Arthur Miller And Tennessee Williams, Including A Streetcar Named Desi
re(1947, film, 1951) and Death of a Salesman (1949). He directed the Academy
Award-winning films Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and On The Waterfront
(1954), as well as East of Eden (1955), A Face in the Crowd (1957),
Splendor in the Grass (1961), and The Last Tycoon (1976). His two
autobiographical novels, America, America (1962) and The Arrangement
(1967), were turned into films in 1963 and 1968.
Bibliography: Koszarski, Richard, Hollywood Directors, 1941-1976 (1977).
Jolson, Al
——————————–
(johl’-suhn)
The singer Al Jolson, b. Asa Yoelson in Lithuania, c.1886, d. Oct. 23,
1950, immigrated with his family to Washington, D.C., around 1895. After a
long apprenticeship as a singer in burlesque, minstrel shows, and
vaudeville, he won (1911) his first important role in the Broadway show La
Belle Paree. Jolson’s style was notable for its vigor and volume, its
blatant sentimentality, and for his use of blackface, a leftover theatrical
convention from the already moribund minstrel show. His work–especially
his film roles, beginning with The Jazz Singer (1927), the first major
sound picture–won him a large audience during his lifetime. Jolson was
awarded the Congressional Medal of Merit posthumously for his many overseas
tours of wartime army camps, the last at the beginning of the Korean War in
1950.
Bibliography: Friedland, Michael, Jolson (1972). Discography:Best of Al
Jolson: Steppin’ Out and California, Here I Come (1911-29).
Duchamp, Marcel
——————————–
(doo-shahm’)
Marcel Duchamp, b. July 28, 1887, d. Oct. 2, 1968, was a French painter
and theorist, a major proponent of DADA, and one of the most influential
figures of avant-garde 20th-century art. After a brief early period in
which he was influenced chiefly by Paul CEZANNE and Fauve color (see
FAUVISM), Duchamp developed a type of symbolic painting, a dynamic version
of facet CUBISM (similar to FUTURISM), in which the image depicted
successive movements of a single body. It closely resembled the multiple
exposure photography documented in Eadward MUYBRIDGE’s book The Horse in
Motion (1878).
In 1912, Duchamp painted his famous Nude Descending A Staircase, which
caused a scandal at the 1913 ARMORY SHOW in New York City. In the same
year he developed, with Francis PICABIA and Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, the
radical and ironic ideas that independently prefigured the official
founding of Dada in 1916 in Zurich. In Paris in 1914, Duchamp bought and
inscribed a bottle rack, thereby producing his first ready-made, a new art
form based on the principle that art does not depend on established rules
or on craftsmanship. Duchamp’s ready-mades are ordinary objects that are
signed and titled, becoming aesthetic, rather than functional, objects
simply by this change in context. Dada aimed at departure from the physical
aspect of painting and emphases in ideas as the chief means of artistic
expression.
In 1915, Duchamp moved to New York City, where he was befriended by Louise
and Walter Arensberg and their circle of artists and poets, which
constituted New York Dada. That same year he began his major work, The
Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a
construction of wire and painted foil fitted between plates of transparent
glass. In 1918 he completed his last major painting, Tu m’, a huge oil and
graphite on canvas, a unique combination of real and painted objects and
illusionistic and flat space. Following his maxim never to repeat himself,
Duchamp “stopped” painting (1923) after 20 works and devoted himself
largely to the game of chess. Nevertheless, by 1944 he had secretly begun
sketches on a new project, and between 1946 and 1949 created his last work,
the Etant Donnes (Philadelphia Museum of Art). BARBARA CAVALIERE
Bibliography: Alexandrian, Sarane, Duchamp (1977); d’Harnoncourt, Anne, and
McShine, Kynaston, eds., Marcel Duchamp (1973); Duchamp, Marcel, From the
Green Box, trans. by George H. Hamilton (1957); Golding, John, Duchamp
(1973); Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 2d ed.
(1970); Tomkins, Calvin, The World of Marcel Duchamp (1966).
Renoir, Jean
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(ren-wahr’)
One of the greatest and best-loved of all French filmmakers, Jean Renoir,
b. Sept. 15, 1894, d. Feb. 13, 1979, the second son of the impressionist
painter Auguste Renoir, exercised a major influence on French cinema for
almost 50 years. From his beginnings in the silent era, aspects of his
mature film style were apparent: a love of nature, rejection of class
values, and a mixture of joy and sorrow. Some of his earliest films were
made with his wife Catherine Hessling as star, among them an interpretation
of Zola’s Nana (1926), and The Little Match Girl (1928).
During the 1930s Renoir was at the top of his form in two celebrations of
anarchy, La Chienne (The Bitch,
