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Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was both artist and inventor. True, Brian Cox was in that band before he gave it all up for the Large Hadron Collider. But in general, art and science seem to eye each other uncomprehendingly. Medical research charity the Wellcome Trust has long tried to make artists and scientists work fruitfully together by funding collaborations. Can the divide ever be breached? I talked to four scientists and four artists who have worked together to find out.
The artist and the geneticist
Just before 9/11, Marc Quinn did a portrait of Sir John Sulston, one of the genetic scientists who decoded the human genome. "At the moment this divisive attack happened, John's work and this portrait were suggesting that we are all connected - in fact that everything living is connected to everything else," Quinn says.

It was a radical departure for portraiture. Certainly few sitters contribute, as Sulston did, a sample of DNA from his sperm. That sample was cut into segments and treated so they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria was spread on agar jelly and placed under glass, forming a portrait about A4 size. "Some say it's an abstract portrait, but I say it's the most realistic portrait in the National Portrait Gallery," says Quinn. "It carries the instructions that led to John and shows his ancestry back to the beginning of the universe."

"Well, yes," says Sulston, "but DNA gives the instructions for making a baby, not an adult. There's a lot more to me than DNA."

A decade after their collaboration, Quinn and Sulston are meeting in the artist's east London studio. Did the collaboration change each man's attitudes towards the other's discipline? "I still think science is looking for answers and art is looking for questions," says Quinn.

"Science simply means finding out about stuff, but in that process science is the greatest driver of culture," says Sulston. "When you do something like decode the human genome, it changes your whole perspective. In terms of genetic manipulation we're not just looking for answers but modifying what's there."

That is very much the focus of Quinn's recent work. Last year, his White Cube show featured a sculpture called Catman, depicting Dennis Avner, who has been tattooed to look like a cat, and another of Allanah Starr, a transsexual woman who, according to the blurb, "has changed her body into the idealisation of femininity even though she also has a penis". Quinn says: "They're about the fantasy of being someone else - you can be a man or a woman, anything. We've always had those fantasies and now science is making them possible."

Quinn says Sulston's portrait was important to his later work. He shows us his painting of a human iris in the studio. "I've made a lot of work since, to do with eyes and fingerprints, because we are controlled so much more by scans of abstract data about ourselves." As for Sulston, since he finished working on the human genome, he has become concerned with ethical questions to do with the application of his work to police DNA databases and civil liberties.

The collaboration came about when Quinn was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, with the support of the Wellcome Trust, to do Sulston's portrait. "John did all the work," says Quinn. The artist, at least, decided on the portrait's frame. "People can see themselves in the reflective surround, which highlights that we're all connected - one of the great messages of the Human Genome Project.

"Because it's true, isn't it, that our DNA is 90% the same as bananas'?" asks Quinn. "Well, no, actually it's more like 50%," clarifies Sulston, who won the Nobel prize in 2002. "Our DNA is about 90% the same as other mammals." Our material connection with everything else, not just our world but in the universe, clearly appeals to Quinn: no wonder that his Iris painting from 2009 is subtitled We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars.

In Quinn's most famous work, Self (1991), he made a sculpture from a cast of his head filled with nine pints of his own deep-frozen blood. It is carefully maintained in a refrigeration unit, reminding us of the fragility of existence. Every five years since 1991, he has replaced what he calls a "frozen moment" on life support, with a new transfusion of his own blood. He calls it an ongoing project, while the portrait of Sulston is suspended in time for ever; once the Nobel laureate dies, there is something of him preserved in this picture, a code from which, perhaps, he could be cloned.
The poet and the speech scientist
"I once overheard someone say, 'Its mother was a crab,'" says Valerie Hazan, professor of speech sciences at University College London. "Can you think of a situation in which that would be used? I often ask my students this."

Hazan's point is that hearers often work imaginatively to supply a context to a discombobulating utterance, to annex incomprehensible or uncanny speech into the more soothing realm of the understood. But there's another point, too: "Certain utterances stick in your mind: a contorted use of language not planned in any way is often most memorable."

This resonates for poet Lavinia Greenlaw. "Those are the things I'm trying to recreate in my work," she says. "I'm trying to get at that unconscious manipulation of language. I've become more and more interested in particular voices at the edge - especially overheard, fragmentary voices."

For her latest project, Greenlaw spent two years eavesdropping on passengers at railway stations. She even has a Twitter feed to record gnomic utterances, such as her recent favourite: "trifle for grownups". She wrote monologues based on these eavesdroppings, got actors to voice them, and - with the help of a sound designer - cut them into little snippets. But the results weren't just what she heard. "I started with the overheard and then I moved into interior voices, which clearly I imagined. So I started with something very real and then it became about heightening it."

The result is called Audio Obscura. The project started at Manchester's Piccadilly station and will next month appear on the concourse of London's St Pancras station. Visitors put on headphones and, alone, engage in what she calls "dark listening" to voices in the crowd - fragments of narratives, glimpses of interior worlds.

For Hazan, this project bears comparison with her own research interests. "In my work, I'm realising more and more that you can't take things out of context and that if there isn't an obvious one, hearers supply it." Recently, Hazan recorded 40 speakers in 12 pairs trying to exchange information about a "spot the difference" picture. "In one of them, one talker heard the other via a three-channel noise vocoder. But even with minimal pitch and acoustics, that kind of very degraded speech can be given a context by the hearer."

What of that mysterious crab sentence utterance we started with? "I heard it in an airport," says Hazan. "The wheels of a trolley were splayed out, and it couldn't move forwards and back. It was odd to overhear that, but what it shows is how we try desperately to make sense with semantically anomalous sentences."

Is there any parallel between the two women's disciplines? Hazan says: "As a scientist you have to be creative to really think what is the question. I didn't think a poet had to be methodical."

Greenlaw says: "Poets are often thought of as vague and wishy-washy, but, like scientists, they can't be. A poem can be about vagueness, but it has to be in precise relationship to vagueness if it's any good. I'm ridiculously analytical. Poetry, though, is an unsettlement - unlike you, Valerie, I'm not drawing connections."

"But we're both manipulating reality to understand it," says Hazan. "What makes a good scientist is someone who can see beyond the obvious."
The photographer and the physiologist
When Mary Morrell and Catherine Yass collaborated on a project called Waking Dream, each hoped to unravel what, if anything, essentially happens in the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Physiologist Morrell, now professor of sleep and respiratory physiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, wanted to give a scientific account of that transition.

Turner-shortlisted artist Yass says she came to the collaboration with a lot of "what ifs". "What if we could be said at some moments to be both asleep and awake? What if we were both dreaming and in reality at the same time?"

The collaboration started after Morrell received an email from Yass asking if she could photograph and film patients at the sleep unit to capture this transition. "I thought it sounded impossible, but agreed to let her try."

In the corridor outside Morrell's office at the sleep and breathing unit of London's Royal Brompton Hospital is a lightbox photograph of one of Yass's subjects, Selina, depicted as she came from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep to wakefulness. It's one of a series Yass took during the collaboration. Each image invites the viewer to decide whether she is asleep or not.

"I was interested in the limitations of my instruments and the impossibility of representing something," says Yass. "I enjoy that in photography - how it can point to a failure?"

"Initially, I didn't get that at all," laughs Morrell. "Failure pleasurable?" Morrell was also blindsided by the idea that the two women were going to be funded to collaborate on a project that had no obvious outcome.

"Essentially, once we got funding for the project from the Wellcome Trust, we were allowed to find nothing, which to me was incredible." Maybe that freedom, Morrell wonders, can give artist and scientist alike the chance to think outside the box.

Morrell shows me one of the results, hanging on the wall of the Royal Brompton's sleep unit. It's a lightbox in which a furl of lurid pink seems to unroll from the mouth of a black-and-white MRI scanner. "I love this because it looks like that Rolling Stones tongue," says Morrell. Yass says she was trying to highlight the discrepancy between a medium associated with truth, and images which are illusions.

"What came out of the project for me was how you look dictates the answer you get," says Morrell. "You can measures sleep with electrodes, MRI scans, measuring respiratory patterns and whichever way you choose changes your result."

Both women say working on Waking Dream broadened their horizons. "Catherine challenged my preconditioned ideas," says Morrell. After the collaboration, she took a photography course. Some photographs from mountaineering jaunts hang on the walls of her office.

"I was inspired by your attitude," says Yass. "I came with a tentative idea and you would say, 'This is how you can do it.'" Could Yass imagine having been a scientist? "I used to think about being a brain surgeon, but I wouldn't trust myself in a million years. In terms of science, I've always been daunted by the amount of knowledge a scientist needs, but I love the idea that there's a lot of knowledge and someone like Mary has it."

"I'm not sure I do," says Morrell.
The theatre director and the neuroscientist
"If you hear a recording of someone whispering in your ear," says theatre director David Rosenberg, "you can convince yourself you felt their breath."

"Expectation is everything," agrees Professor David McAlpine, director of London University's Ear Institute. "Your brain fills in so much it's not funny. You've got a very narrow bandwidth by the time you get to your ears and your eyes. The rest is artificial, filled in by that expectations machine - your brain."

For his latest theatre piece, Electric Hotel, Rosenberg wanted to play with some of these auditory ideas, to tease his audience with sound illusions. So he approached neuroscientist McAlpine, whose research work into brain mechanisms for spatial hearing and detecting sounds in noisy environments proved key to the effects Rosenberg wanted to achieve. "We were trying to create a very intimate experience for an audience in a show which they see from a distance and also through glass," says Rosenberg.

Electric Hotel initially took place in a decommissioned gasworks behind London's King's Cross station. As darkness fell, audience members were given special headphones and asked to sit before a four-storey set with glass-fronted chambers representing hotel rooms in which dancers played the parts of hotel guests, couriers and cleaners.

Those headphones supplied binaural recordings to each spectator's ears. Rosenberg, along with sound designers and composers Max and Ben Ringham, made a complete score made up not just of music but of everyday sounds. Soft noises were heard thrillingly close to audience members' ears: a woman pulling on a robe after a swim, the plumping of a pillow. The illusory effect was that the individual spectator, far from being in a crowd of other audience members, was in the room with them. While these noises sounded as though they were taking place on stage, in fact they were part of a pre-recorded soundtrack to which the dancers' choreographed moves were fitted.

What does binaural mean? "It's two-eared hearing, and involves extracting information you couldn't have from one ear," says McAlpine. "There are binaural recordings using two microphones at an appropriate distance apart used within a dummy head to try to reproduce effects of your normal hearing," says Rosenberg.

McAlpine recalls the most sophisticated binaural illusion he ever heard. "I was at Dolby's headquarters in San Francisco. They made me put on headphones, close my eyes and then you hear you're in an aeroplane and you crash into the ocean. I really felt a sense of the whoosh of water and the sense of going up on to a sandy beach. Those sensations were my brain filling in the experience from what it heard."

Rosenberg says a key moment of Electric Hotel was another illusion. "The sound moved out into the audience, and the audience became confused as to whether what they're hearing was part of the performance or the actual audience surrounding them."

It sounds like the aural application of a Brechtian alienation technique. Is it? "Totally. It was very important in a show which is essentially you alone with the performers, and then suddenly you have a moment when you recognise the audience around you."

Rosenberg's next theatre project will put his audience in the dark. "The show will enfold you when the lights go out. The audience will wear headphones, and their imaginative experience will involve creating environments they can feel they're a part of without the distraction of vision."

"Your eyes are in charge but not always," says McAlpine. "If it's dark, then you have to do imaginative work. People think of visual scenes, and there are gestalt [psychological] principles for understanding how that is put together. But there's also an auditory scene which is less robust than the visual scene, and how it's put together is still not very clear." Perhaps, then, Rosenberg's next play could be a rare case of art helping scientific enquiry.

Correction 22/8/11: We mistakenly called Professor Mary Morrell 'Margaret' in the piece. This has been corrected

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When two tribes meet: collaborations between artists and scientists

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Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was both artist and inventor. True, Brian Cox was in that band before he gave it all up for the Large Hadron Collider. But in general, art and science seem to eye each other uncomprehendingly. Medical research charity the Wellcome Trust has long tried to make artists and scientists work fruitfully together by funding collaborations.

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Art and Science

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Has an art ever become a science? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Dave Featherstone, Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, on Quora:
Science = art. They are the same thing.

Both science and art are human attempts to understand and describe the world around us. The subjects and methods have different traditions, and the intended audiences are different, but I think the motivations and goals are fundamentally the same.

I think one of the most primitive innate needs of humans is to understand the world around us, and then share that understanding.

We need to understand because we are terrified by things that are unpredictable, that don't make sense. I don't care how crazy you say you are, how much you think you like adventure. Unpredictability and senselessness are stressful. They drive people to suicide. It happens in war. It happens as a result of neurological diseases like schizophrenia. Scary movies are all about unpredictability and things that just cannot be real. We crave order. We crave predictability.

We share because we are social creatures. The success and failure of others is meaningful. We are bound up in this world together. All in the same boat, so to speak. Thus, when we have information, we like to share it. Even if it's trivial. Who doesn't gossip? Who doesn't like to be the bearer of news? Who doesn't like to show off some new insight? Everyone loves to talk about themselves, share their viewpoint, make their opinion heard. Quora and Facebook and telephones and books and movies are all about sharing our points of view and seeing the world through another's eyes and experiences.

At this point, I could make up some evolutionary 'just so story' about how sharing our perceptions with others made us successful as a species. And you would like it, because it would make sense. And you would like it because I shared it. And we would all feel good about it, even though it's complete nonsense that I just pulled out of my ass.

So ... does that make it science or art?

It doesn't matter. Both artists and scientists strive to see the world in new ways, and to communicate that vision. **

When they are successful, the rest of us suddenly 'see' the world differently. Our 'truth' is fundamentally changed.

Both scientists and artists with nothing new to reveal are failures. Scientists and artists who cannot communicate their insights are failures. It takes both skills to make a successful scientist or artist. Scientists who can communicate but have nothing new to say are frauds and hype-sters. Artists with new views of the world but who cannot communicate them effectively are crackpot fringies.

Scientists tend to struggle more gaining the new insights. Artists tend to struggle more with the communication. Both often work hard to gain the background and skills that will help them be successful. That's why there are prestigious schools of science and art.

Scientists do experiments over and over and over, trying to pin down some new aspect of reality. Once they have their new understanding, there are pre-arranged traditional modes of communication that make that part easier.

Artists often start with the new vision, then work through 'periods' in which they explore how best to get the message across. They have shows. They seek feedback to help them understand what works.

Artists and scientists often need to invent new concepts and technologies to accomplish their goals.

Both science and art have useful spin-offs. Applied science is technology. Applied art is decoration. Technology and decoration are applications of science and art for practical purposes. Technology and decoration make life easier. But they don't change how we fundamentally perceive what is around us. Science and art do.

Art = science.

** I used visual art analogies, but I think this is true for any art medium, including music, written word, spoke word, dance, mathematics, and cooking.

This question originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:​

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Why Art And Science Are More Closely Related Than You Think

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Has an art ever become a science? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. Answer by Dave Featherstone, Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, on Quora: Science = art. They are the same thing.

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By Bob and Roberta Smith RA and Kelly Grovier

Should art have politics at the forefront of its agenda? Artist Bob and Roberta Smith RA and critic Kelly Grovier go head to head.

From the Spring 2015 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

Yes

Artists should make work that speaks out against society's ills, argues Bob and Roberta Smith RA

I know what people mean when they say artists should be "more political". They mean people should address politics more directly in their art.

The times we live in are so horrible, the news so unbearable, that it seems strange that so little contemporary art deals with the shocking imagery of our age. For the RA's 2014 Summer Exhibition, I transcribed onto canvas an interview between BBC Radio 4 presenter Eddie Mair and Dr David Nott that had discussed the surgeon's efforts to save lives in Syria. I was trying to say something about the gap between the average Summer Exhibition-goer's experience of enjoying life and David Nott's experience of saving life.

But sometimes I think that to draw a lemon or a landscape can be deeply subversive in a time when our Education Secretary Nicky Morgan declares that "choosing the arts in school can hold children back". I believe it has been a terrible time for art education - so much so that I am now standing as an independent candidate against Michael Gove in Surrey Heath - and one could argue that the last thing we should be doing is placing more prescriptive demands on people who call themselves artists. "Let people do their thing," I can hear my inner hippy cry.

But great art is always political. Great art has to say something, and that something is often mind-bending, earth-shaking and epoch-altering. Take, for instance, Goya's The Horrors of War, Picasso's Guernica, Louise Bourgeois' Cell or John Heartfield's collages that warned of the rise of Nazism. Or Tracey Emin RA's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, her piece where the names of people she had slept with were embroidered on the inside of a tent - the embodiment, in nylon, of the idea that the personal is political. Or J.M.W. Turner RA, who showed us not only dying slaves thrown from ships to drown close to port, but also wives picking through the corpses of their husbands killed on the plains of Waterloo.

Artists need to get in front of politicians and with an eagle eye inspect and depict each expression of mean-mindedness.

Bob and Roberta Smith

At MoMA PS1 in New York last year, I saw a landmark exhibition, Zero Tolerance, curated by the museum's director Klaus Biesenbach. The show examined the idea that the world's repressive regimes are cracking down on art for the same reason that New York Mayor Giuliani cracked down on homeless people at the end of the 1990s. The reason? Kill the chicken and you scare the cow. Imprison Ai Weiwei Hon RA and beat up Pussy Riot and you tell wider society that compliance is the only way forward.

I don't think that in Britain we live in an extreme police state, but we do live in a state of mind that is deadened by the media, where kids are told education is just about getting a job, where few young people can afford to buy somewhere to live and where some kids are brainwashed to think violence is the only way out. For the first time since Mosley in the 1930s, we now have a serious political party that is telling people Britain's problems stem from outsiders.

This is why art is embracing, indeed must embrace, politics. Call me old fashioned, but I think we have a duty to society not just to buy things we don't need and borrow money we cannot afford, but also to speak out. We need to treat our politicians with the same zero tolerance of which they are so fond. Artists need to get in front of politicians and with an eagle eye inspect and depict each expression of mean-mindedness. We also must advocate the world we want to live in. It's not Pussy Riot or Ai Weiwei who are extreme or outrageous, it is the governments who rule over them. To protect our society and make it more democratic, artists' diverse, angry voices must be celebrated and heard. The Royal Academy and the great public collections are not just art galleries. They are huge repositories of free speech and free thinking.

