Artnit

Symbolist poetry of French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé anticipated and inspired artistic schools of the early 20th century like Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dadaism. The idea of poetry as evocative, derived from the world of ideas, philosophy, and arguably, from the poets own drive to create something original from the depth of their being. Stéphane Mallarmé said: “The art of evoking an object little by little so as to reveal a mood or, conversely, the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an ‘etat d’ame’” -- a state of the soul.

Girl with a Mandolin is one of the most beautiful, lyrical, and accessible of all Cubist paintings but is also an early example of an Analytic Cubist painting. The idea for this painting originated in Cadaques where Pablo Picasso and Fernande Olivier spent a summer vacation in 1910. The same year Picasso painted in Paris Girl with a Mandolin within the Cubism. Today it is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Influenced by Camille Corot, who taught him that the addition of a musical instrument endows a character with the stillness of an object, Georges Braque returned to the depiction of the human figure after two years that was almost entirely dedicated to painting landscapes and still life pieces. He painted Woman with a Mandolin in the spring of 1910, during his first cubist phase, known as Analytical Cubism. This painting was the first oval-shaped cubist painting, painted by Georges Braque in the usual rectangular shape. After he completed this work Pablo Picasso also produced a painting featuring a figure with a mandolin, an oval Girl with a Mandolin, and a rectangular Girl with a Mandolin. Today, the painting Woman with a Mandolin is in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich.

Pablo Picasso's The Young Ladies of Avignon is usually compared to Paul Cézanne's The Large Bathers. Picasso had been very much inspired by this painting. It helped him to look at objects from varying viewpoints. Painted around the same time but with completely different feels, these paintings are influential and have given the painters their distinguished recognition, particularly those that include nude figures in their work.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon is a revolutionary large oil painting created in 1907 by Pablo Picasso. Picasso prepared this painting in his Paris studio over six months by making hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings of revision. He named the painting The Young Ladies of Avignon after a brothel in Avignon Street in Barcelona. This painting is considered to be the first cubist, avant-garde, and municipal modern painting of the XX century and the most famous example of cubism painting. It is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Joy of Life by Henri Matisse is perhaps the first canvas to clearly understand the great formal challenge of Paul Cézanne and to further the elder master's ideas. This painting is simultaneously seen as inspired by and breaking free of Paul Cézanne's, last great painting, The Large Bathers in its marked symmetry and the adaptation of the nude forms to the triangular pattern of the trees and river.

Three large paintings of bathers in the landscape were the main preoccupation of the French painter Paul Cézanne in the last years of his life. The most famous is the painting The Large Bathers, which he painted for an incredible seven years, and considered unfinished until he died in 1906. The painting is considered a masterpiece of modern art and one of the greatest compositions of all time. It became an inspiration for Cubism and influenced many generations of modern artists. In form and date, The Joy of Life by Henri Matisse is closest to Cézanne's last great image of bathers and the nude figures in the painting were later compared to Pablo Picasso's painting of The Young Ladies of Avignon. The painting The Large Bathers is housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

During his Fauve years, Henri Matisse often painted landscapes in the south of France during the summer and worked up ideas developed there into larger compositions upon his return to Paris. In 1906, he finished the oil on canvas Le Bonheur de Vivre, or The Joy of Life, his typical important imaginary composition which gives in a concise form the spirit of Fauvism better than his any other Fauve painting. Today, this painting is in the collection of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Human happiness has long been understood as something difficult or impossible to achieve, and over the centuries philosophers have advised people how to live a happy life. In philosophy, happiness is translated from the Greek concept of eudaimonia, and it refers to the good life or prosperity and not only to emotions, and is generally understood as a moral goal of life or as an aspect of chance. Philosophical “theories of happiness“ can be about either of at least two different things: well-being or a state of mind can be related to any of at least two different things, well-being or state of mind.

For this reason also the question is asked, whether happiness is to beacquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training, or comes in virtue of some divine providence or again by chance. Now if there is any gift of the gods to men, it is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, and most surely god-given of all human things in asmuchas it is the best. But this question would perhaps be more appropriate to another inquiry; happiness seems, however, even if it is not god-sent but comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning or training, to be among the most god like things; for that which is the prize and end of virtue seems to be the best thing in the world, and something god like and blessed.