2015 World Art of the 20th Century and Contemporary Art

The paper is dedicated to the creative work of an American artist Cindy Sherman. A significant part of her artworks is assigned to allusions to classical art. Particular interest is aroused towards Sherman’s interpretation of Old Master paintings in the famous 1980–1990s series “History Portra­its / Old Masters”.
The artist’s comprehension of art forms, its traditions and the laws of art developed by the Renaissance masters helps Sherman to interpret images embodied by the great artists in her own way. The “History Portraits / Old Masters” series takes us back to the formal level of the Renaissance art, appealing to the problem of vertically oriented gestalt in the classical art.
Sherman’s series is regarded in the context of gender studies from the point of modern feministic criticism and the theory of art.
The research focuses on the problem of myth arising in American art of the 1980–1990s and associated with the reception of Roland Barthes’ scientific work.

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Sir Antony Gormley (b. 1950) is one of the most significant contemporary sculptors, winner of the Turner Prize (1994) and many other important awards, Knight of the Order of the British Empire (2014).
His work is a brilliant example of the continuous break with the abstract minimalism and immaterial conceptual practices, with an aim to rediscover humanistic grounds of art, and the visual image of the human being. Gormley uses his own body as his primary subject and research instrument, as it is well familiar and always available to him. He has developed a special sculptural technology that involves casts from living models. However, achieving naturalistic accuracy is not his main goal; Gormley prefers to generalize his forms, to dissect them into fragments, and to bring them closer to symbolic state.
For Gormley, sculpture is not so much a physical object as a way of revealing the trace left in space by a human being. This is why many of his works can be understood only in relation to the landscape and environment for which they were created. Antony Gormley’s figures interact actively with their surroundings and the viewer, overcoming the classical distance between an artwork and a person who perceives it.
Gormley is constantly in a dialogue with the classical heritage. On the one hand, his own academic training and deep interest in the best examples of the past (for instance, Greek archaic sculpture or Vitruvian theory of proportions) motivated the artist to turn specifically to the issues of the body, to capturing the visible presence of humans in the world. On the other hand, Gormley is not afraid to argue with the old masters, as he is convinced that at a certain point sculpture took the wrong path in its attempts to convey the fleeting moments, movements, and conditions in inert and weighty materials.
Gormley maintains that sculpture should not aim at narrative but rather at calm and static contemplation, which would make the viewer stop and get a new sensation of his or her own self in space. As the artist puts it, his figures “are being, not doing, and they are waiting. They have time, we have consciousness, and they are waiting for the viewer’s thoughts and feelings. This is the absolute antithesis of heroic sculpture” (fragment of an interview for The Telegraph, 2012).

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“The Mill and the Cross”, a film directed by Lech Majewski, is dedicated to the episode from life of the great Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is widely known that his biography is almost obscure (see, for example: Karel van Mander’s “Het Schilderboeck”), but modern authors have attempted to “reconstruct” events. A French historian K. -A. Roque wrote a book “Bruegel: ou l’Atelier des songes” (1987); a Polish film director L. Majewski directed the above-mentioned film. What attracts a 21th-century viewer in Bruegel’s art? Is it possible to assess the artist’s works adequately without accurate biographical information about him? What is preferable when it comes to a master of a classical epoch — a documentary or an artistic project? Finally, has a customer’s relationship with an ar­tist, and that of an author wihe th an audience changed? Before Majewski’s film successful attempts of cinematic interpretation of the artist’s biographies were made by Jos Stelling (1977) and Derek Jarman (1986). What’s the difference between them and Majewski’s work?

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The report describes the results of the research concerning the patterns of appearance as well as evolution of modern court buildings in the USA.
The history of specialized judicial buildings in the ancient times is traced. As a result their special architectural characters are defined.
The origin and development of court places in England in the 11th–19th centuries is analyzed. The examples of the first court buildings in colonial America are given and their further development during the first decades after the independence was declared are studied.
Taking the American court buildings of the mid-20th — the beginning of 21th century as an example, the basic principles of development of public places are identified. Also the communications schemes are studied and classified.
The development of courtroom place in accordance with the evolution of a place for public is exa­mines as well as the development of courtrooms under the influence of changes in judicial procedures.
Finally the modern standard requirements of courtroom organization made for newly constructed buildings are given.

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The modern art of book illustration offers a wide field for scientific reflection. In particular, the explicit and implicit influence of Art Nouveau, which can be observed in works by such illustrators as Alan Lee, Charles Vess and many other less famous ones, sets us thinking again about the reasons of the topicality of the specific Art Nouveau approaches to illustration of fiction. In this case the matter concerns the illustration of a myth, an epic and a fairy tale — as a rule, illustrators visualize the chronotopes of Celtic and Scandinavian mythology, chivalric romance, European fairy tale. The direction developing most rapidly in this sphere today is the one which transforms the traditions of Art Nouveau under the influence of an artist on the borderline of Art Nouveau, Arthur Rackham. Such a reference point allows enriching the Art Nouveau priciple of hierarchical arrangement of figurative and non-figurative sections with the mixture of realism and grotesque, which helps Rackham’s illustrations to enjoy constant popularity. The assimilation of the Art Nouveau heritage through the prism of his work is determined by the two main paths of development of the fairy tale genre in the 20th century: work with a narrative (a myth; the creation of Tolkien’s consistent secondary reality can serve as an example) and work with metanarrative (creation of a fairy tale about a fairy tale, illustration of an illustration). In the framework of the first trend, which is usually connected with fantasy, the space of total animism is developed, where everything around the human is alive. The second path, which is connected rather with magic realism, is famous mostly thanks to the intermedial projects by Neil Gaiman. For example, in the comics called “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the visualization of Gaiman’s scenario, which is in itself a dialogue with Shakespeare, becomes a dialogue between Charles Vess and Rackham as the author of the most famous illustrations to this text. Such dialogue becomes a part of the postmodern intermedial project, where techniques of illustrator’s work are emphasized up to self-irony.

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In Western art the way to depict a city from the height of a bird flight since the first half of the 15th century has long been the only way to create a relatively accurate and objective picture of cities. In the 16th century there appeared analytical methods for building a wide perspective of views from a bird flight. Since the 19th century “views from above” were shot by a camera-obscura from balloons. In the 20th century, such images were replaced by aerial photography, which performs both documentary and artistic tasks.
When creating a bird’s eye view of a city, contemporary artists ignore the problem of topographic precision even if they portray a particular city, like New York (Wols) or Rome (D. Notargiacomo). The main thing is the desire to express emotional, personal attitude to the city. So, in G. Richter’s and T. Beyrle’s canvases metropolis appears as something endless, repetitive. Wols, F. Hundertwasser and D. Notargiacomo show it as a complex organic form, concentrated life energy of everything that the city consists of. In many cases we can notice the movement towards the language of abstraction.

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