trade Center until it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.
In 1973, the 63-foot tall vermillion-colored public art sculpture "Four Arches" was installed on Bunker Hill, Los Angeles to serve as "a distinctive landmark." The plaza site was designed in tiers to maximize the sculpture's visual effects.
In 1974 Calder unveiled two sculptures, "Flamingo" at Federal Plaza, and "Universe" at Sears Tower, in Chicago, Illinois, accompanied by the exhibition "Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition," at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago which opened simultaneously with the unveiling of the sculptures.
Originally meant to be constructed in 1977 for the Hart Senate Office Building, "Mountains and Clouds" was not built until 1985 due to government budget cuts. The massive sheet-metal project, weighing 35 tons, spans the nine-story height of the building's atrium in Washington, D.C. Calder designed the maquette for the United States Senate in the last year of his life.
Theatrical productions.
Calder created stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions, including "Nucléa", "Horizon", and most notably, Martha Graham's "Panorama" (1935), a production of the Erik Satie symphonic drama "Socrate" (1936), and later, "Works in Progress" (1968). "Works in Progress" was a "ballet" conceived by Calder himself and produced at the Rome Opera House, featuring an array of mobiles, stabiles, and large painted backdrops. Calder would describe some of his stage sets as dancers performing a choreography due to their rhythmic movement.
Painting and printmaking.
In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking in 1925, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals. His projects from this period include pen-and-ink line drawings of animals for a 1931 publication of Aesop's fables. As Calder's sculpture moved into the realm of pure abstraction in the early 1930s, so did his prints. The thin lines used to define figures in the earlier prints and drawings began delineating groups of geometric shapes, often in motion. Calder also used prints for advocacy, as in poster prints from 1967 and 1969 protesting the Vietnam War.
As Calder's professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings were marketed, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available.
Painted aircraft and automobile.
One of Calder's more unusual undertakings was a commission from Dallas-based Braniff International Airways to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four-engined jet as a "flying canvas". George Stanley Gordon, founder of the New York City advertising agency Gordon and Shortt, approached Calder with the idea of painting a jet in 1972, but Calder responded that he did not paint toys. When Gordon told him it was a real, full-sized airliner he was proposing, the artist immediately gave his approval. Gordon felt that Braniff, known for melding the worlds of fashion and design with the world of aviation, would be the perfect company to carry out the idea. Braniff Chairman Harding Lawrence was highly receptive and a contract was drawn up in 1973 calling for the painting of one Douglas DC-8-62 jet liner, dubbed "Flying Colors", and 50 gouaches for a total price of $100,000. Two years later, Braniff asked Calder to design a flagship for their fleet celebrating the U.S. Bicentennial. That piece, a Boeing 727-291 jet N408BN called the "Flying Colors of the United States", and nicknamed the 'Sneaky Snake' by its pilots (based on quirky flight tendencies), featured a rippled image of red, white and blue echoing a waving American flag.
In 1975 Calder was commissioned to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL automobile, which would be the first vehicle in the BMW Art Car Project.
Jewelry.
Calder created over 2,000 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many as gifts for friends. Several pieces reflect his fascination with art from Africa and other continents. They were mostly made of brass and steel, with bits of ceramic, wood and glass. Calder rarely used solder; when he needed to join strips of metal, he linked them with loops, bound them with snippets of wire or fashioned rivets. Calder created his first pieces in 1906 at the age of eight for his sister's dolls using copper wire that he found in the street.
For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, Calder set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard that shimmered with dangling fish. In 1942, Guggenheim wore one Calder earring and one by Yves Tanguy to the opening of her New York gallery, The Art of This Century, to demonstrate her equal loyalty to Surrealist and abstract art, examples of which she displayed in separate galleries. Others who were presented with Calder's pieces were the artist's close friend, Georgia O'Keeffe; Teeny Duchamp, wife of Marcel Duchamp; Jeanne Rucar, wife of the filmmaker Luis Buñuel; and Bella Rosenfeld, wife of Marc Chagall.
Exhibitions.
Calder's first solo exhibition was in 1927 at the Gallery of Jacques Seligmann in Paris. His first solo show in a US commercial gallery was in 1928 at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. He exhibited with the Abstraction-Création group in Paris in 1933.
In 1935, he had his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. In New York, he was championed from the early 1930s by the Museum of Modern Art, and was one of three Americans to be included in Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s 1936 exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art".
Calder's first retrospective was held in 1938 at George Walter Vincent Smith Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a Calder retrospective, curated by James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp; the show had to be extended due to the number of visitors. Calder was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. His mobile, "International Mobile" was the centerpiece of the exhibition. Calder also participated in "documentas" I (1955), II (1959), III (1964). Major retrospectives of his work were held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1964), the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France (1969), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974). In addition, both of Calder's dealers, Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Perls Galleries in New York, averaged about one Calder show each per year.
An exhibition was held at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Bruton, Somerset, called "Alexander Calder: From the Stony River to the Sky". It ran from May 26 – September 9, 2018.
An exhibition is held at the SF MOMA from February 16 – June 6, 2021 called "Elemental Calder".
Collections.
Calder's work is in many permanent collections across the world. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, has the largest body of work by Alexander Calder. Other museum collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. There are two pieces on display in the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art offers a view of works by three generations of Alexander Calders. From the second floor window on the east side of the Great Stair Hall (on the opposite side from the armor collection) there is behind the viewer the "Ghost" mobile from the 3rd generation (born 1898), ahead on the street is the "Swann Memorial Fountain" by the 2nd generation (born 1870), and beyond that the statue of "William Penn" atop City Hall from the 1st generation (born 1846).
Art market.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Calder's works were not highly sought after, and when they sold, it was often for relatively little money. A copy of a Pierre Matisse sales ledger in the foundation's files shows that only a few pieces in the 1941 show found buyers, one of whom, Solomon R. Guggenheim, paid only $233.34 () for a work. The Museum of Modern Art had bought its first Calder in 1934 for $60, after talking Calder down from $100. In 2010, his metal mobile "Untitled (Autumn Leaves)", sold at Sotheby's New York for $3.7 million. Another mobile brought $6.35 million at Christie's later that year. Also at Christie's, a standing mobile called "Lily of Force" (1945), which was expected to sell for $8 to $12 million, was bought for $18.5 million in 2012. Calder's 7.5-foot-long hanging mobile "Poisson volant (Flying Fish)" (1957) fetched $25.9 million, setting an auction record for the sculptor at Christie's New York in 2014.
Galerie Maeght in Paris became Calder's exclusive Parisian dealer in 1950 and for the rest of Calder's life. After his New York dealer Curt Valentin died unexpectedly in 1954, Calder selected the Perls Galleries in New York as his new American dealer, and this alliance lasted until Calder's death.
Legacy.
Beginning in 1966, winners of the National Magazine Awards are awarded an "Ellie", a copper-colored stabile resembling an elephant, which was designed by Calder. Two months after his death, the artist was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Gerald Ford. However, representatives of the Calder family boycotted the January 10, 1977, ceremony "to make a statement favoring amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters".
Calder Foundation.
In 1987, the Calder Foundation was established by Calder's family, "dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, preserving, and interpreting the art and archives of Alexander Calder and [is] charged with an unmatched collection of his works". The foundation has large holdings, with some works owned by family members and others by foundation supporters. The art includes more than 600 sculptures including mobiles, stabiles, standing mobiles, and wire sculptures, and 22 monumental outdoor works, as well as thousands of oil paintings, works on paper, toys, pieces of jewelry, and domestic objects.
After having worked mainly on cataloging Calder's works, the Calder Foundation is now focusing on organizing global exhibitions for the artist.
Authenticity issues.
The Calder Foundation does not authenticate artworks; rather, owners can submit their works for registration in the Foundation's archive and for examination. The committee that performs examinations includes experts, scholars, museum curators, and members of the Calder family. The Calder Foundation's website provides details on the current policies and guidelines governing examination procedures.
In 1993, the owners of "Rio Nero" (1959), a sheet-metal and steel-wire mobile ostensibly by Calder, went to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia charging that it was not by Alexander Calder, as claimed by its seller. That same year, a federal judge ruled that for "Rio Nero" the burden of proof had not been fulfilled. Despite the decision, the owners of the mobile could not sell it because the recognized expert, Klaus Perls, had declared it a copy. The judge recognized the problem at the time, noting that Perls' pronouncement would make "Rio Nero" unsellable. In 1994, the Calder Foundation declined to include the mobile in the catalogue raisonné on the artist.
Referring to the "Rio Nero" case, the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court in 2009 rejected the appeal of an art collector who wished to sell a couple of stage sets that Calder had designed but did not live to see completed, which had been unsuccessfully submitted to the Calder Foundation for authentication. The court found that it did not have the power to declare the purported Calder work authentic, nor to order the Calder Foundation to include it in the catalogue raisonné.
In 1995, questions arose about another purported Calder, "Two White Dots" (not to be confused with the similarly-named piece, "Two White Dots in the Air", which Calder created in 1958). In 1973, Calder had created a -high sheet metal maquette for an unrealized stabile he called "Two White Dots". He gave this maquette to Carmen Segretario, founder and owner of the Segré Foundry of Waterbury, Connecticut. For decades, Calder had utilized the services of Segré Foundry in manufacturing his mobiles and stabiles. Each piece (no matter how many copies were made) would be initialled personally by Calder in white chalk, after which a welder would follow the chalk marks to burn the initials into the work. Calder died in 1976, without a full-size version of "Two White Dots" having been made. In 1982, Segretario constructed a full-size version of "Two White Dots", and sold it in 1983 to art dealer Shirley Teplitz for $70,000. Segetario's documentation claimed that the work had been fabricated around 1974 "under the supervision and direction of Artist". "Two White Dots" was then sold at auction in May 1984 for $187,000. Over the next decade, the piece was sold repeatedly. In 1995, Jon Shirley (the former president of Microsoft and a Calder collector) purchased "Two White Dots" for $1 million. When Shirley submitted the work to the Calder Foundation for inclusion in their catalogue raisonné, the Foundation contested the work's authenticity. The André Emmerich Gallery refunded Shirley's money, and sued the Segré Foundry, which sought bankruptcy protection. The suit was settled out of court in the late 1990s. "Two White Dots" now resides outdoors on a farm near a river outside the small town of Washington, Connecticut.
Plans for a Calder Museum.
After similar ideas were developed for New York in 1998, plans for a museum devoted to Calder in Philadelphia were announced in 2000. The proposed 35,000-square-foot Calder museum, designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, was to be located on a two-acre lot. The facility, which was slated for a 2008 opening, would have cost an estimated $70 million. The late sculptor's heirs had agreed to an unprecedented gift to the museum but in 2005, the plans were abandoned over failed fundraising efforts.


