Some background for last night's post on Diego Rivera—
See "Octavio Paz" + "Solar Country" in this journal.
"Mexico is a solar country— but it is also a black country, a dark country.
This duality of Mexico has preoccupied me since I was a child."
Friday, December 9, 2011
Duality
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Friday, October 1, 2010
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Sunday December 14, 2008
Symmetry
and
Reflections
and
Reflections
A figure from
Nobel Prize day, December 10,
and from Eugene Wigner‘s
birthday, November 17:
Also on December 10:
the death of Constantine–
(Click for details.)
Related material:
Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life,
Photos by Tina Modotti,
Art Wars for Trotsky’s Birthday,
as well as
Art Wars, June 1-15, 2007:
“Ay que bonito es volar
A las dos de la mañana….”
— “La Bruja“
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Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Wednesday December 12, 2007
Found in Translation:
Words and Images
Words and Images
From today’s New York Times:
“Thomas P. Whitney, a former diplomat and writer on Russian affairs who was best known for translating the work of the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into English, died on [Sunday] Dec. 2 in Manhattan. He was 90….
During World War II, he was an analyst in Washington with the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency….
In the late 1960s and afterward, he bred thoroughbred horses….
On one occasion, Mr. Whitney took Mr. Solzhenitsyn to Saratoga Racetrack….”
Related material:
Words
“Lewis began with
a number of haunted images….”
a number of haunted images….”
“The best of the books are the ones…
where the allegory is at a minimum
and the images just flow.”
“‘Everything began with images,’
Lewis wrote….”
Images
Yesterday’s entry on
Solzhenitsyn and The Golden Compass
and the following illustrations…
from Sunday in the Park with Death,
a Log24 entry commemorating
Trotsky’s birthday–
–and from Log24 on the date
of Whitney’s death,
Sunday, Dec. 2, 2007—
Personal Emblem
of psychiatrist
Harry Stack Sullivan
The horses may refer to
the Phaedrus of Plato.
See also Art Wars.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Thursday November 24, 2005
Crossroads
In memory of Diego Rivera,
who died on this date in 1957
"… the socialist muralist Diego Rivera, hired by Nelson Rockefeller to paint a fresco for the newly constructed Rockefeller Center in New York, inserted a likeness of Lenin's head into the fresco. Rockefeller insisted that the head be replaced or removed, and when Rivera refused the fresco was destroyed…. The event… is captured with great wit in E.B. White's poem…."
I Paint What I See
[A Ballad of Artistic Integrity]
by E.B. White
The New Yorker, 20 May 1933
"'What do you paint, when you paint on a wall?'
Said John D.'s grandson Nelson.
'Do you paint just anything there at all?
'Will there be any doves, or a tree in fall?
'Or a hunting scene, like an English hall?'
'I paint what I see,' said Rivera.
'What are the colors you use when you paint?'
Said John D.'s grandson Nelson.
'Do you use any red in the beard of a saint?
'If you do, is it terribly red, or faint?
'Do you use any blue? Is it Prussian?'
'I paint what I paint,' said Rivera.
'Whose is that head that I see on the wall?'
Said John D.'s grandson Nelson.
'Is it anyone's head whom we know, at all?
'A Rensselaer, or a Saltonstall?
'Is it Franklin D.? Is it Mordaunt Hall?
Or is it the head of a Russian?
'I paint what I think,' said Rivera.
'I paint what I paint, I paint what I see,
'I paint what I think,' said Rivera,
'And the thing that is dearest in life to me
'In a bourgeois hall is Integrity;
'However . . .
'I'll take out a couple of people drinkin'
'And put in a picture of Abraham Lincoln;
'I could even give you McCormick's reaper
'And still not make my art much cheaper.
'But the head of Lenin has got to stay
'Or my friends will give the bird today,
'The bird, the bird, forever.'
'It's not good taste in a man like me,'
Said John D.'s grandson Nelson,
'To question an artist's integrity
'Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
'But I know what I like to a large degree,
'Though art I hate to hamper;
'For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks
'You painted a radical. I say shucks,
'I never could rent the offices—–
'The capitalistic offices.
'For this, as you know, is a public hall
'And people want doves, or a tree in fall
'And though your art I dislike to hamper,
'I owe a little to God and Gramper,
'And after all,
'It's my wall . . .'
'We'll see if it is,' said Rivera.
Related material:
Pictures of the Rockefeller Center mural,
"Man at the Crossroads," and
Rivera's re-creation of the mural,
"Man, Controller of the Universe."
See also another treatment of the "Man at the Crossroads" theme–
The Concrete Gospel
of Donald E. Knuth:
of Donald E. Knuth:
(from Feb. 18),
continued —
This holy icon
appeared at
N37°25.638'
W122°09.574'
on August 22, 2003,
at the Stanford campus.
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Sunday, November 20, 2005
Sunday November 20, 2005
“There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate’s unanswered question ‘What is truth?'”
— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Richard J. Trudeau’s remarks on the “Story Theory” of truth as opposed to the “Diamond Theory” of truth in The Non-Euclidean Revolution
“A new epistemology is emerging to replace the Diamond Theory of truth. I will call it the ‘Story Theory’ of truth: There are no diamonds. People make up stories about what they experience. Stories that catch on are called ‘true.’ The Story Theory of truth is itself a story that is catching on. It is being told and retold, with increasing frequency, by thinkers of many stripes*….”
— Richard J. Trudeau in
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
“‘Deniers’ of truth… insist that each of us is trapped in his own point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise of power, try to impose them on others.”
— Jim Holt in The New Yorker.
(Click on the box below.)
Exercise of Power:
Show that a white horse–
a figure not unlike the
symbol of the mathematics
publisher Springer–
is traced, within a naturally
arranged rectangular array of
polynomials, by the powers of x
modulo a polynomial
irreducible over a Galois field.
This horse, or chess knight–
“Springer,” in German–
plays a role in “Diamond Theory”
(a phrase used in finite geometry
in 1976, some years before its use
by Trudeau in the above book).
Related material
On this date:
In 1490, The White Knight
(Tirant lo Blanc 
)–
a major influence on Cervantes–
was published, and in 1910
the Mexican Revolution began.
Illustration:
Zapata by Diego Rivera,
Museum of Modern Art,
New York
“First published in the Catalan language in Valencia in 1490…. Reviewing the first modern Spanish translation in 1969 (Franco had ruthlessly suppressed the Catalan language and literature), Mario Vargas Llosa hailed the epic’s author as ‘the first of that lineage of God-supplanters– Fielding, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner– who try to create in their novels an all-encompassing reality.'”
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