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quinta-feira, março 14, 2024

Ferdinand Hodler nasceu há cento e setenta e um anos

Self-portrait, 1916
     
Ferdinand Hodler (Bern, March 14, 1853 – Geneva, May 19, 1918) was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism he called "parallelism".

Hodler was born in Bern, the eldest of six children. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Marguerite (née Neukomm), was from a peasant family. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His mother remarried, to a decorative painter named Gottlieb Schüpach who had five children from a previous marriage. The birth of additional children brought the size of Hodler's family to thirteen.

The family's finances were poor, and the nine-year-old Hodler was put to work assisting his stepfather in painting signs and other commercial projects. After the death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1867, Hodler was sent to Thun to apprentice with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer. From Sommer, Hodler learned the craft of painting conventional Alpine landscapes, typically copied from prints, which he sold in shops and to tourists.
 
 Woodcutter, 1910
   

quarta-feira, dezembro 27, 2023

Bernoulli nasceu há 369 anos

  
Jakob Bernoulli, ou Jacob, ou Jacques, ou Jacob I Bernoulli (Basileia, 27 de dezembro de 1654 - Basileia, 16 de agosto de 1705), foi o primeiro matemático a desenvolver o cálculo infinitesimal para além do que fora feito por Isaac Newton e Gottfried Leibniz, aplicando-o a novos problemas.

Publicou a primeira integração de uma equação diferencial; deu solução ao problema dos isoperímetros, que abriu caminho ao cálculo das variações de Euler e Lagrange e estendeu suas principais aplicações ao cálculo das probabilidades. É considerado o pai do cálculo exponencial. Foi professor de matemática em Basileia, tendo sido importantíssima sua contribuição à geometria analítica, à teoria das probabilidades e ao cálculo de variações.

Em 1713, depois de sua morte, foi publicado o seu grande tratado sobre a teoria das probabilidades, Ars Conjectandi, que ainda oferece interesse prático na aplicação da teoria da probabilidade nos seguros e na estatística

   

segunda-feira, dezembro 18, 2023

Paul Klee nasceu há 144 anos

  

Paul Klee (Münchenbuchsee, 18 de dezembro de 1879 - Muralto, 29 de junho de 1940) foi um pintor e poeta suíço, naturalizado alemão. O seu estilo, fortemente individual, foi influenciado por várias tendências artísticas diferentes, incluindo o expressionismo, cubismo e surrealismo. Ele foi um estudante do orientalismo. Klee era um desenhador nato, que realizou experiências e, consequentemente, dominou a teoria das cores, assunto sobre o qual ele escreveu extensivamente. As suas obras refletem o seu humor seco e, às vezes, a sua perspetiva infantil, os seus ânimos e as suas crenças pessoais e a sua musicalidade. Ele e o seu amigo, o pintor russo Wassily Kandinsky, também eram famosos por darem aulas na escola de arte e arquitetura Bauhaus.
   
Senecio2, 1922
      
Angelus novus, 1920
    

quinta-feira, dezembro 14, 2023

O zoólogo e geólogo Louis Agassiz morreu há cento e cinquenta anos...


Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (Môtier, 18 de maio de 1807 - Cambridge, 14 de dezembro de 1873) foi um zoólogo e geólogo suíço, famoso pela sua Expedição Thayer.

Louis Agassiz nasceu em Môtier (Vully), no Cantão de Friburgo, Suíça. O início da sua educação começou em casa, seguido de quatro anos numa escola secundária em Bienne (alemão Biel), completou os seus estudos elementares na academia de Lausanne. Selecionando a medicina como a sua profissão, estudou nas universidades de Zurique, Heidelberg e Munique. Em seguida aumentou o seu conhecimento nos processos biológicos, especialmente na Botânica. Em 1829, doutorou-se em Erlangen e em 1830 doutorou-se em Medicina em Munique.
Mudou-se para Paris e ficou sobre a tutela de Alexander von Humboldt e de Georges Cuvier, que o lançaram nas suas carreiras da Geologia e do Zoologia respetivamente. Até esta altura não prestou nenhuma atenção especial ao estudo da Ictiologia, a qual se transformou na grande ocupação de sua vida, ou pelo menos na área em que atualmente é mais recordado.

     
   