Yelena Yefimova

Yelena Ivanovna Yefimova (born 1948 in Russia) is a Russian artist and sculptor and a member of the National Association of Art crafts and Guild masters (armourers division). She has participated in six specialized weapons exhibitions and more than twenty other national and international exhibitions. Her works are in private and museum collections, including the collection of the State Historical and Cultural Museum-Reserve at the Moscow Kremlin.
She graduated in 1968 from Abramtsevo Artistic-Industrial College, Vasnetsova, in the department of art of carving on bone. From 1968 to 1974, she worked at the "Northern Souvenirs" Chukchi at workshop in the village Uelen. From 1976 to 1987 she was chief artist at the Research Institute of the Art Industry in the scientific laboratory of bones, skin, and fur. She has 35 years of experience in the fields of jewelry and decorative arts. She is a member of the National Club of the Hortaya borzaya breed of borzoi dogs.


Public Opinion Poll Center

The Public Opinion Poll Center (POPC) is one of Egypt's most outstanding polling centers and is the first center in Egypt as well as the Arab world to use telephones as a data collection tool. Affiliated to the Cabinet's Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC), the POPC was established in 2003, as the first poll center in Egypt responsible for studying trends of Egyptian public opinion towards different internal social, political and economic affairs. Such trends are forwarded to decision makers to use them in the preparation of different plans and policies. The POPC also measures public opinion preferences in order to understand priority issues and put them on the priority list of decision makers.
The POPC aims to provide accurate and fast measurement of Egyptian public opinion trends in a way that helps decision makers take accurate decisions. The POPC tries to reinforce the role of polls in supporting decision makers and achieving comprehensive development, strengthening the bond between the government and the people and building a social culture that accepts the idea of public opinion polling and encouraging positive participation.
The POPC depend on telephones in their data collection process. A data base compromising ten millions publicly listed landline telephone numbers is used. Telephones have been proven to be less costly and time and effort saving. A uni-stage stratified sample is designed for Egyptian households in different governorates after being divided into three areas: urban governorates, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Relative weights are then given to each area according to their actual representation in society. Sample size used by the POPC ranges from 1 to 2 thousand, depending on the nature of the poll. A factor analysis method is used to calculate the economic class of households, depending on the ownership of certain possessions, and dividing them into three economic classes: low, middle and high.
An Electronic Poll Management System has been used by the POPC since 2006. This system is considered as one of the pioneer systems in the field of public opinion poll management in the Middle East due to its high capabilities in completely automating the work flow. The EMS is the first Arab professional effort done to provide an integrated surveying solution based on the use of the latest technologies and supported by theoretical and scientific standards and specifications.
Polls conducted by the POPC cover a wide range of topics, particularly pertaining to economic, social and political matters. Polls conducted include subsidies, healthcare, investment, education, unemployment, the job market, political participation, political amendments, women's participation in political life, role of women in society, and many others.
The Public Opinion Poll Center has many national, regional and international partners. On the international level, POPC has previously conducted polls in cooperation with the UNDP, WTO, Globescan, and several others. On the national level, POPC works with all different ministries, government institutions such as the Social Fund for Development (SFD) and National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM), as well as local and research centers and national councils.


Constraint automaton

In computer science, Constraint automata are a formalism to describe the behavior and possible data flow in coordination models. It was introduced by Arbab et al. as a variation of finite automata for model checking Reo connector circuits.
Constraint automata can be considered generalizations of probabilistic automata, in which data constraints, instead of probabilities, label state transitions and influence their firing.


