:Jean Eustache was also the name of a 17th century French organ maker.

Jean Eustache (November 30, 1938 – November 3, 1981) was a French filmmaker. During his short career, he completed numerous shorts, in addition to a pair of highly regarded features, of which the first, The Mother and the Whore, is considered a key work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema.

In his obituary for Eustache, the influential critic Serge Daney wrote:

"In the thread of the desolate 70s, his films succeeded one another, always unforeseen, without a system, without a gap: film-rivers, short films, TV programs, hyperreal fiction. Each film went to the end of its material, from real to fictional sorrow. It was impossible for him to go against it, to calculate, to take cultural success into account, impossible for this theoretician of seduction to seduce an audience."

Biography

Eustache was born in Pessac, Gironde, France into a working class family. Relatively little information exists about Eustache’s life prior to the time he became a member of the Cahiers du cinéma coterie in the late fifties, though it is known that he was largely self-educated and worked in the railroad service prior to becoming a filmmaker. Information suggests that the mystery surrounding his youth was intentional, with sources stating that "during his lifetime Eustache published little information about his early years, indicating that he felt no nostalgia for an unhappy childhood.".

Though not a member of the Nouvelle vague, Eustache maintained ties to it, appearing as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard's Week End and editing Luc Moullet's Une aventure de Billy le Kid, In 1981, he was partially immobilized in an auto accident. He killed himself in his Paris apartment, a few weeks before his 43rd birthday.

Eustache had a son, Boris Eustache (b. 1960), who worked on his father's second feature and appears as an actor in Eustache's short film Les Photos d'Alix.

Work

Eustache was quoted as saying, “The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be.” Because of his reticence to discuss his personal life, it is assumed that his body of work was largely autobiographical. Besides his fictional shorts and features, Eustache made numerous documentaries, many of them very personal, including several shot in his hometown of Pessac and a feature-length interview with his grandmother.

Eustache directed two narrative features. The Mother and the Whore (La maman et la putain), the first, is a 217 minute rumination on love, relationships, men and women. The film’s central three-way romance plot focuses on Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), his girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and the nurse he meets and falls in love with, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun).

Eustache’s second feature, Mes petites amoureuses (1974), was intentionally different from his debut. Shot in color by cinematographer Nestor Almendros (as opposed to The Mother and the Whore's grainy black-and-white), the film also features significantly less dialogue and focuses on teenage characters in a rural setting.

Remakes and Serial Works

Eustache admired the documentary qualities of early actuality films, and frequently cited the Lumiere Brothers as influences. He made two films about a religious parade in Pessac, both titled La Rosière de Pessac, in 1968 and 1979, and remade his short Une sale histoire twice. Regarding the tendency to re-examine in Eustache's work, the American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: "An obsessive-compulsive filmmaker and clearly a tormented one who wound up dying by his own hand, Eustache was clearly experimenting with his variations as well as goading viewers into examining their own reactions to them."

Filmography

La soirée (1961), unfinished

Les Mauvaises Fréquentations (1963), 42 minutes (first title, 16 mm), aka Du côté de Robinson (second title, 35 mm); "Bad Company" aka "Robinson's Place" (English titles)

Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966), 47 minutes; "Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes" (English title)

La Rosière de Pessac (1968), 65 minutes; "The Virgin of Pessac" (English title)

Two TV-films of 26 minutes each one in 1969: Sur Le dernier des hommes de Murnau and A propos de La petite marchande d'allumettes de Jean Renoir

Le Cochon (1970), 65 minutes, directed with Jean-Michel Barjol; "The Pig" (English title)

Numéro zéro (1971), 110 minutes (TV-version: Odette Robert, 54 minutes): a portrait of Eustache's elderly grandmother.

La Maman et la putain (1973), 220 minutes; "The Mother and the Whore" (English title)

Mes petites amoureuses (1974), 120 minutes

Une sale histoire (1977), part document: 22 minutes and part fiction: 28 minutes; "A Dirty Story" (English title)

La Rosière de Pessac (1979), 67 minutes; "The Virgin of Pessac" (1979) (English title)

Les Photos d'Alix (1980), 18 minutes

Le Jardin des délices de Jérôme Bosch (1980), 34 minutes; "Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Delights" (English title)

Offre d'emploi (1980), 18 minutes

References

External links

Biography on newwavefilm.com

Desire & Despair: The Cinema of Jean Eustache by Jared Rapfogel

He stands alone: Sight & Sound online feature on Eustache's career

The Thread - obituary

Category:1938 births Category:1981 deaths Category:French film directors Category:Film directors who committed suicide Category:Suicides in France

