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Coordinates: 29°29′09″N 98°27′22″W / 29.485776°N 98.456233°W / 29.485776; -98.456233

McNay Art Museum
220px Entrance to the original McNay home and museum.
Location of the McNay in Texas
Established	1950
Location	6000 N. New Braunfels Ave., San Antonio, Texas,  United States
Type	Art Museum
Director	William J. Chiego
Curator	Rene Paul Barilleaux
Website	www.mcnayart.org

The McNay Art Museum, founded in 1950 in San Antonio, is the first modern art museum in the U.S. State of Texas. The museum was created by Marion Koogler McNay's original bequest of most of her fortune, her important art collection and her 24-room Spanish Colonial Revival-style mansion that sits on 23 acres (9.3 ha) that are landscaped with fountains, broad lawns and a Japanese-inspired garden and fishpond.

McNay was an American painter and art teacher who inherited a substantial oil fortune upon the death of her father. The museum was named after her, and has been expanded to include galleries of medieval and Renaissance artwork and a larger collection of 20th-century European and American modernist work.

The museum focuses primarily on 19th and 20th century European and American art by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Diego Rivera, Mary Cassatt, and Edward Hopper. The collection today consists of over 14,000 objects and is one of the finest collections of Contemporary Art and Sculpture in the Southwestern United States. The museum also is home to the Tobin Collection of Theater Arts, which is one of the premiere collections of its kind in the U.S., and a research library with over 30,000 volumes. More recently, the McNay Art Museum recently added the Stieren Center, built by internationally renowned architect Jean-Paul Viguier, to display their Modern collection.

References[link]

• "A Modern Miscellany: The McNay Art Museum", wsj.com, Nov. 12, 2008
• McNay Art Museum, NY Times listing with review by Frommer
• Marion Koogler McNay, Fine Art Dealers Association
• McNay Press Release^{[dead link]}
• McNay Press Release^{[dead link]}

External links[link]

• McNay website

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: McNay Art Museum

This article uses bare URLs for citations. Please consider adding full citations so that the article remains verifiable. Several templates and the Reflinks tool are available to assist in formatting. (Reflinks documentation) (November 2011)

The Louvre in Paris, France, is one of the world's largest museums and it is the most visited art museum in the world.

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art. Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection. Paintings are the most commonly displayed art objects; however, sculpture, decorative arts, furniture, textiles, costume, drawings, pastels, watercolors, collages, prints, artists' books, photographs, and installation art are also regularly shown.^[1] Although primarily concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host other artistic activities, such as performance art, music concerts, or poetry readings.

Types of galleries[link]

The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, Willem van Haecht, 1628. A private picture gallery as an early precursor of the modern museum.

The term is used for both public galleries, which are non-profit or publicly owned museums that display selected collections of art. On the other hand private galleries refers to the commercial enterprises for the sale of art. However, both types of gallery may host traveling exhibits or temporary exhibitions including art borrowed from elsewhere.

Galleries in museums[link]

The rooms in museums where art is displayed for the public are often referred to as galleries as well, with a room dedicated to Ancient Egyptian art often being called the Egyptian Gallery, for example.

Contemporary art gallery[link]

The term contemporary art gallery refers usually to a privately owned for-profit commercial gallery. These galleries are often found clustered together in large urban centers. Smaller cities are usually home to at least one gallery, but they may also be found in towns or villages, and remote areas where artists congregate, e.g. the Taos art colony and St Ives, Cornwall.

Contemporary art galleries are usually open to the general public without charge; however, some are semi-private. They usually profit by taking a portion of art sales; from 25% to 50% is typical. There are also many non-profit or collective galleries. Some galleries in cities like Tokyo charge the artists a flat rate per day, though this is considered distasteful in some international art markets. Galleries often hang solo shows. Curators often create group shows that say something about a certain theme, trend in art, or group of associated artists. Galleries sometimes choose to represent artists exclusively, giving them the opportunity to show regularly.

