Author Archives: s.okounev

Pablo Picasso was born on 1881 in Spain. Over the course of his lifetime, he created more than 20,000 individual sculptures, paintings, drawings, and ceramics. He is regarded as one of the most influential and celebrated modernistic artists of the twenty first century. He is responsible for the Cubism movement founded alongside with Georges Braque.

Woman with Pears(Summer 1909) was a portrait of Picasso’s companion, Fernande Olivier during the summer of 1909. In this portrait, she is depicted with a large elongated neck and is holding up a pear, which is circular in shape. Her neck and head are comprised of geometric shapes, such as triangles, rectangles, and odd shapes with a mixture of sharp and round edges. This portrait, although done with 2-dimentional shapes, gives a sense of depth and 3-dimentional qualities.

Woman with Pearsreflects aesthetic preferences associated with Modernism because Picasso’s particular style with Cubism use the appeal of geometric shapes to define his paintings instead of the orthodox style of painting. His portrait of a woman is drastically different from what a normal person would be painted at the turn of the century. Pablo’s idea of painting supersedes the societal standards when it comes to painting. I can see how some people at the time period may criticize him for painting “childish” shapes, but we can see now that the success of his Cubism movement proved him to be more forward thinking than those of his time.

The fourth floor of the MoMA had the exact specifications for the time period, and so I went with my classmate to explore the options. In the main exhibit, there was a painting of the Starry Night by Van Gogh, to the right was an exhibit by Pablo Picasso. Because I was familiar with this artist because the sound of his name was very familiar to my ear, I wanted to see what I can learn from his paintings. This was a portrait straight across the entrance to an adjacent room.

This painting was mind-boggling because geometric shapes made a portrait of a woman. The positioning of rectangles and triangles made it seem impossible, but my brain processed it so that I only see a woman. In addition, if I squint my eyes, the portrait seems to be even more detailed to me; I can see a woman more clearly and I can see a pear in the palm of her hands.

https://www.pablopicasso.org/

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80394

From the start of the story, I related to the melancholy tone when Lu Xun did not recognize his home town and felt like a stranger. After returning from the North back to his home town, Xun thought he would see people he knew from his past, or at least know his way around. To his surprise, everything was different except one wine shop. This change was talked about through out the story and had played a major role in how Lu Xun felt being back home.

From the age of 3, my family would rent a summer home in Arrowhead Lake community, located Upstate. I basically lived there for two months every year and absolutely loved it. The community had multiple swimming pools, 4 beaches, and many other kids that came repeatedly for the summers. In addition to all that, the community had many activities like tennis and even a swim team that held practice everyday. What I didn’t mention was that my grandparents that live in Russia would come and babysit me and my brother the whole time we were in Arrowhead.

In 2016, my grandparents couldn’t make it any more. So my family resorted to having my other grandma watch my brother for the summer. That year was also the year I started working and could only come up to Arrowhead on the weekends with my parents. But it was not the same. Since I didn’t live there and only came for one and a half days every week, I couldn’t attend the activities I grew up too. My childhood friends also had jobs, and some completely stopped coming. That summer was the worst for me, coming to my second home and realizing my youth days were over.

I still visited Arrowhead, maybe once or twice a summer in 2017 and 2018.

“I felt that the North was certainly not my home, yet when I came South I could only count as a stranger.”

— How is the institution of marriage treated in Tartuffe? What are some of the models or ideals of marriage that are raised by Moliere or his characters?

Throughout the play, Moliere brings up multiple examples of how institutional marriage was in his time. To simply word it, the husband was the king of the family, and decided everything. One example of this would be when Orgon was to choose who his daughter, Mariane, would marry. To continue on the thought of Orgon’s daughter, Orgon decided to break his promise to marry Mariane to Valere, the man she loved, and offered her to Tartuffe, a man hated by everyone else in the family. The second example would be when Mariane didn’t fight Orgon’s decision to marry her and Tartuffe. She simply said that her father was the shot-caller and then basically told her lover she hates him and never wants to see him again. The third example was during the scene when Orgon and his wife Elmire made a plan to expose Tartuffe. The deal was that Elmire had to flirt with Tartuffe and make him advance on her. Shortly after, he did, but Orgon didn’t stop them. The only thing that pissed him off was when Tartuffe said Orgon would do anything he wishes. This showed how a wife was portrayed in the 17th century.

All of these examples perfectly painted what a marriage was back then, and in addition showed how the words of the man of the land were godly, and couldn’t be disputed.