Callum Innes

Callum Innes (born 1962) is a Scottish abstract painter, a former Turner Prize nominee and winner of the Jerwood Painting Prize. He lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Early life and education.
Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh. He studied at Gray's School of Art (1980–84) and graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1985.
Career.
Innes began exhibiting in the mid-to-late 1980s and in 1992 had two major exhibitions in public galleries, at the ICA, London, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Since then he has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Britain, Europe, North America, New Zealand and Asia.
Solo Exhibitions.
Innes' first major London exhibition was hosted in 1990 at Frith Street Gallery, London who continue to represent him. A substantial selection of his best-known series, the "Exposed" paintings, was exhibited in 1998 at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England, and at the Kunsthalle Bern the following year. "From Memory", a major exhibition of Callum Innes' work over the past 15 years, was shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2006, and toured to Modern Art Oxford, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.Innes had a substantial solo exhibition of new work at Ingleby Gallery for the Edinburgh Art Festival (2009). "At One Remove", featured at Sean Kelly Gallery New York (2010), as did an exhibition entitled "water|colour", featuring 101 of the artist's watercolours paired with text by Irish writer Colm Tóibín. Callum Innes held his first major solo exhibition in Asia at Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong in 2012.
His most recent solo exhibitions include "Callum Innes: Keeping Time", Frith Street Gallery, London (2019), "In Position," Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France (2018), "Watercolours", Galerie Tschudi (2013–14), "Liminal", Sean Kelly Gallery, New York (2013), Whitworth Gallery, Manchester (2013) and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland (2013). "I'll Close my Eyes""," a major retrospective of Innes' work, was shown at De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands in 2016.
Group Exhibitions.
Callum Innes has participated in many group shows including "The British Art Show 3" (1990), "Wonderful Life", Lisson Gallery, London (1993), "From Here", Karsten Schubert Gallery and Waddington Galleries (1994), "Abstractions Provisoires", Musee d'Art Moderne de St Etienne (1997), the touring exhibition "About Vision - New British Paintings in the 1990s" (1996-7) and "Abstract Painting Once Removed" at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The last decade has seen Innes continue to participate in international group exhibitions including "Six Degrees of Separation" Jensen Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2001), "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004), "Three: 3 Artists in solo displays", Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2007), "Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing", Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (2009), "What you see is where you're at", Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010), "Heaviness and Grace", Villa Medici, Rome, Italy (2010). Recent group exhibitions include, "Actions. The image of the world can be different", Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2018). "Abstract Painting Now!," Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, Austria (2017),"Silver," Frith Street Gallery, London (2014), "GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland", Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (2014) and "Watercolour", Tate Britain (2011), among others.
Collections.
Innes' work is represented in numerous collections, both private and public including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, The Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Tate London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Guggenheim Museum, Deutsche Bank, De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre Pompidou, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Arts Council Collection, UK, British Museum, London, IMMA, Dublin, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
Recognition.
In 1995 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize which was won by Damien Hirst. In 1998 Innes won the NatWest Art Prize and in 2002 he won the Jerwood Painting Prize and the Artisti Invitati Al Premio Internazionale.


Bernard Lokai

Bernard Lokai (born 5 September 1960 Bohumin, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic) is a German painter. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was a student of Gerhard Richter, and part of the Young Figuratives movement. He lives and works in Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany. In 2002 he began teaching at the Freie Kunstakademie Essen in Essen in the Department of Painting and Graphics.
Life.
After his parents left the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic Bernard Lokai grew up in Düren, Germany. After finishing high school he began to study art at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1982. In 1987 he finished the academy as "Meisterschüler" of Gerhard Richter. At the academy he met the colorfield landscape painter Hans-Jörg Holubitschka, with whom he has participated in several exhibitions as part of the exhibition serial Young Figuratives.
Work.
Bernard Lokai's work incorporates the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism and the spray paint of graffiti. His "Landscape Block" works consist of multi-panelled grids composed of eighteen 12 by 16 inch panels, each painted in the studio, then combined into a grid at random.
Art critic Mara Hoberman wrote that Bernard Lokai's Landscape Blocks depict "eighteen land-, sea-, and sky-scapes in disparate styles quoting, in turn, the brushstrokes of Monet, Turner, and Richter (his teacher), among others."


Gretna Campbell

Gretna Campbell Finkelstein (1922 – July 14, 1987) was an American painter and educator who was affiliated with the abstract expressionist New York School. Campbell's works are described as having developed "among a generation of painters respectful of the achievements of Abstract Expressionism but confident that depictions of the natural world remained timely and significant."
Born in the Bronx, Campbell began formal studies in painting in 1939 attending an art workshop organized by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and continued at Cooper Union and the Art Students League in New York City. In 1946, she married fellow New York School artist Louis Finkelstein (1923-2000). After studies in France, and Italy, and brief stints in Provincetown on Cape Cod, she settled into spending her summers painting on Cranberry Island, Maine and the rest of the year in New York City.
Campbell taught at the Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia College of Art, Yale School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, and the New York Studio School. From 1978 to 1986, she and her husband settled in Stillwater Township, New Jersey where she began painting in the winter and spring until her final illness. In 1987, she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate member.
On 14 July 1987, Gretna Campbell died in New York City.


Ce Roser

Cecilia Roser, who works under the name Ce Roser, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1925. Roser has been active in New York City as an artist since the 1960s. Ever since childhood, Roser had been painting and drawing.<ref name="Institute for Women and Art, accessed March 4, 2013, http://iwa.rutgers.edu/programs/mary-h-dana-women-artists-series/40-years-of-women-artists-at-douglass-library/introduction-to-women-artists-series-year-6/"></ref> While studying in Berlin, Roser learned of a female artist named Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz, who worked until the day she died, was an inspiration to Roser. Remarking that she would like to live that way too, Roser proceeded to emphasize the need for young artists, especially women, to find a fitting predecessor and mentor.
Roser studied under the Japanese calligrapher Hidai Nankoku (b. 1912) during his New York City visit. Roser later transferred the experience of rendering abstract characters on paper to painting on canvas. Although the experience with Hidai paid homage to her Asian ancestry, Roser’s work does not fall into the East Asian art tradition. According to Peter Townsend, Roser’s work seems “oriental only to those who don’t know oriental art.”
In addition to Kollwitz and Hidai, Roser admired Emil Nolde's watercolors and the way Claude Monet transformed nature into paint. Hans Uhlmann, Charmion von Wiegand, and Sari Dienes also served as other mentors for her vivid, lively, and daringly delicate work.
Art.
Roser has stated that it is for others, not her, to say what tradition her art belongs to; yet many critics categorize her work as abstract. Abstract art focuses on what a person sees; i.e. color, shape, size, and scale, thus, it does not directly depict objects in the visible world. Roser’s work exemplifies the idea that art is a bridge between the verbal and pre-verbal world, a blending of the reality and perception of life. Roser believes that the “communication of painting can express the architecture, landscape, aerial views, free associations, random choices and unexpected juxtapositions of perceptions and feelings that constitute life experience.” Roser’s abstraction and distinct style of purposefully using colors has been described as “suggesting a symbolic language of earth and mountain topography.” That critique continues on to stress that her work is a great example of “perception shifts” and her abstraction is able to “engage the viewer through ambiguity.”
John Russell described her work as “something of the headlong imagery of Kandinsky's early ‘Improvisations’” and referred to her “recognizable images which come and go” with color that is “everywhere light, clear, clean and free.” The use of expansive white space helps in her emphasis of crisp clean color which is used with distinct intention so much that Roser is regarded as “very good on the edges of her pictures, too, with plenty of action backed up into the corners.” This increase in white space, praised by many critics, came about as a translation of the sunlight that she saw flickering on the Hudson River from her New York studio. The work owned by The Cleveland Museum of Art is a good example of the use of expansive white space.
While some critics claim that her work is “best suited for water color,” Roser’s style is bold, vibrant and unintentionally intimate. Her colorful style and broad brush strokes “become abstract elements that float over the picture plane.” The organic nature of her paintings reflect a process based on feeling and through the rhythm and underlying harmony, viewers are given a pleasurable experience for the eyes. Roser’s work embodies childlike verve and spirited expression while remaining seemingly delicate.
Women in the Arts Foundation (WIA) and Women Choose Women.
Women in the Arts (WIA) was founded by both Cynthia Navaretta and Ce Roser as a protest against the chauvinism of art galleries. The foundation was created as a solution to the failure of galleries to actively exhibit works by women artists. The Women in the Arts Foundation continues work to overcome discrimination against women artists by providing information that aids women in functioning effectively as professional artists. Since its creation in 1971, WIA has obtained grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Exxon Corporation, Mobil Foundation, the Eastman Fund, and Consolidated Edison thus allowing its objective to be achieved. Currently WIA is open to all women interested in the arts.
“Women Choose Women Exhibition” was organized as the first exhibition by WIA. The exhibition was held in 1973, at the New York Cultural Center, after Mario Amaya responded to an exhibition proposal that the WIA group sent to every major art museum in New York. The works that were exhibited were selected by a committee composed of WIA members, including Pat Passlof, Ce Roser, Sylvia Sleigh, Linda Nochlin, Elizabeth C. Baker, and Laura Adler. In all, 109 artists were selected from among the 700 anonymous submissions that were received to be exhibit in the show. Among those chosen for the exhibition were Audrey Flack, Hannah Wilke, Alice Neel, May Stevens, and Faith Ringgold. The exhibition was historic because a female panel, composed mainly of artists, selected the work of their sisters to be exhibited. “Women Choose Women” sought to represent the ability of all artists in order to overcome the hierarchy and bureaucracy of the museums.
Roser was a supporter of exhibiting in alternative spaces and stressed how exhibiting at the Mary H. Dana Artists Series opened a window that introduced her work to Lawrence Alloway. Her painting Double Vision (1991) was in the collection of her colleague, Sylvia Sleigh, who was married to Alloway. Today, the painting is part of the Sylvia Sleigh Collection at Rowan University. Roser also exhibited at the East Hampton Guild Hall “Artist of the Region,” a show that sought to revel under-recognized talent.


