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Mary Meerson
Mary Meerson, née Marija Popowa, also known as Madame Langlois (12 November 1902, Sofia – 19 July 1993, Paris), was a French ballet dancer, model and archivist of the Cinémathèque Française. She was a companion and associate of Henri Langlois, the founder and director of the Cinémathèque Française. Life Marija Popowa was born on 12 November 1902 in Sofia, Bulgaria. She left her country traveling through central Europe and joined the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev in Monte Carlo and then in Paris. Along with her friend Kiki, the muse of the Montparnasse, Popowa was painted by the best known artists. In the late 1920s, she was a model for Giorgio de Chirico and Reisling. In 1931, she posed as a model for the paintings of Oskar Kokoschka. In the 1930s Popowa was connected to the Parisian artistic milieu and was acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. She made a sensational entry into the world of cinema through her meeting with Lazare Meerson Lazar ...
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Cinémathèque Française
The Cinémathèque Française (), founded in 1936, is a French non-profit film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Based in Paris's 12th arrondissement, the archive offers daily screenings of worldwide films. History The collection emerged from the efforts of Henri Langlois and Lotte H. Eisner in the mid 1930s to collect and screen films. Langlois had acquired one of the largest collections in the world by the beginning of World War II, only to have it nearly wiped out by the German authorities in occupied France, who ordered the destruction of all films made prior to 1937. He and his friends smuggled huge numbers of documents and films out of occupied France to protect them until the end of the war. After the war, the French government provided a small screening room, staff and subsidy for the collection, which was relocated to the Avenue de Messine. Significant French filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s, ...
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Henri Langlois
Henri Langlois (; 13 November 1914 – 13 January 1977) was a French film archivist and cinephile. A pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema. His film screenings in Paris in the 1950s are often credited with providing the ideas that led to the development of the auteur theory. Langlois was co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française with Georges Franju and Jean Mitry and also co-founder of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in 1938. Through close collaboration with the Cinémathèque's longtime chief archivist, Lotte Eisner, he worked to preserve films and film history in the post-war era. An eccentric who was often at the center of controversy for his methods, he also served as a key influence on the generation of young cinephiles and critics who would become the French New Wave. In 1974, Langlois received an Academy Honorary Award for "his devotion to the art of film, his massive contributions in preserving it ...
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Sofia, Bulgaria
Sofia ( ; bg, София, Sofiya, ) is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria. It is situated in the Sofia Valley at the foot of the Vitosha mountain in the western parts of the country. The city is built west of the Iskar river, and has many mineral springs, such as the Sofia Central Mineral Baths. It has a humid continental climate. Being in the centre of the Balkans, it is midway between the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea, and closest to the Aegean Sea. Known as Serdica in Antiquity and Sredets in the Middle Ages, Sofia has been an area of human habitation since at least 7000 BC. The recorded history of the city begins with the attestation of the conquest of Serdica by the Roman Republic in 29 BC from the Celtic tribe Serdi. During the decline of the Roman Empire, the city was raided by Huns, Visigoths, Avars and Slavs. In 809, Serdica was incorporated into the Bulgarian Empire by Khan Krum and became known as Sredets. In 1018, the Byzantines ended Bulgarian rule ...
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Ballet Russe De Monte-Carlo
The company Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo (with a plural name) was formed in 1932 after the death of Sergei Diaghilev and the demise of Ballets Russes. Its director was Wassily de Basil (usually referred to as Colonel W. de Basil), and its artistic director was René Blum. They fell out in 1936 and the company split. The part which de Basil retained went through two name changes before becoming the Original Ballet Russe. Blum founded Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, which changed its name to Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo (note the singular) when Léonide Massine became artistic director in 1938. It operated under this name until it disbanded some 20 years later.Koegler, Horst, ''Concise Oxford Dictionary of Ballet'' (1st English edition, 1977). The Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo featured such dancers as Ruthanna Boris, Frederic Franklin, Alexandra Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Nicholas Magallanes, Tamara Toumanova, George Zoritch, Alicia Alonso, Yvonne Joyce Craig, Nina Novak, Raven Wi ...
