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The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture situated in London. Its collections, which number more than 7 million objects, are among the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present.
The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centuries has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum of Natural History in South Kensington in 1887. Until 1997, when the current British Library building opened to the public, replacing the old British Museum Reading Room, the British Museum was unique in that it housed both a national museum of antiquities and a national library in the same building.
The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. As with all other national museums and art galleries in Britain, the Museum charges no admission fee, although charges are levied for some temporary special exhibitions. Since 2001 the director of the Museum has been Neil MacGregor.
History
Though principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities today, the British Museum was founded as a "universal museum". Its foundations lie in the will of the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). During the course of his lifetime Sloane gathered an enviable collection of curiosities and whilst not wishing to see his collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II, for the nation, for the princely sum of £20,000.
At that time,
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Henri Matisse (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. As a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but principally as a painter, Matisse is one of the best-known artists of the 20th century. Although he was initially labeled as a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s, he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. Early life and education Born Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois in Northeastern France, where his parents owned a seed business. He was their first son. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it, and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Initially he painted still-lifes and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters;as an art student he made copies of four Chardin paintings in the Louvre.In 1896 he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle
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Tristan Tzara (born Samuel or Samy
Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; April 4 or April 16, 1896 –
December 25, 1963) was a Romanian and Frenchavant-garde poet, essayist and performance
artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic,
composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and
central figures of the anti-establishmentDada movement. Under
the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent
Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolulwith Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel
Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland.
There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art
manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented
Dada's nihilisticside, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball. After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of
Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which
marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism.
He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his
principles against André Breton and Francis
Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclecticmodernism of
Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas
Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A
forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually
rallied with Breton's Surrealism, and, under its influence, wrote his
celebrated utopianpoem The Approximate Man. During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascistperspective with a
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André Breton (February 19, 1896 – September 28, 1966) was a French
writer, poet, and surrealisttheorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism.
His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined
surrealism as pure psychic automatism. BiographyBorn to a family of modest means in Tinchebray(Orne) in Normandy, he
studied medicineand psychiatry.
During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he
met the spiritual son of Alfred Jarry, Jacques
Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic
tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24
and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume
entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton
wrote four introductory essays. From Dada to SurrealismIn 1919 Breton founded the review Littérature with Louis
Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also connected with DadaistTristan
Tzara. In 1924 he was instrumental to the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research. In The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques),
a collaboration with Soupault, he put the principle of automatic writing into practice. He published
the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and
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Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula
Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was
an Andalusian-Spanishpainter, draughtsman,
and sculptor.
As one of the most recognized figures in twentieth-century art, he is best known for
co-founding the Cubistmovement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his
most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and
his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil
War, Guernica (1937) Biography Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José
Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima TrinidadClito, a series of names honouring various saints and relatives. Added to these
were Ruíz and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish
custom. Born in the city of Málaga in the
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André Derain (10 June 1880 – 8 September
1954) was a French painter and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri
Matisse.
Biography
André Derain was born in 1880
in Chatou, Yvelines, Île-de-France, just outside Paris. In 1898,
while studying to be an engineer at the Académie Camillo, he attended painting
classes under Eugène Carrière, and there met Matisse.
In 1900, he met and shared a studio with Maurice de Vlaminck and began to paint his
first landscapes.
His studies were interrupted from 1901 to 1904 when he was conscriptedinto the French army. Following his release from service, Matisse persuaded
Derain's parents to allow him to abandon his engineering career and devote
himself solely to painting; subsequently Derain attended the Académie
Julian.Derain and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterraneanvillage of Collioureand later that year displayed their highly innovative paintings at the Salon
d'Automne. The vivid, unnatural colors led the critic Louis
Vauxcelles to derisively dub their works as les Fauves,
or "the wild beasts", marking the start of the Fauvist movement.
In March 1906, the noted art dealer Ambroise
Vollard sent Derain to London to compose a series of paintings with the
city as subject. In 30 paintings (29 of which are still extant), Derain put
forth a
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Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller is a Swiss collector, born in Geneva in 1930. Biography
He has been under the influence of a passionnate father : poetry, philosophy,
musicor science (he got his PhD in biology at the age of 47).
After law studies in Geneva and London, he registers at the Bar and become
manager, at the age of 28, of a financial society. In 1960, he creates his own
society, the Private Society of Managment, specialized in the managment of the
housing stock and construction of social flats.
Collector as his father-in-law Josef Mueller, he goes in for « non-western »
arts. With his wife Monique, he creates in 1977 the Barbier-Mueller museum,
which organize more than seventy-five exhibitions, most of them attended with
importants catalogues, presenting the differents sections of the familial
collection, with the contribution of major european, american and asian
museums. He carries out or finances researches in Sumatra, in Ivory Coast and
Guinea. He’s one of the best expert of the Batak ethnic group, in the north of
Sumatra. In may 1997, the Barbier-Mueller precolombian art museum opens
opposite to the Picasso museum, in Barcelona. The town council offers a
long-time loan from the Nadal Palace to expose around 400 works of art from
Pre-Hispanic America. Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller is also a recognized specialist of the poetry and the
french history of the 16th century. Bibliophile since the age of 13, he has gathered
one of the most full library devoted to Ronsard and other authors of the Pléiade.
Entitled « Ma Bibliothèque poétique », the catalogue of this collection
count 7 volumes already published. Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller has also written
many articles for journals such as « Bibliothèque d’humanisme »,
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Jean Rouch (31 May1917 - 18 February2004) was a French filmmaker
and anthropologist. He began his long association with African subjects in
1941 after working as civil engineer supervising a construction project in Niger. However,
shortly afterwards he returned to France to participate in the Resistance.
After the war, he did a brief stint as a journalist with Agence France-Presse before returning to
Africa where he become an influential anthropologist and sometimes
controversial filmmaker. He is considered as one the pioneers of Nouvelle
Vague, of visual anthropology and the father of ethnofiction.
Rouch's films mostly belonged to the cinéma vérité school – a term that Edgar Morinused in a 1960 France-Observateur article referring to Dziga
Vertov's Kinopravda. His best known film, one of the central works of the
Nouvelle Vague, is Chronique d'un été (1961) which he filmed
with sociologist Edgar Morin and in which he portrays the social life of
contemporary France. Throughout his career, he used his camera to report on
life in Africa.
Over the course of five decades, he made almost 120 films. He died in an automobile accident in February
2004, some 16
kilometres from the town of Birnin N'Konni in central Niger. Main films- 1954: Les Maîtres Fous (The Mad
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