A gallery's definition can also include the artist cooperative or artist-run space, which often (in North America and Western Europe) operates as a space with a more democratic mission and selection process. Such galleries typically have a board of directors and a volunteer or paid support staff that select and curate shows by committee, or some kind of similar process to choose art that typically lacks commercial ends.

Vanity galleries[link]

A vanity gallery is an art gallery that charges fees from artists in order to show their work, much like a vanity press does for authors. The shows are not legitimately curated and will frequently or usually include as many artists as possible. Most art professionals are able to identify them on an artist's resume.^[2]

Visual art not shown in a gallery[link]

Works on paper, such as drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and photographs are typically not permanently displayed for conservation reasons. Instead, public access to these materials is provided by a dedicated print study room located within the museum. Murals generally remain where they have been painted, although many have been removed to galleries. Various forms of 20th century art, such as land art and performance art, also usually exist outside a gallery. Photographic records of these kinds of art are often shown in galleries, however. Most museum and large art galleries own more works than they have room to display. The rest are held in reserve collections, on or off-site.

Similar to an art gallery is the sculpture garden (or sculpture park), which presents sculpture in an outdoor space. Sculpture installation has grown in popularity, whereby temporary sculptures are installed in open spaces during events like festivals.

Architecture[link]

The architectural form of the art gallery was established by Sir John Soane with his design for the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1817. This established the gallery as a series of interconnected rooms with largely uninterrupted wall spaces for hanging pictures and indirect lighting from skylights or roof lanterns.

The late 19th century saw a boom in the building of public art galleries in Europe and America, becoming an essential cultural feature of larger cities. More art galleries rose up alongside museums and public libraries as part of the municipal drive for literacy and public education.

In the middle and late 20th century earlier architectural styles employed for art museums (such as the Beaux-Arts style of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City or the Gothic and Renaissance Revival architecture of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum) were increasingly replaced with more modern styles, such as Deconstructivism. Examples of this trend include the Guggenheim Museum in New York City by Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Centre Pompidou-Metz by Shigeru Ban, and Mario Botta's redesign of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Some critics argue that these galleries are self-defeating, in that their dramatic interior spaces distract the eye from the paintings they are supposed to exhibit.

Cultural aspects[link]

Many art museums throughout history have been designed with a cultural purpose or been subject to political intervention. In particular National Art Galleries have been thought to incite feelings of nationalism. This has occurred in both democratic and non-democratic countries, although authoritarian regimes have historically exercised more control over administration of art museums. Ludwig Justi was for example dismissed as director of The Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery) in Berlin in 1933 by the new Nazi authorities for not being politically suitable.^[3]

Since the 1970s a number of political theorists and social commentators have pointed to the political implications of art museums and social relations. Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, argued that in spite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (such as classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly tie in with their social position. So called Cultural capital is a major factor in social mobility (for example, getting a higher-paid, higher-status job). The argument states that certain art museums are aimed at perpetuating aristocratic and upper class ideals of taste and excludes segments of society without the social opportunities to develop such interest. The fine arts thus perpetuate social inequality by creating divisions between different social groups. This argument also ties in with the Marxist theory of mystification and elite culture.^[4]

Furthermore, certain art gallerias, such as the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris are situated in buildings of considerable emotional impact. The Louvre in Paris is for instance located in the former Royal Castle of the ancient regime, and is thus clearly designed with a political agenda. It has been argued that such buildings create feelings of subjugation and adds to the mystification of fine arts.^[5]

Notable art museums[link]

Online museums[link]

Museums with major web presences[link]

Most art museums have only limited online collections, but a few museums, as well as some libraries and government agencies, have developed substantial online catalogues. Museums, libraries and government agencies with substantial online collections of prints, photographs, and other works on paper include:

• Library of Congress, prints (C19 on) and photographs collection (several million entries).^[6]

• The British Museum has 1,969,197 objects available online, of which 606,348 have one or more image (as at August 2011).^[7]

Museums, libraries and government agencies with substantial online collections with more focus on paintings and sculpture include:

• Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with over 330,000 works, most with images. Good for prints.[1]
• Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, with over 85,000 works
• Harvard Art Museums, with over 81,000 works, about half of which have very low resolution images.^[8]
• Louvre, with over 80,000 works in various databases, with a large number of images, as well as another 140,000 drawings.^[9]
• National Gallery of Art, with over 108,000 works catalogued, though with only 6,000 images.^[10]
• (French) The Mona Lisa Database of French Museums — Joconde *(from the French Ministry of Culture)

Online art collections[link]

There are a number of online art catalogues and galleries that have been developed independently of the support of any individual museum. Many of these are attempts to develop galleries of artwork that are encyclopedic or historical in focus, while others are commercial efforts to sell the work of contemporary artists.

A limited number of such sites have independent importance in the art world. The large auction houses, such as Sotheby's and Christie's maintain large online databases of art which they have auctioned or are auctioning. Bridgeman Art Library serves as a central source of reproductions of artwork, with access limited to museums, art dealers and other professionals or professional organizations.

Folksonomy[link]

There are also online galleries that have been developed by a collaboration of museums and galleries that are more interested with the categorization of art. They are interested in the potential use of folksonomy within museums and the requirements for post-processing of terms that have been gathered, both to test their utility and to deploy them in useful ways.

The steve.museum is one example of a site that is experimenting with this collaborative philosophy. The participating institutions include the Guggenheim Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

See also[link]

• Art exhibition
• Artist cooperative
• Artist-run initiative
• Artist-run space
• Arts centre
• Black cube art museum
• Contemporary art gallery
• List of most visited art museums in the world
• List of notable museums and galleries
• National Gallery (disambiguation)
• Vanity gallery
• Virtual museum

References[link]

George Rickey (June 6, 1907–July 17, 2002) was an American kinetic sculptor.

Rickey was born on June 6, 1907 in South Bend, Indiana.

Life and work[link]

When Rickey was a child, his father, an executive with Singer Sewing Machine Company, moved the family to Helensburgh, Scotland. Rickey was educated at Glenalmond College and received a degree in History from Balliol College, Oxford. He spent a short time traveling Europe and studied art in Paris. He then returned to the United States and began teaching at the Groton School, where among his many students was future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

After leaving Groton, Rickey worked at various schools throughout the country as part of the Carnegie Corporation's Visiting Artists/Artists in Residence program (partially funded by the Works Progress Administration). His focus was primarily on painting. While taking part in these programs, he painted portraits, taught classes, and created a set of murals at Knox College, Galesburg, IL.

In 1942, Rickey joined the United States Army, where he worked in engineering. Following his discharge, he studied art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts and later at the Chicago Institute of Design, funded by the G.I. Bill. He taught art at variety of colleges, including Muhlenberg College. While at Muhlenberg, J. I. Rodale commissioned Rickey to illustrate an edition of Anton Chekhov's The Beggar and Other Tales. Rickey later moved on to Indiana University South Bend. There, he met and was inspired by the work of David Smith.

Beginning in the early-1950s, Rickey shifted his focus from painting to sculpture and began creating kinetic sculpture. In his own work, Rickey combined his love of engineering and mechanics, Smith's graceful, yet solid, cubic forms, and the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Rickey was able to design sculptures whose metal parts moved in response to the slightest air currents. These parts were often very large, sometimes weighing tons.

In works such as Two Open Triangles Up Gyratory Rickey's two wind driven elements (engineered to withstand winds of 80 mph) provide an endless series of combined, almost dance like, shapes and movements.

Most of his work was created in his studio in East Chatham, NY, where he moved after taking a position as a professor of art ( sculpture ) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. His kinetic sculpture titled "Two Rectangles, Vertical Gyratory Up, Variation III" was a central element of the Rensselaer campus from 1972 until its removal in 1984. (The sculpture was universally known among students as the "Chrinitoid" after an article in a campus humor magazine parodying the long-running Reader's Digest series was titled "I am Joe's Chrinitoid" and included a drawing resembling the sculpture.) It is now located in Geneva, Switzerland, at the headquarters of UBS.

