Hybrid encounters : Refraiming Picasso´´´ s Suite Vollard

El 50º aniversario de la muerte de Picasso brinda la oportunidad de revisar su enfoque del arte. Mi artículo reconsidera su Suite Vollard (1930-37), una serie de 100 grabados que habitualmente se describen, de alguna manera, como no concordante con la modernidad, como representante de un estilo legítimamente 'naturalista' o 'tradicional', y que no tienen casi nada que ver con su(s) 'modo(s)' anterior(es) de trabajar. Está demostrado, sin embargo, que la naturaleza cambiante, fragmentada y equívoca de su carpeta de grabados indica una forma de creatividad mucho más híbrida. Es similar, por ejemplo, a las hibridaciones de Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) del artista y sus collages y papiers collés c. 1912. De este modo, me resisto a la tendencia a ver la serie de grabados de Picasso a través de la lente más bien monocular de un estilo definitivamente "clásico" o "neoclásico". Al tratar de desestabilizar y reformular los lenguajes y construcciones que han plagado constantemente la Suite de Picasso, sugiero que sus 100 láminas son parte de una estratagema más amplia para deshacer los lugares comunes que siempre han definido las historias del arte.The 50th year of Picasso’s death affords an opportunity to look again at his approach to art. My article reconsiders his Suite Vollard (1930-37), a series of 100 prints that are habitually described as somehow at odds with modernism, as representative of a legitimately ‘naturalistic’ or ‘traditional style’, and having almost nothing to do with his earlier ‘mode(s)’ of working. As demonstrated, however, the shifting, fragmented and equivocating nature of his print portfolio indicates a far more hybrid form of creativity. It is akin, for example, to the hybridizations of the artist’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and his collages and papiers collés c. 1912. As such, I resist the tendency to view Picasso’s print series through the rather monocular lens of a definitively ‘classical’ or ‘neo-classical’ style’. In trying to unsettle and reframe the languages and constructs that have consistently plagued Picasso’s Suite, I suggest that its 100 plates are part of a wider stratagem to undo the commonplace occurrences that have always defined the histories of art.    

The petition in the Court of Session in early modern Scotland

Petitions to Scotland’s central civil court, the Court of Session, contained common features of style despite being presented for a wide range of purposes. As well as being employed in the course of procedure in a number of litigated cases, the petition was used to obtain entry to an office, or in seeking an equitable remedy which might relieve imminent suffering. In many cases they offer detailed narratives about everyday life, commerce, politics and religion which preserve a great deal that may be of value to the legal and social historian. Some petitioners, such as the poor and vulnerable, enjoyed a privileged status entitling them to have their claims heard summarily. A number of petitions, written by lawyers in order to persuade, contain ideas about liberty, justice and reason reflecting the fact that they were addressed to a court of both law and equity. This contribution identifies the features of such petitions, attempts to classify them, and considers their wider historical significance

A Solution To An Open Problem In Random Graph Theory

In Graph Theory we describe an object called a graph G(V,E) which is a set of vertices, V, and the set of edges, E, between the vertices. Practically any type of system which can be described by a network, such as the interaction between neurons in the brain, the connections within a crime ring, or species migration between islands in the South Pacific, can be modeled at some level by a graph. Within theoretical mathematics they provide an enormous field of study in combinatorics with applications in geometry, number theory, and probability. One graph model we explore in our research is that of a randomly perturbed graph. This model begins with an arbitrarily dense graph with minimum degree d, where degree is the number of edges incident to each vertex. To this graph we add m additional edges to get our final graph G. We then randomly color edges with r colors. Based on a conjecture by Anastos and Frieze from 2019, we have shown that with r=5 and m constant, G is rainbow connected with high probability. A graph is connected if there is an edge path between any two vertices. A graph is rainbow connected if there exists a path between any two vertices where no color is repeated along the path. We relied heavily on the probabilistic method to prove our statement. The probabilistic method lies at the junction of discrete math and probability theory. The method involves proving the existence of a structure with desired properties by defining an appropriate sample space of structures and showing that the a structure with desired properties exists in the sample space with positive probability. Thinking of it conversely, the probability that the structure with the desired properties does not exist is less than one in violation of Kolmagrov\u27s axioms. This presentation will introduce the notions of Graph Theory required to understand our result. Additionally, it will be an introduction to the probabilistic method which is likely to be novel to people who are not specialized in the area, but has increasingly shown its far reaching applications. Finally, this presentation will show the use of the probabilistic method within our argument. My hope is that this will provide a general audience an understanding of our result and the method used to prove it without straying too far into the thicket of discipline-specific details

Randomly Perturbed Graphs and Rainbow Connectivity

In this work we explore randomly perturbed graphs; that is, for an arbitrarily dense graph H we add a set R consisting of m edges randomly to create a graph G. We then randomly color the edges of G with r colors. We prove, for r ≥ 5 and m a large enough constant, that between any two vertices in G there exists a rainbow path and thus G is rainbow connected. This result confirms a conjecture of Anastos and Frieze [How many randomly colored edges make a randomly colored dense graph rainbow Hamiltonian or rainbow connected?, J. Graph Theory 92 (2019), no. 4, 405–414] which resolved the case when r ≥ 7 and m is a function of n (that tends to infinity arbitrarily slowly). We also explore concepts and results related to this result

The Unfleshed Eye: a Study of Intellectual Theism in the Poetry and Criticism of Yvor Winters.

