Entrada do Estádio Palestra Itália, Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras, São Paulo, Brasil

 

Entrada do Estádio Palestra Itália, Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras, São Paulo, Brasil

São Paulo - SP

Fotografia

O Uso de Cápsulas do Composto "UC-II 40 MG + Move 100 MG" no Tratamento de Artrite, Artrose, Lesões, Entre Outras Doenças - Artigo

 

O Uso de Cápsulas do Composto "UC-II 40 MG + Move 100 MG" no Tratamento de Artrite, Artrose, Lesões, Entre Outras Doenças - Artigo
Artigo



"UC-II" (colageno tipo 2) 40mg + "Move" 100mg, em cápsulas.
Descrição:
O colágeno é uma proteína fibrosa presente na pele, tendões, ossos, dentes, vasos sanguíneos, intestinos e cartilagens, correspondendo a 30% da proteína total e a 6% em peso do corpo humano. 

Também é encontrado em diversos tecidos de animais. 

"UC-II" é um colágeno do tipo II, não desnaturado, derivado da cartilagem de frango. É fabricado através de um processo de produção não enzimático, à baixas temperaturas, o que garante a obtenção de um colágeno puro, sem alteração molecular, com atividade biológica inalterada. "UC-II" é o único produto deste tipo disponível em doses de 40mg para serem consumidas uma vez ao dia. 

Estudos publicados comprovaram que "UC-II" é duas vezes mais eficaz do que a glucosamina + condroitina na promoção conjunta de conforto, mobilidade e flexibilidade das articulações.
"Move" é um anti-inflamatório natural, capaz de diminuir a dor e a inflamação nas articulações.

Informações do produto:
"UC-II" é capaz de dessensibilizar o sistema imunológico, desta forma prevenindo o ataque autoimune às nossas cartilagens. Por consequência há um bloqueio da inflamação, sem a qual o paciente não apresenta mais o quadro de dor. 

Quando o organismo não ataca mais exacerbadamente as cartilagens, é reestabelecida a homeostase entre quebra e síntese do colágeno tipo II, devolvendo a mobilidade e o conforto ao paciente, promovendo melhora da qualidade de vida.
"Move" é um ingrediente natural, contendo no mínimo 20% de akba biodisponível, que apresenta comprovadamente propriedades antinflamatórias, melhorando a dor e a qualidade de vida do paciente de forma segura e natural. 

Estudos realizados com "Move" comprovaram melhora significativa nos níveis de dor e funções físicas em pacientes com osteoartrite em apenas 5 dias após o início do tratamento.
Principais indicações:
"UC-II" é indicado para humanos e animais nos casos abaixo, acompanhados de dor e inflamação articular: artrose e osteoartrose, artrite e osteoartrite, artrite reumatoide, poliartrite reumatóide juvenil, lesão articular, lesão da cartilagem, prevenção e fortalecimento articular, ajuda a manter a saúde das articulações, promove maior conforto das articulações inflamadas, melhora a mobilidade e flexibilidade das articulações.

"Move" tem ação anti-inflamatória, promove a inibição da 5-lipoxigenase (fundamental no processo de inflamação das articulações), inibe tnf- (importante citocina pró-inflamatória de presença fundamental na osteoartrite, sendo responsável pela ativação de linfócitos, estimulação da liberação de enzimas proteolíticas pelos macrófagos e produção de outras citocinas inflamatórias como a IL-6 e IL-13), reduz a dor e o desconforto articular.
Nota do blog: Recomendo que converse com seu médico à respeito desse composto. No meu caso vem ajudando bastante no alívio da dor. Talvez seja de grande valia para você também.

Por Que Dar Gorjeta é Quase Obrigatório nos EUA - Artigo

 