 
In 1832 he was appointed professor of natural history in the University of Neuchâtel. The fossil fish there soon attracted his attention. The fossil-rich stones furnished by the slates of Glarus and the limestones of Monte Bolca were known at the time, but very little had been accomplished in the way of scientific study of them. Agassiz, as early as 1829, planned the publication of the work which, more than any other, laid the foundation of his worldwide fame. Five volumes of his Recherches sur les poissons fossiles ("Research on Fossil Fish") appeared at intervals from 1833 to 1843. They were magnificently illustrated, chiefly by Joseph Dinkel. In gathering materials for this work Agassiz visited the principal museums in Europe, and meeting Cuvier in Paris, he received much encouragement and assistance from him. They had known him for seven years at the time.
Agassiz found that his palaeontological labours made necessary a new basis of ichthyological classification. The fossils rarely exhibited any traces of the soft tissues of fish. They consisted chiefly of the teeth, scales and fins, even the bones being perfectly preserved in comparatively few instances. He therefore adopted a classification which divided fish into four groups: Ganoids, Placoids, Cycloids and Ctenoids, based on the nature of the scales and other dermal appendages. While Agassiz did much to place the subject on a scientific basis, this classification has been superseded by later work.
As Agassiz's descriptive work proceeded, it became obvious that it would over-tax his resources unless financial assistance could be found. The British Association came to his aid, and the Earl of Ellesmere — then Lord Francis Egerton — gave him yet more efficient help. The 1,290 original drawings made for the work were purchased by the Earl, and presented by him to the Geological Society of London. In 1836 the Wollaston Medal was awarded to Agassiz by the council of that society for his work on fossil ichthyology; and in 1838 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. Meanwhile invertebrate animals engaged his attention. In 1837 he issued the "Prodrome" of a monograph on the recent and fossil Echinodermata, the first part of which appeared in 1838; in 1839–40 he published two quarto volumes on the fossil Echinoderms of Switzerland; and in 1840–45 he issued his Etudes critiques sur les mollusques fossiles ("Critical Studies on Fossil Mollusks").
Before his first visit to England in 1834, the labours of Hugh Miller and other geologists brought to light the remarkable fish of the Old Red Sandstone of the northeast of Scotland. The strange forms of the Pterichthys, the Coccosteus and other genera were then made known to geologists for the first time. They were of intense interest to Agassiz, and formed the subject of a special monograph by him published in 1844–45: Monographie des poissons fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge, ou Systeme Devonien (Old Red Sandstone) des Iles Britanniques et de Russie ("Monograph on Fossil Fish of the Old Red Sandstone, or Devonian System of the British Isles and of Russia"). In the early stages of his career in Neuchatel, Agassiz also made a name for himself as a man who could run a scientific department well. Under his care, the University of Neuchâtel soon became a leading institution for scientific inquiry.
In 1837 Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age. In the same year, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Prior to this proposal, Goethe, de Saussure, Venetz, Jean de Charpentier, Karl Friedrich Schimper and others had made the glaciers of the Alps the subjects of special study, and Goethe, Charpentier as well as Schimper had even arrived at the conclusion that the erratic blocks of alpine rocks scattered over the slopes and summits of the Jura Mountains had been moved there by glaciers. The question having attracted the attention of Agassiz, he not only discussed it with Charpentier and Schimper and made successive journeys to the alpine regions in company with them, but he had a hut constructed upon one of the Aar Glaciers, which for a time he made his home, in order to investigate the structure and movements of the ice.
These labours resulted, in 1840, in the publication of his work in two volumes entitled Etudes sur les glaciers ("Study on Glaciers"). In it he discussed the movements of the glaciers, their moraines, their influence in grooving and rounding the rocks over which they travelled, and in producing the striations and roches moutonnees seen in Alpine-style landscapes. He not only accepted Charpentier's and Schimper's idea that some of the alpine glaciers had extended across the wide plains and valleys drained by the Aar and the Rhône, but he went still farther. He concluded that, in the relatively recent past, Switzerland had been another Greenland; that instead of a few glaciers stretching across the areas referred to, one vast sheet of ice, originating in the higher Alps, had extended over the entire valley of northwestern Switzerland until it reached the southern slopes of the Jura, which, though they checked and deflected its further extension, did not prevent the ice from reaching in many places the summit of the range. The publication of this work gave a fresh impetus to the study of glacial phenomena in all parts of the world.
Thus familiarized with the phenomena associated with the movements of recent glaciers, Agassiz was prepared for a discovery which he made in 1840, in conjunction with William Buckland. The two visited the mountains of Scotland together, and found in different locations clear evidence of ancient glacial action. The discovery was announced to the Geological Society of London in successive communications. The mountainous districts of England, Wales, and Ireland were also considered to constitute centres for the dispersion of glacial debris; and Agassiz remarked "that great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found; that this gravel was in general produced by the trituration of the sheets of ice upon the subjacent surface, etc."
In 1842–1846 he issued his Nomenclator Zoologicus, a classified list, with references, of all names employed in zoology for genera and groups — a work of great labour and research. With the aid of a grant of money from the King of Prussia, Agassiz crossed the Atlantic in the autumn of 1846 with the twin purposes of investigating the natural history and geology of North America and delivering a course of 12 lectures on “The Plan of Creation as shown in the Animal Kingdom,” by invitation from J. A. Lowell, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. The financial and scientific advantages presented to him in the United States induced him to settle there, where he remained to the end of his life. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1846.
His engagement for the Lowell Institute lectures precipitated the establishment of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University in 1847 with him as its head. Harvard appointed him professor of zoology and geology, and he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology there in 1859 serving as the museum's first director until his death in 1873. During his tenure at Harvard, he was, among many other things, an early student of the effect of the last Ice Age on North America.
He continued his lectures for the Lowell Institute. In succeeding years, he gave series of lectures on “Ichthyology” (1847–48 season), “Comparative Embryology” (1848–49), “Functions of Life in Lower Animals” (1850–51), “Natural History” (1853–54), “Methods of Study in Natural History” (1861–62), “Glaciers and the Ice Period” (1864–65), “Brazil” (1866–67) and “Deep Sea Dredging” (1869–70). In 1850 he married an American college teacher, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, who later wrote introductory books about natural history and, after his death, a lengthy biography of her husband.
Agassiz served as a non-resident lecturer at Cornell while also being on faculty at Harvard. In 1852 he accepted a medical professorship of comparative anatomy at Charlestown, Massachusetts, but he resigned in two years. From this time his scientific studies dropped off, but he was a profound influence on the American branches of his two fields, teaching decades worth of future prominent scientists, including Alpheus Hyatt, David Starr Jordan, Joel Asaph Allen, Joseph Le Conte, Ernest Ingersoll, William James, Nathaniel Shaler, Samuel Hubbard Scudder, Alpheus Packard, and his son Alexander Agassiz, among others. He had a profound impact on the paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott. In return his name appears attached to several species, as well as here and there throughout the American landscape, notably Lake Agassiz, the Pleistocene precursor to Lake Winnipeg and the Red River.
During this time he grew in fame even in the public consciousness, becoming one of the best-known scientists in the world. By 1857 he was so well-loved that his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "The fiftieth birthday of Agassiz" in his honor. His own writing continued with four (of a planned ten) volumes of Natural History of the United States which were published from 1857 to 1862. During this time he also published a catalog of papers in his field, Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae, in four volumes between 1848 and 1854.
Stricken by ill health in the 1860s, he resolved to return to the field for relaxation and to resume his studies of Brazilian fish. In April 1865 he led a party to Brazil. Returning home in August 1866, an account of this expedition, entitled A Journey in Brazil, was published in 1868. In December 1871 he made a second eight month excursion, known as the Hassler expedition under the command of Commander Philip Carrigan Johnson (brother of Eastman Johnson), visiting South America on its southern Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. The ship explored the Magellan Strait, which drew the praise of Charles Darwin.
Elizabeth Aggasiz wrote, at the Strait: '…the Hassler pursued her course, past a seemingly endless panorama of mountains and forests rising into the pale regions of snow and ice, where lay glaciers in which every rift and crevasse, as well as the many cascades flowing down to join the waters beneath, could be counted as she steamed by them.... These were weeks of exquisite delight to Agassiz. The vessel often skirted the shore so closely that its geology could be studied from the deck.'
   