No

Politics should not dominate art, argues critic Kelly Grovier

Art with an agenda is rarely good art. The only obligation that art bears is to enable its audience to reflect more profoundly on what it means to be here in the world. If one thinks of the most moving examples of political art from the Western tradition - Picasso's Guernica, say, or David's The Death of Marat - their success lies less in the particularities of the social conflicts they chronicle than in the timelessness of their comprehension of what in 1950 the American writer William Faulkner called "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself". These "alone", Faulkner said, are what makes the act of creating "worth the agony and the sweat". What makes Picasso's and David's masterpieces moving is precisely that which deepens the countenances of less obviously political works, such as Rothko's diaphanous veils or the world-weary blossoms of Van Gogh's sunflowers: the poignant grasp of the contours of human anguish and soulful travail. Goya's The Third of May, 1808 and Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa are not great works of art because they are political, they are great works of art that happen to be political.

Politics, at best, can only be incidental to the achievement of a great work. At worst, it risks miring an object in the ephemera of transitory context, diminishing the work's meaning to something didactic and disposable. Insisting that art should be more political is surely as arbitrary as asserting it should be more scientific or philosophical or theological. Such an insistence suggests an impatience with the power of art as art to be significant - that it requires an auxiliary cause to justify and elevate it.

Fortunately, we live in an age of agile artists, adept at deploying politics as an invigorating texture in their works - one that agitates subliminally from beneath without capsizing meaning. Indeed, politics is everywhere in today's art if we know how to detect and decode it.

Insisting that art should be more political is as arbitrary as asserting it should be more scientific.

Kelly Grovier

In Sean Scully RA's ongoing series of austere grids, Doric, the quadrate jostle of simple blocks of monochrome may seem at furthest remove from the social frictions of the day. Scully's title alludes to one of the three ancient orders of classical architecture and the furious purity of form he achieves in his work commemorates Greece's gifts to global culture, including democracy. Exhibited in 2012, the Doric series unveiled itself at a moment when many in Europe were demanding that Greece be cut off for its alleged fiscal improvidences. Without tethering itself to the fleeting specifics of this clash, Scully's series embraces timeless and archetypal tensions.

Or take the squeegeed canvases in Gerhard Richter's Cage series, created for the 2007 Venice Biennale. Though the paintings appear to scrape clean any acknowledgement of the political context against which it was conceived (escalations in violence between Palestine and Israel in 2006), they nevertheless harmonize into a mute symphony of tumult and torment, in which each note of colour is conducted through a tug-of-war between horizontal and vertical scores.

Or, lastly, take the crumpled eloquence of Cornelia Parker RA's brutal chandelier, Breathless, installed in the V&A in autumn 2001. Comprising 54 brass instruments crushed flat by the machinery used to raise and lower London's Tower Bridge, the work at once proclaims the end of imperialism while salvaging a tortuous elegance from the debris. Described by Parker as "the last gasp of empire", Breathless aims to crush shut not only an era of colonial arrogance and exploitation but centuries of chauvinism during which any such work by a woman artist would have been accorded little space. What Scully, Richter and Parker intuitively understand is that politics is most powerful when it is an ingredient that vibrates from below the surface, not a perishable varnish that glazes the eye.
Bob and Roberta Smith RA is an artist. Kelly Grovier is a writer.

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Should art have politics at the forefront of its agenda? Artist Bob and Roberta Smith RA and critic Kelly Grovier go head to head.

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The Enduring Relationship of Science and Art

Science and art naturally overlap. Both are a means of investigation. Both involve ideas, theories, and hypotheses that are tested in places where mind and hand come together—the laboratory and studio. Artists, like scientists, study—materials, people, culture, history, religion, mythology— and learn to transform information into something else. In ancient Greece, the word for art was techne, from which technique and technology are derived—terms that are aptly applied to both scientific and artistic practices.

Art and Scientific Investigation in Early-European Art
Leonardo da Vinci, painter and draftsman of the High Renaissance, is best known as an artist whose works were informed by scientific investigation. Leonardo observed the world closely, studying physiology and anatomy in order to create convincing images of the human form. He believed that the moral and ethical meanings of his narrative paintings would emerge only through the accurate representation of human gesture and expression. For this Christian artist, science and art were different paths that led to the same destination—a higher spiritual truth. His Sketch of Uterus with Foetus (c. 1511–13) is one of several thousand drawings he produced in his lifetime in which artistic and scientific investigation are bound together. These extraordinary drawings are revered as examples of the Renaissance concept of the integration of all disciplines.

The Astronomer (1668) by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer is another example of the profound connection between science and art. The people of 17th-century Netherlands had an exploratory spirit. Equally interested in this world and the larger universe, the familiar and the exotic, they were intent on looking and investigating. It was here in the early 17th century that the microscope and telescope were first developed. Vermeer's painting celebrates an astronomer. Yet it equally celebrates the work of artists and the materials of this world. The painting hanging on the back wall was created by a local artist; the Middle Eastern carpet on the table was crafted by a foreign artist; Vermeer's own paints (ground mineral pigments mixed with linseed oil) and brushes were produced by local artisans. The globe at which the astronomer gazes evidences the link between science and art most pointedly, for it demonstrates this astronomer's—and his culture's—combined interest in finely crafted objects and scientific systems, such as cartography and astronomy.

The Science of Color in 19th-Century Painting
In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the physiological, psychological, and phenomenal effects of color and light were of primary concern to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists such as Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Paul Gauguin (1843–1903), and Claude Monet (1840–1926). Considered by many to be the greatest nature painter in modern-art history, Monet suggested that our sense of our physical environment changes continuously with our shifting perceptions of light and color. In On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868), a painting of his wife-to-be, Monet captures a fleeting "impression" of the landscape through loose brushwork and composition. His impression is pre- cognitive—before the mind labels, identifies, and converts what it sees into memory. Tellingly, the woman in the painting looks not at the house and trees across the river, but down at their wavering, upside-down reflections in the river, a perspective that echoes the process of perception itself. Images in the form of light enter the eye, an orb with a nerve-sensitive background. As light penetrates, it is inverted and projected onto the back of that light-sensitive orb, where the brain processes the information. Monet's painting captures the vibration between impression and perception—the contingent moment. It conveys a sense of trembling as the light and color of the landscape shift and time passes.

A number of years after Monet's Bennecourt, Georges Seurat began painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte— 1884 (1884–1886) (above). As an art student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, he studied the physics of color, and this enormous painting is an exercise in color theory. Unlike Renaissance and Dutch artists, Seurat and Monet did not mix their own paint. They benefited from breakthroughs by French chemists in the early 19th century who had invented both premixed paints packaged in tubes and synthetic pigments, such as ultramarine blue, which previously had been made from ground lapis lazuli and was, therefore, the most expensive pigment. Neither Seurat nor Monet, with little money in their pockets, could have created their blue-filled, experimental works without the scientific breakthroughs earlier that century.

Using these new paints, Seurat invented a technique called Pointillism to investigate how adjacent colors blend when taken in by the eye. Up close, the surface of his painting contains thousands of painted dots and dashes, discrete areas of color. But Seurat placed these dots of complementary colors next to each other—purple and yellow, orange and blue, green and red—so that at a distance they interact to create vibrant blended colors and larger, whole forms. Carrying his scientific approach to color theory to the edges of the image, Seurat represented the range of the visible spectrum in the painting's border dominated by red and blue.

20th-Century Art and Science
Pablo Picasso's (1881–1973) portrait of art dealerDaniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) combines Monet's ideas about the contingency of time and Seurat's theory about the perception of discrete elements. Here, Picasso breaks up the figure and objects in his composition in the style known as Cubism. Instead of rendering his subjects as distinctly recognizable forms, he paints them from several points of view. Kahnweiler's head, suit, watch fob, and hands, as well as the still life to the left and the decorated wall behind, remain identifiable, but these elements have been broken up into flattened planes and rearranged across the picture surface. Painted just a few years after Albert Einstein put forth his theory of relativity, which asserts the contingent nature of observing reality, Picasso's work similarly illustrates the elusive presence of his subject—Mr. Kahnweiler. Picasso's Cubist painting style, like studying Einstein's scientific theory, requires careful analysis, but it rewards the viewer's effort with perception and understanding.

The invention of photography in the middle of the 19th century was a technological wonder—artistically and scientifically. The practice of oxidizing and fixing images on light-sensitive paper or a metal plate posed a great challenge to painters, who had historically been charged with the task of providing their culture with images of itself and the world around them. People believed this new medium could represent the world accurately and more quickly. Ansel Adams (1902–1984) one of the most extraordinary photographers of the North American landscape, used his camera to capture the spirit and beauty of the American West. His majestic vistas of mountains and rivers, such as The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (1942), embraced the bond between man and nature while recording with astonishing technical accuracy the phenomenal effects of light and atmosphere.

Today, light-and-space artist James Turrell seeks to link the terrestrial and celestial realms in his work at Roden Crater, a natural cinder volcano situated on the southwestern edge of the Painted Desert in northern Arizona. Since 1972, Turrell has been transforming the crater into a large-scale artwork by subtly manipulating and reshaping its form. Like Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci did, Turrell uses his knowledge of engineering, and, like Seurat and Monet, he employs his knowledge of the effects of light and space. When Turrell completes his gigantic project, visitors standing in the middle of the crater on the reflective material with which the artist has lined it will feel suspended between the sky and earth.

There has long been a connection between art and science, one that can be traced back to the Egyptian pyramids. History proves that the two disciplines cannot exist without each other, enduring in constantly changing and evolving relationships.

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The Enduring Relationship of Science and Art

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Science and art naturally overlap. Both are a means of investigation. Both involve ideas, theories, and hypotheses that are tested in places where mind and hand come together-the laboratory and studio. Artists, like scientists, study-materials, people, culture, history, religion, mythology- and learn to transform information into something else.

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In 1893, Henry James wrote an essay praising his friend, the painter John Singer Sargent, in which he declared: "There is no greater work of art than a great portrait," because of the empathetic vision it required. Sargent was remarkable, said James, for the "extraordinarily immediate" translation of his perception into a picture, "as if painting were pure tact of vision, a simple manner of feeling". In particular, he admired Sargent's "faculty of taking a fresh, direct, independent, unborrowed impression". This admiration was widely shared: after seeing The Misses Hunter in 1902, Rodin called Sargent "the Van Dyck of our times". But after Sargent's death, his realism was viewed increasingly as anachronistic and facile, the work of a society painter, a careerist happy to pander to aristocratic privilege. One of the most successful and esteemed painters of his day was rapidly dismissed as virtuosic but lightweight, a slick craftsman rather than an innovative creator, superseded by Matisse and Picasso. He was a Gilded Age flatterer, "not an enthusiast," sniffed Pissarro, "but rather an adroit performer".

The forthcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery aims to end that assessment for good by crediting the texture and inventiveness of Sargent's realism. It is not a full retrospective, focusing instead on Sargent's interactions in artistic and intellectual circles, but it certainly makes the case for a show that would reveal all of Sargent's range - not only the many magnificent portraits on display in this exhibition, but also his landscapes, watercolours, sketches and murals, as well as the extraordinary Gassed, the colossal late painting of soldiers blinded on the western front that anticipates "proletarian realism".

Modernism - in the evolving forms of impressionism, fauvism, cubism -increasingly directed the energies of the art world during Sargent's life, but while defiantly sticking to realism, Sargent redefined it by putting Van Dyck, Velázquez, Reynolds and Gainsborough into dialogue with moderns including Manet and Monet, using visual echoes and quotations to create a new fusion of classic and modern technique (portraits painted, following Monet, en plein air and sur le motif) with contemporary subjects and perspectives. James understood this, praising Sargent's portraiture for "the quality in light of which the artist sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, enlarges and humanises the technical problem" of creating a realistic portrait.

This notion of art as perfect empathy is also the novelist's art; it is no coincidence that James and Sargent have so often been paired. They had much in common, not least as Americans raised across the European continent by affluent parents on a kind of permanent grand tour. Sargent was born in Florence in 1856, and spent his formative years travelling around France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Spain. This "Baedeker education" made Sargent multilingual, "civilised to his fingertips", in James's words. But their affinities ran much deeper than being well-travelled cosmopolitans who focused largely on high-society subjects. Both brought to an apparently conventional realism an experimental sensibility, exploring psychology, narrative and identity. Sargent is the novelist's painter, his portraits intimating entire worlds, dramas or what James always called "scenes". Like James, Sargent had an instinctive appreciation for what it meant to "make a scene". Sargent's first biographer, his friend Evan Charteris, wrote in 1927 that Sargent's best portraits reveal "Jamesian perplexities, the play of social type against personality, of the sitter's inner nature against fashion's constantly shifting ideals".

A celebrity in his day, Sargent was notoriously publicity-shy, avoiding interviews and ferociously guarding his privacy. The artist William Rothenstein recalled: "I think of his huge frame, of his superb appetite, his constant consumption of cigars; of his odd shyness too, and his self-consciousness, of his decided opinions expressed with a Jamesian defensiveness." Just over 6ft tall, he was affable, urbane and social, and devoted to the creation of beauty. Sargent told his cousin that his earliest memory was of a deep red cobblestone in a gutter in Florence that obsessed him. Drawing from a young age, he studied painting in Paris with Carolus-Duran, who became the subject of his first major portrait in 1879. His paintings elicited praise from the start and began to win prizes, his virtuosity of technique recognised almost immediately. At just 26, he painted both El Jaleo and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, as well as the beautiful Lady with the Rose. James called El Jaleo "astonishing" for "the sense it gives of assimilated secrets and instinct and knowledge". The famous Daughters of Edward Darley Boit offers a salute to Velázquez's Las Meninas, but daringly composes its apparently conventional Edwardian subject around empty space, giving the painting a dark, enigmatic edge.

RAM Stevenson, a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson who studied with Sargent in Paris, wrote of his classmate's remarkable talent: "Sargent's painting is strict painting, as Bach's fugues are strict music." An accomplished musician himself, Sargent was known for talking constantly while he painted, and would walk around the room (he once estimated that he walked four miles every day going back and forth around his model and the easel) and interrupt his work to play the piano. Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, painted in the late summer of 1885 and 1886, was named for a popular song; its style "is poised", the exhibition catalogue notes, "between several aesthetics: French impressionism, English pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism". Sargent's chief aim in this portrait, all who watched him create it agreed, was to capture en plein air the transient quality of "fugitive evening light". It took him two years to achieve, for he could only paint for 25 minutes each night in late summer: every evening at 6:45 Sargent "would drop his tennis racquet", remembered a friend, and "lug out the big canvas" from his 70ft-long studio into the garden, where he would paint for as long as "the effect lasted". He had almost certainly been to Giverny by then, and had watched Monet paint out of doors. He came to share Monet's preoccupation with the play of natural light, but he never fully embraced impressionism's subordination of subject to technique, its willingness to dissolve representation into paint, colour and light.

Although Sargent's subjects were often posed, his oeuvre suggests the painter as flaneur, strolling through metropolitan cities and capturing the personalities he encountered, the scenes he saw. His own coterie was stylish, knowing, chic: he portrayed other painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, dancers, including WB Yeats, Eleonora Duse, Edwin Booth, Edmund Gosse, George Meredith, Antonio Mancini (whom Sargent once described as "the best living painter"), the collector and hostess Isabella Stewart Gardner. There is the famous portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, raising the crown on to her head, and the 1885 picture of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, who said their portrait was "like an open box of jewels". He painted a Chilean mining heiress, formidable and stylishly dressed, who became a lay nun and had her habit designed by Coco Chanel. There is An Interior of Venice, depicting the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, where James wrote The Wings of the Dove, and which some have speculated may have helped inspire The Aspern Papers. Sargent presented the painting as a gift to his hostess, but, offended by her appearance and her son's informal pose, she rejected it, to the dismay of James, who wrote to her that he "absolutely and unreservedly adored" the painting. She did not change her mind. There is Sargent's first double portrait, from 1881, of the Pailleron children. They are in a claustrophobic, dark but richly furnished space, and seem to have a knowing gaze; viewers have since been reminded of the doubtful children in James's Turn of the Screw, written more than 15 years after the picture was first shown. There is the scarlet Dr Pozzi, painted as a handsome, louche aesthete, whose dressing gown slyly evokes cardinals: contemporary British reviewers found it objectionably Parisian, too insolent, too en vogue. Sargent's paintings may look staidly traditional now, but they were seen as modern when he painted them.

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Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife by John Singer Sargent (1885). Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photography by Dwight Primiano

Celebrity and theatricality were central to Sargent's style, and his success. It is the portrait of Amélie Gautreau, titled Madame X, for which he remains best known. Working on the painting, he told his friend the writer Vernon Lee that he was "struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness" of his sitter, but eventually, fusing techniques from Velázquez, Titian and Manet, as well as Sargent's then fashionable interest in Japanese art, he produced a painting now seen as a masterpiece, but which first inspired outrage, creating a succes de scandale when it was exhibited at the 1884 Paris Salon. Reviews either objected to Madame Gautreau's appearance (some complaining at the powder-blue pallor of her skin, others at the depth of her decolletage or the shockingly wanton shoulder strap allowed to fall suggestively loose) or hailed the modernity of Sargent's technique.

When he sold Madame X to the New York Metropolitan Museum years later, Sargent admitted to feeling it might have been the best work he had ever done, but at the time he was unnerved by the malice it elicited. He beat a retreat to London, where James had promised him a more sympathetic reception. British critics did not, in fact, instantly embrace Sargent: The Misses Vickers was voted the worst painting of 1886 by the Royal Academy, for example, while the Spectator demanded: "Could we fancy anyone a hundred years hence caring to possess such a picture as this?" Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose might strike some viewers as prettily pre-Raphaelite (although they would have to ignore its spectacular luminescence), but it provoked controversy when it was purchased through the Chantrey Bequest, one journal reporting that "artists [had] almost come to blows over this picture". Modern, too, are the expressionist portrait of Lee, who appears to be chattering away, and a lovely impressionist evocation of one of Sargent's touchstones, Monet, characteristically painting outside, sur le motif. There is the famous 1913 portrait of James for his 70th birthday, which, as the catalogue notes, delighted the Master: "Sargent at his very best and poor old HJ not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting."