Por Que Dar Gorjeta é Quase Obrigatório nos EUA - Artigo
Artigo



Você vai com seu parceiro a um restaurante nos Estados Unidos, lê o cardápio, pede dois pratos de US$ 15 e uma garrafa de vinho de US$ 20. Total: US$ 50.
Mas você acaba pagando US$ 60. Ao pagar em restaurantes você tem que pagar cerca de um quinto adicional da conta.
O pagamento é concebido como uma recompensa voluntária para agradecer o bom tratamento recebido, mas na prática ele é quase obrigatório, independentemente de o serviço ter sido excelente ou desastroso.
E isso acontece não apenas em restaurantes. Em bares, no cabeleireiro, no hotel ou no táxi, o cliente presume que tem que deixar uma generosa "tip", palavra que significa "gorjeta" em inglês.
E, caso algum cliente ainda não conheça essa etiqueta, a conta costumar vir com um lembrete ("gorjeta sugerida: 18%, 20% ou 22%)". Alguns estabelecimentos chegam a acrescentar a "taxa de serviço", dando ao cliente a opção de aumentar sua contribuição.
Muitos estrangeiros hesitam ou se irritam ao dar gorjetas nos EUA. A origem da cultura americana de "tip" vem de fora do país.
"Se um homem com seu cavalo se hospeda em uma pousada, além de pagar a conta, ele deve dar pelo menos um shilling (moeda inglesa) ao garçom e seis pence à empregada, ao noivo e ao engraxate, o que equivale a meia coroa."
Este texto escrito na Inglaterra em 1795 por um jornalista anônimo é citado no livro Tipping: An American History of Social Gratuities (Gorjeta: Uma História Americana de Gorjetas Sociais, em tradução livre) de Kerry Segrave.
O historiador diz que nos EUA não havia prática de se dar gorjetas pelo menos até 1840.
O viajante inglês John Fowler visitou uma cidade do Estado de Nova York em 1830, onde registrou a seguinte despesa: "total, 81 centavos; garçom 0, empregada e botas, idem; e cortesia e agradecimento pelo tratamento. Algo semelhante seria visto na Inglaterra? Levará algum tempo até que isso vire um costume por lá."
Fowler, um famoso engenheiro ferroviário, acreditava que a eliminação das gorjetas seria uma tendência exportada dos EUA para a Europa. Mas aconteceu justamente o contrário.
A cultura das gorjetas decolou nos EUA no final do século 19 e início do século 20, quando os americanos importaram esse costume da Europa, onde era mais comum, explica o doutor em psicologia social William Michael Lynn, autor de mais de 70 publicações sobre este fenômeno.
Assim, uma vocação elitista motivou os primeiros americanos a dar gorjeta em seu próprio país, imitando os costumes da aristocracia europeia.
No entanto, enquanto no Velho Continente o hábito não se consolidou em todos os estratos sociais, do outro lado do Atlântico ele pegou. Por quê?
A emancipação dos escravos nos EUA no final do século 19 teve um papel fundamental, diz Saru Jayaraman, ativista dos direitos trabalhistas e presidente da organização One Fair Wage.
"Restaurantes e empresas de hospitalidade queriam continuar a ter mão de obra negra gratuita, então adotaram essa cultura da Europa e transformaram a gorjeta de um incentivo extra do salário. Então eles falaram para os negros: nós vamos te contratar, não vamos te pagar, mas você pode receber gorjetas", explica ela.
Ao longo do século 20, a cultura da "gorjeta" se estabeleceu nos EUA, mas não sem resistências — seis Estados aboliram temporariamente essa prática em 1915, opositores proeminentes como o ex-presidente William Howard Taft surgiram e grupos anti-gorjeta foram formados — até que em 1966 a gorjeta foi definitivamente consolidada quando o Congresso promulgou a cláusula "Tip Credit".
Esse sistema permite que empresários do setor de serviços paguem a determinados funcionários um salário inferior ao salário mínimo, supondo que isso será complementado pela generosidade dos clientes.
Assim, hoje nos EUA o salário mínimo para trabalhadores que recebem gorjetas é de US$ 2,13 (quase R$ 11) por hora.
No entanto, apenas Porto Rico e 15 dos 52 Estados mantêm o salário mínimo federal. No resto do país, ele é maior e varia de US$ 2,33 (R$ 12) em Wisconsin ou US$ 6,60 (R$ 34) em Illinois a US$ 12,50 (R$ 64) em Nova York e US$ 13 (R$ 67) na Califórnia.
"Basicamente vivo de gorjetas", diz Diana, 30, que trabalha como garçonete em um restaurante peruano em Miami.
Seu salário é de US$ 6,98 (R$ 36) por hora, o mínimo legal na Flórida, que chega a uma média de cerca de US$ 1,2 mil (R$ 6,1 mil) por mês.
No entanto, contando as gorjetas, sua renda mensal passa de US$ 4 mil (R$ 20 mil) brutos. "O que me pagam por hora mal dá para cobrir os impostos", diz ela à BBC News Mundo.
Com seu trabalho como garçonete, Diana pagou seus estudos universitários, ajudou sua família e até poupou um pouco.
E se as gorjetas são boas para os trabalhadores de restaurantes, na vida noturna elas são ainda maiores.
"Na minha experiência, em uma noite você pode ganhar entre US$ 300 e US$ 1 mil (R$ 1,5 mil e R$ 5 mil). Depende do tipo de festa e do ambiente, se você presta um bom serviço e se você é bonito. Eu sou bonita e noto que me dão mais gorjetas", explica Silvia, uma chef cubana de 36 anos que trabalha no bar em boates e festas particulares em Miami.
A relação entre gorjetas e aparência física, gênero ou raça de quem as recebe tem sido objeto de estudo e também motivo de polêmica.
Um relatório da consultoria IPUS CPS publicado na revista especializada Eater indicou que entre 2010 e 2016 os funcionários brancos nos EUA ganharam em média US$ 7,06 (R$ 36) em gorjetas por hora, ante US$ 6,08 (R$ 31) para os latinos, US$ 5,57 (R$ 28) para os negros e US$ 4,77 (R$ 24) para asiáticos.
Além disso, garçons brancos, pouco mais da metade do total, responderam por 78% dos empregos em restaurantes de alta gastronomia, onde as gorjetas são maiores.
De acordo com um estudo mais recente, realizado pela One Fair Wage em Nova York em 2020, garçons brancos ganham US$ 5 (R$ 25) a mais por hora do que garçonetes negras.
"Homens brancos sempre recebem mais gorjetas devido ao preconceito implícito dos trabalhadores americanos", diz a presidente da ONG.
Jayaraman diz que a One Fair Wage não pede a abolição das gorjetas, mas leis que igualam o salário mínimo de todos os trabalhadores, considerando que a dependência de gorjetas coloca os empregados — principalmente mulheres e minorias — em uma posição mais frágil.
"Se você vive quase inteiramente de suas gorjetas, você é muito vulnerável ao preconceito e ao assédio do cliente. É por isso que nossa indústria tem as maiores taxas de assédio sexual nos EUA, juntamente com enormes disparidades entre mulheres, pessoas de cor e homens brancos que recebem gorjetas", denuncia.
Nota do blog: Eu, por princípio, sou contra gorjeta. Acho que todos os trabalhadores tem que receber pagamento diretamente do seu empregador, que é para quem eles trabalham, exatamente como acontece com a imensa maioria dos segmentos comerciais / industriais.
Qual a lógica de uma pessoa ter que pagar o salário de um funcionário de uma empresa de propriedade de um terceiro, da qual é cliente, para atendê-lo? O correto não seria o proprietário dessa empresa pagar seus próprios funcionários, para atender seus clientes, exatamente como acontece com a imensa maioria das atividades econômicas pela mundo?
Ter que pagar um funcionário de uma determinada empresa (da qual você é cliente) para obter um "bom atendimento" é algo que beira o absurdo (se você não for bem atendido, não comprará mais naquele local).
Ninguém deveria ter que trabalhar por gorjetas, ter sua renda baseada na boa vontade de outras pessoas. O correto é ter um salário, direitos e deveres, saber o quanto vai receber em troca da venda de sua mão-de-obra.
Sempre paguei gorjetas mas nunca concordei com isso. Sempre achei uma "tática" dos comerciantes para não remunerar seus funcionários com justiça, tercerizando o pagamento para os clientes. Acho, inclusive, que os estabelecimentos faturariam mais se ao invés de usar essa "tática", pagassem seus funcionários de maneira regular.
Finalizando, deixo claro o princípio que uso no tocante ao tema: se tiver que optar entre dois comércios, um que paga seus funcionários regularmente não cobrando gorjeta dos clientes e outro que usa essa "tática", vou sempre optar pela primeira. É o meu modo de combater essa prática que considero errada.

