V - Forever spinning … Windmills

The use of windmills is documented since ancient times. Thanks to wind energy, Dutch succeeded to dry their land from the invading waters and replace swamps by grounds of high quality (polders). Today the pumps are electrically powered but some of the mills are still in place like in Kinderdijk close to Rotterdam  for the pleasure of bikers and hikers… 

Windmills in the Kinderdijk area, Netherlands

Credits: CS-L

Windmills are a recurrent topic or motive in the Dutch painting. In Ryusdael's painting below if the mill is the dominating element, the artist wanted to combine it with three main features of the Dutch landscape: le Lek river waters, the flatness of the low land and the threatening sky… Wijk bij Duurstede is a known place in Holland for bikers along the Rhine: it is the place at the intersection of the Lek with the Amsterdam/Rijnkanaal where the ferry will allow to continue the excursion…The castle and the windmill are still there to visit.

Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael (ca 1628-1682),

The windmill at the Wijk bij Duurstede, ca 1668/72,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Most of the windmills have been destroyed or have disappeared from our European landscapes because they progressively became useless. However some of them have survived with the power of myths and legends like for instance the Moulin de Fontvielle referring to Alphonse Daudet's "Les lettres de mon moulin" (letters from my windmill). Daudet never lived there and this series of novels about Provence were written... in Clamart (a suburb of Paris).

Moulin de Fontvieille

Credits: Wikpedia

Another myth: Le Moulin Rouge which is visited every year by thousands of tourists at the Place Blanche/White square. In the past (1790), stood at this place a toll gate (Barriere Blanche). A mandatory place to cross for the numerous horse carriages that wanted to enter into Paris loaded with the flour from the mills or the extracted gypsum from the Montmartre quarries. Today this is over, the fuel of this very special mill is no longer wind but champagne!

Le Moulin Rouge, Paris

Credits: CS-L

Vincent Van Gogh left the Netherlands in 1886 to visit his brother Theo who was living rue Lepic in Montmartre. Le moulin de la Gallette stood very close to this place and Vincent van Gogh made few paintings of it. In the copy below, did he want to revisit a familiar topic of the old Dutch masters or simply represent something reminding him his native country? The outcome still looks academic though the influence of the French impressionists (light clours) can be noticed. The hilly relief of Montmartre is clearly put in evidence and the absence of constructions around raises the impression to feel paradoxically in a countryside landscape… Montmartre was still a peripheral village at that time.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), le moulin de la Galette, 1886

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittburgh, USA

Credit: Wikipedia

Let's come back to Holland with Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël. The painting below was made three years only after the van Gogh's one above. The intention of the painter here was to put in evidence the saturated colors of the Dutch landscape… (when it is not raining :-). The second given name of this painting is also the "Month of July"! In fact we may not be very far from the Kinderdijk representation above by a beautiful summer day...

Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël (1828-1903),

A windmill on a polder waterway, ca 1889,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944) Windmill in sunlight: The winkel mill, 1908

Gemeente Museum, Den Haag

June 10th, Abolitionism day

Today is the celebration of abolitionism in French Guiana. This painting of Marie-Gillemine Benoist exibited in the Salon de Paris (1800), six years after the slavery abolition by the Convention, is considered as a symbol for women's emancipation and black people rights (source wikipedia). This work which has been acquired by Le Louvre Museum is presented here as a contribution to the 10th of June celebration.

Marie-Gillemine Benoist (1768-1826)

Portrait d' une femme noire - Original title Portrait d'une Négresse, 1800, Musée du Louvre

There are few key entries to "read" this work and to eventually get an overall interpretation: the biography of M.-G. Benoist, the problems she encountered as a woman to study in men's atelier under the Ancien Régime, the respective influences of Louise Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Jacques-Louis David on her painting style, the identity of the portrayed woman, … they are widely detailed on the web or in museum guides not be repeated here.

En passant, few years before, Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793), beheaded during the French Revolution, was also a significant figure fighting for women rights and abolitionism. She should be mentioned as well.

(C22) Fuelling Preparation

After the unloading from the Paylaod adaptor (CCU), MSG-4 has been weighed last Monday (08/06). The dry mass of the spacecraft is 1074 kg. This weighing method (double pesée) has been explained in a dedicated post for MSG-3 (MSG-3 on the weighing scale).
MSG-4 is set now on the fuelling stand where the filling of the propellant tanks with MON (oxidiser) and MMH (hydrazine fuel) will take place. About 970 kg of propellant (604 kg of MON and 366 kg of MMH) will be loaded for the nominal seven year mission.

 

ThalesAleniaSpace team removing hoisting devices after mating on the Fuelling stand

During the recent transfer activities, it was possible to get a view on a part that can rarely been observed as it is located beneath the spacecraft : the cooler cover. This cover, that will be ejected ca 8 days after the launch, protects an important area of the SEVIRI thermal subsystem: a series very fragile mirrors glued on the conical sunshield that helps to cool down the spacecraft during its mission.

 

View of the Cover Cooler seen through the payload adaptor

Coming back to the propulsion, today (09/06), the MON containers have been delivered in the dedicated storage room of the S5B facility as it can be seen from the TV monitors installed in S1B. The MMH containers are planned to arrive on Friday and will be stored in a separate room. These two components are dangerous substances for humans and environment and stringent safety precautions are implemented to prevent any accident. Only a dedicated ThalesAleniaSpace team (called in French "les ergoliers") is authorised to perform this fuelling operation.

MON container in S5B storage room

In parallel, the preparation and validation of the Fuelling Ground Segment Equipment (to be used to transfer the propellant from these containers to the tanks) are made.