Of Sargent's private life, little is known. He never married; although twice he was suspected of being on the verge of an engagement, nothing came of it. Many have come to believe that his extreme privacy was a sign on the closet door, signalling a life kept carefully secret to hide desires deemed unacceptable (and illegal). Certainly Sargent executed many - very beautiful - drawings of male nudes, which he did not exhibit during his life. It is also true that a number of men with similarly suppressed or hidden desires, including James, were among his close circle of friends. But so were married couples, and heterosexual philanderers. The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who once sat for Sargent, claimed after his death that Sargent was "notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger." But no other affirmation of this claim has come to light, and Sargent's private papers were destroyed. Many scholars believe he had an affair with Louise Burckhardt, who sat for Lady with the Rose, while some of his female nudes have struck viewers as being as erotic as his males.

But in the end this is all conjecture. For better or worse - again like James - Sargent had married his art. Lee wrote after his death that the only useful biographical summation would be two words: "he painted". Late in life, Sargent declined the honour of a knighthood, because he was American. He died at 69, in his sleep, a volume of Voltaire beside him. It was 14 April 1925, four days after The Great Gatsby was published; the modern era was at hand, and it was Sargent, whether we know it or not, who helped show us what it would look like.

* Sargent: Portrait of Artists and Friends opens at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2H, on 12 February. npg.org.uk

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In 1893, Henry James wrote an essay praising his friend, the painter John Singer Sargent, in which he declared: "There is no greater work of art than a great portrait," because of the empathetic vision it required.

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Islander: A Journey Around Our Archipelago review - beguiling

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THE GRAND TOUR

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The French Revolution marked the end of a spectacular period of travel and enlightenment for European youth, particularly from England. Young English elites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often spent two to four years touring around Europe in an effort to broaden their horizons and learn about language, architecture, geography, and culture in an experience known as the Grand Tour.

The Grand Tour, which didn't come to an end until the close of the eighteenth century, began in the sixteenth century and gained popularity during the seventeenth century. Read to find out what started this event and what the typical Tour entailed.

Origins of the Grand Tour

Privileged young graduates of sixteenth-century Europe pioneered a trend wherein they traveled across the continent in search of art and cultural experiences upon their graduation. This practice, which grew to be wildly popular, became known as the Grand Tour, a term introduced by Richard Lassels in his 1670 book Voyage to Italy. Specialty guidebooks, tour guides, and other aspects of the tourist industry were developed during this time to meet the needs of wealthy 20-something male and female travelers and their tutors as they explored the European continent.

These young, classically-educated Tourists were affluent enough to fund multiple years abroad for themselves and they took full advantage of this. They carried letters of reference and introduction with them as they departed from southern England in order to communicate with and learn from people they met in other countries. Some Tourists sought to continue their education and broaden their horizons while abroad, some were just after fun and leisurely travels, but most desired a combination of both.

Navigating Europe

A typical journey through Europe was long and winding with many stops along the way. London was commonly used as a starting point and the Tour was usually kicked off with a difficult trip across the English Channel.

Crossing the English Channel

The most common route across the English Channel, La Manche, was made from Dover to Calais, France-this is now the path of the Channel Tunnel. A trip from Dover across the Channel to Calais and finally into Paris customarily took three days. After all, crossing the wide channel was and is not easy. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Tourists risked seasickness, illness, and even shipwreck on this first leg of travel.

Compulsory Stops

Grand Tourists were primarily interested in visiting cities that were considered major centers of culture at the time, so Paris, Rome, and Venice were not to be missed. Florence and Naples were also popular destinations but were regarded as more optional than the aforementioned cities.

The average Grand Tourist traveled from city to city, usually spending weeks in smaller cities and up to several months in the three major ones. Paris, France was the most popular stop of the Grand Tour for its cultural, architectural, and political influence. It was also popular because most young British elite already spoke French, a prominent language in classical literature and other studies, and travel through and to this city was relatively easy. For many English citizens, Paris was the most impressive place visited.

Getting to Italy

From Paris, many Tourists proceeded across the Alps or took a boat on the Mediterranean Sea to get to Italy, another essential stopping point. For those who made their way across the Alps, Turin was the first Italian city they'd come to and some remained here while others simply passed through on their way to Rome or Venice.

Rome was initially the southernmost point of travel. However, when excavations of Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748) began, these two sites were added as major destinations on the Grand Tour.

Features of the Grand Tour

The vast majority of Tourists took part in similar activities during their exploration with art at the center of it all. Once a Tourist arrived at a destination, they would seek housing and settle in for anywhere from weeks to months, even years. Though certainly not an overly trying experience for most, the Grand Tour presented a unique set of challenges for travelers to overcome.

Activities

While the original purpose of the Grand Tour was educational, a great deal of time was spent on much more frivolous pursuits. Among these were drinking, gambling, and intimate encounters-some Tourists regarded their travels as an opportunity to indulge in promiscuity with little consequence. Journals and sketches that were supposed to be completed during the Tour were left blank more often than not.

Visiting French and Italian royalty as well as British diplomats was a common recreation during the Tour. The young men and women that participated wanted to return home with stories to tell and meeting famous or otherwise influential people made for great stories.

The study and collection of art became almost a nonoptional engagement for Grand Tourists. Many returned home with bounties of paintings, antiques, and handmade items from various countries. Those that could afford to purchase lavish souvenirs did so in the extreme.

Arriving in Paris, one of the first destinations for most, a Tourist would usually rent an apartment for several weeks or months. Day trips from Paris to the French countryside or to Versailles (the home of the French monarchy) were common for less wealthy travelers that couldn't pay for longer outings.

The homes of envoys were often utilized as hotels and food pantries. This annoyed envoys but there wasn't much they could do about such inconveniences caused by their citizens. Nice apartments tended to be accessible only in major cities, with harsh and dirty inns the only options in smaller ones.

Trials and Challenges

A Tourist would not carry much money on their person during their expeditions due to the risk of highway robberies. Instead, letters of credit from reputable London banks were presented at major cities of the Grand Tour in order to make purchases. In this way, tourists spent a great deal of money abroad.

Because these expenditures were made outside of England and therefore did not bolster England's economy, some English politicians were very much against the institution of the Grand Tour and did not approve of this rite of passage. This played minimally into the average person's decision to travel.

Returning to England

Upon returning to England, tourists were meant to be ready to assume the responsibilities of an aristocrat. The Grand Tour was ultimately worthwhile as it has been credited with spurring dramatic developments in British architecture and culture, but many viewed it as a waste of time during this period because many Tourists did not come home more mature than when they had left.

The French Revolution in 1789 halted the Grand Tour-in the early nineteenth century, railroads forever changed the face of tourism and foreign travel.

Burk, Kathleen. "The Grand Tour of Europe". Gresham College, 6 Apr. 2005.

Knowles, Rachel. "The Grand Tour." Regency History, 30 Apr. 2013.

Sorabella, Jean. "The Grand Tour." Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Met Museum, Oct. 2003.

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Everything You've Ever Wondered About the Grand Tour of Europe

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The French Revolution marked the end of a spectacular period of travel and enlightenment for European youth, particularly from England. Young English elites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often spent two to four years touring around Europe in an effort to broaden their horizons and learn about language, architecture, geography, and culture in an experience known as the Grand Tour.

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Series 1, Great Continental Railway Journeys - BBC Two

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Michael Portillo retraces the journeys from George Bradshaw's 1913 Continental Guide.

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Bradshaw's Handbook was first published in 1863 but has now been catapulted into the top ten UK Amazon sales list after being featured on Great British Railway Journeys, currently being screened on BBC2.

The book - an exact facsimile of the original - has already sold more than 8,000 copies and a second print run could be in the offing.

Abraham Davies, a spokesman for Oxford-based Old House Books and Maps, the company which reproduces the edition, said: 'This is a big deal for us - it is very difficult to break into the top 50 and this is the first time we have come anywhere near the top 10. Everyone is ecstatic about it.

'The book gives a lot of detail of what the traveller would expect to see in local areas, which makes it a very interesting social history.'

The BBC series stars former Cabinet minister Michael Portillo who uses the book to explore Britain's railways and see how the country has changed in the decades since it was published.

Managing director Nick Wright said: 'Not only is ours the only available version that includes the exact routes and places referred to in the TV programme, it is available for less than £10 and customers have recognised that as remarkable value.'

Lancashire-born George Bradshaw began his career as a cartographer and produced Britain's first railway timetable in 1839.

After his death in 1853, the company continued to produce travel publications in his name.

There has been something of a revival in the travel books of past adventurers - Baedeker guides, started by Prussian Karl Baedeker in 1827, have also recently been reprinted.

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Railway to go: Thousands rush to buy Victorian guidebook

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Bradshaw's Handbook was first published in 1863 but has now been catapulted into the top ten UK Amazon sales list after being featured on Great British Railway Journeys, currently being screened on BBC2. The book - an exact facsimile of the original - has already sold more than 8,000 copies and a second print run could be in the offing.

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After grinding grain since 1897, Sydney's Crago Flour Mill finally cranked to a halt in the mid 80s. Over the years, this handsome industrial Newtown site became rundown, a dusty labyrinth of rooms sprawled over four buildings.

Given the job in 2008 of transforming the mill into 47 strata studios, architects Allen Jack+Cottier (AJ+C) made a strategic decision. By refusing to tear down the structure, they saved an estimated 21,000 tonnes of CO2. Preserving embodied energy (the energy consumed by the entire building process) was key, along with avoiding the physical energy needed to destroy a large structure.
Machine smarts: how will pedestrians negotiate with driverless cars?
"The most sustainable thing we can do is to not build new stuff," insists AJ+C architect Peter Ireland. "I often say to a client, everything is an asset until we prove it otherwise. A lot of demolition doesn't make sense."

Across Australia, historical buildings are being adapted for reuse. While preserving heritage is key, construction methods have changed dramatically while energy efficiency is often paramount, so architects are looking at ways to make these buildings more sustainable.

In the newly dubbed Flourmill Studios, it was important to preserve the mill's industrial core and character, such as the original shafts, wheels and belts while making the buildings more comfortable and energy-efficient. Internal layers were removed to allow natural light into the dim insides; an insulated sandwich roof system (in which a metal outer panel is glued to an inner core of foam)was added to the historic roof, reducing heat transfer and adding insulation;carpets created from recycled PET plastic bottles were laid down;and solar panels were installed for heating water and rainwater is collected for landscaping.

The Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) encourages the reuse and retrofitting of existing buildings. "Around 80,000 buildings in Australia have fallen through the 'green gap' and are missing out on retrofit opportunities that would improve their energy productivity, resilience and sustainability," says chief executive Romilly Madew. To correct this, the GBCA is developing a building retrofit toolkit and is working with governments to get more support for funding and incentives to encourage upgrades and retrofits.

Last year Tonsley, a 1950s Adelaide automobile factory turned technology and innovation centre, was awarded a six star Green Star rating. It's Australia's first mixed-use urban redevelopment to achieve the highest available rating. Madew points to "world leadership" design, such as internal forests in the expansive former Mitsubishi main assembly building which "provide beautiful natural spaces for members of the community to enjoy, while at the same time capturing carbon and purifying the air". Its roof also supports an extensive photovoltaic array, or complete power-generating unit.

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The redeveloped hall at Tonsley with internal forests. Photograph: Renewal SA

The main assembly building is central to the Tonsley site. Paul Stoller, director of the environmental design consultants Atelier Ten, Australia, who advised on Tonsley, says it acts as an "environmental buffer, shading in the summer and sheltering from cold winds in the winter". It was decided to retain it, along with installing skylights to maximise light and solar panels on the roof to produce sustainable energy.

South Australian development body Renewal SA estimates that conserving the main assembly building prevented the loss of roughly 90,000 tonnes of carbon embodied in its construction - the equivalent of taking 25,000 cars off the road for one year.

Woods Bagot architect Gavin Kain, who was behind the Tonsley project, says the most difficult element was convincing tenants that the structure would perform sustainably. " It was hard for them to visualise as it was a new concept," he says. "When tenants are signing up to a lease for 10 years, a degree of conservatism is in play."

Kain convinced tenants to think about their workforce productivity, which dramatically increases in an environment where "wellness" is prioritised. "Productivity improvements are much more beneficial than small reductions in rent," he insists. "So we showed them what young creatives were after [ie healthy places to work] and that if they wanted to succeed, they needed the best people."

For all the latest technology, there are energy-efficiency lessons to be learned from historical buildings. For example, before the advent of airconditioning in the 1960s, structures made do with passive environmental control from cross-ventilation windows to shutters, awnings and masonry that helped keep out the sun. Similarly the high thermal mass of stone, as seen in Victorian buildings, retains warmth in winter and cold in summer.

"Old buildings, when properly renovated or restored, can use less energy than flash new buildings (even those badged as sustainable) that set up problems for themselves by over-glazing, or by creating deep floor plates requiring ventilation fans and lights on all day," says Stoller.

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The restoration of 171 Collins Street in Melbourne received a six star Green Star rating. Photograph: Peter Clarke

One of the challenges in historic buildings is light. Many require extra artificial lighting or skylights. That didn't put off the restoration of the heritage-listed Mayfair building in Melbourne. Built in 1913, the Auditorium, as it was then known, was converted to a cinema in the 30s and a shopping mall in the 80s. In 2013 the facade was retained amid a $280m revamp that addedoffice and retail space set in a newly built nine-storey internal glass atrium.

Now called 171 Collins Street, the atrium works like a kaleidoscope, providing ample natural light. Efficiency features for the six star Green Star-rated structure include floor to ceiling double glazing, a dedicated waste storage area for recycling, an advanced rainwater and grey water reuse system, LED and T5 fluorescent lighting, and fritted insulating glass to maximise solar insulation. A 315kW natural gas co-generation generator has also been set up to transform wasted heat into an energy source, as well as cutting carbon dioxide emissions by up to two-thirds.

Knight Frank's senior facilities and engineering manager CJ Harshana Wijewardane says that the six-star rating was achieved through "methodically fine-tuning existing infrastructure" while installing new technologies.

Most important was the co-generation system, which operating in parallel with the grid supply is not only the base source of electricity for the office tower but also provides heating for the building and for hot water.

Despite all this, the Mayfair building retains a richness and decadence, says Kristen Whittle of Bates Smart architects. No matter what is going on inside the belly of the building, such rare "materiality, a sense of depth and texture" remains invaluable to our cities. Buildings of historic significance "have great bones", agrees Stoller. "It's our job to bring them up to a 21st century level."
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Preserving historical buildings: the most sustainable thing is not to build new stuff

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After grinding grain since 1897, Sydney's Crago Flour Mill finally cranked to a halt in the mid 80s. Over the years, this handsome industrial Newtown site became rundown, a dusty labyrinth of rooms sprawled over four buildings. Given the job in 2008 of transforming the mill into 47 strata studios, architects Allen Jack+Cottier (AJ+C) made a strategic decision.

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Artistic projects of all kinds are so much a part of the fabric of our society/culture and continue to be tremendously inspirational, carrying a strong message and having the ability to resonate with large audiences no matter what the medium. It is this context that makes the work I am engaged in a small but important part of the enormous creative talent that exists throughout the world. I am a strong believer in the fact that in our world today, we are now all inter-connected in ways we never thought possible and that this enables us to change public discourse on critical issues. It of course takes much strength and conviction to create art that can promote transformational social change.

The intersection of arts and political activism are two fields defined by a shared focus of creating engagement that shifts boundaries, changes relationships and creates new paradigms. Both activist and artist work in the challenges of the unknown and the unpredictable, never truly able to determine the outcome and forever questioning if there is more to be done. This experimentation also forms the essence of what can be the engine of success and motivation towards true change whether we are immersed in a specific social cause or a global peace movement, composing an original score, sharing a story by means of carving a sculpture, or using performance to highlight a critical message. Whatever our chosen palette, the practice of understanding the importance of our own creative engagement is a source of potential change on its own, and a space where valuable insight can be found through reflection and sharing.

Art, Religion and Peace and Activism

In conjunction with Religions for Peace and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, I have engaged at the intersection of interreligious dialogue and engagement in social action though the arts and other forms of dialogue in the Middle East, the Gulf States, North Africa and the Caucuses, over the course of several trips that took place in the last few years. We spent time with leaders and visionaries in both the UAE and Israel, to discuss our diverse ideas for stability beyond coexistence. In May 2015, I shared a panel in Baku, Azerbaijan for the 3rd World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue to discuss opportunities within dialogue as an influential tool and specifically ways it can be capitalized on as a mechanism for attempting to shift violent extremism.

In 2015 I also collaborated with two significant and powerful arts festivals that showcased globalization for participants that attended from every part of the world. They both actively demonstrated experiential proof of how gatherings such as these can play a powerful role toward achieving and promoting social change.

I was proud to support and promote The Creative Time summit in conjunction with Creative Time Reports as an official partner of the Venice Biennale in 2015. This was the first time the Biennale hosted an arts activism conference of this nature which is significant in itself.

Provocative perspectives from artists from many countries around the world from China to India and from the Middle East to North Africa to Europe congregated at the Summit to air their views on charged political subjects facing our world today such as migration and refugees, conflict zones, terrorism, uprisings and elections, race and integration and women's rights. These views were streamed to over 50 countries, creating a discussion in real time on how artists engage in voicing their unique point of view and can challenge others to see things in a new light which can speak truth to power. A few strong examples included artist Mariam Ghani in conversation with her father Ashraf Ghani, President of Afghanistan about the current state of affairs post 9/11 and on her project "The Guantanamo Effect," an interactive digital archive defining and connecting key terms and events in the global war on terror and on the flow of weapons from conflict zones back to the US and its prisons. Another participant was Joshua Wong, the well known and prominent Hong Kong student activist who was the conveyer and founder of the Hong Kong student activist group, demanding equal voting rights from the Chinese in 2014. The 19-year-old has been featured as an important youth leader by both Time Magazine in 2014 and Fortune in 2015.

Music, Culture and Healing

I ended the summer with another equally prominent gathering in Jerusalem which I was proud to be a part of and who I will be working with again in 2016. Jerusalem Season of Culture is now in its sixth year and is an amazing gathering of thousands of Israeli artists and hundreds of other international artists and musicians that congregate in Jerusalem not just to engage Israelis with Palestinians, but the secular and Orthodox communities as well. There are thousands of artistic venues in galleries, museums, historic sites, restaurants, private homes, and broadcasts. The festival has helped to engage the community in the power of art and artists to create transformation and has been successfully used as a tool to dissolve politically charged issues in a city that is otherwise seen by the world as deeply divided. In fact, after the Gaza war in 2014, even though some of the programs were postponed due to security issues, the sacred music festival which is probably the most powerful venue was used as a successful tool to bring people together around healing through music.