Leo Amino

Leo Amino was a Japanese-American sculptor known for his Abstract Expressionist sculptures created with a variety of materials, including wood, wire, and plastics.
Biography.
Born in 1911 in Taiwan, to Japanese parents, he spent much of his early life in Tokyo, where his father's calligraphy and his mother's floral design interested him in working in art. He immigrated to the United States in 1929, enrolling at San Mateo Junior College before briefly attending New York University.
In 1937 he began studying direct carving at under Chaim Gross at the American Artists School. His pieces were included in the 1939 New York World's Fair alongside those of Isamu Noguchi. Another influence was sculptor Henry Moore, whose work Amino encountered on a trip to England in 1938.
Amino's artistic career was briefly halted by World War II, during which he served in the US Navy as a translator. After the war concluded, he noticed the increased availability of synthetic resin due to its use as a substitute for materials that were needed for the war effort. He became the first artist to experiment with and use synthetic resin as an artistic medium, alternating between resin and wood in his sculptures.
In the summers of 1946 and 1950, he taught at Black Mountain College, and from 1952 until 1977 taught at Cooper Union.
Amino died on December 1, 1989, in New York City.
His work is held at institutions including the Asheville Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Montclair Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Newark Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.


Michel Gigon

Michel Gigon (born 1929 in Caen, Calvados) is a French painter and stained-glass window designer. He began his artistic career in 1953.
Work.
Gigon had many exhibitions in France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Poland. Many of its paintings are in private collections in France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain.
Bibliography.
Revue du centre international du vitrail - n° 4 - 2eme semestre 1989
ISSN 0991-0131
Page 52: Les peintres et le vitrail
About Michel Gigon.
Jil Silberstein, preface from André Frossard (1980).
Françoise Perrot - Centre international du vitrail - Chartres
Edition: L'oeil & la main - La manufacture
Diffusion LA MANUFACTURE 1984
Page 68
Jean-Marie Geron - Albert Moxhet
Edition: Dexia - La renaissance du livre
Collection Références
Pages 18, 146, 147
association
Monuments de picardie
April 1987
Pages 4, 5
Portrait "Un artiste déconcertant"
Geneviève Bayle