terça-feira, setembro 05, 2023

O túnel de São Gotardo foi inaugurado há 43 anos


O túnel rodoviário do São Gotardo, na Suíça, com 16,4 km de comprimento é o terceiro maior túnel rodoviário do mundo - o maior é o Túnel de Lærdal, na Noruega) - e liga Göschenen, no cantão de Uri, a norte, com Airolo, no cantão do Ticino, a sul.
O túnel foi inaugurado em 5 de setembro de 1980, em resposta ao aumento constante do tráfego Norte-Sul nesta região dos Alpes, não só do tráfego comercial, mas também do boom turístico em direção da Itália, pela auto-estrada A2

   
Características
  • Comprimento: 16,9 km
  • Túneis: uma de 2 vias (bidireccional)
  • Velocidade: 80 km/h
  • Tráfego: 6,1 milhões veículos em 2011
   
Acidente
Em 24 de outubro de 2001, ocorreu um acidente no interior do túnel com a colisão de dois camiões onde morreram onze pessoas, por esse motivo o túnel ficou fechado por dois meses, para reparações e limpeza.
Após esse acidente instalou-se um sistema com semáforo para: primeiro, manter uma distância de segurança entre cada veículo que é de 50 metros para os automóveis e de 150 para os camiões, e segundo, impedir que muitos veículos fiquem dentro do túnel ao mesmo tempo, permitindo a intervenção e evacuação em caso de acidentes. Por conta disso grandes congestionamentos se formam próximo da entrada do túnel no verão.
    

sexta-feira, julho 28, 2023

Jacques Piccard nasceu há cento e um anos

    
Jacques Piccard (Bruxelas, 28 de julho de 1922 - Cully, 1 de novembro de 2008) foi um explorador e engenheiro suíço, reconhecido pelo desenvolvimento de veículos subaquáticos para o estudo das correntes oceânicas. Piccard e Don Walsh foram as primeiras pessoas a ter atingido o ponto mais baixo na superfície terrestre, a Challenger Deep, na Fossa das Marianas.
Jacques Piccard era filho de Auguste Piccard, que foi ele próprio engenheiro e explorador.
Em 23 de janeiro de 1960 Jacques Piccard e Don Walsh atingiram o fundo do mar no seu batiscafo Trieste. A profundidade da descida foi medida em 10.916 metros, mas medições feitas em 1995 determinaram um novo valor para a profundidade da Challenger Deep em 10.911 metros. A descida demorou cinco horas e os dois homens estiveram no fundo oceânico cerca de vinte minutos antes da subida, que demorou 3 horas e 15 minutos. 
  

