The name of the game? Jazz, the name of a dude? Louis Armstrong. For this survey I will be telling you all about this prolific figure of the Jazz era named Louis Daniel Armstrong. Louis was born Aug 4, 1901 and grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. The area he grew up in was especially poor and was nicknamed “The Battlefield” He began to gain popularity in the 1920’s with his two strongest features, his more daring trumpet style as well as his unique vocals.

Louis was encouraged to sing often by a Jewish family who often gave him a job and invited him to meals at their home. However after he was arrested for firing his stepfather’s gun he was sent to the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys. This place was coincidentally where he fell in love with music as he received musical instructions while he was there.

It was after this experience when he had begun to earn himself a name as a fine blues player. While he was beginning he was eventually under mentorship with one of the greatest cornet players in town, Joe “King” Oliver. Soon he replaced King Oliver in Kid Ory’s band, which was back then the most popular band of New Orleans.

Things that Louis was known for was being in the first jazz big band, his band “the Hot Five, later Hot Seven, popularizing scat singing, unique covers of popular songs, the first African-American to get a featured billing role in a major movie, the first African-American musician to write an autobiography, first African-American entertainer to host a nationally sponsored radio show in 1937, Louis Armstrong House, telling the government off for not letting nine African-American children go to a public school, as well as songs like “Weather Bird”, “West End Blues”, “What a Wonderful World”, and “Hello, Dolly!”

Sources:

• https://www.biography.com/musician/louis-armstrong

 For this week’s survey,  we are talking about colour. One of the biggest things that I want to focus on would be the Plakatstil or Sachplakat poster style of Russia. “Plakatstil” is defined as “poster style” in German. This style came about after younger artists searched beyond the current Victorian, Art Nouveau, and Arts and Craft styles.

The whole movement had started with the 15 year old Lucian Bernhard and an exhibition. Bernhard went to the “Munich Glaspalast Exhibition Of Interior Decoration” once and felt the experience of, as he describes it “walking drunk with colour”. When Lucian Bernhard had made his first real poster in the style of Plakatstil, for the ‘Priester’ (1906) match company for a contest, it was a shocking difference compared to the other posters of the time. One thing to note as well was that the judges at first had discarded the poster and thought that the design was bizarre, however when the sales manager of the Berlin’s leading proto-advertising agency and poster printer saw Bernhard’s poster, he thought it was genius and named it first prize. This is because before this, simplified posters were an oddity and rarely used, the amount of text was also quite different in comparison, due to the fact that other posters tended to use way more text in their posters compared to Bernhard’s who uses barely any words in his.

The style came out of a rejection of medieval poetry and complex patterns as the new century approached. The Plakatstil style was the beginning of modern graphic design, in which they emphasized on more symbols and shapes. Some key aspects of the style would be the bold, straight fonts and simplified designs, the subject matter was also slightly more detailed while shapes and objects that aren’t the focus are simplified. The point of Plakatstil in the end was to have a standard  that presents a smooth product or image to the target audience. The simplified idea of this poster made it very advertisement friendly and therefore became standardized.

Sources:

• https://ericcraps.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/plakatstil/
• https://dylanspiteri.weebly.com/blog-posts-about-graphic-design-artists/plakatstil-german-posters-1905-1915
• http://historiadesigneteoria.blogspot.com/2013/02/plakatstil.html
• https://jennrichardsart.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/history-of-art-movements-plakatstil/
• http://guity-novin.blogspot.com/2010/05/chapter-31-german-plakatstil-movement.html#Ten

This survey, we are taking it back to Japan. Now, during this era, one of the biggest movements to come along was Japonism. The spread of Japonism gave the artists of the era a new perspective to look at the world from. Before the spread of Japonism, the only real way of looking at the world was from the point of view of the western Renaissance.

 Artists were attracted to the vivid colours, and the different perspectives of the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. These aspects along with how unconventional, minimal, and yet realistic the prints were caused western artists to explore new ways of illustrating. These experiments led to new ideas within the realm of perspective. Some key artists that Japonism had influenced were Edouard Manet, Vincent Van Gogh, James Whistler, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and Mary Cassatt. However I would like to focus on three artists this post, these artists being Van Gogh, Manet, and Degas.

Each one of these artists had a distinct style after being exposed to Japonism. Some traits that they have taken would be the flatter colours, strong colours, unusual spacing, everyday objects, detail from nature, exotic and beautiful atmosphere, the flat backgrounds or lack of depth, and the use of some more interpretive brush strokes. In Van Gogh’s life, he wasn’t very interested at first. However he came around to it later on and began collecting the prints. As he collected Van Gogh began to see the effects and techniques of the illustrations, these would be traits that he later took into his own paintings. Soon enough, Van Gogh had his flat colours and swirled brush stroke style. Degas’s inspiration took on some other aspects. His inspiration being the candid scenes, bare lighting or muted colours, intimate moments, and asymmetrical compositions, These can all be clearly seen when observing the work of Degas. Since Degas was also an impressionist, he wanted to capture moments in time. Therefore once photography was introduced, Degas’s works had his main inspirations for his style set. Lastly, for Manet, his work really grew beside Japonism. He was named the main draw for the modernist movement. For Manet the reason his works grew to be more well known was due to Japonism giving the west a new thing to accept. Therefore Manet was more so able to integrate the new style into his works as well. The main one being his new odd light source.

Sources:

• https://www.theartstory.org/movement/japonism/
• https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/stories/inspiration-from-japan?v=1#5
• https://michelinewalker.com/2013/07/08/manet-japonisme-and-modernism/
• http://covenantarthistory.blogspot.com/2016/04/degas-and-influence-of-japonisme.html
• https://www.theartstory.org/artist/manet-edouard/

Note: Apologies for the late upload, during this time I was having troubles with logging into my account.