J. A. Scott Kelso

J. A. Scott Kelso (born 1947 in Derry, Northern Ireland) is a neuroscientist, and Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences and Biomedical Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida and The University of Ulster (Magee Campus) in Derry, N. Ireland.
Kelso has worked on coordination dynamics, the science of coordination and on fundamental mechanisms underlying voluntary movements and their relation to the large-scale coordination dynamics of the human brain.
His experimental research in the late 1970s and early 1980s led to the HKB model (Haken–Kelso–Bunz), a mathematical formulation that quantitatively describes and predicts how elementary forms of coordinated behavior arise and change adaptively as a result of nonlinear interactions among components.
Biography.
Kelso was born in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland. He attended Foyle College (1958–1965), receiving his undergraduate education at Stranmillis University College Belfast from 1965 to 1969, and the University of Calgary, Alberta from 1971 to 1972. He obtained his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1975.
From 1976 to 1978 Kelso was Assistant Professor and Director of The Motor Behavior Laboratory at the University of Iowa. Between 1978 and 1985 he was Senior Research Scientist at Yale University's Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut and Professor of Psychology and Biobehavioral Sciences (Unit of Behavioral Genetics) at the University of Connecticut.
In 1985 he founded the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, an interdisciplinary research center that includes neuroscientists, applied mathematicians, physicists, psychologists and computer scientists housed in the same physical facility, working together on common problems of complex, biological systems ranging from molecules to minds. Kelso leads a team of researchers in the Center's Human Brain and Behavior Laboratory.
Since 1985, Kelso has held the Glenwood and Martha Creech Eminent Scholar Chair in Science at Florida Atlantic University, where he is also Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences, and Biomedical Sciences. Kelso was Program Director of the NIMH’s National Training Program in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University between 1987 and 2005. Working with the FAU Administration and the Chancellor's office of the State University System, Kelso helped establish the Center's PhD Degree in Complex Systems and Brain Sciences.
In 1995, Kelso co-directed the Summer School in Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He served as President of the South Florida chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, from 1995 to 1999. He is a Member of the Scientific Board of the Plexus Institute, the World Council of the Einstein Institutes and the Advisory Board of the Intelligent Systems Research Center at the University of Ulster Magee Campus.
Kelso has held visiting professorships in France, Germany, Russia and (currently) Ireland. He has also lectured extensively in the U.S.A. and abroad. He has received many honors and awards for his scientific research. In 2007, he was named Pierre de Fermat Laureate.
Work.
The objective of Kelso's research is to understand how human beings (and human brains — singly and together) coordinate behavior. Kelso and his research team currently use non-invasive neuroimaging techniques (EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET, etc.) and statistical tools to gather information about the structure and function of the brain during real-time behavior.
Over the last 30 years or so, along with colleagues working in laboratories around the world, he has participated in an interdisciplinary science called coordination dynamics. Coordination dynamics is an empirical and conceptual framework that tries to explain how patterns of coordination form, persist, adapt and change. The insights of coordination dynamics have been applied to predict behavior in different kinds of systems at different levels of analysis.
Coordination dynamics is grounded in the concepts of synergetics and the mathematical tools of dynamical systems (see nonlinear dynamic systems theory and synergetics). But coordination dynamics seeks to model specific properties of human cognition, neurophysiology, and social function – such as anticipation, intention, attention, decision-making and learning. The principal claim of coordination dynamics is that the coordination of neurons in the brain and the coordinated actions of people and animals are linked by virtue of sharing a common mathematical or dynamical structure.
Kelso has worked on metastability in neuroscience. This concept has seen a growing interest among theoretical and computational neuroscientists, since it provides a mathematical formalization for the idea that the individual parts of the brain can on the one hand be specialized and segregated yet on the other hand function as an integrated whole.
Early work.
Kelso's early work used nerve block techniques to cut off sensory input from the limbs in humans. His experiments showed that even without conscious awareness of limb position, humans could move accurately to desired locations in space. Along with work conducted by Polit and Bizzi on monkeys at MIT Kelso's research was a key to helping establish the equilibrium point theory of motor control originally postulated by Anatol Feldman. Then, working with his students David Goodman and Dan Southard he demonstrated—using a pulsed light emitting diode technique long before the age of sophisticated computer assisted motion analysis—that the brain controls the complex, coordinated movements of the upper limbs by exploiting functional synergies, a notion originally put forth by the Russian physiologist and cybernetician Nicolai Bernstein. Further work at Haskins Labs using a combination of novel perturbation techniques, kinematic and intramuscular recordings discovered that the control and coordination of complex speech gestures was also based on functional synergies or coordination structures. In asking how synergies might be formed in motor systems Kelso turned from Sherringtonian neurophysiology to theories of self-organization in particular the fledgling interdisciplinary field of synergetics founded by Hermann Haken. At that time, the dominant understanding of animated movement was that behavior is determined by a "central program", a prearranged set of instructions that prescribe how a set of biomechanical components should behave. In contrast, Kelso showed experimentally that behavior can also emerge in a self-organizing way, as a result of highly nonlinear interactions among many interconnected elements. His experiments were the first to demonstrate the existence of phase transitions—sudden and spontaneous shifts from one coordinated state to another as a parameter is continuously varied. Phase transitions are a basic mechanism of self-organization in nature and Kelso's experiments, which have been replicated many times, were the first to show them in the coordinated movements of human beings.
HKB model.
Kelso and his colleagues later demonstrated that many of the complexities of coordinated motor behavior in complex, multi-degree-of-freedom systems can be derived from relatively simple, but nonlinear mathematical laws. For a review of this work see Kelso et al. (1987) and Schöner and Kelso (1988) In particular, Kelso developed a mathematical model in collaboration with the eminent theoretical physicist Hermann Haken, the father of laser theory and synergetics. This "HKB model" was able to derive basic forms of coordination observed in Kelso's experiments using a system of nonlinear relations between individual coordinating elements The HKB model explained and predicted experimental observations such as "critical slowing down", and "enhanced fluctuations" associated with instability and dramatic changes in coordination. Later extensions of HKB accommodated the effects of noise, broken symmetry, multiple interacting heterogeneous components, recruitment-annihilation processes, parametric stabilization, and the role of changing environments on coordination
Brain imaging work.
Subsequently, Kelso and his colleagues moved from the hand to the brain, using large arrays of SQUID magnetometers to record the neuromagnetic activity of the brain and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to record BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level Dependent) activation in brain regions. This work showed that mathematical forms observable in the coordinated movement of the hands (such as phase transitions), were also observable in images of brain activity. Or as Kelso puts it, "the same coordination dynamics governs brain activity and human behavior." For example, on the basis of recordings and analysis of human brain activity Viktor Jirsa and Armin Fuchs along with Kelso were able to derive the HKB equations of coordination at the behavioral level from a more realistic anatomical and physiological model of the underlying neural substrate
Current research.
Kelso's current work focuses on whether the same principles and mechanisms of coordination dynamics apply also to human brains working together in social settings. Using large electrode arrays now available in the field of electroencephalography (EEG), he and his co-workers have been imaging the brains of pairs of humans, as they perform coordinated hand movements. Remarkably, Kelso's team has identified signatures in the brain that correspond to whether humans coordinate together or act independently. In another line of research, Kelso and colleagues have created a novel way to understand the real time interaction between a human and a machine, called Virtual Partner Interaction (VPI). In VPI, humans coordinate with a virtual partner whose behavior is driven by a computerized version of the HKB equations, known to govern basic forms of human coordination. VPI is a principled approach to human-machine interaction and may open up new ways to understand how humans interact with human-like machines.
Books.
Kelso's first full-length book, "Dynamic Patterns : The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior" (MIT Press, 1995) summarizes the first 20 years of his theoretical and experimental work on coordination, and argues that the creation and evolution of patterned behavior at all levels—from neurons to mind—is governed by the dynamical processes of self-organization. The book is written for the general reader, and uses simple experimental examples and illustrations to convey essential concepts, strategies, and methods, with a minimum of mathematics.
With Viktor Jirsa, Kelso edited the book "Coordination Dynamics: Issues and Trends " (Springer, 2004). Kelso is also the Founding Editor for the Springer series on "Understanding Complex Systems" and has served on the Editorial Boards of 10 scientific journals/periodicals in various disciplines.
Kelso's second full-length book, written with his former postdoc David A. Engstrøm, is "The Complementary Nature" (MIT Press, 2006). This book attempts to reconcile what it calls "the philosophy of complementary pairs" with the science of coordination dynamics. Pairs of opposites are found everywhere in nature and in science (e.g. cooperation and competition, integration and segregation, individual and collective, self and other, body and mind, nature and nurture, etc. etc.). Kelso and Engstrøm argue that these pairs are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. They propose a comprehensive, empirically-based scientific theory of how contraries can be reconciled based on Kelso's theory of metastable coordination dynamics. The essence of the theory is that the human brain is capable of displaying two apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive behaviors – integration and segregation – at the same time. Kelso and Engstrøm use the tilde, or squiggle (~), as the symbol for reconciled complementary pairs (e.g. body~mind, nature~nurture). The squiggle exposes a basic truth: both complementary aspects and their dynamics are needed for an exhaustive description and understanding of the complex phenomena and systems in life, mind, society and nature.
Publications.
Scott Kelso has published numerous articles and books. A selection:


Academic ranks in the Netherlands

Academic ranks in the Netherlands are the titles, relative importance and power of professors, researchers, and administrative personnel held in academia. These ranks are mostly limited to scholars holding a position at the Dutch research universities with the position of Lector being the exception at the vocational universities.
Professor ranks.
Most academic staff will have both research and teaching duties.
The ranking system of faculty with combined teaching and research tasks in Dutch universities is as follows:
In daily practice no distinction is made between rank 1 and 2 in the Dutch ranking system. Each rank increase come with a shift in pay grade. Promotion from rank 2 to rank 1 within the same function is usually easier than moving to a differently named function.
University of applied sciences appoint "lector"s to coordinate their (applied) research. Like a full professor, a lector coordinates a research group. In contrast to full professors, lectors are not allowed to be principal supervisor of PhD students and are not allowed to use the formal title "professor".
Full professors.
A (full) professor should have substantial research achievements and international reputation. The title professor is not protected by Dutch law.
The head of a department or of a "chair-group" within a department is a full professor. After a "chaired" professor leaves university, an open application is usually announced to replace the chair holder.
Personal chairs, are full professors created based on personal achievement but have no formal administrative function in leading a department. Personal chair are becoming increasingly familiar; and are generally promoted from the assistant or associate professor ranks in a department. If a personal chair leaves the chair ceases to exist.
Dutch universities also appoint "professors occupying an endowed chair" (Dutch: "bijzonder hoogleraar", literally "special professor"), often on a part-time basis. Special professors usually have their main employment somewhere else, often in industry or at a research institute or University elsewhere, although some foundations sponsor a special professor for one of the sitting associate professors. The special professor ("bijzonder hoogleraar") does not get paid by the university, but receives a salary from an external organization, such as a company, an organization or a fund. Special (endowed) professors sometimes provide lectures or do research on special topics associated with their main employment. They also often supervise graduate students who may do their research at the place of the professor's main employment.
Some Dutch universities have also instituted "University Professorships" appointing scientific ambassadors by the university, rather than representing a department. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences can sponsor an established professor to be an "Academy Professor". In addition, members of the Royal Academy are selected full professor. Being elected to member of the academy is a high honor for a sitting professor.
When a full professor retires in good standing, the professor becomes professor emeritus. This allows the retired professor to keep the title professor for life. A professor emeritus is allowed to supervise doctorate theses until five years after retirement, but the use of the honorific professor is for life. Professors emeriti have no formal teaching or administrative duties and are paid no salaries (instead they receive pension payment). They are often provided with a desk and will have access to university resources for as long as the person so requests. In any event, professors who move out of the academy or retire in good standing retain the "ius promovendi". (see below) for five years thereafter.
Due to the system of part-time special professors and personal chair-holders promoted from sitting staff within a department, many university research groups will have several professors.
In the Netherlands a special right of a full professor has always been the "ius promovendi". This means that by Dutch law, any doctoral dissertation must always be supported by a full professor; or in other words the principal supervisor of any PhD project is always a full professor. From 2018 onwards, the law has changed and holder of a position with a research university appointment (effectively an experienced UD or UHD or a (senior) researcher who has a doctorate) is eligible to be main supervisor of a PhD. student. Universities have agreed that only such colleagues with proven capacity to supervise PhD projects will be granted this right (this means in practice that such colleagues have to have research-led profiles and considerable experience in co-supervising research students). Increasingly, Ph.Ds are co-supervised by a UD or UHD, and they are often the regular point of contact for the Ph.D student, particularly in large research groups.
International comparison.
Although the ranks are often translated as if they were aligned with the American system (i.e. assistant, associate, and full professor), this not as clear-cut. Traditionally a lecturer could only become associate or full professor by applying for such a position if there was a vacancy. However, Dutch universities are moving towards a system closer to the US tenure track system to have more flexibility in rewarding merits of individuals. In Dutch universities, permanent positions must be offered upon the third extension of fixed-term position or after 6 years of continuous contracts (whichever comes first), a rule which was instigated to avoid permatemp situation; permanent positions may, of course, be offered sooner. Unlike in the US, the terms Assistant Professor and Associate Professor are not as such indicative of tenure status.
In 1986 there was a reform of the system. Junior professors and professors of the agricultural and technology universities, until then labelled as "Lector" were transformed into full Professors, but as a new Professor A rank at a lower salary scale than the existing professors (who were designated Professor B) on the older, and more favourable, salary scale. The present salary scales refer to Professor 1 or Professor 2 (the former is the higher in standing, as the Universities adopted the Hay criteria for function-ranking). The former title "buitengewoon hoogleraar" ("professor by special appointment", literally "extraordinary professor") for a part-time professor is no longer used (since the 1986 reforms); all the then holders of such positions became part-time full professors '(gewoon hoogleraren).
In the early 2000s the lector position (Readership in traditional UK terms) was introduced at universities of applied sciences for research group leaders dealing with applied research. Until that moment universities of applied sciences had no research tasks. Based on salary pay grade, lectors would rank between associate and full professor in the research university system.