sexta-feira, julho 14, 2023

O Matterhorn foi escalado pela primeira vez há 158 anos

O Matterhorn visto de Zermatt
   
O Matterhorn ou Cervino (em francês Cervin e em italiano Cervino) é talvez a montanha mais conhecida dos Alpes, a par do Monte Branco. Localizado na fronteira da Suíça com a Itália, com 4.478 metros  de altitude, a sua graciosa silhueta domina a cidade suíça de Zermatt e a cidade italiana de Breuil-Cervinia, no Valtournenche.
Foi a última grande montanha dos Alpes a ser escalada, talvez devido aos receios que provocava em muitos montanhistas. A sua primeira ascensão marca o final da idade de ouro do alpinismo de meados do século XIX. Apesar de se destacar com um desnível alto e forma triangular bem definida, não possui um valor elevado de proeminência topográfica pois muitos montes mais altos são próximos e unidos por tergos de altitude elevada (casos do Monte Rosa, Dom, Liskamm e Weisshorn). O seu cume-pai é o Weisshorn.
A sua vertente norte é uma das "grandes vertentes norte dos Alpes".
A sua forma inspirou a cultura ocidental em numerosas ocasiões, desde o formato dos chocolates Toblerone, ao batismo de outros montes de forma semelhante (como o Machapuchare, o Matterhorn do Nepal), à utilização em capas de álbuns dos grupos Depeche Mode e Goldfrapp.
    
A tragédia do Monte Cervino, em 14 de julho de 1865 - gravura de Gustave Doré
     
Primeira subida e acidente
Foi apenas em 14 de julho de 1865, que depois de muitas tentativas falhadas, que Edward Whymper e o guia Peter Taugwalder tentaram seguir a chamada rota Hörnli, e conseguir subir ao cume do Matterhorn/Cervino, tendo sido surpreendidos pela facilidade do percurso.
Na realidade a cordada que completa era formada pelo guia Michel Croz que acompanhava Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas, Robert Hadow e pelo guia Peter Taugwalder pai, acompanhado pelo seu filho também chamado Peter, e por Edward Whymper, ganhou o cotovelo pela aresta de Hörnli. Mais acima dirigiram-se para a face norte. Edward Whymper foi o primeiro a atingir o cume e para esse fim cortou a corda e poder assim, quase correndo, ser o primeiro a lá chegar. Foi seguido pelo seu guia Michel Croz de Chamonix, que achou por bem não o deixar partir em solitário. Mais lentamente foram chegando os outros composto pelo reverendo Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas, Douglas R. Hadow, o grupo dos ingleses, assim que Peter Taugwalder e o filho.
Na descida, os quatro primeiros da cordada (Croz, Hadow, Hudson e Douglas), tiveram uma queda mortal ao longo da face norte, acima do famoso "cotovelo".
    

segunda-feira, julho 10, 2023

Calvino nasceu há 514 anos

    
João Calvino (Noyon, 10 de julho de 1509 - Genebra, 27 de maio de 1564) foi um teólogo cristão francês. Calvino teve uma influência muito grande durante a Reforma Protestante, uma influência que continua até hoje. A forma de Protestantismo que ele ensinou e viveu é conhecida por alguns pelo nome calvinismo, embora o próprio Calvino tivesse repudiado contundentemente este termo . Esta variante do Protestantismo viria a ser bem sucedida em países como a Suíça (país de origem), Países Baixos, África do Sul (entre os africânderes), Inglaterra, Escócia e Estados Unidos.
Nascido na Picardia, ao norte da França, foi batizado com o nome de Jean Cauvin. A tradução do apelido de família "Cauvin" para o latim Calvinus deu a origem ao nome "Calvin", pelo qual se tornou conhecido.
Calvino foi inicialmente um humanista. Nunca foi ordenado sacerdote. Depois do seu afastamento da Igreja católica, este intelectual começou a ser visto, gradualmente, como a voz do movimento protestante, pregando em igrejas e acabando por ser reconhecido por muitos como "padre". Vítima das perseguições aos protestantes na França, fugiu para Genebra em 1536, onde faleceu em 1564. Genebra tornou-se definitivamente num centro do protestantismo europeu e João Calvino permanece até hoje uma figura central da história da cidade e da Suíça.
Martinho Lutero escreveu as suas 95 teses em 1517, quando Calvino tinha oito anos de idade. Para muitos, Calvino terá sido para a língua francesa aquilo que Lutero foi para a língua alemã - uma figura quase paternal. Lutero era dotado de uma retórica mais direta, por vezes grosseira, enquanto que Calvino tinha um estilo de pensamento mais refinado e geométrico, quase de filigrana. Citando Bernard Cottret, biógrafo (francês) de Calvino: "Quando se observa estes dois homens podia-se dizer que cada um deles se insere já num imaginário nacional: Lutero o defensor das liberdades germânicas, o qual se dirige com palavras arrojadas aos senhores feudais da nação alemã; Calvino, o filósofo pré-cartesiano, precursor da língua francesa, de uma severidade clássica, que se identifica pela clareza do estilo".
      