Musicians participated from all over the world and nine bands stayed to play despite international boycotts including a Muslim group from Morocco, Orchestre Chabab al Andalous who performed together with a Rabbi in the Old Citadel, singing Andalusian songs in Hebrew and Arabic. A pop up radio station was also created during the conflict to broadcast interviews about the importance of art under fire. Other interesting projects included ones around the history of the Temple Mount and that of Lifta, an abandoned Palestinian village which was successfully and beautifully brought back to life through art, lights and music.

It is programs such as these which very clearly demonstrate how essential it is to push forward through generations of obstacles with ideas and programs that bring people together towards social cohesion rather than division despite the political rhetoric in their country and by their governments.

As I move forward in this new, busy year, I look forward to being an inspirational change agent, pushing forward with more projects that inspire activism, fighting for human rights and building on themes of unity and social actions. Engagement with these opportunities and dedication to these objectives, no matter how complicated and unpredictable will provide the space for creating solutions to the challenges our world is desperately in need of.

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Art and Politics: The Power of Creativity and Activism Across the Globe

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Artistic projects of all kinds are so much a part of the fabric of our society/culture and continue to be tremendously inspirational, carrying a strong message and having the ability to resonate with large audiences no matter what the medium.

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I profughi dopo la disfatta

Nella notte tra il 24 e il 25 ottobre di un secolo fa si svolse l'episodio più drammatico e cruciale della Prima Guerra Mondiale sul fronte italiano: lo sfondamento effettuato dalle truppe austro-tedesche, presso Caporetto, un piccolo comune situato a nord di Gorizia (oggi in Slovenia), e la loro conseguente penetrazione nel territorio peninsulare. Sulla disfatta di Caporetto e sulla caotica e disordinata rotta che ne seguì sono stati scritti fiumi di inchiostro, sin dall'immediato; si è passati dalla tesi del complotto a quella di uno sciopero dei soldati, dalle interpretazioni che ne individuavano l'origine nel disfattismo interno fino ad arrivare a quella che è oramai accettata quasi da tutti nel campo storiografico, ovvero, una sconfitta militare dovuta ai gravi errori commessi dagli alti comandi.

Caporetto, nella memoria storica italiana, insieme all'8 settembre 1943, ha rappresentato e rappresenta tuttora, a cento anni di distanza, una cicatrice indelebile, tanto che la parola stessa è entrata a far parte del nostro linguaggio quotidiano quale sinonimo di disfatta, sconfitta epocale e disastro. Lo sfondamento e la ritirata di quei giorni, durata fino al 12 novembre, oltre a dimezzare l'esercito italiano (furono infatti circa 300.000 i prigionieri deportati in Austria) e a trasformare la guerra da offensiva a difensiva, con l' arretramento del fronte sul Piave, ebbe come altra immediata conseguenza l'occupazione da parte dell'esercito straniero delle intere province di Udine e Belluno e di parte di quelle di Venezia, Treviso e Vicenza.

Il portale "14-18 - Documenti e immagini della Grande Guerra", creato nel 2005 e che al momento raccoglie al proprio interno circa 600.000 immagini, rende consultabile agli utenti un importante patrimonio documentario e di interesse storico sugli anni della Prima Guerra Mondiale consentendo, al tempo stesso, la valorizzazione delle collezioni digitali possedute da diverse istituzioni tra cui archivi, musei e biblioteche, che contribuiscono costantemente all'arricchimento della banca dati. Così come per altri argomenti legati al conflitto anche sul tema specifico relativo all'evento di Caporetto questo archivio digitale mette a disposizione degli utenti materiale di differente tipologia.

È possibile innanzitutto consultare le numerose fotografie che fanno parte del Fondo Guerra del Museo Centrale del Risorgimento: al contrario di quello che si potrebbe pensare queste foto non ritraggono le fasi cruente delle battaglia, ma riescono comunque ad evocarla mostrandone gli effetti disastrosi. Oltre alle fotografie scattate a Caporetto nei mesi che precedono lo sfondamento austriaco della linea italiana, vi sono, infatti, quelle successive che immortalano la caotica ritirata dell'esercito italiano e della popolazione locale, evidenziandone tutta la drammaticità: soldati a piedi e su automezzi in fuga, profughi, cadaveri, case distrutte, ponti abbattuti, zaini, armi e divise abbandonate, carcasse di cavalli e di automezzi. Sono presenti anche alcune foto che raffigurano l'assestamento delle forze italiane sulla linea del Piave, con la costruzione di nuove trincee, e le prime azioni militari su questo nuovo fronte difensivo. Sulla distruzione di artiglieria pesante effettuata dall'esercito italiano durante la ritirata viene data testimonianza da alcune fotografie scattate dal Reparto cinematografico della Marina, di proprietà dell'Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare.

Sempre sul tema del ripiegamento italiano alcuni libri e opuscoli provenienti dalla Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma e dalla Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, costituiscono resoconti e impressioni di grande interesse storico poiché scritti da uomini e donne che hanno vissuto in prima persona tale esperienza traumatica.

Alcuni riferimenti sull'evento si possono trovare anche in fogli, volantini e manifesti di diversa tipologia e provenienza, stampati soprattutto durante il 1918 e rivolti principalmente ai soldati.

Per quel che riguarda i documenti di carattere un po' più privato e personale vale la pena segnalare su tutti il diario dattiloscritto attribuibile alla maestra Antonietta Calcinoni, che fa parte del Fondo della Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea.

In questo diario, scritto nel novembre 1917, viene raccontata la fuga dei soldati italiani e l'occupazione del paese di Follina (Treviso) da parte delle truppe nemiche. Di grande interesse è anche la lettera datata 8 novembre 1917, dell' Archivio di Stato di Mantova, nella quale un militare rassicura il padre sulle proprie condizioni di salute dopo il disastro e la ritirata.

Tra le poche cartoline presenti nel portale ve n'è una assai significativa prodotta nel novembre 1918, subito dopo la conclusione della guerra. In tale documento, che fa parte della raccolta Formiggini, vengono raffigurati un soldato e un marinaio che con un panno cancellano da un muro le scritte "Caporetto" e "Voiussa". Il significato è chiaro: il Regio Esercito ha finalmente riscattato le gravi sconfitte subite precedentemente sul fronte italo-austriaco e su quello albanese e per questo motivo i nomi legati alle disfatte possono essere rimossi dalla memoria e dalla coscienza nazionale.

Un discorso a parte va fatto per la vastissima collezione di periodici, tutti di eccezionale interesse, sia per qualità che per rarità. In essi mancano riferimenti espliciti alla sconfitta di Caporetto, della quale, ovviamente, si tenta di parlare il meno possibile per non demoralizzare ulteriormente le truppe e per non macchiare il prestigio militare della nazione. Tra le testate conservate, notevole importanza ricoprono i giornali di trincea (per lo più digitalizzati e forniti dalla Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea), le cui pubblicazioni aumentano sensibilmente a partire dal novembre 1917, quando il governo intravede in essi il mezzo ideale per svolgere un'efficace azione di propaganda sui soldati, spronandoli al riscatto dell'orgoglio e dell'onore nazionale. Viene stampato così un elevato numero di giornali per i combattenti con incitamenti, notizie dagli altri fronti, ricorrenze patriottiche e alcuni riferimenti alle violenze e alle brutalità commesse dal nemico nei territori occupati.

Articoli correlati

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Caporetto, documenti e immagini della peggiore sconfitta dell'esercito italiano

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I profughi dopo la disfatta Nella notte tra il 24 e il 25 ottobre di un secolo fa si svolse l'episodio più drammatico e cruciale della Prima Guerra Mondiale sul fronte italiano: lo sfondamento effettuato dalle truppe austro-tedesche, presso Caporetto, un piccolo comune situato a nord di Gorizia (oggi in Slovenia), e la loro conseguente penetrazione nel territorio peninsulare.

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'What's next?' for the museum sector? The Europe's major conference on the future of Museums call for papers is out. The 2015 edition of MuseumNext will take place in the Swiss city of Geneva between April 19-21. Updates and latest news about the event at Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

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http://musei.beniculturali.it/en/notizie/events/2018-european-year-of-cultural-heritage

For 2018, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have instituted the European Year of Cultural Heritage with the aim of:

promoting cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue, and social cohesion;

strengthening the contribution of Europe’s cultural heritage to society and the economy through its capacity to support the cultural and creative sectors, including small and medium enterprises;

contributing to promote cultural heritage as an important element of the relations between the European Union and other countries, based on the interests and the requirements of the partner countries and on the competencies of Europe in the field of cultural heritage.

The Member States are called upon to implement activities and events to enhance appreciation of the cultural heritage of Europe and to reinforce the sense of belonging of its citizens.

The Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism adheres to this initiative by involving museums, institutions, and archaeological sites throughout the national territory, with the intention of favouring international dialogue that begins from the history and artistic beauty of Italy.

The European Year of Cultural Heritage was presented at the Forum della Cultura in Milan on 7 and 8 December 2017. More information on the websites ec.europa.eu and europa.eu/cultural-heritage

The first calendar of events in Italy is available on www.beniculturali.it

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FENOMENO

Consiste nell'approccio ludico alla didattica. Negli Usa spopola. Da noi arranca. Ci sono i software. Ma i docenti usano metodi tradizionali. Mentre nel privato...

A sentire studenti di tutte le età, uno dei motivi per cui non amano la scuola è semplice: non sono motivati nell'apprendimento perché si annoiano a morte. Sì, si annoiano, punto e basta.
Chiaramente ce la si può prendere con i soliti pelandroni, ma è anche giusto chiedersi cosa possano fare i docenti per uscire da questa impasse.
"Coloro che fanno distinzione fra intrattenimento ed educazione forse non sanno che l'educazione deve essere divertente e il divertimento deve essere educativo", disse il secolo scorso il grande sociologo della comunicazione Marshall McLuhan.
FUSIONE TRA EDUCATION ED ENTERTAINMENT. Parole che suonano più che mai attuali a 35 anni dalla sua morte, con l'affermazione, sia a livello pratico che teorico, del concetto di edutainment, neologismo inglese che combina il termine education (educazione) con entertainment (intrattenimento, appunto, svago, divertimento, spettacolo).
A pensarci bene l'edutainment è un po' come la scoperta dell'acqua calda. Basta ricordare le favole di Esopo e di Fedro o le parabole di Gesù, e se è per quello i dialoghi di Platone, a loro volta ispirati dalla maieutica di Socrate, educatore interattivo ante litteram. E poi le filosofie orientali, lo Zen in particolare, offrono tante belle storie volte a impartire con stile leggero, divertente appunto, profonde verità spirituali.
TERMINE USATO PER LA PRIMA VOLTA DALLA DISNEY. Il termine edutainment viene usato per la prima volta poco dopo la fine della Seconda Guerra Mondiale dalla Walt Disney Productions che, a partire dal 1948 e fino al 1960, produce True Life Adventures, una serie di mini documentari sulla natura che si guadagneranno una sfilza di statuette Oscar.
Si arriva quindi al 1973, quando Robert Heyman usa la parola per descrivere i suoi documentari per la National Geographic Society. E al 1978, quando Chris Daniels fa lo stesso per riassumere la sua visione futuristica nel Millenium Project.

Dalle università alle imprese: Usa capofila dell'edutainment

Non è un caso (è il famoso zeitgeist, lo spirito del tempo) se proprio negli Anni 70 diversi gruppi negli Usa, nel Regno Unito e in America Latina, usano un approccio ludico per affrontare problemi nel campo sociale e sanitario, come la dipendenza da droghe, la vaccinazione, le gravidanze tra i minori, l'Aids e il cancro. Seguono a ruota diverse università statunitensi, Ong e perfino agenzie governative come i Cdc (Centers for Disease Control, Centri per il Controllo delle Malattie).
Con l'arrivo di internet, e soprattutto attraverso YouTube, il concetto di edutainment è diventato ordine del giorno. E naturalmente anche televisione, radio e videogame si sono uniti in modo diretto o indiretto nella diffusione del metodo, in particolare negli Usa, ma non solo.
NEI MUSEI SPOPOLA L'APPROCCIO INTERATTIVO. Nel campo radiofonico basti pensare alla soap opera britannica The Archers, che per decadi ha educato il pubblico in questioni agricole, mentre in Tanzania un'altra soap opera, Let's go with the times, è stata scritta principalmente per insegnare alla gente la pianificazione famigliare.
Un capitolo a parte meritano musei e zoo, laddove, sempre negli Usa, è stato introdotto un approccio ludico e interattivo per aiutare le scolaresche in visita, ma anche gli adulti a capire meglio quello che si trovano di fronte. Naturalmente l'altro lato della medaglia è che è nata una competizione a livello di business per attrarre le masse con i dollari. Il pericolo è che si finisce per divertirsi troppo a scapito dell'educazione vera e propria.
IL MASS COMMUNICATION GAME IN AZIENDA. Non c'è da sorprendersi se l' edutainment è approdato nelle corporation. Per rendere le presentazioni con i PowerPoint meno noiose sono state introdotte animazioni e grafiche. Il premier Matteo Renzi, con le sue slide (e indipendentemente dalla sostanza di quel che dice) sembra averlo capito.
Sempre nel campo aziendale si è poi affermato il Mass communication game, un gioco di simulazione costruito a partire da dati e fatti specifici di un'azienda, che fa esplorare diverse alternative di comportamenti individuali, di gruppo, attuali e potenziali.

In Italia insegnanti ancorati al metodo didattico tradizionale

Per tornare alla scuola vera e propria, se da un lato, a livello ufficiale, Rai Educational si è adoperata nel campo dell' edutainment introducendo, per esempio, Il Divertinglese in collaborazione con il ministero dell'Educazione, negli istituti elementari si stanno sì diffondendo software dedicati, ma il corpo degli insegnanti sembra tuttora ancorato a un approccio didattico tradizionale.
Se si prende l'esempio dell'inglese, non sorprende che l'Italia sia agli ultimi posti in Europa per la conoscenza della lingua. Si insiste molto sulla grammatica e sulla sintassi, a scapito dell'applicazione pratica. E, oltre all'uso della musica e dei film in lingua originale, cosa più potrebbe aiutare l'apprendimento se non la simulazione ludica per eccellenza come il teatro?
FAVIA E L'ENGLISH THROUGH DRAMA. Giuseppe Favia, tutore bilingue d'inglese da oltre 40 anni, ha introdotto in diverse scuole private corsi di English through drama (Inglese attraverso il teatro) e organizza weekend di English Full Immersion in tutta Italia (incontri principalmente ludici e il meno possibile didattici con una sola regola: vietato parlare italiano): "Da quando ho scoperto l' edutainment mi si è aperto un mondo", racconta a Lettera43.it. "Mi ricordo di quando usavo ancora il metodo tradizionale: tanta fatica, lentezza nell'apprendimento, noia degli alunni. L'improvvisazione teatrale invece costringe le persone a parlare la lingua, a mettersi in gioco".
Con l' edutainment, continua Favia, "si torna un po' bambini e si è anche più creativi. La grammatica e la sintassi? Sono importanti", chiarisce, "sono lo scheletro, poi bisogna aggiungere carne, muscoli, nervi. E non c'è modo migliore se non attraverso la pratica ludica".
IL LUDENDO DOCERE DI PIERO ANGELA. A parte la timidezza "credo che ci sia anche un banale problema di ego: molti, pur conoscendo bene grammatica e sintassi, esitano a parlare la lingua perché temono di far brutta figura. Ma chi se ne frega, dico io e aggiungo: imparate dal bambino che fa i primi passi: cade, si rialza, poi cade di nuovo, ma poi alla fine cammina. Easy, no? Oh, scusate, facile no?".
A questo punto vale la pena citare Piero Angela: "Personalmente, mi sono annoiato mortalmente a scuola e sono stato un pessimo studente. Tutti coloro che si occupano di insegnamento dovrebbero ricordare continuamente l'antico motto latino ' ludendo docere ', cioè 'insegnare divertendo'".

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Edutainment, in Italia il modello fatica a diffondersi

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FENOMENO Consiste nell'approccio ludico alla didattica. Negli Usa spopola. Da noi arranca. Ci sono i software. Ma i docenti usano metodi tradizionali. Mentre nel privato... A sentire studenti di tutte le età, uno dei motivi per cui non amano la scuola è semplice: non sono motivati nell'apprendimento perché si annoiano a morte.

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Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia | MUVE

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La Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia promuove itinerari culturali alla scoperta del patrimonio, della storia della città di Venezia e dei suoi Musei. Le proposte "Non solo Museo" mirano a valorizzare l'offerta museale nel quadro di percorsi tematici che coinvolgono diversi sestieri facendo dialogare le collezioni permanenti con la vita e la storia della città.

Gli itinerari sono organizzati e condotti dalle Guide ufficiali abilitate di Venezia che per professione sono interlocutori qualificati per garantire al visitatore un servizio d'eccellenza e rispondere alle diverse esigenze ed aspettative del pubblico.

" Non solo Museo" aderisce alla campagna di sensibilizzazione della Città di Venezia #EnjoyRespectVenezia.

