Imagining intimacy : rhetoric, love and the loss of Raphael.

This article looks at the problem of historical narrative painting in terms of the idealisation of Raphaelesque conventions. It deals with the neglected “Raphaelitism” that Pre-Raphaelitism claimed to reject, seeking to articulate what is termed here an aesthetic of intimacy in contrast to the alienating surface complexity of Pre-Raphaelite art. The aesthetic of intimacy downplays pictorial surface but plays on the ideal of the penetration of surface itself as a revelation of the form of truth to which art gestures. O’Neil’s paintings use the model of Raphael’s pictorial “softness” in order to develop a pictorial strategy in which the viewer is encouraged to attend to the subtle variations of body language. The article appeared in a themed issue of Visual Culture in Britain that was edited by Barlow himself. It is part of the same broad project as Barlow’s monograph, Time present and time past: The Art of John Everett Millais, namely the re-examination of models of “progressive” art by exploring ways in which artists formerly deemed to be “academic” were engaging in complex ways with the problems of representation and tradition. Barlow’s Introduction and the issue as a whole addresses the question of modernity in relation to the conceptualisation of history painting. In this instance, however, the intent is to examine the problem further by looking at an artist who specifically positioned himself as an enemy of stylistic innovation

Resistance and persistence: on the fortunes and reciprocal international influences of French romanticism

Resistance and Persistence: On the Fortunes and Reciprocal International Influences of French Romanticism Abstract This article addresses ambivalence toward Romanticism on the part of Romantic artists and writers active in France - a group that includes Heinrich Heine, Eugène Delacroix, Alfred de Musset and Théophile Gautier. In counterpoint, the argument sets forth the persistence of the Romantic legacy in the work of the ostensibly anti-Romantic Gustave Courbet. I contend that the unease of Romantics vis-à-vis Romanticism is inseparable from their quixotic quest to transgress convention; that, in the face of negation and ridicule, signal characteristics of the movement endured, affecting the outlook of even its most bitter enemies (e.g., the Catholic royalist writers associated with the paper L'Action française and their admirer, the London art critic and philosopher T.E. Hulme); that, in the art of Van Gogh and Rodin, new life was breathed into Romanticism through contact with its ostensible opposite, Realism; and that Romanticism continued to speak to the concerns of artists active long after the mid-nineteenth century. I conclude with a consideration of how the negative view of Romantic pathos fostered by twentieth-century Formalism has been challenged, since the 1950s, by revisionist art historians

Wicked, Hard and Supple: An Examination of Suzanne Valadon's Nude Drawings of Young Maurice

This article examines the nude drawings Suzanne Valadon made of her young son, Maurice Utrillo. These drawings, depicting Utrillo from late childhood until adolescence, began Valadon's interest in the male nude, which she carried into her later career. Though children appeared often in her work, the drawings of Utrillo are complicated by the relationship between the artist and subject.Publisher allows immediate open acces

KARL: A Knowledge-Assisted Retrieval Language

Data classification and storage are tasks typically performed by application specialists. In contrast, information users are primarily non-computer specialists who use information in their decision-making and other activities. Interaction efficiency between such users and the computer is often reduced by machine requirements and resulting user reluctance to use the system. This thesis examines the problems associated with information retrieval for non-computer specialist users, and proposes a method for communicating in restricted English that uses knowledge of the entities involved, relationships between entities, and basic English language syntax and semantics to translate the user requests into formal queries. The proposed method includes an intelligent dictionary, syntax and semantic verifiers, and a formal query generator. In addition, the proposed system has a learning capability that can improve portability and performance. With the increasing demand for efficient human-machine communication, the significance of this thesis becomes apparent. As human resources become more valuable, software systems that will assist in improving the human-machine interface will be needed and research addressing new solutions will be of utmost importance. This thesis presents an initial design and implementation as a foundation for further research and development into the emerging field of natural language database query systems

An approach to software maintenance support using a syntactic source code analyser data base : this thesis is presented in a partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Computer Science at Massey University

In this thesis, the development of a software maintenance tool called a syntactic source code analyser (SSCA) is summarised. An SSCA supports other maintenance tools which interact with source code by creating a data base of source information which has links to a formatted version of program source code. The particular SSCA presented handles programs written in a version of COBOL. Before developing a SSCA system, aspects of software maintenance need to be considered. Hence, the scope, definitions and problems of maintenance activities are briefly reviewed and maintenance support through environments, software metrics, and specific tools and techniques examined. A complete maintenance support environment for an application is found to overlap considerably with the application documentation system and shares some tools with development environments. Program source code is also identified as the fundamental documentation of an application and interaction with this source code is a requirement of many maintenance support tools

Pathology and Imagination: Ingres's Anatomical Distortions

abstract: In this thesis, I investigate the anatomical excesses represented in the works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In recent years, art historical scholarship on Ingres has multiplied after being quiescent for much of the twentieth century, as contemporary scholars perceive the unusual contradictions in his works. I introduce the concepts of pathological versus imaginary distortions. Pathological distortions are distortions that represent diseased bodies, such as the goiters in many of Ingres's female figures, whereas imaginary distortions are not anatomically possible, such as the five extra vertebrae in the Grande Odalisque. Ingres employed both of these types of these distortions in his bodies, and I discuss how these two types of distortions can be read differently. My thesis is that Ingres employed extended anatomical variations-in his paintings, most notably in his female figures, for several reasons: to reconcile his anxiety about originality while remaining within the tradition of Classicism and "disegno," to pay homage to his predecessors who were also the masters of line, and to highlight his command of line and drawing. Though Ingres has never been a strictly Neoclassical artist in the Davidian tradition, the Romantic elements of his work are underlined further by these anatomical variations.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Art History 201

KAPTUR: technical analysis report

Led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) and funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme (2011-13) KAPTUR will discover, create and pilot a sectoral model of best practice in the management of research data in the visual arts in collaboration with four institutional partners: Glasgow School of Art; Goldsmiths, University of London; University for the Creative Arts; and University of the Arts London. This report is framed around the research question: which technical system is most suitable for managing visual arts research data? The first stage involved a literature review including information gathered through attendance at meetings and events, and Internet research, as well as information on projects from the previous round of JISCMRD funding (2009-11). During February and March 2012, the Technical Manager carried out interviews with the four KAPTUR Project Officers and also met with IT staff at each institution. This led to the creation of a user requirement document (Appendix A), which was then circulated to the project team for additional comments and feedback. The Technical Manager selected 17 systems to compare with the user requirement document (Appendix B). Five of the systems had similar scores so these were short-listed. The Technical Manager created an online form into which the Project Officers entered priority scores for each of the user requirements in order to calculate a more accurate score for each of the five short-listed systems (Appendix C) and this resulted in the choice of EPrints as the software for the KAPTUR project