Ayano Hori

 is a Japanese women's professional shogi player ranked 1-kyū. She is a member of the .
Promotion history.
Hori has been promoted as follows:
Note: All ranks are women's professional ranks.


Neil Williams (artist)

Neil Williams (1934 – March 28, 1988) was an American painter. Williams was an abstract painter primarily known for his pioneering work with shaped canvases in the early 1960s. His paintings of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are associated with geometric abstraction, hard-edge painting, color field, and lyrical abstraction, although he did not readily subscribe to any category for his work. He taught Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts from the late 1970s until the early 1980s.
Biography.
Williams was born in Bluff, Utah. He was in the process of moving to Brazil when he died in New York City at the age of 53.
Williams graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1959; showed his work in 1959 at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and moved to New York City that same year. He began exhibiting his paintings in New York in 1960. He was a regular patron of Max's Kansas City throughout the period of the mid-1960s and early 1970s when it belonged to his friend Mickey Ruskin.
His paintings were exhibited at important art galleries in New York including solo exhibitions at the Green Gallery (1964), and the André Emmerich Gallery (1966 and 1968) both on 57th Street in Manhattan and at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles (1966). His work was included in several important group exhibitions during the 1960s including in 1966 the influential "Systemic Painting" exhibition that showcased Geometric abstraction in the American art world via Minimal art, Shaped canvas, and Hard-edge painting curated by Lawrence Alloway at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He also participated in several group exhibitions at museums including 2 Whitney Museum of American Art annuals in 1967 and 1973; the Park Place Gallery and galleries and museums elsewhere. In 1968 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Williams had four more solo exhibitions in New York during the 1970s. By 1982 he had a solo exhibition in Brazil and decided to move there permanently. In 1986 he had a career retrospective in the historic Clocktower Gallery in New York City, (currently directed by Alanna Heiss, founder and former Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens).


Toxic (graffiti artist)

Torrick Ablack, also known as Toxic (born January 16, 1965) is an American artist who was part of the Graffiti movement of the early 1980s in New York City. He transitioned from street art to exhibiting his paintings in galleries and museums internationally.
Life and career.
Ablack was born in Bronx, New York on January 16, 1965. His mother was Puerto Rican and his father's family came from Trinidad. In his youth he was given the nickname Toxic Battery, which became his graffiti tag. He began painting graffiti at the age of 13 with A-One and Kool Koor. They joined Rammellzee's graffiti crew Tag Master Killers, which also consisted of Delta2. Each member designed their own style for arming letters based on Rammellzee's theory of Gothic Futurism, which describes graffiti as the weaponization of letters in a battle to reclaim language from a "diseased culture" of social control. In the early 1980s, they were among the graffiti artists bringing original art and music from the Bronx and Queens to the downtown art scene. In 1982, Toxic, A-One, and Kool Koor participated in the group show "Camouflaged Panzerism" at Fashion Moda in South Bronx.
Toxic met artist Jean-Michel Basquiat soon after Basquiat's exhibit at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1982. Basquiat became his mentor and hired him as an occasional studio assistant. In late 1982, Toxic and Rammellzee accompanied Basquiat to Los Angeles while he prepared for his show at the Gagosian Gallery. While in Los Angeles, where they were struck by how the film industry portrayed African Americans, especially during the Golden Age of Hollywood. In response, they dubbed themselves the Hollywood Africans as a social and political statement to counter the stereotypical portrayals of African Americans in Hollywood. The trio are depicted in Basquiat's paintings "Hollywood Africans in front of the Chinese Theater with Footprints of Movie Stars" (1983) and "Hollywood Africans" (1983).
Toxic stayed true to the graffiti spraying technique and worked on canvases pinned to the wall. His work became more abstract that the tags he wrote on subway cars. Toxic was part of the exhibit "Rapid Enamel" at the University of Chicago in 2014, which was the first showcasing of graffiti in an American institution. His artwork has since appeared in the collections of major museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Groninger Museum and the Museum of the City of New York. In 2013, he was featured in the exhibit "Last of the Hollywood Africans: Toxic, Rammellzee and Jean-Michel Basquiat" at Londonewcastle Project Space in London. In 2015, he was featured in the group exhibit "Le Pressionnisme" at Pinacothèque de Paris. That year, he participated in the exhibi"t Graffiti, New York meets the Dam" at the Amsterdam Museum. In 2020, his painting, "Ransom Note: CEE" (1984), was included in the exhibit "Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Toxic designed a wallpaper, a printed linen, and a wall panel in collaboration with French textile house Pierre Frey.
He is based in France, but spends his time between Paris, Florence, and New York.