Scopri tutti gli itinerari compresi nell'iniziativa:
Dalla Casa di Carlo Goldoni alla Venezia dei teatri
Lasciamoci conquistare dalla Casa di Carlo Goldoni. Tra costumi, maschere e marionette, sarà come entrare in una commedia. Attraversiamo poi il Canal Grande con la tipica gondola-traghetto, per continuare con un percorso a piedi alla scoperta della Venezia dei teatri tra passato e presente.
Scopri di più >
Il Risorgimento a Venezia dalla città al Museo Correr
L'itinerario mette in luce il periodo dell'occupazione francese e austriaca a Venezia con una passeggiata che ne definisce il quadro storico e prepara alla visita della sezione neoclassica del museo Correr
Scopri di più >
Dai Frari e a Ca' Pesaro tra potere e mecenatismo
Esploriamo assieme nella chiesa dei Frari le tracce lasciate dalla famiglia Pesaro, grande sostenitrice di pittori illustri, tra Giovanni Bellini e Tiziano e poi raggiungiamo la loro dimora principesca sul Canal Grande, Ca' Pesaro, ora affascinante museo di arte moderna
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Alla scoperta della Venezia del '700: Giacomo Casanova e Ca' Rezzonico
Una passeggiata alla scoperta della Venezia del '700: dai luoghi di Casanova, tra San Samuele e Santo Stefano, fino a Ca' Rezzonico, per visitare uno dei palazzi più affascinanti e significativi del '700 veneziano.
Scopri di più >
La storia di Venezia attraverso le sale del Museo Correr
Ripercorriamo la millenaria storia di Venezia attraverso le sale del Museo Correr e della Libreria Marciana, ricche di testimonianze ed oggetti legati al fasti della Repubblica ed agli aspetti politici, economici e culturali della vita quotidiana in città.
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Fragranze e colori nella Venezia del Settecento:
Palazzo Mocenigo e dintorni

Una visita alla scoperta del palazzo nobiliare Mocenigo e i suoi sontuosi interni settecenteschi, un percorso dedicato alla moda, gli arredi, l'arte, e gli aromi dell'epoca a cui è dedicata un'ampia sezione del museo: una vera novità questa intesa ad illustrare la storia dei maestri profumieri, le essenze e le spezie. E dal museo ai luoghi che furono il centro di questi importanti scambi: Rialto e i suoi mercati, grande centro economico e finanziario, crocevia di merci e traffici, frequentato da mercanti, nobili e popolani, un mondo affascinante tutto da raccontare.
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Storie di singole ambizioni e di partecipazione collettiva
Ca' Rezzonico e la Scuola Grande dei Carmini

Per far fronte alle consistenti spese militari sostenute per combattere i Turchi, nel corso del Seicento la Serenissima conferì il rango nobiliare ad oltre un centinaio di famiglie disposte a versare cospicue somme nelle casse dello Stato. I nuovi patrizi, tra cui la famiglia Rezzonico, si impegnarono in uno sfoggio di magnificenza che si tradusse in grandiose imprese architettoniche e decorative. Committenti ambiziose furono anche le Scuole Grandi che, in collaborazione con artisti eccellenti, eressero sedi maestose e straordinari apparati decorativi.
Scopri di più >

Venezia, Fortuny e la Belle Époque
La metamorfosi di Venezia, tra Ottocento e Novecento

Un viaggio nel tempo: una passeggiata alla scoperta dei luoghi che subito dopo la fine della Repubblica di Venezia furono oggetto di un processo di modernizzazione del tessuto urbano, tra nuovi ponti, canali interrati, antiche chiese demolite, palazzi svuotati, trasformati, o venduti a famiglie straniere e noti intellettuali. E dalla città al museo, Palazzo Pesaro-Orfei, che l'artista spagnolo Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo trasformò nella propria residenza e luogo di uno straordinario e innovativo laboratorio di sperimentazione.
Scopri di più >

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Non solo museo | Percorsi tematici a Venezia | Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

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La Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia promuove itinerari culturali alla scoperta del patrimonio, della storia della città di Venezia e dei suoi Musei. Le proposte "Non solo Museo" mirano a valorizzare l'offerta museale nel quadro di percorsi tematici che coinvolgono diversi sestieri facendo dialogare le collezioni permanenti con la vita e la storia della città.

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Il 21 Febbraio del 1892, esattamente 125 anni fa, un articolo del New York Times a proposito di immigrazione commenta:

"Non vogliamo e dovremmo rifiutare questi italiani, russi o ebrei sporchi. Abbiamo già abbastanza sporcizia, miseria, crimine, malattie e morte per i fatti nostri senza doverci accollare pure questi". We do not want and we ought to refuse to land all or any of these unclean Italians or Russians or Hebrews. We have enough dirt, misery, crime, sickness and death of our own without permitting any more to be thrust upon us" - Restricting immigration. Vai qui per leggere l'articolo.

Il 25 gennaio 2017 il presidente degli Stati Uniti ha firmato l'ordine esecutivo di costruire un muro al confine meridionale con il Messico per prevenire "l'immigrazione illegale, il traffico di droga e di persone e gli atti di terrorismo". Due giorni dopo ha firmato il Muslim ban, altro ordine esecutivo con cui si sospende l'accoglienza dei rifugiati e si limita l'ingresso nel paese alle persone provenienti da sette paesi (Iran, Iraq, Libia, Siria, Somalia, Sudan e Yemen).

Sembra che sia negli Stati Uniti, sia in Europa, ci sia stata una ripresa di politiche di restrizione che da tempo sembravano seppellite. Come funzionavano 100 anni fa le politiche di restrizione negli Stati Uniti?

Il testo della "Nuova legge sull'Immigrazione negli Stati Uniti d'America" del 1907 recita:

" Non saranno ammesse negli Stati Uniti le seguenti categorie di stranieri. Gli idioti, gli imbecilli, i deboli di mente, gli epilettici, i pazzi e le persone colpite da pazzia durante il quinquennio precedente allo sbarco o che hanno avuto due o più accessi di pazzia in qualunque tempo anteriore. Gli indigenti, le persone che possono cadere a carico della pubblica beneficenza, i mendicanti di professione.
Le persone affette da tubercolosi o da malattie ributtanti o contagiose. Le persone non comprese nelle categorie precedenti, che siano riconosciute e dichiarate dagli ispettori medici mentalmente o fisicamente difettose a tal segno da non essere in grado di guadagnarsi la vita. Le persone che abbiano riportato condanne o confessino di aver commesso truffe od altro crimine o reato che implichi turpitudine morale. I poligami o le persone che ammettono la pratica della poligamia.
Gli anarchici e le persone che professano o propugnano il sovvertimento con la forza o con la violenza del Governo degli Stati Uniti o di ogni altro Governo o di ogni ordinamento legislativo, o l'assassinio di pubblici funzionari. Le prostitute o le donne o le fanciulle, che vengano negli Stati Uniti a scopo di prostituzione o per qualunque altro fine immorale; (...)

Dopo l'Immigration Act del 1824, la prima legge che restringeva notevolmente l'ingresso degli emigranti in America, vennero predisposte stazioni per il controllo degli emigranti anche nel resto del Nord America come Boston, Baltimora, Seattle, Galveston, Philadelphia, New Orleans e San Francisco. Tuttavia è al porto di New York che arrivava la maggior parte di persone da esaminare; persone che, solo dopo aver superato i controlli, potevano entrare negli Stati Uniti. La stazione federale per il controllo dell'immigrazione si trovava a Ellis Island, un isolotto nella baia di New York, alla foce del fiume Hudson. La scelta dell'isola non fu casuale: le fughe erano meno facili e la popolazione americana non rischiava il contagio di qualche malattia por- tata dallo "straniero".

Vi furono poi ulteriori restrizioni alle ammissioni degli stranieri negli Stati Uniti, espresse nell'Immigration Act del 1907 di tipo sanitario. Persone colpite da malattie infettive non potevano fare ingresso negli USA ed erano costrette a ritornare al loro paese di provenienza.

Se l'emigrante riusciva a superare la visita medica e il controllo legale - non doveva essere un criminale, o un anarchico - lo aspettava un controllo di tipo psico-attitudinale.

"Ogni sforzo era fatto per cogliere coloro la cui apparenza poteva anche solo in modo vago ricordare l'esistenza di una malattia o un atteggiamento psicopatico. Se il comportamento sembra oltremodo animato, apatico o apprensivo o se l'espressione è vuota e persa, l'immigrante veniva trattenuto".

I termini idiota, imbecille e debole di mente venivano usati anche nel testo della legge sull'immigrazione per descrivere livelli di debolezze mentali. Li identificò lo psciologo americano Henry H. Goddard. Goddard fu responsabile anche della metodologia dei primi test mentali nelle stazioni di immigrazione americane. Egli diffuse nel 1908 un test di intelligenza attraverso gli USA verso chiunque fosse sospettato di disturbo mentale. I dati che ricavò Goddard avvaloravano la tesi dell'esistenza di razze mentalmente inferiori rispetto ad altre. L'80% degli italiani, ebrei e russi venne classificato come mentalmente deficiente.

Con l'aumentare dei numeri di stranieri che tentavano l'ingresso in America le restrizioni si fecero più rigide. Nel 1924 si vietava l'ingresso anche agli analfabeti, lasciando fuori così un numero cospicuo di persone. Vuoi saperne di più su questi temi?
Leggi i regolamenti sull'immigrazione che abbiamo raccolto nell'Archivio del MEM - Memoria e Migrazioni.

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Immigrazione ieri e oggi - Galata Museo del Mare

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"Non vogliamo e dovremmo rifiutare questi italiani, russi o ebrei sporchi. Abbiamo già abbastanza sporcizia, miseria, crimine, malattie e morte per i fatti nostri senza doverci accollare pure questi". We do not want and we ought to refuse to land all or any of these unclean Italians or Russians or Hebrews.

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Immigration Museum - The Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island

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L'taliano che ha salvato l'arte dell'Olocausto

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L'taliano che ha salvato l'arte dell'Olocausto

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Roberto Malini è tra coloro che operano affinché si conservi la memoria della tragedia dei campi di sterminio. Amante della pittura, si è trasformato in un instancabile cacciatore di quadri dipinti prima, durante e dopo la persecuzione dei nazisti contro gli ebrei, alcuni di grande valore artistico e tutti profondamente emozionanti

Per ricostruire le storie degli eroi sconosciuti che, a rischio della vita, hanno salvato l'arte dalle guerre dell'ultimo secolo ho percorso migliaia di chilometri, in Italia e all'estero. Ma per illuminare la vicenda più emozionante dell'intero libro ("Operazione Salvataggio", editore Chiarelettere) mi è bastato imboccare la familiare Strada Padana e sbarcare nella vicina Treviglio, nella Bergamasca, dove abita uno scrittore che è riuscito a recuperare (e a donare al Museo della Shoah a Roma) oltre 170 opere di artisti ebrei, realizzate prima della persecuzione nazista e durante l'Olocausto: così Roberto Malini ha consegnato all'umanità un patrimonio fondamentale per comprendere l'arte yiddish, altrimenti destinata alla damnatio memoriae, e illuminato un buco nero della storia del Novecento.

Aveva 12 anni, Roberto, quando una sopravvissuta ai lager nazisti concluse la sua testimonianza "a nome di sei milioni di vittime ebree", in un'aula della scuola media Puecher di Milano, commuovendo insegnanti e allievi.

Di quell'invito perentorio il giovane Roberto avrebbe fatto una delle ragioni della sua vita e, dal 2000 in poi, si sarebbe impegnato a ricostruire le vite degli artisti dell'Olocausto e i loro dipinti.

La prima opera in assoluto l'ho comprata nel 2000 a Parigi: raffigurava un rabbino e proveniva dal ghetto di Łódź, in Polonia. Era firmata da David Weiss e datata 1939. Quel giorno presentavo in una galleria di Parigi un portfolio di 30 incisioni che avevo realizzato sui bambini ebrei deportati. L'inaugurazione della mostra coincise con la finale del campionato europeo di calcio Italia-Francia, e l'evento sportivo fece sì che si presentassero pochi curiosi, perlopiù esponenti della comunità ebraica. Uno di loro mi portò in dono questa opera che volli comunque pagare.

Il resto della raccolta (170 opere) è il risultato di viaggi in mezzo mondo, nelle comunità ebraiche e nei principali musei, specialmente negli Stati Uniti e in Israele. Quando non viaggiava, Malini usava telefono e computer. Così, amplificata dai messaggi telematici, si è concretizzata in poco più di un decennio l' Operazione Salvataggio di gran parte dell'arte yiddish.

Mi hanno fatto da bussola gli ammonimenti dei tanti testimoni che ho conosciuto personalmente e una frase del diario di Anna Frank: "Non penso a tutta la miseria, ma alla bellezza che rimane"

La pittura del dolore per tenere viva la memoria

Malini indica in circa 200 mila gli artisti ebrei internati nei lager, 50-60 mila di essi rappresentanti del filone artistico yiddish. Il valore delle opere donate viene sottolineato dalla curatrice della collezione, Carol Morganti, storica dell'arte:

Chi si avvicinasse a questa collezione donata da Malini rimarrà sorpreso dalla elevata qualità artistica di ogni singolo pezzo. Una parte delle opere risale al periodo precedente allo sterminio (anni Venti e Trenta), altre si collocano invece negli anni cruciali delle deportazioni e altre ancora nell'immediato dopoguerra.

La ricerca di Malini ha fatto emergere dall'oscurità maestri di notevole valore, come Jacob Vassover (vivente), Eugeniusz Aleksandroski, Tamara Deuel (scomparsa quest'anno), nomi non ancora acquisiti dalla storia dell'arte. Di altri, già noti alla letteratura artistica, sono stati trovati nuovi lavori: Shimon Balicki, Simcha Nornberg, Yehoshua Grossbard, Herbert Sandberg, Yehuda Bacon, Leo Kahn, Samuel Bak, Moshe Fishon, Moshe Chauwski, Leonard Bernstein, Fiszel Zber (Fiszel Zylberberg), Halina Olomucki, Esther Lurie, Regina Mudlak, Moshe Kupferman, Aldo Carpi e Simon Natan Karczmar. Completano la collezione opere grafiche conosciute di artisti noti: Leo Haas, Anatoli Kaplan, Richard Grune, Rudolph (Rudy) Lehmann e Hermann Struck.

Com'è noto, il feroce sterminatore degli artisti dell'Olocausto era un artista mancato: Hitler aveva desiderato molto diventare una firma dell'arte ma ebbe cocenti delusioni. ( vedi la sezione a fine articolo).

L'ultimo degli artisti yiddish ancora viventi, incontrato da Roberto Malini in Israele, è Jacob Vassover. La sua storia è esemplificativa di tutti gli altri. Nacque a Lòdz, in Polonia, nel 1926. La sua arte yiddish è la pittura degli shtetl, fatta di luce e colore puri, splendida come la Shekinah, la manifestazione dello spirito divino, e innocente come una mitzvah (una buona azione).

Ascoltiamo Malini:

Oggi Vassover, 88 anni, ha qualche problema di salute ma le sue idee sono chiare e forti come ieri. È difficile dire se l'arte yiddish avrà un futuro, mi ha spiegato, perché gli eredi di quella cultura quasi distrutta dal nazismo sono pochi e la maggior parte dipinge come se raccontasse delle storie. Lui no. Dipinge come si dipingeva nella sua Polonia; dipinge osservando un mondo che è rimasto dentro di lui, nella sua memoria. Mi ha confessato: "L'arte yiddish deve essere oggi pittura della memoria. La missione della mia vita d'artista è dipingere il mondo che c'era"

Un mondo davvero brutto, ma che potrebbe tornare. Satana è ovunque in qualunque momento.

Tra i quadri donati da Malini c'è anche uno Chagall

Roberto considera Jacob uno degli artisti più importanti del nostro tempo, l'erede di una cultura che poteva (e forse può ancora) influire non solo sull'immaginario, ma sul pensiero dell'umanità. Un pittore incomparabile, che il mondo non ha ancora scoperto, forse perché la sua opera rappresenta il simbolo di un dolore senza confini. E dal dolore gli esseri umani tendono a fuggire. Jacob ha visto suo fratello uscire dal camino di un crematorio di Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ha visto i suoi familiari, i suoi amici cadere nelle mani dei carnefici e subire un destino atroce. L'arte yiddish, prima che la popolazione ebraica di Lòdz fosse ridotta in cenere, celebrava la vita, la gioia, l'amore, la preghiera. Oggi celebra la memoria. Per restituirci il ricordo di un mondo perduto, Jacob Vassover è scampato alla più feroce persecuzione. Di 250.000 ebrei che vivevano a Lòdz prima della Seconda guerra mondiale, meno di 10.000 sono sopravvissuti. Dopo cinque anni nel ghetto, Jacob fu deportato ad Auschwitz, quindi in una fabbrica a Braunschweig. Poco prima della Liberazione dovette affrontare una lunga marcia della morte, nel corso della quale i suoi compagni cadevano uno dopo l'altro. Riascolto Malini:

Jacob mi ha ricordato: "Valevamo meno dei topi e io sopravvivevo pensando a un pezzo di pane. Il pensiero di quel pezzo di pane era il filo che mi legava alla vita". Il cibo e i ricordi. "Sì, i volti ebraici, i luoghi dove ero cresciuto, gli shtetl con i rabbini, i portatori d'acqua, i matrimoni, i musicisti klezmer e i violinisti sui tetti: e poi, sinagoghe e strade, negozi e scuole. Quei cari volti apparivano e appaiono ancora oggi nella mia mente, in continuazione".

La raccolta donata da Malini contiene opere di artisti famosi come Marc Chagall (una litografia, Mystical Crucifixion, 1950) e di anonimi. Molti autori ritrovati sono maestri che fiancheggiano i grandi dell'arte all'epoca e che forse avrebbero potuto essere protagonisti.

Assolutamente sì, il caso più eclatante è stato Chagall, con il suo legame con la tradizione yiddish e con la religione ebraica vissuta nel periodo dell'infanzia, che dal villaggio di Vitebsk, allora facente parte dell'Impero russo, oggi in Bielorussia, arriva in Francia, si afferma con i suoi personaggi eccentrici e sognanti, e la sua fama è pari quasi a quella di Picasso. Chagall è la punta di una piramide corposa che è l'arte yiddish. Per Vassover l'arte yiddish è semplice come una preghiera. Questi artisti dell'Olocausto stavano segnando una svolta molto importante per l'arte, una nuova simbologia, una nuova libertà del segno, un nuovo utilizzo delle prospettive, delle proporzioni tra personaggi. E poi il volo, il grande volo, così presente nelle opere di Chagall... vediamo che tutti volano ma non è Chagall che l'ha inventato, le persone che volano fanno parte dell'arte yiddish, perché simboleggiano l'ebreo che fugge dai pogrom, dalla persecuzione. L'artista immagina di fuggire in volo, di portarsi la casa sulle spalle...

Nel 2015 i dipinti donati da Malini al Museo della Shoah a Roma hanno costituito il nucleo di una mostra internazionale a Villa Torlonia, antica residenza romana di Mussolini, dove è stata istituita la collezione permanente.

A PROPOSITO

Ecco dove sono finiti

i quadri dipinti da Hitler

testo di Salvatore Giannella per Conoscere la storia

A Hitler, artista mancato, bruciò in particolare il rifiuto dell'Accademia di belle arti di Vienna, che nel 1907 emise un verdetto senza appello:

Sprovvisto di talento e di cultura generale. Prova di disegno insufficiente. Non ammesso.