There is a smaller broken sculpture located at the NYS Department of Labor Office (Building 12). This device originally had six pointed arms connected to a spring/shock absorber system. It is missing one of the arms. The remaining five arms are still swinging in the wind. It sits in a broken fountain in front of a 9/11 memorial.

In 1985, George Rickey had a retrospective of over 100 of his sculptures in South Bend, Indiana. The pieces were installed outside (and inside) of the South Bend Art Center, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, and at the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame. Accompanied by his wife, Mr. Rickey personally gave a presentation of his work at the Snite, including drawings, recalling the entire history of his life including his childhood. One of the stories he told concerned how, as a result of a WWII-era, government-administered aptitude test, he was assigned to design machine gun turrets for bombers. It was in this job that he became familiar with the high-quality ball bearings, balancing weights, riveted sheet metal, lightweight aircraft construction techniques and modern hardware (and the vendors for same) that were to become the mechanical foundation for his later forays into lightweight, delicately balanced, wind-activated kinetic sculpture. Another story concerned one his earliest memories of how, as a very small child in South Bend, he was fascinated by the window latches in his South Bend home; these latches, which can be found in many historic South Bend homes, operate conically at counter-intuitive angles that are oblique to the "apparent" design of the otherwise rectilinear form of the latch. "One expects the latch to open by pulling, but it's a conical crank, you see." This conical, oblique design shows up in many of the most emblematic of George Rickey's works, where the axes of motion are surprising given the rectilinear forms of his work.

He also lived and worked in Berlin for a short time. In his later years, he divided his time between his home in East Chatham, Santa Barbara, California and Saint Paul, Minnesota.

He died at his home in Saint Paul, Minnesota on July 17, 2002 at the age of 95.

In 2010, his sculpture "Two Open Rectangles, Horizontal" that was located in situ west of the SBC (now ATT) office building in downtown Dallas was moved to a site just outside the Bob Hope Peristyle Courtyard of the Owen Art Center, which houses SMU's Meadows School of the Arts.

Gallery[link]

• 

  "Vier Vierecke im Geviert", by George Rickey, 1969, Stahl, Berlin

• 

  "Three Squares Vertical Diagonal", sculpture by George Rickey in Naoshima, Kagawa prefecture, Japan

• 

  Kinetic sculpture "Conversation" 1999 by George Rickey in Ludwigshafen, Germany

• 

  ” Drei rotierende Quadrate” by George Rickey in Münster, Germany

• 

  Kinetic sculpture by George Rickey in Germany

• 

  Kinetic sculpture by George Rickey in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

• 

  Kinetic sculpture (1971) by George Rickey in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Honors and awards[link]

• (1999) Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, International Sculpture Center.

See also[link]

• Indianapolis Art Center who created the retrospective show "A Life in Art: Works by George Rickey"

References[link]

• Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, An Annotated Inventory of Outdoor Sculpture in Washtenaw County, Master's Degree Project, 1989.
• Lizzi, Maria. Archivist, George Rickey Workshop, East Chatham, NY
• New Jersey State Museum, Sculptures by George Rickey and James Seawright, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, 1970.
• Popper, Frank, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, Studio Vista and New York Graphic Society, 1968.
• Thalacker, Donald, The Place of Art In the World of Architecture, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1980, pp. 61-63.

External links[link]

• George Rickey on artnet Monographs

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: George Rickey

• Art Cyclopedia
• Cluster of Four Cubes at National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden - video 5' 6"
• Biography & Available Works by George Rickey Galerie Ludorff, Düsseldorf, Germany
• "In Search of the Chrinitoid", an article about Rickey's work at RPI.
• George Rickey at Find a Grave
• Photos of George Rickey Sculptures

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the French Wikipedia. (January 2012) Don't speak French? Click here to read a machine-translated version of the French article. Click [show] on the right to review important translation instructions before translating. Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. After translating, {{Translated|fr|Jean-Paul Viguier}} must be added to the talk page to ensure copyright compliance. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Jean-Paul Viguier (b. May 4, 1946) is a French architect. He is considered one of the world's leading architects and one of the few French ones to work extensively outside of Europe.^[1][2] Amongst buildings he has designed are the headquarters for France Télévisions and Bristol-Myers Squibb, Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Toulouse, Cœur Défense and the Sofitel Chicago Water Tower, the latter of which is listed on the American Institute of Architects' "America's Favorite Architecture" list.^[1][2][3]