Bgcolour	#EEDD82
Name	Hieronymus Bosch
Caption	Attributed to Jacques Le Boucq, Portrait of Hieronymus Bosch. c. 1550
Birthname	Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken
Birthdate	1450
Birth place	's-Hertogenbosch, Duchy of Brabant
Deathdate	Buried on August 09, 1516
Nationality	Netherlandish
Field	Painting
Movement	Early Netherlandish Renaissance
Works	The Garden of Earthly Delights The Temptation of St. Anthony

Hieronymus Bosch (, ; born Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken ; c. 1450 – August 9, 1516) was an Early Netherlandish painter. His work is known for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives.

Life

Hieronymus Bosch was born Hieronymus (or Jeroen, respectively the Latin and Middle Dutch form of the name "Jerome") van Aken (meaning "from Aachen"). He signed a number of his paintings as Bosch (pronounced Boss in Middle Dutch). The name derives from his birthplace, , which is commonly called "Den Bosch".

Little is known of Bosch’s life or training. He left behind no letters or diaries, and what has been identified has been taken from brief references to him in the municipal records of , and in the account books of the local order of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. Nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art. Bosch’s date of birth has not been determined with certainty. It is estimated at on the basis of a hand drawn portrait (which may be a self-portrait) made shortly before his death in 1516. The drawing shows the artist at an advanced age, probably in his late sixties.

Bosch was born and lived all his life in and near , the capital of the Duchy of Brabant. His grandfather, Jan van Aken (died 1454), was a painter and is first mentioned in the records in 1430. It is known that Jan had five sons, four of whom were also painters. Bosch’s father, Anthonius van Aken (died c. 1478) acted as artistic adviser to the Brotherhood of Our Lady. It is generally assumed that either Bosch’s father or one of his uncles taught the artist to paint, but none of their works survive. Bosch first appears in the municipal record in 1474, when he is named along with two brothers and a sister.

's-Hertogenbosch was a flourishing city in fifteenth century Brabant, in the south of the present-day Netherlands, at the time part of the Burgundian Netherlands, and during his lifetime passing through marriage to the Habsburgs. In 1463, 4,000 houses in the town were destroyed by a catastrophic fire, which the then (approximately) 13-year-old Bosch presumably witnessed. He became a popular painter in his lifetime and often received commissions from abroad. In 1488 he joined the highly respected Brotherhood of Our Lady, an arch-conservative religious group of some 40 influential citizens of , and 7,000 'outer-members' from around Europe.

Sometime between 1479 and 1481, Bosch married Aleyt Goyaerts van den Meerveen, who was a few years older than the artist. The couple moved to the nearby town of Oirschot, where his wife had inherited a house and land, from her wealthy family.

An entry in the accounts of the Brotherhood of Our Lady records Bosch’s death in 1516. A funeral mass served in his memory was held in the church of Saint John on 9 August of that year.

Art

is Bosch's most widely known triptych]] Bosch produced several triptychs. Among his most famous is The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting, for which the original title has not survived, depicts paradise with Adam and Eve and many wondrous animals on the left panel, the earthly delights with numerous nude figures and tremendous fruit and birds on the middle panel, and hell with depictions of fantastic punishments of the various types of sinners on the right panel. When the exterior panels are closed the viewer can see, painted in grisaille, God creating the Earth. These paintings—especially the Hell panel—are painted in a comparatively sketchy manner which contrasts with the traditional Flemish style of paintings, where the smooth surface—achieved by the application of multiple transparent glazes—conceals the brushwork. In this painting, and more powerfully in works such as his Temptation of St. Anthony (Lisbon), Bosch draws with his brush. Not surprisingly, Bosch is also one of the most revolutionary draftsmen in the history of art, producing some of the first autonomous sketches in Northern Europe.

Bosch never dated his paintings. But—unusual for the time—he seems to have signed several of them, although other signatures purporting to be his are certainly not. Fewer than 25 paintings remain today that can be attributed to him. In the late sixteenth-century, Philip II of Spain acquired many of Bosch's paintings, including some probably commissioned and collected by Spaniards active in Bosch's hometown; as a result, the Prado Museum in Madrid now owns The Garden of Earthly Delights, the circular tabletop of The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, the The Haywain Triptych and The Stone Operation.