Derretimentos de Gelo no Rio Sena, Perto de Bennecourt, França (Déblâcle de la Seine, Près Bennecourt / Break-up of the Ice on the Seine, Near Bennecourt) - Claude Monet

 

Derretimentos de Gelo no Rio Sena, Perto de Bennecourt, França (Déblâcle de la Seine, Près Bennecourt / Break-up of the Ice on the Seine, Near Bennecourt) - Claude Monet
Bennecourt - França
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Inglaterra
OST - 65x100 - 1893




This picture was painted in 1893 and shows the River Seine - in northern France - near to Monet's home at Giverny. It is early morning or late afternoon and the time of year is probably February as the ice breaks up and flows downriver. It is assumed that most of the picture was painted on the spot and Monet may have been attracted to the view precisely because the ice on the water produced such a complex mix of colours. This picture is one of a series of views of the frozen Seine painted during the particularly severe winter of 1892/93. Monet is on record as having complained about the bitter coldness while he worked. By this period Monet was increasingly painting pictures in series. He described how he first decided to take up this approach: "When I began I was like the others; I believed that two canvases would suffice, one for grey weather and one for sun. At that time I was painting some haystacks that had excited me and that made a magnificent group, just two steps from here. One day, I saw that my lighting had changed. I said to my stepdaughter: "Go to the house, if you don't mind, and bring me another canvas!" She brought it to me, but a short time afterward it was again different:" Another! Still another!" And I worked on each one only when I had my effect, that's all. It's not very difficult to understand" Despite the large amount of work done out-of-doors on the painting Monet also almost certainly did a substantial amount of fine-tuning of his colour in his studio. The surface of the picture is complex with long snaking strokes of pinky-lilac and green in the water and with Monet's distinctive diagonal tick-like strokes in the cloudy sky and high river-bank. By 1890 Monet complemented his on-the-spot Impressionist practice with extensive re-working in the studio. This resulted in many pictures with close-toned atmospheric harmonies. This is most famously evident in his Rouen Cathedral and haystack series, but can also be seen in this work. Traditionally landscape painters had settled for a general approximation to a particular time of day or fall of light in their pictures. Until the 1830s nearly all landscapes were painted in the artist's studio, although sketches were often done out-doors. There were also certain conventions about composition and the use of dark shadow that many artists followed. From about 1830 several landscape artists began to do more of their pictures out-of-doors and to use blonde, paler tones in an attempt to get closer to the specific and extremely varied appearance of real light shining on foliage or water. From the mid-1860s Monet and the Impressionists took this new direction further. Monet argued that all of a picture should be painted 'in front of the motif' and he was fond of declaring that he actually had no studio. He and his fellows were particularly attracted to the mundane bank-side landscape of the River Seine in the outer suburbs of Paris, where ordinary people came to swim or walk or boat on a Sunday afternoon-views which included lots of reflected light, few shadows and bright clear vistas.