Negli anni seguenti, nella sua vita raminga tra Vienna (città che lo respinse e che poi detesterà come simbolo dell'odiato ebraismo) e Monaco, dove si trasferì nel 1913, si guadagnò da vivere ricopiando cartoline, creando schienali campestri per i divani, dipingendo acquerelli per i corniciai.

Gli insuccessi accademici facevano sentire il dittatore nazista un artista incompreso da un mondo che, a suo dire, aveva abbandonato i canoni classici e si era fatto contaminare da modelli irrazionali e degenerati, derivati soprattutto dalla cultura e dalle tradizioni giudaiche, che il suo odio antisemita identificava quali germi di decadenza. Espresse chiaramente il suo pensiero a tale proposito nel Discorso per il congresso della cultura del 1935. Eccone uno stralcio: "Sono sicuro che pochi anni di governo politico e sociale nazionalsocialista regaleranno importanti innovazioni nel campo della produzione artistica e notevoli progressi nel settore, comparati ai risultati degli ultimi anni del regime giudaico. Per raggiungere tale fine, l'arte deve proclamare imponenza e bellezza e quindi rappresentare purezza e benessere. Chiunque voglia giustificare i disegni e le sculture di dadaisti, cubisti, futuristi o di quei malati degli espressionisti, sostenendo l'opportunità di uno stile primitivista, non capisce che compito dell'arte non è quello di nutrire germi di degenerazione, ma di trasmettere ideali di salute e di bellezza".

Picasso? Il male

Hitler, quindi, provava disgusto di fronte alle opere di Marc Chagall e dei pittori yiddish. Suscitavano in lui sentimenti iconoclasti le novità formali di Otto Müller, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann. Era convinto che il lavoro di Kandinskij, Paul Klee, Kathe Kollowitz, Edward Munch corrompesse i giovani artisti del Reich, distogliendoli dalla ricerca della perfezione. Nel suo mondo ideale, sterilizzato da ogni diversità e imperfezione, Pablo Picasso rappresentava il serpente di Eva, il male assoluto.

Spesso mi sento chiedere: dove sono finiti i quadri di Hitler? Quattro dei suoi dipinti li ho visti con i miei occhi nel luglio del 1981 (ero inviato del settimanale L'Europeo) in un deposito dell'esercito statunitense al pianterreno di un anonimo palazzo di dieci piani ad Alexandria, in Virginia, a meno di venti chilometri da Washington. Rappresentano vie e piazze cittadine, rigorosamente prive di ogni traccia di vita. In occasione della mia visita al deposito dei quadri di Hitler mi furono mostrati anche alcuni dei 6953 quadri firmati da 369 Kriegsmaler, pittori di guerra nazisti. Rappresentavano la desolazione, la distruzione sui vari fronti, dal bombardamento di Cassino ai francesi in fuga davanti ai Panzer, ai villaggi ucraini che bruciano tra le bandiere tedesche. Mi sorprese la diversità dei soggetti: volti di volontari francesi e cosacchi ritratti accanto a quelli dei soldati tedeschi, lugubri bandiere e svastiche del Reich, capi politici e militari a cavallo intenti ad avanzare tra i mostri del bolscevismo e del liberalismo.

Strumenti di propaganda

"Come nascono questi quadri?" chiesi alla custode di quella collezione nazista, Marilou Guernes. Mi fu spiegato che l'idea venne proprio al Führer. Da artista mancato, riconosceva l'importanza dell'arte come strumento di propaganda della dottrina nazista. Ancora prima dell'invasione della Polonia (1939) aveva invitato vari artisti a dipingere in studio scene di combattimento della Prima guerra mondiale. Roman Feldmeyer, per esempio, dipinge immaginarie scene di battaglia sul fronte di Fromelles e Lille, dove aveva prestato servizio l'allora caporale Hitler.

Il programma artistico ufficiale della Germania viene elaborato nel 1941 quando, durante uno dei rari viaggi al fronte, il Führer vede alcuni quadri di ottima fattura eseguiti nel tempo libero dai soldati-pittori per i comandi locali. Hitler, che si ritiene un'autorità in tutti i campi dell'arte, istituisce presso l'alto comando delle forze armate un reparto speciale composto da un'ottantina fra i migliori pittori. Li seleziona tra i disegnatori della scuola di Paul Klee e di Vasilij Kandinskij, fa venire i più bravi dalla periferia dell'impero (da Merano, per esempio, fa le valigie Rudolph Hengstenberg). Nomina come supervisore del programma un capitano, Luitpold Adam. E a lui ricorda l'obiettivo principale del reparto: glorificare i risultati ottenuti dalle forze armate tedesche e fornire un supporto alle attività di propaganda destinate a rafforzare e a perpetuare lo spirito militaristico.

Gli artisti vengono inviati sui vari fronti di guerra dove prendono schizzi e appunti di scene di vita (sul fronte italiano si segnala Herbert Agricola, discendente di una famiglia di pittori pendolare da secoli tra Italia e Germania). In un secondo tempo rientrano nei loro studi nelle retrovie e trasferiscono sulla tela le scene cui hanno assistito. I loro quadri finiscono esposti nei comandi militari, nei musei, nelle mense. I pittori che ricevono un incarico ufficiale sono costretti ad accettare le direttive artistiche di Hitler: stretta aderenza al realismo, nessuna concessione alle correnti artistiche di avanguardia che si stanno sviluppando in Europa.

"Raccogliete tutti i quadri di ispirazione nazista e attendete nuove indicazioni": l'ordine del presidente americano Harry Truman arriva con il messaggio cifrato JCS 1067/6 al generale Dwight Eisenhower il 15 maggio 1945, otto giorni dopo la fine della guerra. La ricerca diventa una vera e propria caccia al tesoro. Dipinti e schizzi sono stati portati via e nascosti nei luoghi più impensati durante gli ultimi, caotici giorni del Reich. Parte della collezione di Hitler è stata nascosta nella famosa miniera di salgemma ad Altaussee, in Austria. Anche la collezione Alti comandi di Adam viene divisa: acquerelli e disegni finiscono nella baracca abbandonata di un taglialegna vicino alla frontiera con la Cecoslovacchia, mentre quella di Heinrich Himmler, Arte di guerra delle SS, finisce a Kelheim in una sala congressi.

Che fare delle 8722 opere raccolte? La decisione è presa a Potsdam nel luglio del 1945 da Stalin, Truman e dal premier inglese Clement Attlee: "È dichiarata illegale l'installazione di qualsiasi quadro o altro emblema che conservi o tramandi la tradizione militare germanica". In base all'accordo, Washington s'impegna a distruggere i quadri della collezione di guerra. Che, intanto, vengono imbarcati e portati in America, al Museo di storia militare di Washington.

Alcuni quadri, quelli "politicamente neutrali", sono stati assegnati agli uffici dei parlamentari e alle caserme americane. Tutti quelli presi agli alleati dei nazisti, i giapponesi, per esempio, sono stati restituiti a Tokyo: erano 150 tele. Nell'ottobre del 1950 il dipartimento di Stato ha autorizzato il rientro in Germania di ben 1659 quadri riconosciuti "senza contenuto né militaristico né politico". Altri dieci quadri, tutti del pittore norvegese Claud Bergen, sono stati imbarcati il 6 agosto 1979. Destinazione: Bremerhaven, sede di un museo di guerra navale. "Invece terremo qui gli acquerelli di Hitler e quei quadri che potrebbero diventare simboli per i neonazisti" concluse Marilou Guernes accompagnandomi all'uscita della galleria-bunker.

Fonte: Conoscere la storia, febbraio 2015, nuovo mensile della Sprea Editori. Così lo presenta il suo ideatore, Mario Sprea: "Nel fitto panorama delle riviste di Storia, alcune eccellenti e autorevoli (come " BBC History Italia", della nostra scuderia), Conoscere la Storia si distingue non solo per l'eccellenza dei testi e delle illustrazioni ma per la qualità dell'impronta divulgativa. Nell'alimentare la passione per la storia dei suoi lettori, Conoscere la Storia, derivata dalla fortunata rivista inglese All About History, fornisce una grande quantità di informazioni accessorie, insiste su elementi mnemonici e visivi, come planimetrie dei luoghi in cui si sono verificati gli avvenimenti narrati, scalette cronologiche, riferimenti topografici. Un metodo quasi didattico - una didattica affascinante, ricca di dettagli e di curiosità, con suggestive copertine disegnate da grandi illustratori - che permette a chi non ha una grande cultura di farsela, di ricordare, di stabilire collegamenti continui tra fatti e personaggi. Una rivista pensata non solo per quelli che sanno già tutto ma anche e soprattutto per quelli che vogliono sapere tutto".

Salvatore Giannella, giornalista che ha ideato e cura con passione questo blog, ha diretto il mensile scientifico del Gruppo L'Espresso Genius, il settimanale L'Europeo, il primo mensile di natura e civiltà Airone (1986-1994), BBC History Italia e ha curato le pagine di cultura e scienza del settimanale Oggi (2000-2007). Ha scritto libri ( "Un'Italia da salvare", "L'Arca dell'arte", "I Nicola", "Voglia di cambiare", "Operazione Salvataggio: gli eroi sconosciuti che hanno salvato l'arte dalle guerre"), curato volumi di Tonino Guerra ed Enzo Biagi e sceneggiato docu-film per il programma Rai "La storia siamo noi" (clicca qui per approfondire).

Da "I salvatori dell'arte":

A Cassina, alle porte di Milano, ha aperto il MAIO, il Museo dell'Arte in Ostaggio (testo di Tina Lepri per il Giornale dell'Arte online, fotocronaca inaugurazione di Vittorio Giannella

Quei 1.653 tesori rubati da Hitler e ancora prigionieri di guerra (testo di Salvatore Giannella)

Pur sfigurata dalla guerra, ai soldati "aggiustaveneri" l'Italia sembrò bellissima (testo di Ilaria Dagnini Brey per Giannella Channel)

"La Tempesta" nella tempesta della guerra e altre storie di eroici salvatori dell'arte (testo di Mirella Serri per Sette - Corriere della Sera)

Fu trafugata dai nazisti nel 1943, la "Carica dei bersaglieri" torna alla Garibaldi

La Venere di San Giovanni in Perareto torna a Rimini dopo mezzo secolo (testo di Sabrina Urbinati per Giannella Channel)

Sergio Romano elogia Giuseppe Bottai, paladino della cultura: "Era convinto che il nostro patrimonio fosse la prova dell'esistenza di una nazione italiana" (testo di Salvatore Giannella per Sette - Corriere della Sera, elaborazioni artistiche di Giacomo Giannella)

Chi li ha visti? I tesori di Piemonte e Lombardia ancora prigionieri di guerra

Chi li ha visti? I tesori d'arte della Toscana ancora prigionieri di guerra

Chi li ha visti? I primi 60 tesori d'arte di Firenze ancora prigionieri di guerra

Quei tesori d'Italia che intrigano gli Indiana Jones. Armati di metal detector, i predatori di antiche ricchezze scandagliano terreni ed esplorano fortezze dal Piemonte alla Sardegna. Per vivere il brivido del ritrovamento (testo di Salvatore Giannella per Sette - Corriere della Sera)

Gli 007 dei Carabinieri riportano in Italia da Ginevra 45 casse di reperti romani ed etruschi trafugati. Erano in depositi di proprietà dell'antiquario inglese Robin Symes, arrestato

I monumenti di Arquata del Tronto, nelle Marche, prima delle scosse, nel censimento fatto dal futuro "salvatore dell'arte", Pasquale Rotondi (testo di Pasquale Rotondi, introduzione di Salvatore Giannella)

L'uomo che ha combattuto nella ex Jugoslavia per salvare i suoi tesori d'arte. Un nuovo libro illumina la figura e le azioni di Francesco Papafava, una figura a metà tra Sindbad, l'Ulisse d'Oriente e Gino Strada, il medico fondatore di Emergency. Ha fatto fino all'ultimo il pendolare tra la sua casa sulle rive dell'Arno e il Kosovo, per invocare un aiuto (concesso) affinché possano rinascere 1.800 monasteri e affreschi stupendi (testo di Salvatore Giannella)

E Sgarbi annotò: onore a Pasquale Rotondi, salvò l'arte dalla furia nazista. Il Montefeltro in festa per la settimana ad arte dedicata al premio nato vent'anni fa per illuminare chi pratica l'arte di salvare l'arte (testo di Vittorio Sgarbi per QN, foto di Filippo Biagianti)

La dichiariamo dottoressa in legge grazie alla sua tesi su guardie e ladri d'arte. Una studentessa in giurisprudenza all'Università Cattolica di Milano assiste a una serata condotta da uno 007 dei Carabinieri (il capitano Francesco Provenza) impegnato nel recupero delle opere d'arte. S'innamora dell'argomento e s'impegna per un anno in una documentata tesi di laurea che Giannella Channel, dato il grande interesse, presenta condensata in più puntate (testo di Camilla Angelino dalla tesi "Crimini contro il patrimonio culturale")

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Roberto Malini, l'italiano che ha salvato l'arte dell'Olocausto

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Roberto Malini è tra coloro che operano affinché si conservi la memoria della tragedia dei campi di sterminio. Amante della pittura, si è trasformato in un instancabile cacciatore di quadri dipinti prima, durante e dopo la persecuzione dei nazisti contro gli ebrei, alcuni di grande valore artistico e tutti profondamente emozionanti Per ricostruire le storie degli eroi sconosciuti che, a rischio della vita, hanno salvato l'arte dalle guerre dell'ultimo secolo ho percorso migliaia di chilometri, in Italia e all'estero.

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During the 19th and 20th centuries, child migration was used to promote imperial, economic, racial, social and religious goals. The people behind these agendas often ignored the fact that at the heart of all these plans were young children.

The children were separated from their families, often told lies about their parents and deported from their countries of birth. Governments in Britain and Australia failed to protect them. They were often the victims of criminal neglect and physical, sexual and emotional abuse. They were deprived of love and the stability of a caring home. Even allowing for the harsh conditions of their former lives, and the general disregard for children's welfare at the time, this treatment was inexcusable.

Some children managed to create fulfilling lives for themselves, but many more have had a lifetime of physical and emotional trauma. Their families in Britain have also suffered greatly. Apologies from the Australian and British governments in 2009 and 2010 and funds to assist family reunion have helped redress the injustices of the past, but for many it has been too late.

Here are the stories of three child migrants: Hugh McGowan, Sandra Anker and Michael Harvey.

Hugh McGowan: There was never, ever, anybody on my side.

Hugh McGowan never knew who his father was. Without financial or family support, his mother placed him with the Quarriers Home near Glasgow, Scotland, just before his second birthday.

At the age of 13, Hugh was one of five boys sent in 1961 to Dhurringile, the Presbyterian Church's training farm for migrant boys near Tatura, Victoria. A former pastoral property and then prisoner-of-war camp, the house was large and cold, the farm rundown. Hugh was unhappy and bullied at school, and he was soon removed and set to work as a farmhand. He worked 7 days a week, received no wages, and was sexually abused.

Hugh left 'care' when he was 17 to make his own way; he found himself unprepared for the real world. Isolation, lack of education, abuse and a loveless upbringing made it hard to build normal relationships. He made few friends, had difficulties throughout his working life and turned to alcohol.

In 2000, Hugh asked the Child Migrants Trust to find his family. His mother had died, but the Trust introduced him to a half-sister who had no idea of his existence. They have met several times, but it is still a fragile relationship.

Now 63, Hugh has retired from work, stopped drinking, and made a happy life. He credits this entirely to his own determination and the love of his wife and sons. For a man who never knew his parents and was deported from his country of birth, his home and his family are the most important things in the world.

Sandra Anker: I thought there had been a terrible mistake.

Six-year-old Sandra Hill believed she was going to South Africa to live with relatives. Instead, she left the SS Asturias in Melbourne with four other children to live at Northcote Farm School in western Victoria. There had been no mistake; she was the only child of a marriage that ended before her birth, and in 1950 her guardian sent her to Australia.

Sandra lived in a group cottage with an 'auntie' and 11 other children. Even the youngest children had a heavy load of chores before and after school. Discipline was always strict, and occasionally brutal; Sandra believes her partial hearing loss was caused in 1950 when Northcote's principal hit her. Nevertheless, she settled into orphanage life, attended high school and formed friendships that continue today.

Sandra left Northcote at the age of 16 to work in Melbourne. Her inexperience and social isolation led to an early and disastrous marriage. Now re-married, she still struggles with the legacy of her upbringing, making it difficult for her to understand relationships and family life. She wonders what her life might have been if she had stayed in England.

In 1983 Sandra was contacted by her mother's relatives and in 2000 the Child Migrants Trust found her father's family, although both of her parents were deceased. For Sandra, the initial joy of finding family has developed into a complicated but hopeful relationship. Reunion has not meant the end of her story, but the start of a new one.

Michael Harvey: My mother said, 'I want my boys home.'

Michael Harvey and his twin brother Terry left St. Joseph's Orphanage in 1952, bound for Glenorchy, Tasmania. They grew up believing that their parents had been killed in the Blitz.

They went to live at St. John Bosco Boys' Town, run by the Salesian Order. It was a harsh place; discipline was dispensed with the Black Doctor, a length of rubber with a metal truncheon embedded in it. In such an abusive environment, the boys relied on each other for support and formed friendships that have lasted through the years.

Michael left Boys' Town when he was 14 to work as a farmhand. He speaks of this earlier life as a time of great pain, and anger that could not always be controlled. He learned to find comfort in solitude and the clean open spaces of Tasmania.

In 1994 the Child Migrants Trust found Michael and Terry's mother. She had not died in the war, but had placed the boys in the orphanage when their father deserted her. After more than 50 years, they were re-united.

It has been, in Michael's words, both a joy and a burden. He is aware of the difficulties the reunion has raised for other family members, but finding his family has given him a sense of identity and a feeling of closure. Michael's mother died in 2006; in his entire life, he spent only seven weeks with his mother, but they were the most important weeks of his life.
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During the 19th and 20th centuries, child migration was used to promote imperial, economic, racial, social and religious goals. The people behind these agendas often ignored the fact that at the heart of all these plans were young children. The children were separated from their families, often told lies about their parents and deported from their countries of birth.

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archives/historical documents

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Previously unseen records shedding new light on life in Victorian workhouses have gone online for the first time.

