Zhenya Gershman: Dürer’s Enigma: A Kabbalistic Revelation in Melencolia

Zhenya Gershman is an internationally renowned artist. She was born in Moscow, Russia and held her 1st solo exhibition in St. Petersburg at age 14. She was selected as a subject of the TV documentary film Our Generation, a project dedicated to searching for the five most talented teenagers in Russia, showing hope for the cultural future of the country. The youngest student to be admitted to Otis Art Institute, Zhenya graduated with Honors and later received her Masters of Fine Arts degree from Art Center College of Design. Today, Gershman’s portraits are featured in public and private collections including Douglas Simon and Richard Weisman (she is included in the book Picasso to Pop: The Richard Weisman Collection). Gershman’s portrait of Sting was acquired for the permanent collection of the Arte Al Limite Museum in Santiago, Chile. Zhenya participates in important international exhibitions including Art Aspen, Art Miami, and Art Chicago. The GRAMMY MusiCares Foundation selected Gershman to create portraits of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Her exhibition "Larger Than Life" was broadcast by Entertainment Tonight, Extra, and featured in The New York Post. A documentary film, The Model’s Artist, highlights Gershman’s innovative approach to working with artists’ models. In 2000, Gershman was a recipient of ALEX Award in Visual Arts from The National Alliance for Excellence, Honored Scholars and Artists Program, presented by Peter Frank, who is quoted as saying that Gershman’s effort evokes not only Whistler’s and Sargent’s, but that from which they took inspiration, Manet’s and Velazquez’s⏤masters of the figure who in their own ways avoided the banal literalities of their contemporaries for a rendition truer to the vagaries of vision, and (thereby) to the dynamics of human presence.
In addition to her artistic career, Gershman is an independent scholar and a museum educator. She has worked for over a decade at the J. Paul Getty Museum and has contributed to such exhibitions as Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits and Rembrandt: Telling the Difference. As a co-Founder and President of Project AWE, a nonprofit foundation for the arts and education, Gershman has dedicated her scholarly and charitable work to provide new dimensions in understanding and experiencing the cultural icons of Western European heritage. Gershman’s groundbreaking discovery regarding the presence of a hidden Rembrandt self-portrait was published by Arion, Boston University and was brought to European audiences by Le Monde. She continues to work in her studio and is currently working on a book Dürer’s Labyrinth: Melencolia in the Context of Early Modern Knowledge following her article Dürer’s Enigma: A Kabbalistic Revelation in Melencolia §I published by Brill’s Aries Journal.

Пікірлер: 17

  • @klara222
    @klara2222 жыл бұрын

    7:18 St.Jerome 8:18 Reuchlin 9:24 Hebrew roots 11:00 St.Jerome's Study 13:02 Hebrew letters 18:55 Connection 19:35 (Mis)interpretation 21:26 Cameleon. Pliny the Elder 23:15 Pico della Mirandola 25:48 Anagram 27:16 Not wings 28:48 L.A. 30:47 Saturn. Dog days 32:19 Pirckheimer. Library 35:45 Angel 41:50 Measures 42:53 Invisible 44:38 Wreath 45:37 Square 46:50 Bell 47:40 Dürer's Solid 49:50 One

  • @Livingtango
    @Livingtango5 жыл бұрын

    What a wonderful presentation! Zhenya rocked it!

  • @Figueiredoartconservation
    @Figueiredoartconservation2 жыл бұрын

    Wonderful information, THANK YOU SO MUCH, for this beautiful explanation.🙂

  • @schoolofalchemy
    @schoolofalchemy5 жыл бұрын

    Wow! Thanks you UPR for posting this. I'll try to make it on Tuesdays. Ms. Zhenya Gershman, thank you for sharing Durer's work. Hat's off to you.

  • @missymoonwillow6545
    @missymoonwillow65452 жыл бұрын

    Glad I watched this. Incredibly educational, and a wonderful perspective of Durer's work. I really love this piece.

  • @gabriellachiappelli
    @gabriellachiappelli3 жыл бұрын

    Great lecture! I enjoyed every minute!

  • @sergeiloiko6905
    @sergeiloiko69055 жыл бұрын

    Work of Genius! One genius presents another.

  • @DarkMoonDroid
    @DarkMoonDroid5 жыл бұрын

    48:38 By fiddling with SketchUp, I can see that, unlike the Star Tetrahedron, his shape eliminates the lines crossing in the center of the projected Star. There are lines extending out from the points and there is a border, but no lines inside the Star of David. Neat trick.

  • @DarkMoonDroid

    @DarkMoonDroid

    5 жыл бұрын

    I can't figure out the proportions of the cut lines, but I have the general shape and I know how it was constructed. XLNT

  • @DarkMoonDroid

    @DarkMoonDroid

    5 жыл бұрын

    I see on Wolfram's Alpha page for this solid, he/they claim that Durer starts with a "distorted cube which is first stretched to give rhombic faces with angles of 72°." LOL No. These people do not "distort" solids. That's unholy. He started with the tetrahedron and cut the long edges by drawing 36° up from each bottom edge to the top and then down each side. Twice 36 gives you 72 - 1/5 of a circle. Doing this also automatically gives you the 108° on each side - 1/3 of a circle. Both sacred. Then those tips are chopped off. The top is chopped off to give the 126°. There is no way to avoid this number if you evenly chop off the top of a tetrahedron. But what prolly isn't commonly known is that this angle gives you a cyclic number. 360 / 126 = 2.85714.... "A cyclic number is an integer in which cyclic permutations of the digits are successive multiples of the number. The most widely known is the six-digit number 142857, whose first six integer multiples are 142857 × 1 = 142857 142857 × 2 = 285714 142857 × 3 = 428571 142857 × 4 = 571428 142857 × 5 = 714285 142857 × 6 = 857142" ~Wikipedia Then you make another one of these chopped tetras and flip it upside down and match the points and you're done. Pretty sweet... ☕🥐

  • @DarkMoonDroid

    @DarkMoonDroid

    5 жыл бұрын

    LOLOLOL Wolfram's right. I know why it worked with my first attempt. Because I didn't know the angles, I just divided the side in half to get the long side and that can always be inverted. But the 72° doesn't give a half of the side. It gives more. So they don't match. Durer cheated! LOLOL

  • @DarkMoonDroid

    @DarkMoonDroid

    5 жыл бұрын

    And now his genius is truly exposed. He would have to "distort" the cube just perfectly in order to get all 3 sacred angles. So, how did he do that? I 💗 geometry.

  • @DarkMoonDroid

    @DarkMoonDroid

    5 жыл бұрын

    Truly, this is a fun puzzle. I am also interested in thots on the rest of the items in the picture: The chipped millstone covered with a cloth and a putto sitting on it, writing something. The 7-runged ladder. The little thingy next to the dog. The 4 nails. The bag hanging on the Angel's belt. The directions.... Sirius has a low arc - South of the Ecliptic, the shadows seem to be showing the sun to be in the North-West, the vertical sundial seems to be on a North Wall... etc. The face on the face of the solid. So many things. Thank you for your presentation.

  • @peggyharris3815
    @peggyharris38155 жыл бұрын

    Fascinating presentation!

  • @abrahamchavez1301
    @abrahamchavez13012 жыл бұрын

    Awsome

  • @SenorPescadorJohnson
    @SenorPescadorJohnson4 жыл бұрын

    gracias, muy interesante

  • @KuassiHounza
    @KuassiHounza5 жыл бұрын

    Super Zhenya. Thanks for your work. Thanks. In a short time, I will be involved in the Project AWE (continuing the work of my godfather John Slifko). And I will...