Manhã Nublada / Os Derretimentos de Gelo, França (Matin Brumeux / Débâcle / Morning Haze) - Claude Monet

Manhã Nublada / Os Derretimentos de Gelo, França (Matin Brumeux / Débâcle / Morning Haze) - Claude Monet
França
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Filadélfia, Estados Unidos
OST - 65x100 - 1894

Os Derretimentos de Gelo, França (Les Glaçons / Ice Floes) - Claude Monet

 

Os Derretimentos de Gelo, França (Les Glaçons / Ice Floes) - Claude Monet

França
Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Nova York, Estados Unidos
OST - 66x100 - 1893


The prolonged freeze and heavy snowfalls in the winter of 1892–93 inspired Monet to capture their effects on the Seine in a series of paintings for which he chose a vantage point not far from his home in Giverny. The river had frozen in mid-January but began to thaw on the 23rd; the following day, in a letter to his dealer, Durand-Ruel, Monet lamented that "the thaw came too soon for me . . . the results—just four or five canvases and they are far from complete." By the end of February, however, he had finished more than a dozen paintings, including this view of the melting ice floes.

Os Derretimentos de Gelo, França (La Débâcle or Les Glaçons) - Claude Monet

 

Os Derretimentos de Gelo, França (La Débâcle or Les Glaçons) - Claude Monet

França

Coleção privada

University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbour, Estados Unidos

OST - 60x99 - 1880

Derretimentos de Gelo, Arredores de Bennecourt, França (Glaçons, Environs de Bennecourt) - Claude Monet

 

Derretimentos de Gelo, Arredores de Bennecourt, França (Glaçons, Environs de Bennecourt) - Claude Monet
Bennecourt - França
Coleção privada
OST - 40x54 - 1893