Henry Haig

Henry Haig (19306 December 2007) was an English abstract artist, painter and sculptor but notable predominantly for his stained glass work.
Early life and education.
Born in Hampstead in 1930, Henry's talent was recognised and encouraged by Jack Fairhurst, his art teacher at Richmond and East Sheen County School for Boys. A visit to Wimbledon School of Art at the age of fifteen led to an immediate offer of a place. Haig studied painting and sculpture there for five years until called for national service in 1949. He refused an officer's commission on completion, preferring to return to his art studies. He applied for a place in the painting school of the Royal College of Art but accepted an invitation to the stained glass department, led by Lawrence Lee. Haig was at RCA between 1952 and 1955, and, having met fellow student Joan Salmon during this time, they were married on New Year's Day, 1956. The couple went on to have five children.
Career and works.
One of Haig's earliest public works is the concrete, glass and granite chip frieze in the booking hall of South Ruislip station. Thought by some to date from the 1948 construction of the station, others date it at 1961.
Both Joan and Henry went into teaching. Henry taught at Kingston College of Art and, whilst there, received a commission for St Richard's Church in Ham, London, under construction in 1964–65. Henry created fourteen dalle de verre windows inspired by the life of St Richard. He also painted the sacristy door panels which are faced with enamels, gold and silver fused onto sheet steel, the left door depicting the Bishop's chalice and the right evoking the "shimmer at the entrance to Paradise". The sculpted wood, copper and gilt processional cross and candlesticks are also Haig's work.
Haig's commissions gradually allowed him to give up teaching and concentrate full-time on his art, based in his home studio, a converted racquets court, in Fifehead Magdalen, Dorset where the family lived from 1969.
Haig received a commission for Clifton Cathedral, Bristol, the project dating from 1965 and completed in 1972–73. Like St Richard's, Clifton has a six-pointed star plan with a hexagonal interior space. Haig's window contains 8,000 pieces of glass set in epoxy resin. The larger of the narthex windows depicts "Pentecost" and the smaller one "Jubilation".
Two windows symbolic of previous churches were made for Christ Church (Methodist/URC) Chichester and installed in 1982. Family associations were the theme for 1984 windows in the church of St. Mary, Donhead St Mary, Wiltshire. In 1985, Haig's two windows were installed in the church of Christ the King, Amesbury depicting 'Jesus Christ the Apple Tree' to the left and 'The Firmament' to the right of the altar. St Theresa's Convent Chapel, Effingham, Surrey has two of Haig's works, a four panel window and a single one on the theme of "light" dated 1987. A year later, in 1988, Haig created two windows each comprising three panels and a triangle for St Peter's Convent, Woking.
One of Haig's best-known works is the memorial window for WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who was shot and killed while on duty during the Libyan Embassy siege on 17 April 1984. The window, in the lady chapel of St Leonard's Church in Yvonne Fletcher's home town of Semley, Wiltshire, was dedicated by the Bishop of Salisbury on 17 April 1988. At the bottom of the centre light is the badge of the Metropolitan Police, and Yvonne's name is along the base of the three lights.
Haig was commissioned to produce a window to commemorate the 50th anniversary of RAF Lyneham, paid for with funds raised from air personnel contributions. The official launch of the work, in St Michael's and All Saints, Lyneham, Wiltshire, was celebrated at a service for the anniversary by the Queen on 17 May 1990.
Most, but not all of Haig's work is installed in religious buildings. In February 1991, Haig's "Minerva" comprising six windows was installed in a surgery in Bath, Somerset.
On 22 November 1992, the Michael James memorial window was installed in the archway of the west door in Wimborne Minster. Haig took inspiration from the phrase "praise to the Holiest in the height and in depth be praise" from Elgar's 'Dream of Gerontius' which Michael James, the church's assistant organist, had been studying prior to his death in 1981.
"The Creed" and "Garden of Eden" windows in St Leonard's parish church, Priors Marston, Warwickshire were installed in 1993.
The north rose window in St Mary's Church, Swanage, installed in 1994, depicts The Creation. Haig's other works in Dorset also include the golden oculus for St Mark's Church in Highcliffe, which represents Alpha and Omega and fills a space in the gallery wall originally occupied by the organ. Other Dorset works include the 'Journey from Stourhead' screen and chapel windows in Shaftesbury Hospital, and a glass dome, cross and the cabinet for the chapel of the Joseph Weld Hospice in Dorchester.
In 1994 Haig provided the east window for St Stephen's York, replacing a window destroyed by arson in 1992. The design was inspired by the writing of Alcuin of York "In word and in example let thy light shine in the black dark like the morning star". The centre panel shows Saint Stephen's arms raised looking up to heaven and seeing the vision of Christ. In the top right of the window, three hunched figures represent the martyrs of every age.
In 1995 the south aisle of St. Michael Shalbourne, Wiltshire, gained a two light window depicting St. Luke and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Atypical for Haig, the non-abstract, figurative, design was by another, respected, stained-glass artist, Karl Parsons, who had lived locally.
In 1997 two lights depicting rural scenes were added to the church of St Edith, Baverstock, Wiltshire. Also that year Haig's arched window was installed at All Saints, Newland, 'The Cathedral of the Forest', and dedicated, in 2000, to the memory of its donor, Joan and her husband, Henry Ludlam.
In 1998 Haig's windows were installed in the church of the Most Holy Name and St. Edward, Shaftesbury. Haig started work on this in 1996, working with the congregation to refine the design, drawing on the colours of the windows in Nantes Cathedral. He used traditional construction with lead came and French, English and German mouth-blown glass. Fired iron oxides and silver stain were used to produce the desired colours and effects.
Haig's twelve windows in the church of Douai Abbey, Thatcham were blessed by Abbot Geoffrey Scott OSB on 20 November 1999.
Haig was commissioned to create a stained glass window to celebrate the millennium for St Michael & All Angels' church, Alsop-en-le-Dale, Derbyshire. Its theme; "I saw a new heaven and a new earth" is from Revelation 21:1. The Bishop of Derby dedicated the window on 30 September 2001. Haig also created a window for the south aisle of St Mary's Church, Fordingbridge in 2000.
Henry Wylie Haig died in Yeovil on 6 December 2007, aged 77.


Selfie Type

Selfie Type is a keyboard technology for mobile phones made by Samsung Electronics. It uses the front-facing camera (the selfie camera) to track the user's fingers, enabling the user to type on an "invisible keyboard" on a table or another surface in front of the phone.
It was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show 2020 and is expected to be launched in 2020.


Grazia Varisco

Grazia Varisco (born 1937 in Milan) is an Italian visual artist and designer.
Varisco attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan from 1956 to 1960, where she was a student of Achille Funi. In 1960 she joined Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo and Gabriele De Vecchi's kinetic art and op art Gruppo T, with whom she participated in exhibitions such as 'Arte Programmata' (Milan, 1962), 'Nouvelle tendance' (Zagreb, 1963) and the 'Miriorama' series (Milan, Genoa, Tokyo, Rome, Padua and Venice, 1960–63). Between 1961 and 1967 she worked as a graphic designer for the multinational retailer La Rinascente, the architecture and design magazine Abitare, the design company Kartell, and the Milan City Council.
Varisco is considered one of the few female artists involved in the op art movement together with Edna Andrade, Bridget Riley and Vera Molnár. Her work has been featured in many international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1964 and 1986), the Rome Quadriennale (1973), the Toyama Triennale (1990); 'Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic’ (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Hayward Gallery, London, 2000); 'Beyond Geometry' (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2004) and 'Op Art' (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2007).
From 1981 to 2007 she was Professor of Theory of Perception at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.
In 2007 the President of Italy Giorgio Napolitano awarded her the 'Presidente della Repubblica Prize for Sculpture' in Rome.


Hideyuki Takano

 is a Japanese professional shogi player ranked 6-dan.
Early life.
Takano was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture on June 15, 1972. He entered the Japan Shogi Association's apprentice school in December 1984 at the rank 6-kyū under the tutelage of shogi professional Makoto Nakahara. He was promoted to 1-dan in March 1991 and was awarded full professional status and the rank of 4-dan in April 1998 after winning the 22nd 3-dan League (October 1997March 1998) with a record of 13 wins and 5 losses.
Promotion history.
Takano's promotion history is as follows:


Thomas Darnell (artist)

Thomas Darnell (February 2, 1958) is an American artist known for his oil paintings of figurative landscapes and flowers, and abstracts.
French newspaper "L'Indépendant" describes his work as being influenced by modern painters Gerhard Richter and Ross Bleckner, but also by Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
Life and work.
Darnell and his second wife live in France, Darnell himself having initially moved to Paris in 1991 and subsequently to the South of France, however he exhibits internationally. His work has been featured in multiple international publications, including Taiwanese design magazine "ppapaer", Australian journal "The Cool Hunter", "Moco Loco", American design and lifestyle magazine "Atlanta Homes" "Brigitte" (Germany's largest women's magazine), "Artful Living Magazine", Spanish design magazine "El Mueble" and monthly British fashion magazine "Tatler".
Darnell was initially drawn to paint seriously after the death of his first wife. Throughout the 1990s, Darnell exhibited in New York City in SoHo and Tribeca He has also exhibited in Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Argentina, and Europe. He exhibited in Barcelona in 2016.
During a 1995 exhibition at the Fernando Alcolea Gallery in Barcelona, a writeup in "El País" described his work as being "painted with an extreme manual dexterity, something, on the one hand, typical of North American painters, based in the Leonardesque principle suggesting innumerable images starting with stains and in this case, effects of luminosity." The article went on to state "Occasionally, it reflects a mystic atmosphere by means of diffused forms which resemble clouds, other times, suggesting hollow waves, or on the contrary, lights more recognizable closer to candles." Like "L'independant", it compared his technique with that of Richter, and his preoccupation with light to that of Bleckner, but also referred to him as an echo of German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.