Yvor Winters\u27 early poetry, from 1920 to 1928, was written in free-verse; the aesthetic principles governing it centered on the image purified of conceptual content, and consisting of a fusion between the natural object being described and the poet\u27s own mind. The result is a kind of naturalistic mysticism, destructive of judgements and evaluations of the conscious intellect. The early poetry also registers the effect of certain scientific theories on Winters\u27 mind; these theories were mechanistic and deterministic in nature, and they turned Winters\u27 world into one in which moral and intellectual values had no reality. Other themes that appear in the early poems are the absence, or non-existence, of God, the fear of death, and the apprehension that the ultimate nature of the universe might be demonic. In the late twenties Winters underwent an artistic and intellectual reformation in reaction to the free-verse and the stylistic violence which that verse finally degenerated into. He embraced a classicism that respected and acted upon the powers of the conscious mind. Writing in conventional meter and employing a style both imagistic and abstract, he wrote poems dealing with the possibility, and the realization, of moral control and intellectual order. His new poetics rested on the philosophical assumption that absolute truth exists. In order to safeguard that truth and save himself from subjective relativism, he was driven by what he viewed as philosophical necessity to a theistic position. He was influenced in this process by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Only the existence of God could guarantee and validate truth and assure its independence of the human mind. Winters most reluctantly admitted theism. He had an instinctive fear of the supernatural; he was afraid the supernatural, its ineffability and absolute foreignness, would generate intellectual confusion in the human realm, which he wanted protected at all cost. Consequently, he defined God in the most intellectually respectful terms at his disposal. God becomes Pure Mind or Perfect Concept, existentially neutral and non-providential as far as the human is concerned. Such a perfect mind becomes the absolute standard by which everything is judged. We see the effects of this definition and the subsequent standard in Winters\u27 view of the natural world, the body-soul composite in man, and the giant movements working in society at large. Since the natural world, as well as man\u27s own body, does not participate in the reality of the Pure Mind, it was viewed by Winters with some distrust as a possible impediment to man\u27s realizing his moral and intellectual good. Since Winters believed so much of modern society was noted for thoughtlessness, he viewed it suspiciously and recommended detachment and isolation as the means of saving oneself from moral and intellectual contamination. To the Holy Spirit, a poem written in his late forties, summarizes all themes related to theism and is his most complete statement on the subject

Essays in International Trade and Spatial Economics

The first chapter of this dissertation studies the relationship between credit constraints, exporting, and misallocation. When financial markets are imperfect, credit constraints hinder firm growth, distort the allocation of inputs, and lower aggregate productivity. Such constraints are particularly costly when they bind for the most productive firms. I focus on exporters, a group of firms that the international trade literature has identified as uniquely productive. Are exporters credit constrained? Do policies that target exporters — which are ubiquitous, particularly in developing countries — mitigate or worsen misallocation? I answer these questions by combining a natural experiment in India with a quantitative model. I exploit a directed credit policy in India as a source of exogenous variation in credit supply. Eligibility was determined by a cutoff in physical capital, allowing me to estimate its effects with a regression discontinuity design. Exporters responded strongly to the relaxation of credit constraints caused by the policy: they borrowed more, hired more workers, and sold more output. By contrast, I find no effect on non-exporters. I conclude that credit constraints must be relatively more important for exporting firms. Motivated by this finding, I build a model of heterogeneous entrepreneurs that links credit constraints and the decision to export. Two forces shape exporting: productivity and access to credit. Which of these dominates determines the relative importance of credit constraints across exporting and non-exporting firms. I estimate the model using the natural experiment, and find that the decision to export is strongly driven by productivity. The result is that credit constraints bind for many exporters; in the model, 37% of exporters and 8% of non-exporters are constrained. Inputs are misallocated and exporters are inefficiently small. In counterfactual experiments, I find that directly relaxing the credit constraint of exporters raises aggregate productivity by 3.33%. However, I also show that subsidizing exporter employment worsens misallocation, because relatively unproductive, unconstrained exporters are the primary beneficiaries. The second chapter considers quite a different topic: the relationship between income inequality and spatial sorting. Housing expenditure shares decline with income. A household’s skill level determines its income, and therefore its housing expenditure share, its sensitivity to housing costs and its preferences over different locations. The result is spatial sorting driven by differences in cost-of-living between skill groups. Increases in the aggregate skill premium amplify these differences and intensify sorting. To quantify this mechanism, I augment a standard quantitative spatial model with flexible nonhomothetic preferences, disciplining the strength of the housing demand channel using consumption microdata. I find that the rising skill premium caused 23% of the increase in spatial sorting by skill since 1980

John Lubbock, science, and the liberal intellectual

John Lubbock's longest-standing scientific research interest was entomology. Some of his earliest systematic investigations of insect and marine life began under the tutelage of Darwin. Darwin shaped the trajectory of, and the programme for, Lubbock's natural history work. However, to understand John Lubbock's identity as a scientist, he must be located within the context of the Victorian ‘intellectual’. This paper traces Lubbock's entomological work from its early development under Darwin to his later work on insect sensory physiology and comparative psychology. Far from being the death of his scientific career, Lubbock's entry into Parliament marked the pinnacle of his career as a scientific intellectual. He built on his early work on invertebrate anatomy, physiology and taxonomy, and on his archaeological and anthropological research to expound his vision of mental evolution. His research on ‘savages’, on ants, bees and wasps, and on his dog, ‘Van’, permitted him to expatiate upon the psychic unity of all sentient beings, which, in turn, underpinned his overarching educational programme.PostprintPeer reviewe