Among Monet’s most celebrated and visually spectacular canvases are his depictions of ice on the Seine. Taking the approach he had developed only three years before in his great Haystacks paintings, Monet produced a series of thirteen river views that capture the spectacle of the frozen Seine in different weather and at different times of day. Monet painted the present work in early 1893, when the large sheets of ice had begun to break apart on the surface, creating a striking interplay between water, land and sky. His exploration of the surface of the water with the ice floating upon it marks the beginning of an idea that would see full realisation in his later Nymphéas. By the end of the month, the thaw brought Monet’s campaign to an abrupt end, leaving the artist with several unfinished compositions that he would have to complete in his studio. The present composition is one of the most beautiful of the series, showing the scene lit by sunlight with the glassy blue of the water mediated by the crisp white of the diminishing ice floes.
The months preceding this series of canvases were relatively unproductive. Monet’s marriage to Alice Hoschéde and the ensuing combination of their households proved a distraction. It was not until the river froze and presented the artist with a new opportunity, that Monet felt compelled to return to work: ‘During this period of renewed enthusiasm, Monet produced thirteen views of ice floes on the Seine that are remarkable for their delicate atmospheric effects and energetic brushwork. Monet, as he had since 1865, braved the elements and produced these extraordinary studies of weather in rather frigid conditions […]. For over two weeks in January of 1893, the Seine went through a period of freezing and thawing that produced dramatic ice floes. These pieces of ice floated for several days, and inspired Monet to produce these subtle atmospheric studies. Painted on the Bennecourt bank of the river, across from Giverny, Monet executed nine examples that face towards the hills on the left bank with subtle changes of site, time of day, and atmosphere […]. In these paintings, the river is filled with snowcapped ice floes, and provides a fascinating combination of ice, water, and cold mist. These works are a triumph of atmosphere. Despite the similar compositions of this series, they are each distinguished by their delicate palettes which vary individually from ice-blue, mauve, and pink of a frigid day on the river to warmer tones of yellow and blue when the sun attempts to melt the thick ice that floats on the water’.
Monet had painted similar scenes much earlier in his career, at Bougival in 1868 and then at Lavacourt, near Vétheuil, in 1879-80. Yet, as Paul Hayes Tucker observes, the later paintings are a very different body of work: ‘Vaguely similar to paintings that Monet had done in the winter of 1879-80, when a similar cold had frozen the river, these Ice Floes pictures are what one might expect from someone who had not been challenged in quite a long time but who was determined to reinvigorate himself, even to the point of painting outdoors in temperatures that were well below freezing. They are at once elegiac and soothing, appropriately familiar in their composition and handling while striking in their colouring and their chilling atmospheric effects’.
Indeed, comparison with this earlier series shows the gradual refinement of Monet’s approach over the years. Whilst the earlier scenes have a remarkable immediacy, there is a notably more nuanced approach to light in the paintings of 1892-93. Where brushstrokes were once looser and more clearly defined, they are now finely blended one into another. By the 1890s Monet’s painstaking investigations had paid off; in these paintings he succeeds for the first time in capturing the elusive envelope – the atmosphere itself.
In turning to winter and snow scenes in this quest, Monet was not alone. The subject had an early and important place in the Impressionist artists’ œuvres, though for most of them they would not maintain this fascination in their later works. Monet, exceptionally, would return to scenes of snow and ice as the nineteenth-century ended and the twentieth-century began. Charles S. Moffett examined the appearance of the snow scene in the Impressionist movement in his exploration of winter scenes in European art history: ‘Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Caillebotte, Gauguin, and others focused on the very particular character of the air, the light, and the appearance of colour in landscapes that were blanketed with white. Their snowscapes represent the first sustained interest in the subject since that of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters. With a few notable exceptions, however, most of these earlier paintings are not about the defining characteristics of the snowscape but rather about a wide range of human activities in the context of a landscape covered with snow. The Impressionists, on the other hand, were drawn to the subject because of its unique visual characteristics. The subtleties of light and colour offered an opportunity to work in a range of often muted colour that brings to mind Whistler’s ‘symphonies’ in particular colours or combinations of colour. The Impressionists concentrated not on ideas about the thing but the thing itself’.
It is true that Monet’s approach has little to connect it with seventeenth century examples or the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Freidrich in which the physical aspect is suborned to an expression of human emotion. His focus remained technical, examining how the experience of seeing, or being in a landscape, could be rendered in paint. As his correspondence on the subject attests, he tirelessly experimented with what could be achieved through painting, exploring and consistently testing the boundaries of his craft. This approach to landscape would have a powerful impact on later artists; when Gerhard Richter began his interrogation of landscape painting in photographic age, it was to Monet he turned and his depiction of icebergs provides a powerful parallel to Monet’s work in its precise and compelling evocation of atmosphere.
Monet’s series paintings from the 1890s are widely considered his finest and most innovative achievements. By painting the same subject at various times of day and under different weather conditions, he could document the continual transformation of his surroundings. His painting of Les Glaçons, Bennecourt and the related canvases coincided with his series of depictions of Rouen Cathedral, and both undertakings reveal similarities in palette and approach. Monet would apply the lessons he learned from these pictures to later series of misty mornings on the Seine and ultimately to his depictions of the waterlilies in his garden at Giverny. Perhaps more than any of the series from this decade, the ice floe pictures laid the groundwork for his approach to rendering the floating lilypads and the reflection of the trees and sky in the garden pond.
For a large part of the twentieth century, this work was owned by French banker André Wormser and his family. Wormser had an extensive collection including works by Renoir, Manet and Degas. A number of these appear in the background of a painting by Edouard Vuillard showing Olga Wormser with their four children at the family home on the rue Scheffer in Paris. Glaçons, environs de Bennecourt is visible in the background, behind Madame Wormser.

Maciço de Crisântemos (Massif de Chrysanthèmes) - Claude Monet

 

Maciço de Crisântemos (Massif de Chrysanthèmes) - Claude Monet
Coleção privada
OST - 130x88 - 1897