sábado, maio 27, 2023

Calvino morreu há 459 anos

  
João Calvino (Noyon, 10 de julho de 1509 - Genebra, 27 de maio de 1564) foi um teólogo cristão francês. Calvino teve uma influência muito grande durante a Reforma Protestante, uma influência que continua até hoje. Portanto, a forma de Protestantismo que ele ensinou e viveu é conhecida por alguns pelo nome calvinismo, embora o próprio Calvino tivesse repudiado contundentemente este termo. Esta variante do protestantismo viria a ser bem sucedida em países como a Suíça (país de origem), Países Baixos, África do Sul (entre os africânderes), Inglaterra, Escócia e Estados Unidos.
Nascido na Picardia, ao norte da França, foi batizado com o nome de Jean Cauvin. A tradução do apelido de família "Cauvin" para o latim Calvinus deu a origem ao nome "Calvin", pelo qual se tornou conhecido.
Calvino foi inicialmente um humanista e nunca foi ordenado sacerdote. Depois do seu afastamento da Igreja Católica, este intelectual começou a ser visto, gradualmente, como a voz do movimento protestante, pregando em igrejas e acabando por ser reconhecido por muitos como "padre". Vítima das perseguições aos protestantes na França, fugiu para Genebra em 1536, onde faleceu em 1564. Genebra tornou-se definitivamente num centro do protestantismo europeu e João Calvino permanece até hoje uma figura central da história da cidade e da Suíça.
Martinho Lutero escreveu as suas 95 teses em 1517, quando Calvino tinha oito anos de idade. Para muitos, Calvino terá sido para a língua francesa aquilo que Lutero foi para a língua alemã - uma figura quase paternal. Lutero era dotado de uma retórica mais direta, por vezes grosseira, enquanto que Calvino tinha um estilo de pensamento mais refinado e geométrico, quase de filigrana. Citando Bernard Cottret, biógrafo (francês) de Calvino: "Quando se observa estes dois homens podia-se dizer que cada um deles se insere já num imaginário nacional: Lutero o defensor das liberdades germânicas, o qual se dirige com palavras arrojadas aos senhores feudais da nação alemã; Calvino, o filósofo pré-cartesiano, precursor da língua francesa, de uma severidade clássica, que se identifica pela clareza do estilo".
    

sexta-feira, maio 12, 2023

H. R. Giger morreu há nove anos...

   
Hans Ruedi Giger (Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland, 5 February 1940 – Zürich, Switzerland, 12 May 2014) was a Swiss painter, whose style was adapted for many forms of media, including record albums, furniture and tattoos.
The Zurich-based artist was best known for airbrush images of humans and machines linked together in a cold 'biomechanical' relationship. Later he abandoned airbrush work for pastels, markers, and ink. He was part of the special effects team that won an Academy Award for design work on the film Alien. In Switzerland there are two theme bars that reflect his interior designs, and his work is on permanent display at the H.R. Giger Museum at Gruyères.
   
Early life
Giger was born in 1940 in Chur, capital city of Graubünden, the largest and easternmost Swiss canton. His father, a pharmacist, viewed art as a "breadless profession" and strongly encouraged him to enter pharmacy, Giger recalled. He moved to Zürich in 1962, where he studied architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970.
  
Career
Giger's first success was when H. H. Kunz, co-owner of Switzerland's first poster publishing company, printed and distributed Giger's first posters, beginning in 1969.
Giger's style and thematic execution were influential. He was part of the special effects team that won an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects for their design work on the film Alien. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger was admitted to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013. He is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums including Danzig III: How The Gods Kill by Danzig, Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Deborah Harry's KooKoo.
In 1998, Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H.R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
  
Personal life
Giger had a relationship with Swiss actress Li Tobler until she committed suicide in 1975. Li's image appears in many of his paintings. He married Mia Bonzanigo in 1979; they divorced a year and a half later.
The artist lived and worked in Zürich with his second wife, Carmen Maria Scheifele Giger, who is the Director of the H.R. Giger Museum.
  
Death 
On 12 May 2014, Giger died in a hospital in Zürich after having suffered injuries in a fall.
    
Birth Machine sculpture in Gruyères 
   
Style
Giger started with small ink drawings before progressing to oil paintings. For most of his career, Giger had worked predominantly in airbrush, creating monochromatic canvasses depicting surreal, nightmarish dreamscapes. However, he then largely abandoned large airbrush works in favor of works with pastels, markers or ink.
Giger's most distinctive stylistic innovation was that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His main influences were painters Dado, Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He met Salvador Dalí, to whom he was introduced by painter Robert Venosa. Giger was also influenced by the work of the sculptor Stanislas Szukalski, and by the painters Austin Osman Spare and Mati Klarwein. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger studied interior and industrial design at the School of Commercial Art in Zurich (from 1962 to 1965) and made his first paintings as a means of art therapy. 
  