No Comment

Pirogue race, Lac du Bois Diable, Kourou, 07/06/2015

IV - Forever spinning … Round dances

From kids' games in kindergartens to more elaborated choreographies on theater stages, round dances find naturally their place in this "spinning forever" recollection. As shown by the selected examples below, this particular spinning move may carry various meanings according to the circumstances...

1-In The Golden age, Lucas Cranach the Elder seems to set the stage in the Garden of Eden surrounded by a brick wall. A merry society lives there without much worries in company of peaceful a wild animals... three couples spend the time chatting, seated, laying or bathing in the river while a in the center a dance around a fruit tree is taking place. One can observe the typical Cranach's ideal (tall and slim) nudes and notice the difference of skin tones between men and women. This painting, close in time with the  Rabelais's Abbaye de Thélème (Gargantua, 1534/1542) is generally considered as an illustration of Hesiod's poem Works and days. No work, just fun!, food grows by itself... it may also be seen as an illustration of a favorite motto of the time: Utopia (See also to Thomas Moore). The initiation of the Lutherian Reform, the discovery of the "new world", the Copernicus system.... opened new perspectives in a slowly ending Middle Age world locked for thousand years by Christianity. 

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553),
The Golden age, ca 1530, Alte Pinakothek Munich,
Credits: Wikipedia

2-In the detail screenshot of the engraving below, P. Brueghel's shows a kermesse in a district nearby Antwerp. There is an evident expression of happiness represented by the round dance but there is also the materilaisation of a strong social link within this community. During the XIVth and XVth centuries, Brugge and Antwerp were flourishing trading cities before Amsterdam took over (mid XVIth) as a consequence of the Dutch revolt and the Declaration of independence in 1581. 

Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525-1569),

The Hoboken kermesse (detail), 1559 (engraving), Bibilothèque Albert Ie, Bruxelles

3- Arnold Böcklin is generally considered as a symbolist painter. He refers here to the Greek God Pan surrounded by young spinning dancers on the rhythm of his flute music. Curiously, the satyr is not using a pan flute but a traverso or a concert flute :-). This round dance, a revisit of the mythology, may likely be understood as an allegory of music.

Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), 

Pan in children's  round dance, ca 1884

Museum Folkwang, Essen

4- There are many versions of Matisse's work called La Danse (including variations) starting  from 1910 up to 1938+. Matisse uses here vivid complementary colours (orange and blue) to model the "shape" of the dancing bodies making the lines of the drawing of secondary importance. This concept will culminate with the Bather in the reeds/Baigneuse dans les roseaux (1952) where the drawing line will be replaced by a cut of colored paper glued on a white sheet. In La Danse, there is no decor in the background for this group of mixed dancers. The spinning is rendered by the posture of the naked bodies and the lightness of the "flying" arms. The effect is extremely decorative and could be a motive for a fresco or a kind of arabesque? Debussy already used this word to name  two of his compositions twenty years earlier: Deux arabesques...

Henti Matisse (1869-1954)

La Danse, 1910

The Hermitage, St Petersburg

Credits: Wikipedia

5-Emile Nolde was a member of "Die Brücke" founded in 1905 in Berlin. This group of German artists was strongly influenced by new trends in arts at the turn of the XXth century. Paris was at that time a mandatory "incubator" to visit and a place to study. The French Fauvist group, even if recognized as such later, started from 1900 to introduce vivid colors in their painting. This new approach was continued by the Expressionnists in Germany. If the use strong colors is an essential element in all his production, Nolde's interest for mysticism has to be noted. In addition to the Golden Calf below, one can also mention in the series of religious scenes: Last Supper (1909), Christ in Bethany (1910), Life of Christ (1911/1912), Burial (1915)...

Emile Nolde (1867-1956)

Dance around the Golden Calf, 1910,

Pinakothek der moderne, Munich

6-This work of Max Pechstein (Another member of Die Brücke) obviously echoes La Danse displayed above. The post-Impressionnists and French painters were known in Germany before the first world war through several important exhibitions (Paul Cassirer). It seems in Pechstein's work here below that the Matisses's lesson has been somehow learnt. In addition, this drawing reflects some other aspects of the Expressionnist ideology around 1900: to live freely, to get closer to the nature, reject conventions,  to return to the essentials of early societies etc… the opposite way of life pushed by the "modernity" where industry, technological innovations, economy were carrying the hope of a better and safer world for all... If the expressionists welcomed the irruption of the first world war in 1914 as a trigger to change the world according to their own ideas, they rapidly changed their mind when they realised the atrocities and the suffering coming out of the conflict. 

Max Pechstein (1881-1955),
Der Tanz, 1912 Lithography,
Land Museum Oldenburg

7-These three voluminous sculptures exhibited in the Nikki de Saint Phalle exhibition (Le Grand Palais, Paris 2014) were on display on a spinning table. This move cannot be rendered by the still picture but fits however perfectly with our post related to round dances. This work is, at first, representative of the excentricities produced in the 60ies. In a period where economy was blooming with no limits, everything seemed possible in all domains and the population mood was quite optimistic (at least in Western Europe). This utopia culminated with the 1968 revolts (May 1968 events in France) and was stopped with the start of a series of energy crisis in 1970. Considering the Nikki de Saint Phalle's very fleshy and flashy women production in particular but more generally a large number of produced work of this period, one can wonder wether these will survive five hundred years as  the Cranach's Golden Age for instance did …  :-)

Nikki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002)

Les trois graces/Three graces, 1995-2003

Le Grand Palais Exhibition, Paris - 2014

No Comment

Aï/Paresseux à trois doigts/Pale Throated Sloth (Bradypus Tridactylus), Lac du Bois Diable, Kourou, 07/06/2015 @ 11:58