As a result of his experience of being persecuted by the Nazi regime, Hundertwasser developed an anti-totalitarian position early on. His early fears of the square marching battalions associated with dictatorships may have led him to oppose any "geometrization" of people and their architecture. In a letter in 1954 Hundertwasser described the square as "geometric rectangles compressed columns on the march".
Hundertwasser had a lively imagination; his art was unruly and chaotic. In his work, he used spirals, organic forms, wavy lines, bright colours, and a strong individualism. He wanted humans to live in harmony with nature, where there are no straight lines. Once, he called straight lines ""something cowardly drawn with a ruler, without thought or feeling.""
Hundertwasser believe that a person has three 'skins. First, her 'epidermis', her skin. Second, her clothes. And finally, her house or home. Later on in the 1970s, he added two more skins: social environment (family, friendships, nation) and the planet (environment, the ecology, nature).
You can see examples of Hundertwasser's paintings here. Colour is a large part of Hundertwasser's art. He didn't select colours for any special significance; instead he used bright, fierce, burning colours, and combined colours to form competing patterns.
While he began as a painter, later in life the third skin - the home, or architecture - greatly interested Hundertwasser. He hated the way most buildings had straight lines and angles. He felt that buildings should fit and represent those who lived inside them. His building designs use natural forms, and often fit around nature rather than trying to bend nature to fit them. In the Hundertwasserhaus, an apartment building in Vienna, Austria, the floors aren't flat and even: they undulate.
Hundertwasser used nature in his buildings, which often have roof gardens. Grass roofs also have ecological, health and insusaltion advantages. A grass roof produces oxygen and makes life possible. It absorbs dust and dirt and converts the earth. Body and soul of man is at ease, both, who looks at it as well as who lives beneath it. (Hundertwasser 1991)
The artist also believed in a human's right to a window. He thought that "Some people say houses consist of walls. I say houses consist of windows."The repetition of identical windows next to each other and above each other as in a grid system is a characteristic of concentration camps.Windows in rank and file are sad, windows should be able to dance.A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach, so that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door. (Hundertwasser 1990)Hundertwasser wanted to allow the residents of his building to personalise their windows.
In the late 1970s, Hundertwasser was asked by City of Vienna to build a housing project - housing for poorer citizens who could not afford it otherwise. Inside, there were wavy, undulating floors (""an uneven floor is a divine melody to the feet""), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows. Hundertwasser took no payment for the design of the house, declaring that it was worth it, to prevent something ugly from going up in its place. Within the house there are 52 apartments, four offices, 16 private terraces and three communal terraces, and a total of 250 trees and bushes. The Hundertwasser House is one of Vienna's most visited buildings and has become part of Austria's cultural heritage.
In Kawakawa, New Zealand, where Hundertwasser lived between 1975 and 2000, he designed the public toilets. Coach-loads of tourists visit every day to see these toilets, which are designed according to the artist's strict beliefs. All of the plants and vegetation which were displaced by the toilet were replanted on the roof, and it was built from recycled bricks from an old bank, and the residents' used glass bottles.
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917) was a French artist. He is famous for his paintings and sculptures: he was one of those who started Impressionism, although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist.
A superb draughtsman, he is identified with the subject of the dance, and over half of his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and the way they show human isolation.
He was born in Paris, France. He began to paint early in his life. Because his father wanted it, he went to university to become a lawyer in 1853. Edgar did not like this, and he went to study at the "École des Beaux-Arts", an important art-school in Paris in 1855. In 1856 he traveled to Naples in Italy, he stayed there for 3 years. He studied famous painters like Michelangelo and Raphael and learnt by copying their work.
In 1859 he came back to Paris. He started his first important painting "The Bellelli Family", and also started on a few paintings on historical myths, like "Alexander and Bucephalus" and "The Daughter of Jephthah". In 1861 he visited Normandy and made his first drawings of horses which were an important subject for his paintings.
After the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas worked for the National Guard. He did not have time to paint. After the war he went to stay with his brother Rene in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1873 he went back to Paris and in 1874 his father died. He then found out his brother had large business debts. Edgar had to sell the house and a collection of art he had inherited. He now had to depend on his paintings for his income. He created a lot of great paintings in next 10 years. With the money he earned, he bought paintings by painters he liked a lot. Examples are Manet, Paul Cézanne, Pissarro, Gauguin, Van Gogh and others.
In 1874 Edgar Degas and a group of other painters started to organise their own art exhibition. Their exhibitions were called "Impressionist Exhibitions". At the end of the 1880s, he started to take photographs of his friends. Other photographs, of dancers and nudes, were used as an example for some of his later paintings.
As the years passed, he became isolated. They think that he made sculptures up until 1910. He probably stopped working in 1912. He never married, and he was nearly blind at the end of his life. He died in Paris in 1917.
Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo (30 April 1883 – 4 February 1947) was a painter and musician from Italy. He was part of the Futurism movement and built his own musical instruments. His instruments were destroyed in World War II in Paris, because the Germans bombed the city, others have simply disappeared.
Bacterial conjugation
Bacterial conjugation is the transfer of genetic material between bacterial cells by direct cell-to-cell contact or by a bridge-like connection between two cells.
Conjugation is a mechanism of horizontal gene transfer, as are transformation and transduction, though these two other mechanisms do not involve cell-to-cell contact.
Bacterial conjugation was discovered by Nobel Prize winners Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum. They showed that the bacterium "Escherichia coli" entered a sexual phase during which it could share genetic information.
Bacterial conjugation is often incorrectly regarded as the equivalent of sexual reproduction, since it involves the exchange of genetic material. During conjugation the "donor" cell provides a conjugative or mobilizable genetic element that is most often a plasmid or transposon. Most conjugative plasmids have systems ensuring that the "recipient" cell does not already contain a similar element.