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While they allow the viewer into the artist's workshop, paintings of the painter's studio are always a stylized portrayal where what is not shown is just as important as what is. This program surveys a number of examples of this classic theme, drawing attention to some of the different approaches artists have used to convey the space in which they work.
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The centuries-long era of painting on wooden panels culminated in magnificent works such as Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece and van der Weyden's Beaune Altarpiece. But then canvas finally came into its own: light in weight, low in cost, easy to prepare, and an ideal replacement for frescoes where climatic conditions did not easily permit mural painting, over time it became the artist's medium of choice. This program traces the evolution of painting...
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This program concentrates on the importance of drawing to the different artistic disciplines as it addresses ongoing debates surrounding the representation of space. Drawing tools and materials are presented, and special attention is given to the application of geometry, the principal science of image construction. Classical and Renaissance theories of perspective are considered, as is the progressive disintegration of these theories by artists of...
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The painter's studio: at once an open forum for exchanging skills with other artists and a private retreat for experimenting with technique. Beginning with the Renaissance and concluding with the 20th century, this program covers an assortment of studio-related topics, including life as a painter's apprentice; the birth and growth of art schools and academies; the progress of the painter's status in society; the development and proliferation of art...
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Should brushstrokes be allowed to show-or even be shown off, like a signature-or should they be carefully effaced whenever possible, leaving the surface of a painting smooth? This program looks at both the mechanical side of the question-the influence of pigments and brush types on the traces of a brush's passage-as well as the long-running doctrinal tension between exponents of visible and hidden brushstrokes.
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This program travels to four locales to examine technical aspects of how frescoes have been painted: a villa in Pompeii, where walls saturated with figures, dense colors, and ornamental motifs functioned both decoratively and ritually; the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, home of della Francesca's Legend of the True Cross; the Salle des Saisons at the Louvre, to view Romanelli's frescoes combined with richly gilded stuccowork; and the Residenz...
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Isaac Newton's ideas transformed our knowledge of what we see and how we see, and the prism and its refracted colors became a captivating image. One-hundred years later, Florence Nightingale's pioneering Rose Diagram was a catalyst in the creation of better and cleaner hospitals that would save thousands of lives.
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This program explains how artists' colors are made and applied by charting the development of various families of pigments-and by demonstrating that the compounding of colors is always a mixture of tradition and technology, experience and innovation. Pigments prepared from natural sources and derived from industrial processes are closely studied, noting failures as well as successes. Decorative applications of color to cloth-making, glass staining,...
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Color adds beauty to our lives and helps us express our deepest feelings, but what exactly is it? This video lays out the scientific principles at the heart of that question, examining the relationship between light and color, the physical and chemical properties that create it, and the ways in which humans and animals perceive it. Viewers are shown how light can be broken down into component colors-or, more accurately, wavelengths-and are given simple...
11) Breaking the Wall of the Flat World of TV: What Three-Dimensional Television Pictures Will Look Like
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In only 15 years' time, we will be watching television in a radical, three-dimensional form. This 2009 Falling Walls lecture video features Thomas Wiegand, professor at the Technische Universität Berlin and head of the Image Processing Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institut, whose work is transforming television and our viewing habits. Having studied electrical engineering at the Universities of Hamburg...
12) Brushstrokes
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John Virtue is painting an impressionist landscape on an enormous canvas laid out in a field. While he paints, he discusses how he expresses himself artistically through creative brushstrokes rather than through realistic imagery. Through Virtue we learn how the elevated social status of artists in general, and physical changes in the composition of paints, have allowed for more artistic experimentation with a wider variety of mediums and techniques....
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Anti-entropy as it applies to art - think of it as a sort of explosion in reverse - results, ultimately, in the annihilation of creativity because each step toward the completion of a project rules out more and more of the random possibilities of what that project otherwise might have been. "The infinite becomes finite," says Kentridge in this lecture, as he seeks an answer to the question "Can we avoid the end of all potentiality?" A partial performance...
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An excerpt from William Kentridge's animated film rendition of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute sets the stage for this lecture in which he builds upon observations elucidated in Drawing Lesson One to argue that colonialism - with all its inherent brutality - is the logical culmination of 18th-century Enlightenment thought. "Every act of enlightenment - " says Kentridge, "all ambitions to save souls, all the basic impulses - is so dogged by the weight...
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The idea that uncertainty and improvisation in art can help in negotiating the dangerous passage between passive acceptance and authoritarian subjugation is a theme that William Kentridge continues to expound upon in Drawing Lesson Four. He uses his short film Journey to the Moon - a tribute, in part, to George Méliès' 1902 cinematic classic La Voyage dans la Lune - as a part of a discussion praising cinema as an art form that exemplifies, as stated...
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This lecture opens with an excerpt from William Kentridge's animated film Shadow Procession, which "immediately calls to mind various historical displacements, exiles, and genocides, even as it avoids pinning the work to any specific time or place," says Harvard Magazine. From that point on, Kentridge's first of six "drawing lessons" travels from Plato's allegory of the cave, to illusion in art, to philosophical tyranny to make the point that knowledge...
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In this lecture, William Kentridge explores the concepts of self and other, transformation and deformation, and translation and mistranslation by yoking together the African funerary sculpture called an asen, a film loop of a panther pacing in its cage, Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Der Panther," Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros created from bits of second-hand description, and Pablo Picasso's bronze sculpture of a she-goat cast from an assemblage...
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In the first two of William Kentridge's "drawing lessons," "the South African filmmaker argued that rationality has often served as a mask for power and control, as ideas of what is 'rational' privilege one group's understanding of reality over another's," says Harvard Magazine. Kentridge carries that theme forward in this lecture - which is anchored by his short animated film Mine - as he delves down into "the legacy of his home country's multiple...
19) Composition
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Everyone has the desire to arrange things in a way that is most pleasing to the eye. In painting, composition involves arranging every ingredient-shape, color, texture, and light-so that working together, they create artistic balance. In this program, artist Ray Richardson deliberately chooses a long, slim canvas to challenge his compositional abilities. As he confronts his quest to create a cinemascopic work, students begin to appreciate the composition...
20) Portrait
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It seems appropriate for a portrait to be a fair representation of its subject. However, problems can arise when the sitter does not perceive himself or herself in the same way the painter does. In this program, Tai-Shan Schierenberg paints a portrait of a wealthy English gentleman in two 3-hour sittings, under the intimidating stare of portraits by Holbein, Reynolds, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. As an artist, Schierenberg is drawn to his subject's natural...