The most famous art shows held in Paris in the late 1800′s were undoubtedly the exhibitions of the Impressionists. However, in 1890, the École des Beaux-Arts held one of what were a series of shows in a style that was nearly as influential: Japonisme.

Japonisme was the French term used to cover a wide variety of Japanese visual art styles. Most often, these were woodcuts and prints from the Edo period. A master of the form was Kitagawa Utamoro, who made a series of prints in the late eighteenth-century. One of these prints, shown above, was called Midnight: The Hours of the Rat; Mother and Sleepy Child. The simple lines and clear composition of the piece would help Cassatt move away from her early Impressionist style toward the more precise look of her late lithograph prints. In homage to Utamaro, the most famous of these prints, made a year after the Japonisme show, also depicts a mother and child: The Bath.

For a recent take on “Japonisme,” read this new book by Lionel Lambourne.

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(René Descartes’ diagram describing the arc of the rainbow)

Along with the Meditations, the most commonly read work by René Descartes is his Discourse on the Method, which contains the famous assertion: “I think, therefore I am.” In the Discourse, Descartes laid out his rules that, he claimed, could be used to solve any problem that the mind might encounter. This was quite a large claim, but Descartes went a long way toward proving it in the essays that followed. (Originally, Discourse was only meant as an introduction to these technical works.) In one of these essays, “The Geometry,” Descartes solved the “Pappus Locus Problem,” a complicated geometrical puzzle that was first formulated thousands of years before Descartes’ birth, and never solved before he applied himself to it. (Incidentally, it was in solving this problem that the great Enlightenment philosopher invented “Cartesian coordinates.”) In another essay, “The Optics,” Descartes discovered the Law of Refraction. And in the final essay, “The Meteors” (what we would now call “meteorology”), Descartes used the new Law of Refraction to make an important discovery about the rainbow.

As today’s entry in the Devotional points out, you can never stand under a rainbow, because it is an optical illusion caused by sunlight passing through raindrops. Descartes used his discoveries in optics to make this point more precisely. As he discovered, the angle at which light passes through the edge of a rainbow at its center – or its “angular radius” – is exactly 42 degrees. As impressive as the Discourse itself was, the fact that Descartes could use its rules to make three major discoveries is far more impressive still.

Read Descartes’ Discourse on the Method here.

For more on Descartes, read the entry for Week 15, Day 6.

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Albert Einstein formulated the world’s most famous equation in 1905, a year that has rightly been called his annus mirabilis, or “Wonderful Year.” It was in that same year that he made three other important discoveries:

1) The Photoelectric Effect
The Photoelectric Effect is an odd property of light: shine a light on a sheet of paper with two small holes on it, and the pattern formed by the light passing through the holes doesn’t quite behave the way you’d expect. The expectations before 1905 were based on the theory that light is a wave, but Einstein postulated another possibility. Or, rather, he postulated three: perhaps light isn’t only a wave; and perhaps something can be matter and a wave at the same time; and perhaps matter can have a mass of zero. With those new assumptions, Einstein solved the problem of the Photoelectric Effect. Even he considered this revolutionary.

2) Brownian Motion
Go to the nearest body of water, look at the surface, and you’re likely to witness an odd phenomenon: pollen zipping around the surface of the water in seemingly random ways. This is called “Brownian Motion.” Einstein explained how it happens, and, in doing so, proved the existence of atoms.

3) The Theory of Special Relativity
Years before formulating his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein postulated a theory that works in a special case: for bodies moving close to the speed of light. The Devoted Intellectual does not pretend to understand this one, but feel free to chime in with your explanations…

And what about that famous equation? It appeared in a fourth paper. In a footnote. Almost an after-thought in a year of magical thinking.

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The label “Impressionist,” like “Tory” or “intellectual” or “suffragette,” was first used as an insult. In this case, the insult was hurled by Louis Leroy, who coined the term in “Exhibition of the Impressionists,” his famous review of the 1874 exhibit that made Renoir, Pissarro, Monet and others famous. Leroy described one painting as “palette-scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas,” and many others agreed. The works of the Impressionists were dismissed as sloppy, slap-dash messes. There might be a few contemporary artists who would be happy to hear their work described like this, but the Impressionists weren’t. They insisted that their paintings represented the world far more accurately than the old masters had. According to a study published last year, they just might have been right.