Ibanez H. R. Giger signature bass and guitars
   
Other works
Giger directed a number of films, including Swiss Made (1968), Tagtraum (1973), Giger's Necronomicon (1975) and Giger's Alien (1979). Giger created furniture designs, particularly the Harkonnen Capo Chair for a film of the novel Dune that was to be directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Many years later, David Lynch directed the film, using only rough concepts by Giger. Giger had wished to work with Lynch, as he stated in one of his books that Lynch's film Eraserhead was closer than even Giger's own films to realizing his vision. Giger applied his biomechanical style to interior design. One "Giger Bar" appeared in Tokyo, but the realization of his designs was a great disappointment to him, since the Japanese organization behind the venture did not wait for his final designs, and instead used Giger's rough preliminary sketches. For that reason Giger disowned the Tokyo bar. The two Giger Bars in his native Switzerland, in Gruyères and Chur, were built under Giger's close supervision and they accurately reflect his original concepts. At The Limelight in Manhattan, Giger's artwork was licensed to decorate the VIP room, the uppermost chapel of the landmarked church, but it was never intended to be a permanent installation and bore no similarity to the bars in Switzerland. The arrangement was terminated after two years when the Limelight closed. As of 2009 only the two authentic Swiss Giger Bars remain. Giger's art has greatly influenced tattooists and fetishists worldwide. Under a licensing deal Ibanez guitars released an H. R. Giger signature series: the Ibanez ICHRG2, an Ibanez Iceman, features "NY City VI", the Ibanez RGTHRG1 has "NY City XI" printed on it, the S Series SHRG1Z has a metal-coated engraving of "Biomechanical Matrix" on it, and a 4-string SRX bass, SRXHRG1, has "N.Y. City X" on it. Giger is often referred to in popular culture, especially in science fiction and cyberpunk. William Gibson (who wrote an early script for Alien 3) seems particularly fascinated: A minor character in Virtual Light, Lowell, is described as having New York XXIV tattooed across his back, and in Idoru a secondary character, Yamazaki, describes the buildings of nanotech Japan as Giger-esque. 
  
Weiblicher Torso von HR Giger, 2009 im Garten des Bündner Kunstmuseums
  
Films
  • Dune (designs for unproduced Alejandro Jodorowsky adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel; the movie Dune was later made in an adaptation by David Lynch)
  • Alien (designed, among other things, the Alien creature, "The Derelict" and the "Space Jockey")
  • Aliens (credited for the creation of the creature only)
  • Alien 3 (designed the dog-like Alien bodyshape, plus a number of unused concepts, many mentioned on the special features disc of Alien 3, despite not being credited in the movie theater version)
  • Alien Resurrection (credited for the creation of the creature only)
  • Poltergeist II: The Other Side
  • Killer Condom (creative consultant, set design)
  • Species (designed Sil, and the Ghost Train in a dream sequence)
  • Batman Forever (designed radically different envisioning of the Batmobile; design was not used in the film)
  • Future-Kill (designed artwork for the movie poster)
  • Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (creature designs)
  • Prometheus (the film includes "The Derelict" spacecraft and the "Space Jockey" designs from the first Alien film, as well as a "Temple" design from the failed Jodorowsky Dune project and original extraterrestrial murals created exclusively for Prometheus, based in conceptual art from Alien. Unlike Alien Resurrection, the Prometheus film credited H. R. Giger with the original designs).
   

sábado, abril 22, 2023

Yehudi Menuhin nasceu há 107 anos...

  
Yehudi Menuhin, Barão Menuhin de Stoke d'Abernon (Nova Iorque, 22 de abril de 1916Berlim, 12 de março de 1999) foi um violinista e maestro norte-americano que passou a maior parte da sua carreira no Reino Unido. Apesar de ter nascido em Nova Iorque, naturalizou-se suíço em 1970 e britânico em 1985. É considerado um dos maiores virtuosos do violino do século XX.

 


terça-feira, março 14, 2023

Ferdinand Hodler nasceu há cento e setenta anos

Self-portrait, 1916
     
Ferdinand Hodler (Bern, March 14, 1853 – Geneva, May 19, 1918) was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism he called "parallelism".
 
Ferdinand hodler.jpg
Self-portrait, 1912
 
  

Hodler was born in Bern, the eldest of six children. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Marguerite (née Neukomm), was from a peasant family. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His mother remarried, to a decorative painter named Gottlieb Schüpach who had five children from a previous marriage. The birth of additional children brought the size of Hodler's family to thirteen.

The family's finances were poor, and the nine-year-old Hodler was put to work assisting his stepfather in painting signs and other commercial projects. After the death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1867, Hodler was sent to Thun to apprentice with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer. From Sommer, Hodler learned the craft of painting conventional Alpine landscapes, typically copied from prints, which he sold in shops and to tourists.
 
 Woodcutter, 1910
   

terça-feira, dezembro 27, 2022

Bernoulli nasceu há 368 anos

  
Jakob Bernoulli, ou Jacob, ou Jacques, ou Jacob I Bernoulli (Basileia, 27 de dezembro de 1654 - Basileia, 16 de agosto de 1705), foi o primeiro matemático a desenvolver o cálculo infinitesimal para além do que fora feito por Isaac Newton e Gottfried Leibniz, aplicando-o a novos problemas.

Publicou a primeira integração de uma equação diferencial; deu solução ao problema dos isoperímetros, que abriu caminho ao cálculo das variações de Euler e Lagrange e estendeu suas principais aplicações ao cálculo das probabilidades. É considerado o pai do cálculo exponencial. Foi professor de matemática em Basileia, tendo sido importantíssima sua contribuição à geometria analítica, à teoria das probabilidades e ao cálculo de variações.