Notable works[link]

• 1992 France Pavilion at Seville Expo '92
• 1997 Headquarters of AstraZeneca, Rueil-Malmaison
• 2001 Parc André Citroën (collaborator)
• 2001 Cœur Défense in La Défense
• 2002 Médiathèque Cathédrale, Reims
• 2002 Hotel Sofitel Water Tower, Chicago, Illinois
• 2005 Hôtel Novotel, le Havre
• 2008 Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Toulouse
• 2008 McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
• 2009 Headquarters of Maroc Telecom, Rabat
• 2009 Hôpital de Castres, Mazamet
• 2011-15 Amphitheater District, Metz

References[link]

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Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
Born	(1763-03-21)21 March 1763 Wunsiedel, Holy Roman Empire
Died	14 November 1825(1825-11-14) (aged 62) Bayreuth, Germany
Pen name	Jean Paul
Occupation	novelist
Nationality	German
Period	1783-1825
Genres	Humour
Subjects	Education, politics

Jean Paul (21 March 1763 – 14 November 1825), born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.

Life and work[link]

Jean Paul was born at Wunsiedel, in the Fichtelgebirge mountains (Bavaria). His father was an organist at Wunsiedel. In 1765 his father became a pastor at Joditz near Hof, and in 1767 at Schwarzenbach, but he died on 25 April 1779, leaving the family in great poverty. After attending the Gymnasium at Hof, Jean Paul went in 1781 to the University of Leipzig. His original intention was to enter his father's profession, but theology did not interest him, and he soon devoted himself wholly to the study of literature. Unable to maintain himself at Leipzig he returned in 1784 to Hof, where he lived with his mother. From 1787 to 1789 he served as a tutor at Töpen, a village near Hof; and from 1790 to 1794 he taught the children of several families in a school he had founded in nearby Schwarzenbach.

Jean Paul began his career as a man of letters with Grönländische Prozesse ("Greenland Lawsuits", published anonymously in Berlin) and Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren ("Selections from the Devil's Papers", signed J. P. F. Hasus), the former of which was issued in 1783-84, the latter in 1789. These works were not received with much favour, and in later life Richter himself had little sympathy for their satirical tone. A spiritual crisis he suffered on 15 November 1790, in which he had a vision of his own death, altered his outlook profoundly. His next book, Die unsichtbare Loge ("The Invisible Lodge"), a romance published in 1793 under the pen-name Jean Paul (in honour of Jean Jacques Rousseau), had all the qualities that were soon to make him famous, and its power was immediately recognized by some of the best critics of the day.

Encouraged by the reception of Die unsichtbare Loge, Richter composed a number of books in rapid succession: Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterleins Maria Wutz in Auenthal ("Life of the Cheerful Schoolmaster Maria Wutz", 1793), the best-selling Hesperus (1795), which made him famous, Biographische Belustigungen unter der Gehirnschale einer Riesin ("Biographical Recreations under the Brainpan of a Giantess", 1796), Leben des Quintus Fixlein ("Life of Quintus Fixlein", 1796), Der Jubelsenior ("The Parson in Jubilee", 1797), and Das Kampaner Tal ("The Valley of Campan", 1797). Also among these was the novel Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstücke, oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten Siebenkäs ("Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death and Wedding of Siebenkäs, Poor Man's Lawyer") in 1796-97.

The book's slightly supernatural theme, involving a Doppelgänger and pseudocide, stirred some controversy over its interpretation of the Resurrection, but these criticisms served only to draw awareness to the author. This series of writings assured Richter a place in German literature, and during the rest of his life every work he produced was welcomed by a wide circle of admirers.