Dona Nelson

Dona Nelson (born 1947) is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership. A 2014 "New Yorker" review observed, "Nelson gives notice that she will do anything, short of burning down her house to bully painting into freshly spluttering eloquence." Since 2002, long before it became a more common practice, Nelson has produced free-standing, double-sided paintings that create a more complex, conscious viewing experience. According to "New York Times" critic Roberta Smith, Nelson has dodged the burden of a "superficially consistent style," sustained by "an adventuresome emphasis on materials" and an athletic approach to process that builds on the work of Jackson Pollock. Writers in "Art in America" and "Artforum" credit her experimentation with influencing a younger generation of painters exploring unconventional techniques with renewed interest. Discussing one of Nelson's visceral, process-driven works, curator Klaus Kertess wrote, the paint-soaked "muslin is at once the tool, the medium, and the made."
Nelson has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and Tang Museum (survey, 2018), and group exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Rose Art Museum, Mary Boone Gallery and Marlborough Fine Art. Her two-sided paintings featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial were widely recognized and deemed some of the show's "most swooned-over works" by "Art in America". Nelson has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994) and her work sits in numerous public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She lives in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and is a professor of painting and drawing at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, where she has taught since 1991.
Life and career.
Nelson was born in 1947 in Grand Island, Nebraska and attended Ohio State University. In the fall of 1967, she moved to New York City to participate in the newly-formed Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. After returning to Ohio to complete her BFA in 1968, she moved to Lower Manhattan, renting a loft in what is now SoHo; five years later, she would move to another in the future Tribeca neighborhood. By 1971, she was featured in prominent shows such as "Twenty‐Six Contemporary Women Artists," curated by Lucy Lippard at the Aldrich Museum, and "Ten Young Artists" at the Guggenheim Museum. Critics Grace Glueck and Hilton Kramer noted her work in "New York Times" reviews of the two shows, respectively. In 1974, the Whitney Museum included her in its "Continuing Abstraction in American Art" exhibition; her first solo show followed at the Rosa Esman Gallery on 57th Street, in 1975.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Nelson exhibited at museums, universities, and the Hamilton and Michael Klein galleries in New York. She moved to Philadelphia in 1996, to continue teaching at the Tyler School of Art. Nelson has continued to show actively in New York, at Cheim and Read and the Thomas Erben Gallery, which has represented her since 2006.
Work.
Although Nelson has created representational images, she has primarily worked in a fluid, abstract vein that writers suggest confront the traditions of Abstract Expressionism head-on and build on Joan Miró's anti-paintings, which used nontraditional materials and processes to disrupt painting conventions. "Artforum" likened her "exhilarating" willingness to take risks to that of Sigmar Polke. Critics especially note her "adventurously tough-minded approach to process," which "flirts with painting’s destruction" by rejecting the "conventionally ingratiating" in favor of dissonant techniques, surfaces, and colors. Noting Nelson's anarchic refusal to adhere to an easily identifiable style, writers have observed that her exhibitions can appear like compendiums of modern and contemporary painting thought.
Nelson regards herself as a process artist rather than an expressionist, emphasizing the primacy of chance, improvisation, and touch in her process. She employs diverse methods—pouring, staining, splattering, stitching, and more—working on unprimed canvas with a variety of paints, nontraditional materials, and at times, a painting's stretchers to create unexpected surfaces, textures, reliefs, and patterns (sometimes referencing the Modernist grid).
Early work: 1968–1990.
Nelson's early art explored geometric, grid-based abstraction through intuitive and systematic modes of pictorial construction; reviewers noted it for its grasp of style, subtle color, and affinities with art by Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly. Considering this work developmental, she eventually destroyed it. In the 1980s, Nelson shifted to painterly representational work (e.g., "Daily News", 1983) featuring ordinary interiors, landscapes and cityscapes, portrayed with an emotional realism and unfussy physicality. Figurative paintings, such as "Summer Man" (1983), offered centralized, life-size everyday subjects that "The New York Times" wrote, display a plain-spoken, "satisfying solidity" like those of Philip Guston; later works, such as "California Landscape or the Man Who Needs Everything" (1988), presaged future directions with glued, clothing-like pieces of muslin, saturated color, and increasing abstraction.
Mature work (1990–2002).
Many critics (and Nelson herself) consider her mature work to have begun after a long period of development, when she returned to abstraction in the 1990s. In this period, she regularly incorporated unconventional materials such as cheesecloth, muslin, gels, and modeling paste. She also began employing unorthodox techniques that combined control and accident to "disrupt" her paintings, such as pouring latex enamel paint over gridded fields (the "12 Stations of the Subway" series, 1997–8), making charcoal rubbings of highly textured, existing paintings (her ghostly "Rubbings," 2002), or adhering wadded, paint-soaked muslin to canvasses. Reviewers commented on the new work's collision of "formal order and procedural chaos," and raw and finished, which they found both dislocating and inviting, its power deriving from a "freeze-framing" of the painting process that revealed a series of discrete, nonlinear acts and decisions. Describing this passage in Nelson's work through the painting "Octopus Blue" (1990), Klaus Kertess wrote, "We are confronted by an organism wrestling with its self-formation—complex, mysterious, fierce, playful, sensual."
Two-sided paintings and "Box" constructions (2002– ).
In 2002, Nelson began creating two-sided works one writer called a "nervy push" of "painterly painting into the realm of sculpture." Critics noted works like "Gaucho Groucho" (2005), "String Turn" (2015) and "Coins in a Fountain" (2015) for their increasing inventiveness and sense of performance, "adamant, difficult beauty" and "elaborate narratives of process," which included punching holes through the canvas and working back and forth between sides, staining through sides, removing and re-stretching canvasses, and more. David Pagel argues that this work "builds memory into the process, creating experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts – and far more mysterious." "The New York Times" wrote, "The paintings... demand that you deal with how they came to be that way… mysteries mount, resolve and mount again." Nelson explains that her exhibition constructions—using steel stands, platforms, bricks and cable—seek a more conscious, intimate viewing process countering the artificiality of typical, "big white box-style" contemporary art spaces, which privilege the reification of art over engagement and the complexity of surface.
In 2016, Nelson returned to the figure in her two-sided, variously constructed "Box" works—free-standing, door-sized painted panels that verge on architecture and continue to employ unconventional materials and processes. Critics describe installations of the work, such as her 2017 show "Models Stand Close to the Paintings," as a "loose, kaleidoscopic maze of contrasting viewpoints" and interacting works—a sense furthered by the central, abstracted figures Nelson portrays in them. Critics such as Dan Cameron noted Nelson's disruption of the frontality of conventional painting, as well as the evolution of the physical presence of her two-sided works into a new, metaphorical level.
Awards and collections.
Nelson has been recognized with awards and grants from Anonymous Was a Woman (2015), Artist Legacy Foundation (2013), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2011), Tesuque Foundation (peer nominated, 2000), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1994). Her work resides in many public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Rose Museum, among others, and several corporate collections.