Em 1713, depois de sua morte, foi publicado o seu grande tratado sobre a teoria das probabilidades, Ars Conjectandi, que ainda oferece interesse prático na aplicação da teoria da probabilidade nos seguros e na estatística

   

domingo, dezembro 18, 2022

Paul Klee nasceu há 143 anos

      
Paul Klee (Münchenbuchsee, 18 de dezembro de 1879 - Muralto, 29 de junho de 1940) foi um pintor e poeta suíço, naturalizado alemão. O seu estilo, fortemente individual, foi influenciado por várias tendências artísticas diferentes, incluindo o expressionismo, cubismo e surrealismo. Ele foi um estudante do orientalismo. Klee era um desenhador nato, que realizou experiências e, consequentemente, dominou a teoria das cores, assunto sobre o qual ele escreveu extensivamente. As suas obras refletem o seu humor seco e, às vezes, a sua perspetiva infantil, os seus ânimos e as suas crenças pessoais e a sua musicalidade. Ele e o seu amigo, o pintor russo Wassily Kandinsky, também eram famosos por darem aulas na escola de arte e arquitetura Bauhaus.
   
Senecio2, 1922
      
Angelus novus, 1920
    

quarta-feira, dezembro 14, 2022

Louis Agassiz morreu há 149 anos

   
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (Môtier, 18 de maio de 1807 - Cambridge, 14 de dezembro de 1873) foi um zoólogo e geólogo suíço, famoso pela sua Expedição Thayer.

Louis Agassiz nasceu em Môtier (Vully), no Cantão de Friburgo, Suíça. O início da sua educação começou em casa, seguido de quatro anos numa escola secundária em Bienne (alemão Biel), completou os seus estudos elementares na academia de Lausanne. Selecionando a medicina como a sua profissão, estudou nas universidades de Zurique, Heidelberg e Munique. Em seguida aumentou o seu conhecimento nos processos biológicos, especialmente na Botânica. Em 1829, doutorou-se em Erlangen e em 1830 doutorou-se em Medicina em Munique.
Mudou-se para Paris e ficou sobre a tutela de Alexander von Humboldt e de Georges Cuvier, que o lançaram nas suas carreiras da Geologia e do Zoologia respetivamente. Até esta altura não prestou nenhuma atenção especial ao estudo da Ictiologia, a qual se transformou na grande ocupação de sua vida, ou pelo menos na área em que atualmente é mais recordado.

     
   
