Arthur Miller And Tennessee Williams, Including A Streetcar Named Desi

Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, film, 1951) and Death of a Salesman (1949). He directed the Academy Award-winning films Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and On The Waterfront (1954), as well as East of Eden (1955), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Splendor in the Grass (1961), and The Last Tycoon (1976). His two autobiographical novels, America, America (1962) and The Arrangement (1967), were turned into films in 1963 and 1968. Bibliography: Koszarski, Richard, Hollywood Directors, 1941-1976 (1977). Jolson, Al -------------------------------- (johl'-suhn) The singer Al Jolson, b. Asa Yoelson in Lithuania, c.1886, d. Oct. 23, 1950, immigrated with his family to Washington, D.C., around 1895. After a long apprenticeship as a singer in burlesque, minstrel shows, and vaudeville, he won (1911) his first important role in the Broadway show La Belle Paree. Jolson's style was notable for its vigor and volume, its blatant sentimentality, and for his use of blackface, a leftover theatrical convention from the already moribund minstrel show. His work--especially his film roles, beginning with The Jazz Singer (1927), the first major sound picture--won him a large audience during his lifetime. Jolson was awarded the Congressional Medal of Merit posthumously for his many overseas tours of wartime army camps, the last at the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Bibliography: Friedland, Michael, Jolson (1972). Discography:Best of Al Jolson: Steppin' Out and California, Here I Come (1911-29). Duchamp, Marcel -------------------------------- (doo-shahm') Marcel Duchamp, b. July 28, 1887, d. Oct. 2, 1968, was a French painter and theorist, a major proponent of DADA, and one of the most influential figures of avant-garde 20th-century art. After a brief early period in which he was influenced chiefly by Paul CEZANNE and Fauve color (see FAUVISM), Duchamp developed a type of symbolic painting, a dynamic version of facet CUBISM (similar to FUTURISM), in which the image depicted successive movements of a single body. It closely resembled the multiple exposure photography documented in Eadward MUYBRIDGE's book The Horse in Motion (1878). In 1912, Duchamp painted his famous Nude Descending A Staircase, which caused a scandal at the 1913 ARMORY SHOW in New York City. In the same year he developed, with Francis PICABIA and Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, the radical and ironic ideas that independently prefigured the official founding of Dada in 1916 in Zurich. In Paris in 1914, Duchamp bought and inscribed a bottle rack, thereby producing his first ready-made, a new art form based on the principle that art does not depend on established rules or on craftsmanship. Duchamp's ready-mades are ordinary objects that are signed and titled, becoming aesthetic, rather than functional, objects simply by this change in context. Dada aimed at departure from the physical aspect of painting and emphases in ideas as the chief means of artistic expression. In 1915, Duchamp moved to New York City, where he was befriended by Louise and Walter Arensberg and their circle of artists and poets, which constituted New York Dada. That same year he began his major work, The Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a construction of wire and painted foil fitted between plates of transparent glass. In 1918 he completed his last major painting, Tu m', a huge oil and graphite on canvas, a unique combination of real and painted objects and illusionistic and flat space. Following his maxim never to repeat himself, Duchamp "stopped" painting (1923) after 20 works and devoted himself largely to the game of chess. Nevertheless, by 1944 he had secretly begun sketches on a new project, and between 1946 and 1949 created his last work, the Etant Donnes (Philadelphia Museum of Art). BARBARA CAVALIERE Bibliography: Alexandrian, Sarane, Duchamp (1977); d'Harnoncourt, Anne, and McShine, Kynaston, eds., Marcel Duchamp (1973); Duchamp, Marcel, From the Green Box, trans. by George H. Hamilton (1957); Golding, John, Duchamp (1973); Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 2d ed. (1970); Tomkins, Calvin, The World of Marcel Duchamp (1966). Renoir, Jean -------------------------------- (ren-wahr') One of the greatest and best-loved of all French filmmakers, Jean Renoir, b. Sept. 15, 1894, d. Feb. 13, 1979, the second son of the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, exercised a major influence on French cinema for almost 50 years. From his beginnings in the silent era, aspects of his mature film style were apparent: a love of nature, rejection of class values, and a mixture of joy and sorrow. Some of his earliest films were made with his wife Catherine Hessling as star, among them an interpretation of Zola's Nana (1926), and The Little Match Girl (1928). During the 1930s Renoir was at the top of his form in two celebrations of anarchy, La Chienne (The Bitch,