They include thousands of untouched 19th Century letters, memos and reports between the Cardiff and Llanfyllin Poor Law Unions and the boards regulating workhouses in London.

The documents have been pieced together by volunteer groups, including several in Wales.

The 'Living the Poor Life' project was led by the National Archives.

Experts at the London institution say the new digitally scanned catalogue of records will prove a vital research tool in helping understand what life was like for those forced to live in the workhouses as well as those who ran them.

The project also reveals how governments throughout the century treated the less advantaged and shows the early origins of the welfare state.

Provisions like health care, pauper education and money for emigration are detailed.

But it is also clear that the system was often corrupt and the records recount instances of family breakdown, poverty, greed, violence and neglect of the poor.

Among the more horrific tales from Wales is the 1844 story of a man from Cardiff who died after walking several miles to receive relief.

POOR LAW TIMELINE

1601 - the Poor Law marked the beginning of state-provided relief for the poor.

It was designed as a 'deterrent' relief system, a last resort for the most destitute.

Many parishes established workhouses during the 18th Century, and by the 1830s most had at least one.

1782 - Gilbert's Act allowed parishes to share the cost of poor relief by forming unions to build and maintain workhouses.

1834 - the Poor Law Amendment Act sets up a centralised Poor Law Commission in Wales and England.

Individual parishes were formed into Poor Law Unions, each of which was to have a union workhouse.

1 April 1930 - the workhouse system was abolished and replaced by other social legislation for the unemployed and retired.

Workhouse conditions were deliberately harsh to deter the able-bodied idle poor from relying on them.

Education was provided, but pauper children were often forcibly apprenticed without the permission or knowledge of their parents.

Inmates surrendered their own clothes and wore a distinctive uniform

And in Llanfyllin, Powys, volunteers uncovered the story of Thomas Jones, a vicious schoolmaster straight from the pages of a Dickens novel, who reportedly beat a boy of eight with a heavy stick.

The majority of the documents are letters, memos and reports between the Cardiff and Llanfyllin Poor Law Unions - covering Glamorganshire, Montgomeryshire and Denbighshire - and the Poor Law Commission and Poor Law Board in London.

Project director Dr Paul Carter, who is principal modern records specialist at The National Archives, said: "In many ways the lives of the poor are still hidden behind the impressive statistics of 19th Century industry and trade.

"The lives of those who remained poor during Britain's tenure of 'workshop of the world' are harder to 'reckon' and much harder for the researcher to track down.

"The groups who have catalogued the Cardiff and Llanfyllin records have made this kind of research so much easier."

The documents exist in 16,741 large bound volumes and cover the period from 1834 to 1900.

The project has involved cataloguing and making available digital scans of 105 of those volumes relating to 20 areas (22 poor law unions) across Wales and England.

Thanks to the work of 200 volunteers, the records are now keyword searchable, so academics, family and local historians, colleges and schools will be able to use them as a research tool.

The project uncovered numerous stories of ordinary people caught up in the Poor Law system.

Among the case studies unearthed during the project was the tale of former collier William Smith, who had lost the use of his arms in a pit explosion.

In 1847 letters detail accusations that his death was accelerated by "ill-usage" by the Poor Law authorities in Cardiff.

Records also show that in Cardiff in 1852, a letter from a pauper survives in which he lodges a complaint against a surgeon.

He claims the surgeon, a Mr Lewis, treated his patients inhumanly and he also criticises a master who made it his particular business to complain to the doctors and governors about the paupers.

It is thought that nearly 80% of the population of Wales and England in the mid-1800s were affected by the Poor Law Unions.

Until now, much of the information in these files remained a mystery as they were difficult to access.

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Previously unseen records shedding new light on life in Victorian workhouses have gone online for the first time. They include thousands of untouched 19th Century letters, memos and reports between the Cardiff and Llanfyllin Poor Law Unions and the boards regulating workhouses in London.

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Anne Imhof col Leone d'Oro (foto Jacopo Salvi, courtesy La Biennale)

In un'intervista, Georg Baselitz lanciò una provocazione che dopo quattro anni brucia ancora: "Frauen malen nicht so gut", le donne non dipingono granché bene, sentenziò uno dei più famosi Matador dell'arte tedesca. Un'asserzione inquietante. Che rivela tutte le difficoltà del 79enne pittore verso la inarrestabile rivoluzione in atto nel campo dell'arte. I fatto cioè che all'inizio del XXI secolo alla testa di musei o gallerie d'avanguardia, nelle accademie o nei cieli più eterei della critica sono sempre di più le donne a rivestire posizioni chiave e a far sentire la loro voce. Così come sono soprattutto tante artiste a presentare opere sempre più incisive all'ultima Biennale, nel nuovo show o al prossimo, immancabile evento multimediale.

"La presenza delle donne è sempre più marcata a livello globale nel campo artistico", inizia a dirci Alya Sebti, direttrice della Ifa-Galerie a Berlino ed ex curatrice della Biennale di Marrakech. "E questo è un segnale di forte mutamento sociale e di mentalità". E dopo un attimo di riflessione la giovane curatrice, nata a Casablanca nel 1983, aggiunge sorridendo: "Persino davanti alla Borsa di Wall Street ora c'è una bambina ad affrontare i mercati finanziari". In effetti, la statuetta in bronzo della "Fearless Girl" che sulla piazzetta del New York Stock Exchange sfida il toro infuriato (opera di Arturo Di Modica) ha già fatto il giro del mondo, sollevando varie polemiche.

È un fatto però che quest'anno, e per la prima volta, i quattro finalisti del prestigioso premio della National Galerie di Berlino sono quattro giovani artiste. Come è un fatto che nella collezione della New Tate Modern a Londra, su 800 opere di 300 artisti da 50 Paesi, "la percentuale delle artiste è aumentata dal 17 al 50 per cento", spiega la direttrice della New Tate Frances Morris.

E nei ranking degli artisti più quotati da tempo ormai, insieme a Gerhard Richter o Bruce Nauman, ci sono Rosemarie Trockel, Cindy Sherman o l'immortale Louise Bourgeois. Se questo è il trend, non stupisce che al centro della sua "Terra inquieta", a Milano, Massimiliano Gioni abbia posto "Mapping Journey Project", il bel video dell'artista marocchina Bouchra Khalili in cui diversi migranti raccontano la loro Odissea per mezza Africa ed Europa.

Alla Documenta di Kassel invece Khalili - nata a Casablanca nel 1975 - ha portato "The Tempest Society": un video di 60 minuti in cui dei giovani ateniesi affrontano, su un palco teatrale, lo stato precario in cui versa oggi il Mediterraneo. "Il video", ci dice Khalili, "prende spunto dalla storia vera di "Al Assifa", gruppo teatrale di operai nordafricani e studenti francesi nei primi anni '60 a Parigi". Le lotte e tempeste politiche del "maggio francese" si combinano così a quelle attuali, i progetti (e le utopie) degli anni '70 a quelli di oggi. Per due volte nel video di Khalili risentiamo versi di Pasolini e il ritratto del poeta friulano compare al centro di "The Tempest Society". "La mia arte", riassume Khalili, "è poesia civica nel senso pasoliniano: porto in scena diseguaglianza e voglia di solidarietà, ma senza sacrificare poesia e bellezza".

Non capita a tutti gli artisti di esporre sia allo Skulptur Projekt di Münster, festival decennale di scultura, che alla Documenta che ogni cinque si tiene a Kassel: Nairy Baghramian ha avuto questo privilegio. A Kassel l'artista, nata in Iran nel 1971 ma trapiantata a Berlino, ha portato una sua rivisitazione dell'enigmatico "The Iron Table" del 2002. "Un'opera in cui parto da un breve racconto di Jane Bowles", spiega l'artista. I materiali malleabili e industriali (plastiche, blocchi di cera, tubi di plexigas) e le forme di protesi sghembe danno alle sue installazioni un'aura misterica, e irritante.

A Münster Nairy ha piantato nei cortili del Palazzo Erbdrosten le sue ricurve asticelle proprio nei "Privileged Points": titolo che rimanda ai punti nevralgici di musei e gallerie ove i curatori dispongono le opere (e il pubblico si aspetta di vedere arte). È con sculture evanescenti, nell'atto di dileguarsi, ma con titoli sorprendenti (l'intera mostra "Slip of the Tongue", a Palazzo Grassi del 2015, doveva il titolo a una sua magnifica installazione) che Baghramian espone in tutto il mondo.

Le sculture di "Hand me Down", nel 2015, nei giardini e nelle sale del Museo Tamayo a Mexico City. Con "Scruff of the Neck", al Museum Konstruktiv di Zurigo, ha spuntato l'anno scorso il Zurich Art Prize. E l'ultima sua mostra, "Deformation professionell", dopo essere stata allo Smak, il museo di Gent, a settembre sarà al The Walker Art Center di Minneapolis. E per il 2018 sono in programma sue mostre al Nasher Center di Dallas e al Museo Reina Sofia di Madrid.

"Il femminismo ha rivoluzionato il mondo dell'arte, e noi donne ci siamo inventate un nuovo modo di fare arte". Così Monica Bonvicini ci accoglie nel suo atelier - zeppo di specchi, catene e cinghie nere, e tende rosa antico - in una ex fabbrica del quartiere berlinese di Wedding. Già in un suo video del 2000 - "Run, Take one square or two" - l'artista di origini veneziane sfotteva Bruce Nauman che, annoiato, se ne stava in studio a girar video, mentre una ragazza sfrecciava per strada al ritmo di "Run" di Lou Reed. "Nella mia arte sono in gioco l'architettura e la ricostruzione delle identità sessuali attraverso le forme degli spazi", spiega lei che, fra l'altro, insegna scultura a Vienna: un esempio della nuova, massiccia presenza delle artiste nelle accademie, che è uno segni del netto cambiamento del paesaggio artistico.

"Quando nel 2003 ho iniziato a insegnare a Vienna eravamo due sole donne", ricorda Bonvicini, "oggi siamo molte docenti". Nel frattempo lei è diventata un'artista richiesta in mezzo mondo: sino a febbraio la sua retrospettiva "her hand in the room" copriva 700 metri quadrati del "Baltic" a Gateshead, una delle più grandi "fabbriche" dell'arte del Regno Unito. Una sua foto-arazzo di cinque metri "sul desiderio sempre più mercificabile della carne", come lo definisce lei, era di recente alle Deichtor Hallen di Amburgo. "Ora sto tornando alla scultura e alla pittura", racconta.

Mozzafiato le mura incatenate a schiacciare un fallo in vetro di Murano che di recente ha ricostruito per "Structural Psychodramas", una mostra da Mitchell-Innes & Nash a New York. Dal 15 settembre al 12 novembre l'artista italo-berlinese porterà tre spettacolari lavori architettonici alla 15° Biennale di Istanbul, curata dal duo di artisti Elmgreen & Dragret.

"La presenza delle donne nell'arte è uno spostamento tettonico a più livelli", spiega la storica dell'arte Shulamit Bruckstein. "Sia per il loro ruolo nei musei che per il formato che le curatrici danno alle mostre". Quella che la Bruckstein, creatrice della piattaforma artistica (digitale) "House of Taswir", ha appena allestito a Berlino s'intitola "Lady Dada Kalam". In un salotto di 80 metri quadrati, un gruppo di sei giovani curatrici provenienti da Kabul, Bagdad o Tunisi ha realizzato una mostra folle di 113 opere, con oggetti di antiquariato e creazioni di 40 artisti contemporanei. "Un'esplosione dadaista di arte, tempo e discorsi", spiega orgogliosa Bruckstein. "Una via di mezzo tra il bazar e la Wunderkammer rinascimentale, il salotto diplomatico e il Diwan orientale". Tant'è vero che ogni acquirente, oltre a trattare il prezzo, poteva discutere in un privée con i creatori delle opere o con una delle sei "Lady Dada".

Oltre a una nuova sensibilità per le mostre, l'altro germe che l'onda femminile ha innestato nell'arte "è la porosità di tutti i presunti schemi politici e il rifiuto di ogni essenzialismo", sintetizza Alya Sebti. L'ultimo evento che la curatrice ha organizzato all'Ifa Galerie (dal 31 marzo all'11 giugno) è "Untie to Tie", sui retaggi coloniali nelle società contemporanee con la magica presenza delle maschere di Pascale Marthine Tajou, artista (uomo) del Camerun che ci tiene a chiamarsi con un nome femminile. Dal 28 settembre la nuova mostra di Sebti verterà sulle "Formen des Feminismus": "Oggi non c'è più un solo femminismo", riassume, "né un codice fisso di mascolinità".

Il rifiuto di una visione lineare, omogenea, eurocentrica della storia dell'arte, così come Hegel la dipingeva nella sua "Estetica", ritorna anche sulle scalinate del padiglione tedesco a Venezia, dove incontriamo Susanne Pfeffer.

La direttrice del Museum Fridericianum di Kassel ha curato quest'anno il padiglione più visitato dei Giardini: quello con la scritta "Germania" sul tetto e in cui la 39enne Anne Imhof ha messo in scena un "Faust". Le pareti del padiglione, costruito in epoca nazista nel '38, di un bianco spettrale. Un team di dodici protagonisti che la Imhof (che da ragazza suonava nella Band "Figlie di buona famiglia") inchioda in performance che spaziano dalle due alle quattro ore e mezzo, e su piedistalli rialzati alle pareti. O a intrecciarsi, lottare, amarsi dietro e persino sotto gabbie-pedane di vetro. Sorvegliati all'esterno da una (allegra) coppia di doberman. Le frustrate musicali e le sincopata regia della Imhof hanno un impatto dirompente non solo sul pubblico (in fila per ore ai Giardini), ma anche sulla giuria che ha giustamente premiato con il Leone d'oro l'artista tedesca.

"Con l'opera complessa ed intensa di Imhof", ci dice Susanne Pfeffer, "è l'intero padiglione Germania a trasformarsi in una performance che occupa lo spazio e coinvolge - ma anche esclude - non solo i protagonisti del Faust, ma il pubblico che assiste all'opera". E che con una selva di cellullari riprende ipnotizzato le gesta rabbiose, al limite del sadomasochismo di questo inquietante "Faust" (che, in tedesco, vuol dire anche "pugno"). "Ci sono modi diversi per realizzare un discorso critico nell'arte", ci dice l'artista turca Nevin Aladag, "anche con oggetti senza voce e i più comuni". Le sue "installazioni-musicali" che inventa con i più impensabili oggetti riescono sempre delicate, e divertenti.

La performance di Nevin Aladag a Venezia (foto Elena de Stabile)

Alla Documenta di Atene, Aladag ha creato un'orchestra con poltroncine e divanetti della nonna, traballanti tavolini e sedie trasformati in (più o meno armonici) tamburelli, arpe e percussioni. All'Arsenale di Venezia ha presentato "Traces", un video in cui sono i giardinetti e le strade di Stoccarda - una giostra arrugginita, un cavalluccio a dondolo, un lampione - a suonare violini, fisarmoniche e tamburelli. E alla vernice di "Viva Arte Viva" l'artista ha fatto danzare, su pedane-tamburi, sette ragazze con micidiali tacchi a spillo e un walkman in testa (e il titolo del brano stampato sulla t-shirt nera). "La musica la si vede all'opera", dice l'artista, "anche senza sentirla".

L'opera di Alicja Kwade all'Arsenale (Foto Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia)

Linguaggi, materiali e forme dell'arte al femminile possono anche essere quelli più ermetici di Alicja Kwade. "Mi interessa il tempo e le interpretazioni che cerchiamo di dare", dice l'artista polacca, "al senso dell'esistenza". Per illuminare questa ricerca, alla Kwade basta poggiare un vetro alla parete di un museo, e un altro a terra rotto in più punti. Oppure, come in una installazione al museo Schirn di Francoforte, un orologio (o una lampadina accesa) che ruotano a mo' di clessidra dal tetto. Opere minimaliste queste della Kwade, ma che - dal Reykjavik Art Museum al Mudam nel Lussemburgo alla Domus Collection di Pechino - sono nelle collezioni di mezzo mondo. A Venezia con i pianeti sparsi e i suoni registrati in "Pars pro Toto", l'artista ha realizzato una delle opere più spettacolari della Biennale. E con "Welten Linie", labirinto di specchi, pietre e legni colorati esposto sempre all'Arsenale, l'opera più fotografata.

Il filo rosso, se c'è, che attraversa le opere, le mostre e le posizioni raggiunte da artiste e curatrici nel mondo dell'arte? "La trama di fondo", azzarda Chiara Bertola, curatrice della Fondazione Querini Stampalia, "è forse la cura che le donne impiegano nei loro lavori e la coscienza al contempo della fragilità delle loro opere. In questa vulnerabilità c'è la traccia di una Bellezza al femminile". Dalle faustiane scene della Imhof, alle graffianti sculture di Baghramian o di Bonvicini, la matrice resta quella minuziosa cura con cui Elisabetta Di Maggio intaglia - sulle mura o sotto vetro - foglie di cavolo, edera o castagno. La magia d'una poesia incisa su fogli di carta velina o saponette di Marsiglia. Il semplice, folle volo di farfalla dell'arte-donna, in mostra sino al 24 settembre alla Fondazione Querini.

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Ecco perché l'arte è sempre più in mano alle donne

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Alla Tate Modern di Londra su 800 opere di 300 artisti la presenza femminile è passata dal 17 al 50 per cento. E al premio della National Galerie di Berlino le finaliste erano quattro artiste. All'inizio del XXI secolo creatrici e curatrici hanno sempre più in mano le leve dell'arte.

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Un "ritrovamento archeologico" in giardino è il pretesto per un percorso di scoperta guidata sulla storia dei luoghi e delle persone per i bambini dell'ultimo anno della scuola dell'infanzia. La narrazione di questa esperienza è ricostruita attraverso un diario che l'insegnante ha elaborato trascrivendo le verbalizzazioni e integrando disegni dei bambini che vi hanno partecipato. La tecnologia e la LIM, in particolare, attraversano il percorso supportando la ricerca delle fonti e del protocollo di lavoro che i "piccoli archeologi" mettono in atto supportati dall'insegnante e da un'esperta.