The four canvases depicting chrysanthemums that Monet painted in 1897 are exceptionally important works, both in their treatment of what might be considered a still-life subject and in the way they anticipate the artist’s celebrated Nymphéas series. Combining impressive scale with brilliant colour and an innovative formal approach, these paintings exemplify Monet’s immense contribution to Modern art.
Massif de Chrysanthèmes is one of two from the series conceived in a larger, vertical format. The towering composition of flowers shifts from pale pink through to orange, red, purple and yellow; the tones are exact, indeed they show a gardener’s eye for colour. Monet began cultivating his celebrated garden at Giverny when he first settled there in 1883. Initially creating an orchard and a flower garden, in 1893 he acquired another piece of land and started work digging a pond and building the water garden. Arsène Alexandre visiting the garden in 1901 wrote: ‘what is most remarkable about Monet’s garden is not the plan but the planting, a play on words that nevertheless describes the principle behind these floral fireworks […]. It is this profusion, this teeming aspect that gives the garden its special quality. The flowers are not overgrown. They do not choke each other, as people ignorant about gardening, like ourselves, might expect, even if they are crowded as heads of grain in a field […]. Monet wants as many flowers in his garden as a space can hold. He also wants, perhaps above all, his flower palette before him to look at all year round, always present, but always changing’.
He goes on to discuss Monet’s creation of these flower beds as the work of a ‘great colourist’, conflating the mixing of pigments on a canvas with the parallel process in planting out a garden. The connection is certainly captured in the present work, where pigment and petal are indistinguishable.
Monet had painted floral still-lifes earlier in his career, often using flowers from his own garden. As Debra N. Mancoff notes in a discussion of the works of the early 1880s: ‘He had painted bouquets of flowers on occasion throughout his career and […] in a time of financial crisis, his own garden offered an alternative to expensive travel searching for subjects to paint’.
Yet, the present work bears very little similarity to those earlier works which, though glorious in their abundance and rich detail, are significantly more conventional. In writing about the 1897 Chrysanthèmes, John House declares them, ‘some of the most lavish still-lifes produced by the Impressionist group and some of the most radical challenges to a long-standing still-life tradition’.
However, upon closer consideration, it becomes apparent that this is not a still life in any sense. There is no element of staging to this composition and clearly the blooms are not arranged in a vase; instead it seems as those Monet may have painted them en plein air sitting directly in front of the flowers as they grew. They are not a still-life, but a close up.
This is important for understanding how influential they may have been within Monet’s own œuvre. John House describes how the ‘flowers fill the canvas, with no explicit spatial context. The blooms are arranged in clusters of varied color and texture, placed against more shadowy foliage, which allows their forms to float across the whole picture surface. This format gave Monet the chance to arrange the whole picture as a colour harmony in a way he never had before; the surface is filled with subtle harmonies and contrasts, and animated by the ebullient brushwork which suggests the patterns of the petals. Monet was to explore again the spatial implications of these Chrysanthemum pictures in the later Water Lilies canvases, which are filled by the lily-covered surface of the pond’. There is a profound connection with the waterlily paintings which Monet began around the same time. The first examples of Nymphéas which are dated to 1897-98 show the artist tentatively exploring the subject; a few flowers and lilypads dot the surface of the water, and the overall spatial treatment, including the close up focus on the subject are clearly a continuation of the same idea.
This treatment of space, which is both unexpected and expressive, may in part have been inspired by the Japanese prints that were popular in Paris, and of which Monet was an avid collector. The artist owned a number of prints of flowers, including one of chrysanthemums by the Japanese master Hokusai. As he wrote to dealer Maurice Joyant in 1896, ‘Thank you for having thought of me for the Hokusai flowers, […]. You don’t mention the poppies and that is the important one for I already have the iris, the chrysanthemums, the peonies and the convolvulus’. Monet was in line with his contemporaries in these tastes; japonisme had become increasingly popular since the reopening of trade with Japan in 1858 and he was one of a number of Western artists attracted to the style.
The impact of Japanese art, and particular the ukiyo-e woodblock prints, was noted early. Writing in 1898, Monet’s contemporary Louis Gonse described this influence, explaining that it had given the Impressionists ‘the practice of clear colours, the taste for simplification, the boldness of certain ways of cutting the motif that is absolutely unprecedented in the composition of paintings. A few years ago one would not have dared cut certain subjects as is done today’. This aspect is particularly visible in the work of artists like Van Gogh, but for other artists – Monet included – it was less a direct borrowing and more an opening up of possibilities for looking at representation in new ways.
Responding to the first of the waterlily paintings in 1909 the critic Roger Marc observed that Monet was now, ‘pursuing the renewal of his art according to his own vision and his own means […]. Mo more earth, no more sky, no limits now’. This is true, too, of Massif de chrysanthèmes and as such it marks the beginning of Monet’s real experiments with form and his movement towards abstraction in the last, great phase of his career.