One piece of technology that The lithographic printer was a “great leap forward in printing technology”. Along with being the topic of survey 4, the lithographic printer had a wide variety of uses and functions, along with the advantage of being so far ahead of it’s time that it is still being used today.

The actual invention of the lithographic printer didn’t come from space, so how was it invented? It was all thanks to Alois Senerfelder, the son of an actor. Growing up, Senerfelder wanted to pursue theatre, however he had little talent for it, and his father wanted him to study law instead. But his love for theatre had not died yet, and he had found a home and success in writing plays. Senerfelder had many of his works published but unfortunately never made too much profit from it. Because of this, Senerfelder decided to find a more cost effective way of reproducing his work. This began with him attempting to produce his own copperplate engravings. A process that required time to master. However, because of this, Senerfelder decided that a better alternative to this would be to practice on Bavarian limestone. In addition to this, Senerfelder invented correction fluid to make sure that his finished engraving didn’t have any unwanted marks. 

The creation of these two caused an experiment of which seeing how ink and water repel each other, would easily be able to transfer an image from the stone. This chemical reaction would then be known later on as the ‘principle of lithography’. However because of the nature of this chemical principle, Senerfelder preferred to call it ‘Chemical printing’.

The final points about lithographic printing is that, after inventing it, Senerfelder devoted the rest of his life to the lithographic progress. Eventually, in 1817, Senerfelder was able to design a press with automatic process of wetting and applying the ink to the plate. This let Senerfelder become a recognized person among his contemporaries. Senerfelder died comfortably with the position of “Bavarian Royal Inspector of Lithography”.

Sources:

• http://sites.tech.uh.edu/digitalmedia/materials/3350/History_of_Litho.pdf

Note: Apologies for the late upload, during this time I was having troubles with logging into my account.

Survey 3, the week of burning witches. For the ordinary citizens of the 15th century, most of the women lived in fear of being accused of being a witch as well as some men since they weren’t fully exempt of accusation either. Until the year that The “British Witchcraft Act” was passed, which was 1735, the church had spread the fear of witches across most of Europe and therefore caused a mass hysteria and many, many executions. 

Most of the accusations happened in parts of what is now, Germany, France, Netherlands, and Switzerland. The number of accusations during the 200 approximate years that the witch hunts went on are estimated to be 40,000 to 100,000 as stated in public records, however the amount of people accused that are unlisted could be up to three times as many. The majority of executions happened around the years of 1580-1650.

Now, how did people know to find witches? What did they do? At around 1450, a certain book was printed and published, this so called book was named the “Malleus Maleficarum”, this book was written or compiled by Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger. Another name it goes by is “The Hammer of Witches”. One of the reasons that it had become so widespread was because of the invention of printers, and so it was able to be mass produced and widely distributed compared to previous iterations of any witch informing piece of literature. The book was split into three sections that entailed believed practices, how they harm and prevention, and convictions. 

The thing about section 3 is that it was biased against the ‘witches’ from the beginning. The authors justification for these were to ‘protect’ the innocent from the devil. The section outlines that judges can lie to the accused by promising them ‘immunity’ if they confess, as well as keeping the identity of the accuser secret to the accused.

Sources:

• https://www.thoughtco.com/european-witch-hunts-timeline-3530786
• https://www.thoughtco.com/malleus-maleficarum-witch-document-3530785
• https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist257/stephwhit/final/malleus.html

 Topic of survey 2, the daily lives of the Tang Dynasty (C. 618-907). While researching the topic, one of the most interesting and useful websites that we found was http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat2/4sub9/entry-5431.html. This website told us all about the Tang dynasty’s big city and the life that populated them. The main topics that the article goes through are daily lives, holidays, the capital Chang’an, other cities, food, styles and luxuries, technology, inventions, medicine, and printing. Through researching this site and all the topics, I believed it would be informative to summarize and present to you the ways that new technology really affected everyone of the Tang dynasty.

 Therefore the topics that we will be going through for my part are, technology, inventions, and printing. Some new inventions that they had recently put to use would be a 3 ft tall wine serving machine disguised as an artificial mountain. The serving faucets were also in the shape of a dragon and a tilting bow was used to pour the wine into goblets to serve with a silver leaf tray. Another invention of theirs that was foraged from an invention of the previous Han dynasty was the first gas cylinders, these were said to be able to be carried “dozens of kilometers and still produce a flame”. 

 Along with these, during the Tang dynasty they also invented the first mechanical clock but also were the first to lose it somehow. The way it worked was that it divided up the day into temporary hours which were determined by other factors. The astronomical clock had a clockwork escapism mechanism, a waterwheel alongside a clepsydra clock to “power a rotating armillary sphere” to show astronomical observation. The clock became so well known that students trying to pass the imperial exams had to write an essay on it in order to pass. 

 Now the last thing to bring up would be that the Tang dynasty developed woodblock printing further into the future. However the way that they made printing work was very different than that of the movable printing style that Bi Sheng developed around the same time, as they instead carved the strokes or images out of wood rather than putting characters together in an almost impossible way to categorize. Now the effects of establishing this new style of printing was that most people in China were now able to access tons of new reading materials. Therefore making most of China more literate. They were also able to spread their language to neighboring countries as well, spreading religion and connecting people as well. Since it was cost effective, it also caught the eyes of Europe and spread a small bit there too. 

 To conclude, China remained using the woodblock printing style until the printing press became the global phenomenon that it was. 

Sources:

• http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat2/4sub9/entry-5431.html