" Oggi dovevamo uscire a piedi per il nostro quartiere per vedere con i nostri occhi gli edifici costruiti tanto, tanto tempo fa come la torre che da noi tutti chiamano "La Torraccia" e che pensiamo sia la torre da cui il nostro quartiere ha preso il nome: "Torrespaccata", e che, invece, si chiama "Torre di San Giovanni o Torre di Centocelle", ma pioveva e abbiamo dovuto rinunciare ma... la solita maestra si è fatta venire un'altra idea che non ci ha voluto però spiegare subito, così ci ha portato ancora nell'aula multimediale e dopo aver acceso il computer e la lavagna LIM ci ha detto che ci faceva andare alla "Torraccia" con Internet. "Come è possibile...?" ci siamo detti e lei senza battere ciglio ma battendo tasti e scrivendo parole ci ha fatto apparire sullo schermo un cielo stellato: "Questo è il cosmo! Il cosmo è il cielo oltre il pianeta terra..."

Grado scolastico: Scuola dell'infanzia - 5 anni Campi di esperienza
Il sé e l'altro
Il bambini sa di avere una storia personale e familiare, conosce le tradizioni della famiglia, della comunità e le mette a confronto con altre; Riconosce i più importanti segni della sua cultura e del territorio, le istituzioni, i servizi pubblici, il funzionamento delle piccole comunità e della città.

Durata: anno scolastico

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Un "ritrovamento archeologico" in giardino è il pretesto per un percorso di scoperta guidata sulla storia dei luoghi e delle persone per i bambini dell'ultimo anno della scuola dell'infanzia. La narrazione di questa esperienza è ricostruita attraverso un diario che l'insegnante ha elaborato trascrivendo le verbalizzazioni e integrando disegni dei bambini che vi hanno partecipato.

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2018 anno europeo del patrimonio culturale

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2018 anno europeo del patrimonio culturale

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2018, anno europeo del patrimonio culturale. Come si prepara l'Italia?

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Il nostro Paese ha una filiera di beni che vale 260 miliardi, e può cogliere l'occasione delle prossime celebrazioni per risolvere le sue fragilità

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La scena è affascinante. All'inizio, una telecamera attaccata al muso di un piccolo aereo telecomandato mostra solo l'oscillante orizzonte assolato di un'area desertica della Giordania meridionale.

Poi, lentamente, la telecamera inizia sorvolare la cima di una collina, la cui superficie bucherellata ricorda i paesaggi lunari che offriva l'Europa del primo dopoguerra mondiale. Createre dopo cratere, la superficie rocciosa della colline sembra aver subito una martellante pioggia d'artiglieria.

I fori però non sono il risultato di esplosioni. Ogni buca è stata scavata laboriosamente, una palata di terra alla volta, da un esercito di tombaroli. La vittima in questo caso è un sito archeologico, Fifa, che ospita oltre 10.000 sepolture dell'Età del Bronzo colme di vasellame, perle di corniola e bracciali di conchiglie; un'enorme necropoli che alcuni archeologi associano a Sodoma e Gomorra, le bibliche "città delle pianure" distrutte dall'ira divina.

Gli autori dei saccheggi "non sembrano particolarmente preoccupati", dice Morag Kersel, archeologa della DePaul University di Chicago, descrivendo quelli che ha incontrato nella Valle del Giordano mentre faceva volare il suo aeroplanino. "Alcuni sono solo ragazzi. Sono venuti perfino a parlarci".

Il traffico di antichità non è certo una novità in Medio Oriente, dove l'instabilità politica, unita all'abbondanza di reperti storici, alimenta un mercato globale affamato di manufatti provenienti dalla Terra Santa.

Il saccheggio sistematico degli straordinari siti mesopotamici in Iraq durante e dopo l'ultima guerra ha riportato in evidenza il problema. Dalla Siria giungono notizie di reperti archeologici barattati con armi.

In Giordania, un'oasi di relativa calma per la regione, le cose sono andate decisamente meglio rispetto ai paesi vicini. Ma la povertà e la domanda internazionale di reperti ha comunque richiesto un tributo. Alcune delle più vaste necropoli del mondo antico, erette su colline e altopiani lungo le aride sponde del Mar Morto già 5.500 anni fa, sono state saccheggiate dai tombaroli.
"Strumenti perfetti"
L'unica vera novità in questo panorama di distruzione culturale sono i droni - uno strumento di alta tecnologia che gli archeologi utilizzano per studiare (e forse contribuire a controllare) il commercio illegale di manufatti.

"Biasogna capire cosa è andato perduto prima di proteggere ciò che resta", spiega Kersel, che cercherà di monitorare questo genere di attività lungo il Mar Morto in Giordania per i prossimi cinque anni. "I droni sono lo strumento perfetto. Costano poco, e offrono informazioni più dettagliate rispetto ai satelliti".

Gli aeromobili a pilotaggio remoto, o UAV, sono noti soprattutto per le discusse attvità militari di sorveglianza e uccisione di combattenti in zone come il Pakistan e l'Afghanistan, ma stanno rivoluzionando la ricerca archeologica. Sono stati impiegati ad esempio per mappare remoti siti funarari della cultura Moche in Perù e per ricostruire immagini tridimensionali delle rovine Gallo-Romane sepolte sotto le autostrade svizzere, e perfino, in un caso, per individuare un quasi irragiungibile sito di arte rupestre nel sudovest americano.

"Negli ultimi 5-7 anni sono state sviluppate una serie di tecnologie che rendono i droni molto interessanti", dice Austin "Chad" Hill, un archeologo e pilota di droni alla University of Connecticut che sta contribuendo alla ricarca di Kersel. "Si possono equipaggiare con magnetometri, barometri, GPS e tutti i tipi di telecamera. Possono fornire un'incredibile quantità di dati".

Le uniche minacce ai droni di Hill sono state rappresentate finora dalle mucche e dalle capre che si trovavano nel punto in cui atterravano i velivoli. "I componenti per costruire un drone costano attorno ai 1.000 dollari", dice Hill. "È possibile costruirne uno da soli. Affittarlo può essere molto più costoso".

Neppure la normale fotografia aerea è altettanto utile, dice Hill, perché il drone in volo riesce a catturare molti più dettagli.
Reperti biblici
Grazie ai droni, Kersel ha scoperto che, in Giordania, a Fifa, i tombaroli - molto spesso ex contadini a cui è stata sottratta la terra - stanno riprendo le vecchie buche: segno che trovare manufatti diventa sempre più difficile.

Kersel spera anche di riuscire a rintracciare il flusso di vasellame dell'Età del Bronzo diretto ai paesi confinanti come Israele, dove potrebbero riapparire con un'etichetta che li indica come "antico periodo Canaanita" o "dell'epoca dei profeti" per attirare compratori appassionati di cose bibliche.

Israele ha delle leggi molto restrittive per quanto riguarda il commercio dei manufatti trovati dopo il 1978, quando fu emanata la normativa che riguardava il patrimonio archeologico. Ma ciò non impedisce che antiquari con pochi scupoli retrodatino gli oggetti in cui vengono in possesso.

Monther Jamhawi, direttore generale del Dipartmento delle Antichità in Giordania, dice che la soluzione al problema dei saccheggi è l'applicazione delle norme già esistenti, e pene severe per chi rapina il patrimonio nazionale. Ma per quanto riguarda i droni, né il governo né gli archeologi hanno proposto - fino ad ora - di utilizzarli a scopo di sorveglianza, per proteggere il sonno degli antichi defunti.

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In Giordania, gli aeromobili a pilotaggio remoto servono a frenare il saccheggio dei siti storici, ma anche altrove stanno diventando uno strumento di lavoro per gli studiosi del mondo antico La scena è affascinante. All'inizio, una telecamera attaccata al muso di un piccolo aereo

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National World War I Museum and Memorial

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Google Arts & Culture

In an era of federal segregation, the national call as "champions of the rights of mankind" rang hollow. Many African Americans saw the war as an opportunity to redefine their U.S. citizenship and improve social, political and economic conditions. Created in partnership with Google Cultural Institute, Make Way for Democracy! portrays the lives of African Americans during the war through a series of rare images, documents and objects.

View more content by the Museum on Google Arts & Culture

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Make Way for Democracy! portrays the lives of African Americans during the war through a series of rare images, documents and objects. In an era of federal segregation, the national call as "champions of the rights of mankind" rang hollow. Many African Americans saw the war as an opportunity to redefine their U.S.

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L'attività di ricerca, che si svolge attraverso analisi, studi comparativi, benchmarking qualitativo e quantitativo, si apre al confronto con le esperienze già realizzate, in Italia e all'estero, per imparare dalle buone pratiche e trarre ispirazione dalle politiche di valorizzazione più innovative, dove l'apertura dei luoghi della cultura ad un pubblico ampliato si intreccia con le politiche per l'inclusione sociale e lo sviluppo sostenibile.

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Pizza has conquered the world, but the art of "pizzaiuolo" - twirling the dough and baking it in a wood-fired brick oven - is less well known outside the Italian city of Naples.

That could now change after the UN's cultural body gave it world heritage status, which aims to raise awareness of traditions around the world.

Pizzaiuolo has been handed down for generations, Unesco said, and encompasses the social ritual of songs, stories and gestures that takes place between pizza makers and diners in working class Neapolitan neighbourhoods.

Italy had argued that the practice was part of a unique cultural and gastronomic tradition.

"Victory!" tweeted Maurizio Martina, Italy's minister for agriculture, food and forestry. "Another step towards the protection of Italy's food and wine heritage."

Pizza-makers in Naples celebrated by handing out free pizza on the streets. Two million people had signed a petition to support pizzaiuolo's application, the Association of Neapolitan Pizzaiuoli's head Sergio Miccu said.

"After 250 years of waiting, pizza is humanity's heritage, its intangible heritage. Congratulations to Naples, congratulations!" pizza-maker Enzo Coccia told the BBC.

'Criminal' pineapple

The traditional Neapolitan pizza has two classic versions.

One is the Margherita with tomato, mozzarella, oil and basil, which has the same red white and green colours as the Italian flag and is believed to have been named after Italy's Queen Margherita of Savoy.

The other is the Marinara, with tomato, garlic, oregano and oil.

Was Margherita really named after Italy's queen?

Hawaiian pizza inventor dies aged 83

Locals profess bafflement at foreign topping innovations such as pineapple, which appears on the Hawaiian.

"I think, and I hope, that this could be the chance to make foreigners understand how pizza is made, without Nutella or pineapple," Matteo Martino, a customer at a Naples pizza restaurant, told Reuters news agency.

On Twitter Alex Iatoni from Bergamo in northern Italy said: "It's good that pizza has been recognised as UNESCO heritage. But now we must insert the pineapple in the list of crimes against humanity."

Endangered traditions

Pizzaiuolo was up against 33 other traditions seeking to join Unesco's list of "intangible heritage", set up in 2003.

Others to be included are:

Saudi Arabia's al-Qatt al-Asin, the crafting of interior wall paintings by women

Bangladesh's Shital Pati, which uses green cane to weave mats and bedspreads

The horseback game of Kok Boru in Kyrgyzstan, in which participants traditionally competed to place a dead goat in a goal, although a mould is nowadays more often used

The list already includes some food traditions, including Turkish coffee culture and the gingerbread craft of northern Croatia.

Altogether it contains more than 350 traditions and crafts, ranging from better known practices such as Spanish flamenco dancing and Indonesian batik fabric making to more obscure items such as a Turkish oil wrestling festival and a Mongolian camel coaxing ritual.

Unesco has also placed six traditions on its urgent safeguarding list, which means they will get support to prevent them disappearing.

They were declining for reasons including the spread of technology and disdain for cultural practices among young people, Unesco said.

The endangered traditions include a Turkish whistled language, which helped local people to communicate across long distances and rugged topography, that was under threat from mobile phone use.

Turkey's 'bird language' under threat

Other practices to receive resources include Botswana's Dikopelo folk music, songs about herding and milking from Colombia and Venezuela, Mongolian traditional worship, the Taskiwin martial dance from Morocco and traditional poetry recitals from the United Arab Emirates.

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Pizza-twirling gets world heritage status

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Pizza has conquered the world, but the art of "pizzaiuolo" - twirling the dough and baking it in a wood-fired brick oven - is less well known outside the Italian city of Naples. That could now change after the UN's cultural body gave it world heritage status, which aims to raise awareness of traditions around the world.

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It's five years since authorities in Germany uncovered around 1500 works of art held by Cornelius Gurlitt, then aged 79. He'd inherited the work - by artists ranging from Old Masters to Picasso - from his father, an art-dealer who worked with the Nazis to acquire valuable artworks from Jewish families. Now exhibitions in Germany and in Switzerland are putting highlights on display, in the hope of alerting descendants who may be the rightful owners.

Gurlitt suddenly came to public notice in 2013, the German authorities had already known for a year that an astounding hoard of artwork had been found at his addresses in Munich and in Salzburg. The artists ranged from Picasso to Durer and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Initially, officials tried to keep the discovery secret. After all, Gurlitt appeared to have broken no laws. But a news magazine got hold of the story.

The collection had been inherited from Gurlitt's father Hildebrand, a major art dealer who died in 1956. Hildebrand served Germany's Nazi leadership in three ways: he helped acquire important works from Jewish families at prices well below their true value; he sold examples of so-called "degenerate art" abroad; he was involved in assembling pieces for the grand "Fuhrer Museum" planned for Linz in Austria.

The works of art are often described as having been looted from Jewish families. But Rein Wolfs, director of the Federal Art Gallery in Bonn, says images of Nazi stormtroopers violently pulling paintings from walls are misleading.

"This was a long bureaucratic process forcing Jewish owners to sell artwork they owned. For some it became a sort of Departure Tax which meant they were permitted to leave the country for South America or wherever. Eighty years later the question is which parts of the Gurlitt hoard came from that source? It's a massively complex issue."

The Bonn exhibition is one of two running in parallel. The gallery in Bonn is showing 250 pictures which throw light on the insidious process of acquiring the art and on the stories of the rightful owners, many of whom perished in the Holocaust.

The other exhibition is in Bern in Switzerland. It focuses on the issue of "entartete Kunst", or degenerate art, which the Nazis wanted to wipe from German culture.

Wolfs says that programme didn't, as people sometimes imagine, target only Jewish artists. "The Nazis wanted to remove all Modernist works from public galleries and museums: they held Modernism to be against German values. It was a ruthless attempt to eradicate what they mistrusted and hated and there's an obvious parallel with the Holocaust."

No one claims all 1500 works of art were acquired from Jewish families forced into selling: Hildebrand Gurlitt was an active art dealer for many decades. Walking around the exhibition in Bonn with Wolfs the complexity of discovering the provenance (ownership history) of each piece is clear.

"For instance we have a wonderful Monet painting of Waterloo Bridge in London, done in 1903. We have no direct indication it was ever a looted artwork. But we also have to be absolutely thorough and there is a weird detail: we know the mother of Hildebrand Gurlitt in 1938 wrote a note confirming that years before she had given him the Monet as a present for his wedding. But why did the mother even need to affirm that fact? - it seems odd and we are still investigating.

Wolfs points out a couple of smaller paintings by Eugene Delacroix, called Oriental Horseman. "They're another example of the problems we face. There are clearly deficits in our knowledge and we just don't know when they were bought by Hildebrand Gurlitt.

"Everybody expects that the team doing provenance research will come up with answers very fast. But in many cases the books are missing and whole archives no longer exist.

"It seems the Delacroix images are not under suspicion of being looted. But if somebody makes a claim we always investigate seriously. It's one of the main purposes of the exhibitions: we want people to make claims if they believe they are heirs of the rightful owners."

Stefan Koldehoff is a well-known German arts journalist who's written a book about the Gurlitt affair.

"At first the authorities in Germany did not handle the situation well: no one seems to have realised how enormous the story was. But eventually they saw this was a way to portray themselves as people who would do something good for Holocaust victims and for those who are still searching for the artwork."

Cornelius Gurlitt died in 2014 and bequeathed his collection to Bern. But Koldehoff says that, in doing so, he gave the German state a massive task.

"Germany has said it won't release works to Switzerland until every doubt about their history is gone. A whole team is working to achieve this. But as I understand it there are around 400 cases where it's proving very hard or impossible to come up with any answers.

"Only a handful of works have been restituted so far to descendants of owners from the Nazi time. So in the end I'm sure there will always be a remainder which present impossible questions of research. But the exhibitions are genuinely a way of trying to be transparent "
Gurlitt: Nazi Art Theft and its Consequences runs at the Federal Art Gallery in Bonn, Germany until 11 March 2018. Gurlitt: 'Degenerate Art' runs at the Art Museum in Bern, Switzerland until 4 March 2018 Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk .

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It's five years since authorities in Germany uncovered around 1500 works of art held by Cornelius Gurlitt, then aged 79. He'd inherited the work - by artists ranging from Old Masters to Picasso - from his father, an art-dealer who worked with the Nazis to acquire valuable artworks from Jewish families.

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Check out our Social Media channels for more fantastic content! | u4h

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Rarely seen works of art and archaeological remains are among the historical treasures being revealed online for the first time.

English Heritage has worked with Google to create walk-around online images of 29 sites across England.

They include Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, with its links to King Arthur, and a Cold War bunker in York.

The partnership uses digital technology including Google Street View and high-definition cameras.

A largely-unseen vast 1820 painting of the Battle of Hastings by Frank Wilkin at Battle Abbey private school is now able to be viewed online.

People can also get 360 degree views of the elaborately decorated Durbar Room at Osborne on the Isle of Wight and of the terrace of the stately home loved by Queen Victoria.

Google's Street View is also allowing people to remotely explore the labyrinthine corridors and workshops of the Victorian J W Evans silver factory in Birmingham, normally only open to the public for pre-booked guided tours.

And for the first time, people will get to see in detail Antonio Zucchi's 18th Century ceiling paintings at Kenwood House, London, and the 17th Century "Elysium" ceiling at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire, which have been photographed in ultra-high definition.

The technology is also being used to open up a store of 160,000 historical artefacts at Wrest Park, Bedfordshire, revealing items such as a Roman sculpture of the goddess Venus.

The partnership is said to be the first time Google Arts & Culture has worked with a heritage organisation.

Matt Thompson, head of collections at English Heritage, said: "We've been able to bring people closer to our historic masterpieces than ever before, open up our storehouses to a global audience, and showcase hitherto unseen artefacts."

Amit Sood, director of Google Arts & Culture, said it was "proud to share these wonders and stories with a global audience".

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Rarely seen works of art and archaeological remains are among the historical treasures being revealed online for the first time. English Heritage has worked with Google to create walk-around online images of 29 sites across England. They include Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, with its links to King Arthur, and a Cold War bunker in York.