Between 1899 and 1905, Claude Monet made 19 paintings of the British House of Parliament at various times of day. Like all the Impressionists, Monet was fascinated by subtle differences in light and shading and captured these in his works. He captured them with remarkable accuracy, as Jacob Baker and John E. Thornes demonstrated in last year’s study. Baker and Thornes compared the position of the sun in the paintings with astronomical records and found that they matched exactly. As Thornes told the New York Times, “We can date, almost to within 15 minutes, when he first put the sun onto certain images.” Now that they know how precise Monet’s observations were, Baker and Thornes hope to use his paintings to analyze “London fogs and air quality during this period.” Apparently, those “palette-scrapings” were placed on canvas far more carefully than M. Leroy cared to admit.

Read the abstract of Baker and Thornes’ paper here.

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Today’s entry in The Intellectual Devotional introduces Langston Hughes’ great poem “I, Too, Sing America.” We can’t think of a better compliment to that entry than another great Hughes poem: “Jazzonia.”

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve’s eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

A wonderful analysis of this poem is included in a volume that every Devoted Intellectual should read: Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow Burn. In that book, Paglia introduces and analyzes “Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems,” as the subtitle indicates. Her selection of poems is strong throughout, and her interpretations are never marred by the kind of academic prose that would send most readers running from a book of “poetry criticism.” As Paglia has immodestly pointed out, “Break, Blow, Burn may be the only book of poetry criticism that has ever reached the national bestseller list in the United States.”

How does she read Hughes’ poem? She starts by making an intriguing point: “modernist” poetry has mostly been associated with the despair and desperation of works like T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” but most modernist poems were written just as jazz — one of the great new popular entertainments of the twentieth century — was coming into its own. Hughes was almost unique in embracing the celebratory aesthetic of jazz in his work, rather than dwelling on the uglier aspects of humanity revealed, for instance, in the trenches of the First World War.

For her actual line-by-line analysis, you’ll have to read the book. Order it here.

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The earliest electrical cars had one particularly inconvenient feature: every night, they needed to be plugged in to restore their batteries. Besides being inconvenient, this also made them somewhat pointless: how much energy was really being conserved if the batteries had to be charged on a nightly basis?

Eventually, car makers came up with an innovative solution. “Hybrid” cars use gas to accelerate, but electricity to run the car at a steady speed. Most importantly, this electricity is not pumped into the car with a large plug or generator. It is produced by the car every time that it brakes. How? Friction. When the brakes are applied to a moving car, this causes friction. Depending on how hard the brakes are pushed, this is enough to slow down or stop the car. Until recently, that’s been all there was to say. But car makers soon decided to reuse the energy generated by that friction. So, every time you brake your hybrid, the heat produced by the brakes is used to charge the battery, allowing it to go for years and decades without ever being plugged in. This is about as true to the environmentalist motto – “reduce, reuse, recycle” – as you can get.

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In 1913, T.S. Eliot was a student at Harvard University who had just been awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford. He hoped to establish himself there as a poet and a thinker, and he knew that one of the most influential people in the field was Ezra Pound. Pound, who would soon take up Eliot’s cause, was the overseas editor of a Chicago magazine named Poetry, to which he would submit Eliot’s “Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the January 1913 edition, Pound published an essay about the best new poets in London (a list that Eliot would soon strive to make). That issue, which Eliot is likely to have read, also contained a poem by the Kentucky writer Malcolm Cawein. The title of the poem was “Waste Land.”

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
Twisted and torn they rose–
The tortured bones of a perished race
Of monsters no mortal knows,
They startled the mind’s repose.
…
I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again–
And man and dog were gone,
Like wisps of the graying dawn.

As Robert Ian Scott first pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995, Cawein’s poem (which preceded Eliot’s by eight years) has more than its title in common with Eliot’s far more famous work. The tone and sensibility are very much like Eliot’s, as are many of the images, from the “skeletons gaunt” to the “breath of dust” that Eliot would transform into a “handful.” At the end of his poem, Eliot famously listed his sources, but not all of them. He was happy to put himself in the same company as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Dante and the Bhagavad Gita, but did not condescend to mention the forgotten poet from Kentucky who influenced him more than anyone else.

Was Eliot’s act plagiarism or homage? Compare Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Cawein’s “Waste Land” and decide for yourself.

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