 
In 1832 he was appointed professor of natural history in the University of Neuchâtel. The fossil fish there soon attracted his attention. The fossil-rich stones furnished by the slates of Glarus and the limestones of Monte Bolca were known at the time, but very little had been accomplished in the way of scientific study of them. Agassiz, as early as 1829, planned the publication of the work which, more than any other, laid the foundation of his worldwide fame. Five volumes of his Recherches sur les poissons fossiles ("Research on Fossil Fish") appeared at intervals from 1833 to 1843. They were magnificently illustrated, chiefly by Joseph Dinkel. In gathering materials for this work Agassiz visited the principal museums in Europe, and meeting Cuvier in Paris, he received much encouragement and assistance from him. They had known him for seven years at the time.
Agassiz found that his palaeontological labours made necessary a new basis of ichthyological classification. The fossils rarely exhibited any traces of the soft tissues of fish. They consisted chiefly of the teeth, scales and fins, even the bones being perfectly preserved in comparatively few instances. He therefore adopted a classification which divided fish into four groups: Ganoids, Placoids, Cycloids and Ctenoids, based on the nature of the scales and other dermal appendages. While Agassiz did much to place the subject on a scientific basis, this classification has been superseded by later work.
As Agassiz's descriptive work proceeded, it became obvious that it would over-tax his resources unless financial assistance could be found. The British Association came to his aid, and the Earl of Ellesmere — then Lord Francis Egerton — gave him yet more efficient help. The 1,290 original drawings made for the work were purchased by the Earl, and presented by him to the Geological Society of London. In 1836 the Wollaston Medal was awarded to Agassiz by the council of that society for his work on fossil ichthyology; and in 1838 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. Meanwhile invertebrate animals engaged his attention. In 1837 he issued the "Prodrome" of a monograph on the recent and fossil Echinodermata, the first part of which appeared in 1838; in 1839–40 he published two quarto volumes on the fossil Echinoderms of Switzerland; and in 1840–45 he issued his Etudes critiques sur les mollusques fossiles ("Critical Studies on Fossil Mollusks").
Before his first visit to England in 1834, the labours of Hugh Miller and other geologists brought to light the remarkable fish of the Old Red Sandstone of the northeast of Scotland. The strange forms of the Pterichthys, the Coccosteus and other genera were then made known to geologists for the first time. They were of intense interest to Agassiz, and formed the subject of a special monograph by him published in 1844–45: Monographie des poissons fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge, ou Systeme Devonien (Old Red Sandstone) des Iles Britanniques et de Russie ("Monograph on Fossil Fish of the Old Red Sandstone, or Devonian System of the British Isles and of Russia"). In the early stages of his career in Neuchatel, Agassiz also made a name for himself as a man who could run a scientific department well. Under his care, the University of Neuchâtel soon became a leading institution for scientific inquiry.
In 1837 Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age. In the same year, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Prior to this proposal, Goethe, de Saussure, Venetz, Jean de Charpentier, Karl Friedrich Schimper and others had made the glaciers of the Alps the subjects of special study, and Goethe, Charpentier as well as Schimper had even arrived at the conclusion that the erratic blocks of alpine rocks scattered over the slopes and summits of the Jura Mountains had been moved there by glaciers. The question having attracted the attention of Agassiz, he not only discussed it with Charpentier and Schimper and made successive journeys to the alpine regions in company with them, but he had a hut constructed upon one of the Aar Glaciers, which for a time he made his home, in order to investigate the structure and movements of the ice.
These labours resulted, in 1840, in the publication of his work in two volumes entitled Etudes sur les glaciers ("Study on Glaciers"). In it he discussed the movements of the glaciers, their moraines, their influence in grooving and rounding the rocks over which they travelled, and in producing the striations and roches moutonnees seen in Alpine-style landscapes. He not only accepted Charpentier's and Schimper's idea that some of the alpine glaciers had extended across the wide plains and valleys drained by the Aar and the Rhône, but he went still farther. He concluded that, in the relatively recent past, Switzerland had been another Greenland; that instead of a few glaciers stretching across the areas referred to, one vast sheet of ice, originating in the higher Alps, had extended over the entire valley of northwestern Switzerland until it reached the southern slopes of the Jura, which, though they checked and deflected its further extension, did not prevent the ice from reaching in many places the summit of the range. The publication of this work gave a fresh impetus to the study of glacial phenomena in all parts of the world.
Thus familiarized with the phenomena associated with the movements of recent glaciers, Agassiz was prepared for a discovery which he made in 1840, in conjunction with William Buckland. The two visited the mountains of Scotland together, and found in different locations clear evidence of ancient glacial action. The discovery was announced to the Geological Society of London in successive communications. The mountainous districts of England, Wales, and Ireland were also considered to constitute centres for the dispersion of glacial debris; and Agassiz remarked "that great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found; that this gravel was in general produced by the trituration of the sheets of ice upon the subjacent surface, etc."
In 1842–1846 he issued his Nomenclator Zoologicus, a classified list, with references, of all names employed in zoology for genera and groups — a work of great labour and research. With the aid of a grant of money from the King of Prussia, Agassiz crossed the Atlantic in the autumn of 1846 with the twin purposes of investigating the natural history and geology of North America and delivering a course of 12 lectures on “The Plan of Creation as shown in the Animal Kingdom,” by invitation from J. A. Lowell, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. The financial and scientific advantages presented to him in the United States induced him to settle there, where he remained to the end of his life. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1846.
His engagement for the Lowell Institute lectures precipitated the establishment of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University in 1847 with him as its head. Harvard appointed him professor of zoology and geology, and he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology there in 1859 serving as the museum's first director until his death in 1873. During his tenure at Harvard, he was, among many other things, an early student of the effect of the last Ice Age on North America.
He continued his lectures for the Lowell Institute. In succeeding years, he gave series of lectures on “Ichthyology” (1847–48 season), “Comparative Embryology” (1848–49), “Functions of Life in Lower Animals” (1850–51), “Natural History” (1853–54), “Methods of Study in Natural History” (1861–62), “Glaciers and the Ice Period” (1864–65), “Brazil” (1866–67) and “Deep Sea Dredging” (1869–70). In 1850 he married an American college teacher, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, who later wrote introductory books about natural history and, after his death, a lengthy biography of her husband.
Agassiz served as a non-resident lecturer at Cornell while also being on faculty at Harvard. In 1852 he accepted a medical professorship of comparative anatomy at Charlestown, Massachusetts, but he resigned in two years. From this time his scientific studies dropped off, but he was a profound influence on the American branches of his two fields, teaching decades worth of future prominent scientists, including Alpheus Hyatt, David Starr Jordan, Joel Asaph Allen, Joseph Le Conte, Ernest Ingersoll, William James, Nathaniel Shaler, Samuel Hubbard Scudder, Alpheus Packard, and his son Alexander Agassiz, among others. He had a profound impact on the paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott. In return his name appears attached to several species, as well as here and there throughout the American landscape, notably Lake Agassiz, the Pleistocene precursor to Lake Winnipeg and the Red River.
During this time he grew in fame even in the public consciousness, becoming one of the best-known scientists in the world. By 1857 he was so well-loved that his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "The fiftieth birthday of Agassiz" in his honor. His own writing continued with four (of a planned ten) volumes of Natural History of the United States which were published from 1857 to 1862. During this time he also published a catalog of papers in his field, Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae, in four volumes between 1848 and 1854.
Stricken by ill health in the 1860s, he resolved to return to the field for relaxation and to resume his studies of Brazilian fish. In April 1865 he led a party to Brazil. Returning home in August 1866, an account of this expedition, entitled A Journey in Brazil, was published in 1868. In December 1871 he made a second eight month excursion, known as the Hassler expedition under the command of Commander Philip Carrigan Johnson (brother of Eastman Johnson), visiting South America on its southern Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. The ship explored the Magellan Strait, which drew the praise of Charles Darwin.
Elizabeth Aggasiz wrote, at the Strait: '…the Hassler pursued her course, past a seemingly endless panorama of mountains and forests rising into the pale regions of snow and ice, where lay glaciers in which every rift and crevasse, as well as the many cascades flowing down to join the waters beneath, could be counted as she steamed by them.... These were weeks of exquisite delight to Agassiz. The vessel often skirted the shore so closely that its geology could be studied from the deck.'