After his mother's death in 1797, Richter went to Leipzig, and in the following year to Weimar, where he started work on his most ambitious novel, Titan, published between 1801-02. Richter became friends with such Weimar notables as Herder, by whom he was warmly appreciated, but despite their close proximity, Richter never become close to Goethe and Schiller, both of whom found his literary methods repugnant; but in Weimar, as elsewhere, his remarkable conversational powers and his genial manners made him a favorite in general society. The English writers Thomas Carlyle and Thomas de Quincy took an interest in Jean Paul's work.

In 1801 he married Caroline Meyer, whom he had met in Berlin the year before. They lived first at Meiningen, then at Coburg; and finally, in 1804, they settled at Bayreuth. Here Richter spent a quiet, simple and happy life, constantly occupied with his work as a writer. In 1808 he was fortunately delivered from anxiety about outward necessities by Prince Primate Karl Theodor von Dalberg, who gave him an annual pension of 1,000 florins which was later continued by the king of Bavaria.

Jean Paul's Titan was followed by Flegeljahre ("The Awkward Age", 1804-5). His later imaginative works were Dr Katzenbergers Badereise ("Dr Katzenberger's Trip to the Medicinal Springs", 1809), Des Feldpredigers Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz ("Army Chaplain Schmelzle's Voyage to Flätz", 1809), Leben Fibels ("Life of Fibel", 1812), and Der Komet, oder Nikolaus Marggraf ("The Comet, or, Nikolaus Markgraf", 1820–22). In Vorschule der Aesthetik ("Introduction to Aesthetics", 1804) he expounded his ideas on art; he discussed the principles of education in Levana, oder Erziehungslehre ("Levana, or, Pedagogy", 1807); and the opinions suggested by current events he set forth in Friedenspredigt ("Peace Sermon", 1808), Dämmerungen für Deutschland ("Twilights for Germany", 1809), Mars und Phöbus Thronwechsel im Jahre 1814 ("Mars and Phoebus Exchange Thrones in the Year 1814", 1814), and Politische Fastenpredigten ("Political Lenten Sermons", 1817). In his last years he began Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls Leben ("The Truth from Jean Paul's Life"), to which additions from his papers and other sources were made after his death by C. Otto and E. Förster.

Also during this time he supported the younger writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who long counted Richter among his influences. Richter wrote the preface to Fantasy Pieces, a collection of Hoffmann's short stories published in 1814.

In September 1821 Jean Paul lost his only son, Max, a youth of the highest promise; and he never quite recovered from this shock. He lost his sight in 1824, and died of dropsy at Bayreuth, on 14 November 1825.

Characteristics of his work[link]

Friedrich Schiller said of Jean Paul that he would have been worthy of admiration if he had made as good use of his riches as other men made of their poverty—the classic approach of "Weimar".

But in working out his conceptions, Jean Paul found it appropriate to express any powerful feeling by which he might happen to be moved. He made it his style to use seemingly out-of-the-way facts or psychological notions which occurred to him. Hence every one of his works is irregular in structure and his style lacks directness, though never grace. His imagination was one of extraordinary fertility, and he had a surprising power of suggesting great thoughts by means of the simplest incidents and relations.

The love of nature was one of Jean Paul's deepest pleasures; his expressions of religious feelings are also marked by a truly poetic spirit, for to him visible things were but the symbols of the invisible, and in the unseen realities alone he found elements which seemed to him to give significance and dignity to human life. His humour, the most distinctive of his qualities, cannot be dissociated from the other characteristics of his writings. It mingled with all his thoughts, and to some extent determined the form in which he embodied even his most serious reflections. That it is sometimes extravagant and grotesque cannot be disputed, but it is never harsh nor vulgar, and generally it springs naturally from the perception of the incongruity between ordinary facts and ideal laws.

Jean Paul's personality was deep and many-sided; with all his willfulness and eccentricity he was a man of a pure and sensitive spirit, with a passionate scorn for pretence and an ardent enthusiasm for truth and goodness.