O Império das Luzes (L’Empire des Lumières) - René Magritte

 

O Império das Luzes (L’Empire des Lumières) - René Magritte
Coleção privada
OST - 114x146 - 1961


The works from Magritte’s L’empire des lumières ‘series’ are among the most iconic images of twentieth century art. With their luminous combination of a bright blue sky set against an inky, dark night-time street, they combine immense visual impact with a profoundly conceptual approach. Alongside Magritte’s La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) and his bowler-hatted men, they are his most important images with an influence that stretches far beyond Surrealist circles. In them, Magritte achieves his most complex and sophisticated exploration of representation and reality. As the composition evolved through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, it would inspire and parallel developments in Conceptual and Pop Art as well as becoming an archetypal image of twentieth century visual culture. Painted in 1961, the present work is among the largest and most refined iterations of the subject. It was painted by Magritte for his patron and friend Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet and has been in her collection ever since.
The origins of this image begin with a gouache of 1938-39 in which silhouetted buildings are overlaid with a starry night sky and crescent moon. However, it was not until 1948 that Magritte began to explore the subject more thoroughly, developing and refining the idea over the following decade to produce a group of seventeen oils that constitute his only real attempt to create a ‘series’ within his painting. From the very outset, Magritte had high expectations for these works. When poet Paul Colinet endeavoured to provide an explanation for the imagery, Magritte complained: ‘his attempt to explain it (only in its early stages) is depressing: it appears I am a great mystic, providing consolation (because of the luminous sky) for our miseries (the landscape of houses and black trees). The intention is no doubt good, but all this keeps us on the level of pathetic humanity’. In fact, Magritte’s aspirations were much less mundane; his subject was not humankind, but the very nature of reality. As he explained in a television programme recorded in April 1956: '... what is represented in the picture 'The dominion of light” are the things I thought of, to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a skyscape such as can be seen in broad daylight. The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry'.
It is this poetic and mysterious quality that makes L'empire des lumières one of Magritte's most celebrated and compelling images. The combination of night and day seen in these works was precisely the sort of reconciliation of opposites that was prized by the Surrealists. The idea for the composition may have been inspired by André Breton’s poem L'Aigrette which had been published in 1923 and which Magritte knew well; the verse opens, 'Si seulement il faisait du soleil cette nuit' ('If only the sun were to come out tonight'). Other Surrealists, from Max Ernst to Salvador Dalí, explored similar ideas in their own paintings, but it is a visual paradox specifically typical of Magritte's art and one which reaches new levels of sophistication in paintings such as the present work.
As in all of Magritte’s best work, the effect is achieved by contrasting the known with the impossible. Here, the setting is typically suburban and recognisable – a quiet street in a Belgian town. In 1954 Magritte had moved to a new home near the Parc Josaphat in Brussels which he later described in specific relation to these paintings: ‘In the evenings it’s like being in the picture – the Dominion of Light. The villa where I live is surrounded by gardens and the houses looking directly onto the boulevard Lambermont stand out against a wide sky’.
Siegfried Gohr argues that the very real nature of this scene – which in his words, provides the viewer with a sense of security – in combination with the other reality of a clouded sky, are crucial to the series' success: ‘In other words, both elements of the composition plausibly derive from the artist’s daily experience, a familiarity that has resulted in a perfectly successful translation into painting’.
Magritte is drawing on other, specifically artistic, familiarities too. Clouds first appear in his work in 1930 in the four-part oil Celestial Perfections and his treatment of clouds throughout his career alludes to the landscapes of the Dutch Golden Age or later cloud studies. They also have a resonance within his own work. His precise reiterations of this motif, conjured in a specific tone of blue have parallels with Yves Klein’s development of IKB blue as an ‘open window to freedom’ inspired by the sky. As with all Magritte’s repeated motifs, the sky signals something specific in his work. As he once told a reporter, 'the sky is a form of curtain because it hides something from us. We are surrounded by curtains'. In other words, although the sight of a blue sky with drifting white clouds may seem benign, it alerts us to the ways in which we are unable to see or comprehend ultimate truths.
The counter-force to the vivid blue sky in the present work, is the inky darkness of the night time scene below. Again, Magritte was drawing on precedent, understanding night’s inherently magical quality as the opposite of our everyday; the world of lovers, the world of shadows, the world of monsters. It has an obvious pull for a Surrealist, in the way it makes everything we know strange again, and has an important history in Magritte’s œuvre. Yet, this power has a wide appeal and is one that has been harnessed by many great artists, from Van Gogh’s nightscapes to Edward Hopper’s work, which in some respects is a natural descendant of Magritte’s enigmatic compositions.
In combining the two the Belgian artist deliberately evokes a long painterly tradition of capturing the phenomena of light against dark that goes back as far as medieval gold ground painting and was reimagined with the discovery of chiaroscuro in the Renaissance and beyond (perhaps most notably in the work of Caravaggio). Magritte’s skill is in realising that as well as a tension between these opposites, there also exists a profound synchronicity. As Gohr suggests, the universal appeal of the image is also rooted in the almost complete balance of strength between the opposing forces of the composition: ‘Even during the night, bourgeois order in maintained; the incredible confrontation takes place for the viewer’s eye alone, the inhabitants of the picture being oblivious to it’, so that what ultimately takes place is ‘a calm neutralisation of opposites that tames the inherent clash of night and day’. That is to say, on first sight, the image seems normal and it is only when considered more closely that its inherent contradictions make themselves known.