Interpretation

In the twentieth century, when changing artistic tastes made artists like Bosch more palatable to the European imagination, it was sometimes argued that Bosch’s art was inspired by heretical points of view (e.g., the ideas of the Cathars and putative Adamites) as well as of obscure hermetic practices. Again, since Erasmus had been educated at one of the houses of the Brethren of the Common Life in S-Hertogenbosch, and the town was religiously progressive, some writers have found it unsurprising that strong parallels exist between the caustic writing of Erasmus and the often savage painting of Bosch. "Although the Brethren remained loyal to the Pope, they still saw it as their duty to denounce the abuses and scandalous behaviour of many priests: the corruption which both Erasmus and Bosch satirised in their work". Others, following a strain of Bosch-interpretation datable already to the sixteenth-century, continued to think his work was created merely to titillate and amuse, much like the "grotteschi" of the Italian Renaissance. While the art of the older masters was based in the physical world of everyday experience, Bosch confronts his viewer with, in the words of the art historian Walter Gibson, "a world of dreams [and] nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes." In one of the first known accounts of Bosch’s paintings, in 1560 the Spaniard Felipe de Guevara wrote that Bosch was regarded merely as "the inventor of monsters and chimeras". In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch art historian Karel van Mander described Bosch’s work as comprising "wondrous and strange fantasies"; however, he concluded that the paintings are "often less pleasant than gruesome to look at."

In recent decades, scholars have come to view Bosch's vision as less fantastic, and accepted that his art reflects the orthodox religious belief systems of his age. His depictions of sinful humanity, his conceptions of Heaven and Hell are now seen as consistent with those of late medieval didactic literature and sermons. Most writers attach a more profound significance to his paintings than had previously been supposed, and attempt to interpret it in terms of a late medieval morality. It is generally accepted that Bosch’s art was created to teach specific moral and spiritual truths in the manner of other Northern Renaissance figures, such as the poet Robert Henryson, and that the images rendered have precise and premeditated significance. According to Dirk Bax, Bosch's paintings often represent visual translations of verbal metaphors and puns drawn from both biblical and folkloric sources. However, the conflict of interpretations that his works still elicit raise profound questions about the nature of "ambiguity" art of his period.

Some writers see Bosch as a proto-type medieval surrealist, and parallels are often made with the twentieth century Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. Other writers attempt to interpret his imagery using the language of Freudian psychology. However, such theses are commonly rejected; according to Gibson, "what we choose to call the libido was denounced by the medieval church as original sin; what we see as the expression of the subconscious mind was for the Middle Ages the promptings of God or the Devil."

Debates on attribution

The exact number of Bosch's surviving works has been a subject of considerable debate. He signed only seven of his paintings, and there is uncertainty whether all the paintings once ascribed to him were actually from his hand. It is known that from the early sixteenth century onwards numerous copies and variations of his paintings began to circulate. In addition, his style was highly influential, and was widely imitated by his numerous followers.

Over the years, scholars have attributed to him fewer and fewer of the works once thought to be his, and today only 25 are definitively attributed to him.

Works

Notes

References

Bax, Dirk. (1949), “Ontcijfering van Jeroen Bosch”. Den Haag.

Gibson, Walter S (1973). “Hieronymus Bosch”. New York: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-5002-O134-X

Koldeweij, Jos & Bernard Vermet & Barbera van Kooij: Hieronymus Bosch. New Insights Into His Life and Work, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2001. ISBN 9-0566-2214-5

External links

Bosch Bruegel Society

Hieronymus Bosch "Between Heaven and Hell" in the "A World History of Art"

Hieronymus Bosch Gallery at ibiblio

Bosch Universe

VA Tech English Dept. Project - Details Hieronymus Bosch paintings and allows for close examination

Hieronymus Bosch at Panopticon Virtual Art Gallery

At the Museo Nacional del Prado

"Hieronymus Bosch, Tempter and Moralist" Analysis by Larry Silver.

Hieronymus Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins table painting Analysis by Anja Zeidler.

A Musical About Hieronymus Bosch

www.Hieronymus-Bosch.org 188 works by Hieronymus Bosch

Short animation film about The Garden of Earthly Delights

Category:1450s births Category:1516 deaths Category:Dutch painters Category:Early Netherlandish painters Category:People from Den Bosch Category:Renaissance painters Category:Requests for audio pronunciation (English) Category:Requests for audio pronunciation (Dutch)