The last scene of Jean Paul's Flegeljahre was the inspiration behind Robert Schumann's composition "Papillons" Op. 2, and Schumann´s Humoreske Op. 20 is inspired by Jean Paul.

19th century works on Jean Paul[link]

Richter's Sämtliche Werke (Complete Works) appeared in 1826-28 in 60 volumes, to which were added 5 volumes of Literarischer Nachlass (literary bequest) in 1836-38; a second edition was published in 1840-42 (33 volumes); a third in 1860-62 (24 volumes). The last complete edition is that edited by R. Gottschall (60 parts, 1879). Editions of selected works appeared in 16 volumes (1865), in Kürschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur (edited by P. Nerrlich, 6 vols, pp. 388–487), &c. The chief collections of Richter's correspondence are:

• Jean Pauls Briefe an F. H. Jacobi (1828)
• Briefwechsel Jean Pauls mit seinem Freunde C. Otto (1829–33)
• Briefwechsel zwischen H. Voss und Jean Paul (1833)
• Briefe an eine Jugendfreundin (1858)
• P. Nerrlich, Jean Pauls Briefwechsel mit seiner Frau und seinem Freunde Otto (1902).

See further:

• The continuation of Richter's autobiography by C. Otto and E. Fürster (1826–33)
• H. Dring, J. P. F. Richters Leben und Charakteristik (1830–32)
• Richard Otto Spazier, JPF Richter: ein biographischer Commentar zu dessen Werken (5 vols, 1833)
• E. Förster, Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben von J. P. F. Richter (1863)
• Paul Nerrlich, Jean Paul und seine Zeitgenossen (1876)
• J. Firmery, Étude sur la vie et les œuvres de J. P. F. Richter (1886)
• P. Nerrlich, Jean Paul, sein Leben und seine Werke (1889)
• Ferdinand Josef Schneider, Jean Pauls Altersdichtung (1901); and Jean Pauls Jugend und erstes Auftreten in der Literatur (1906).
• Thomas Carlyle's two essays on Richter.

Quotations[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean Paul

• Joy is inexhaustible, unlike seriousness.
• Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
• Many young people get worked up about opinions that they will share in 20 years.
• Too much trust is a foolishness, too much distrust a tragedy.
• The German language is the organ among the languages. (Die deutsche Sprache ist die Orgel unter den Sprachen.)
• A man never describes his own character so clearly as when he describes another.
• We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection.
• What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.

Works[link]

• Grönländische Prozesse 1783-1784
• Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren 1789
• Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wutz 1790
• Die unsichtbare Loge 1793
• Hesperus (book) 1795
• Biographische Belustigungen 1796
• Leben des Quintus Fixlein 1796
• Siebenkäs 1796
• Der Jubelsenior 1797
• Das Kampaner Tal 1797
• Des Luftschiffers Giannozzo Seebuch 1801
• Titan 1800-03
• Flegeljahre (unfinished) 1804
• Vorschule der Aesthetik 1804
• Levana oder Erziehlehre 1807
• Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise 1809
• Des Feldpredigers Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz 1809
• Leben Fibels 1812
• Bemerkungen über uns närrische Menschen
• Clavis Fichtiana (see also Johann Gottlieb Fichte)
• Das heimliche Klaglied der jetzigen Männer
• Der Komet 1820-1822
• Der Maschinenmann
• Die wunderbare Gesellschaft in der Neujahrsnacht
• Freiheits-Büchlein

English translations[link]

Richter's more important works have been translated into English, for example:

• Quintus Fixlein and Schmelzles Reise, by Carlyle
• Walt and Vult by Lee (1846)
• Titan by Brooks (1863)
• Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces by Ewing (1877)
• Levana by Wood (1887)

References[link]

• Fleming, Paul. The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006.
•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
•  "Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean Paul

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jean Paul

• Works by Jean Paul on Open Library at the Internet Archive
• Works by Jean Paul at Zeno.org (German)
• Jean Paul's works at Projekt Gutenberg-DE (in German)
• Famous Quotes by Jean Paul Richter
•  James Wood (1907). "Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich". The Nuttall Encyclopædia.