This subtlety marks an important shift in Magritte’s work but also underpins the way this series interrogates traditions of painting. In her discussion of the L’empire des lumières, and particularly of the title these paintings share, Sandra Zalman considers the power play elucidated in the composition. Translated accurately, empire means power or dominance; it ‘can reflect nature’s dominance over humanity, humanity’s dominance over nature or the interplay of these forces as expressed by our power of perception’.
As she goes on to add, one way of asserting dominance over a landscape is to paint it, although this act also necessarily ‘admits that painting is a representation, secondary to nature itself’. This then returns us to Magritte’s sustained consideration of the nature of reality and representation in these works. From Impressionism through into the development of Cubism and Abstraction in the early twentieth century, painting had been moving away from verisimilitude towards a focus on recreating the experience of being or seeing; subject lost ground to effect. Magritte – doubtless deeply satisfied by the anachronism – moves the other way. In the present work, the subject is delineated with crystal clarity but the message is the obverse. Where other painters were saying, we have recreated exactly the experience of seeing, Magritte boldly states that cannot believe anything you see. It is a message that underpins all his work, but finds its most complex and subtle expression in the L’empire des lumières.
The importance of this group of work within the artist’s œuvre cannot be overstated. Whilst Magritte often returned to favourite motifs throughout his career, the consistent titling of the L’empire des lumières paintings marks them out as a much more deliberate attempt to work in a series. The specific imagery of these paintings was immediately popular among Magritte’s patrons and there was high demand for these pictures, indeed at one point a painting was promised to four different collectors. Yet, Magritte was concerned that the works should evolve artistically rather than as a response to external pressures. As he wrote in a letter to the dealer Alexander Iolas: ‘I have to find a way of justifying the replica in my own mind. I managed to enrich the first idea’. This careful process of selection and enrichment can be seen in the way that the compositions evolve over time. Much like the great series of artists such as Monet, the works speak to one another, growing through association: ‘The repetition of this particular theme, and its slight variations from painting to painting in the series, expands the poetic patterning, creating rhythms and rhymes amongst them’.
The present work belongs to the group of large-scale compositions painted from the mid-1950s onwards that includes the versions in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (figs. 14 & 15). There is a remarkable attention to detail and technique, with each leaf of the tree picked out in sharp silhouette and architectural details painstakingly replicated. Indeed, one of the compelling aspects of these works is the balance between their immediate visual impact and the precise detailing of the hinges of the shutters or the railing of the gate that draw the viewer in for a closer look. Important attention is also paid to the structure of the composition which centres on the strong vertical of the tree and the smaller vertical of the streetlight. As a source of light, this latter holds our attention and in the absence of any human presence in these works, its truncated arms and domed top have often been related to the bowler-hatted man that was the artist’s alter-ego.
There is a kind of visual joke in this idea that Magritte would probably have enjoyed. The idea of him inhabiting these works makes sense, as they certainly inhabited his own thoughts. As well as expressing ideas about our lived reality, for Magritte, this group of paintings also had the power to create ideas. 'After I had painted L'Empire des lumières', he told a friend, 'I got the idea that night and day exist together, that they are one. This is reasonable, or at the very least it's in keeping with our knowledge: in the world, night always exists at the same time as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same time as happiness in others)'.
This simultaneity is the real power of L’empire des lumières and underpins its remarkable visual and conceptual impact. For Magritte it became the ultimate combination of opposites, inspiring a series of images that remain among his best-known and most celebrated pictures.
Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet and Magritte:
One of the Belgian master’s finest works, L’empire des lumières was painted by René Magritte in 1961, for Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, a close family friend. Magritte’s connection with the Crowet family began when Anne-Marie’s father Pierre first encountered the then-unknown artist, whilst studying law at Brussels university in the mid-1920s. A friendship developed as artist and law student realised that not only did they both hail from the same part of the country, they both shared a sense of humour and artistic taste.
This friendship – and the legacy of patronage - would endure into the next generation through Pierre’s daughter, Anne-Marie. She was sixteen when she briefly sat for a portrait with Magritte at his home, where he preferred to paint. So striking did Magritte find Anne-Marie’s features, he told her that he had been subconsciously painting her face for years before encountering her. That painting eventually became La Fée Ignorante, one of Magritte’s most powerful portraits.
Not only was the painting of Anne-Marie’s face a powerful moment of inspiration for Magritte, but it marked the start of a warm friendship between the artist and his muse, that lasted until Magritte’s death in 1967. As with her father, the younger Crowet shared with Magritte a cheerfully absurd sense of humour, a passion for art and an innate appreciation of Surrealism.
In 1960, Magritte painted three works for Anne-Marie, including L’empire des lumières. The work has remained in her collection ever since.