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Sergei Diaghilev
Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev ( ; rus, Серге́й Па́влович Дя́гилев, , sʲɪˈrɡʲej ˈpavləvʲɪdʑ ˈdʲæɡʲɪlʲɪf; 19 August 1929), usually referred to outside Russia as Serge Diaghilev, was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, from which many famous dancers and choreographers would arise. The active years of Diaghilev’s career can be divided into two periods: the one in St Petersburg (1898–1906) and the other in emigration (1906–1929). Biography Sergei Diaghilev was born in Selishchi to a noble officer . His mother died from childbed fever soon after his birth. In 1873, Pavel met and married Elena Panaeva, who loved Sergei and raised him as her own child. The in Perm was a local cultural centre, and the Diaghilevs housed a musical evening every second Thursday, Modest Mussorgsky being one of the most frequent guests. Sergei Diaghilev composed his first romance at the age of 15. When he enter ...
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Giorgio De Chirico
Giuseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico ( , ; 10 July 1888 – 20 November 1978) was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the '' scuola metafisica'' art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His most well-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace. After 1919, he became a critic of modern art, studied traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work. Life and works Giuseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, as the eldest son of Gemma Cervetto and Evaristo de Chirico. His mother was a baroness of Genoese originsNikolaos Velissiotis"The Origins of Adelaide Mabili and Her ...
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Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka (1 March 1886 – 22 February 1980) was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense Expressionism, expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement. Early life The second child of Gustav Josef Kokoschka, a Bohemian goldsmith, and Maria Romana Kokoschka (née Loidl), Oskar Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn. He had a sister, Berta, born in 1889; a brother, Bohuslav, born in 1892; and an elder brother who died in infancy. Oskar had a strong belief in omens, spurred by a story of a fire breaking out in Pöchlarn shortly after his mother gave birth to him. The family's life was not easy, largely due to a lack of financial stability of his father. They constantly moved into smaller flats, farther and farther from the thriving centre of the town. Concluding that his father was inadequate, Kokoschka drew closer to his mother; and seeing himself as the head of th ...
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Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of Assemblage (art), constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the Proto-Cubism, proto-Cubist ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'' (1907), and the anti-war painting ''Guernica (Picasso), Guernica'' (1937), Guernica (Picasso)#Composition, a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimente ...
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Georges Braque
Georges Braque ( , ; 13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) was a major 20th-century List of French artists, French painter, Collage, collagist, Drawing, draughtsman, printmaker and sculpture, sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso. Early life Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and interior decorator, decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he also studied artistic painting during evenings at the École supérieure d'art et design Le Havre-Rouen, previously known as the École supérieure des Arts in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 189 ...
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Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painting, painter, sculpture, sculptor, and film director, filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually modified into a more Figurative art, figurative, populism, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art. Biography Léger was born in Argentan, Orne, Lower Normandy, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897 to 1899, before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles, Yvelines, Versailles, Yvelines, in 1902–1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts after his application to the École des Beaux-Arts was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty an ...
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Lazare Meerson
Lazare Meerson (1900–1938) was a Russian-born cinema art director. After emigrating to France in the early 1920s, he worked on French films of the late silent cinema and the early 1930s, particularly those directed by René Clair and Jacques Feyder. He worked in England during the last two years of his life. He had great influence on film set design in France in the years before World War II. Career Early life Lazare Meerson was born in Warsaw, which in 1900 was part of the Russian Empire. He may have begun studying painting and architecture in Russia, but after the revolution of 1917 he moved to Germany and by 1919 he had registered as an art student in Berlin. While in Berlin, he gained some experience of designing for the theatre, before leaving for Paris in 1923 or 1924.Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, Sarah Street. ''Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema''. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. pp. 62-63. In France His ...
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Constructivist Architecture
Constructivist architecture was a constructivist style of modern architecture that flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. Abstract and austere, the movement aimed to reflect modern industrial society and urban space, while rejecting decorative stylization in favor of the industrial assemblage of materials. Designs combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedly communist social purpose. Although it was divided into several competing factions, the movement produced many pioneering projects and finished buildings, before falling out of favour around 1932. It has left marked effects on later developments in architecture. Definition Constructivist architecture emerged from the wider Constructivist art movement, which grew out of Russian Futurism. Constructivist art had attempted to apply a three-dimensional cubist vision to wholly abstract non-objective 'constructions' with a kinetic element. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 it turned its ...
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