Arts and Humanities blog

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world, died on Tuesday in Mexico City. He was 83.

Mr. Fuentes was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s, known as El Boom. He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love.

Mr. Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel “The Old Gringo,” a convoluted tale about the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best seller north of the border, and it was made into a 1989 film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.

In the tradition of Latin American writers, Mr. Fuentes was politically engaged, writing magazine, newspaper and journal articles that criticized the Mexican government during the long period of sometimes repressive single-party rule that ended in 2000 with the election of an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. Mr. Fuentes was more ideological than political. He tended to embrace justice and basic human rights regardless of political labels. He supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, but turned against it as Mr. Castro became increasingly authoritarian. He sympathized with Indian rebels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and skewered the administration of George W. Bush over its antiterrorism tactics and immigration policies, calling them unduly harsh.

He was also critical of Venezuela’s leftist leader, Hugo Chávez, however, calling him a “tropical Mussolini,” and of his own country’s failure to stem its rampant drug violence. On the day he died the newspaper Reforma published a hopeful essay by him on the change of power in France.

Continue reading in The New York Times

This exhibition analyses the important role of landscape in the work of artist David Hockney, currently considered Britain’s greatest living artist.

From May 15, 2012 to Sep 30, 2012

The exhibition features some 190 artworks, most of them from after 2004. They include oil paintings, charcoal drawings, digital videos, sketchbooks and pictures made with iPad, of landscapes inspired by his native county, Yorkshire. The exhibition presents Hockney’s creative universe, and highlights his ability to depict nature using different techniques, as well as his emotional connection with the place where he grew up and his fascination with new technologies.

A selection of works from 1956 to 1998 is also presented, which shows how landscape has been present throughout the artist’s career.

Many years ago, in the magnificent Louisiana Modern Art Museum in Copenhagen,  I happened on a old poster of a 1976 exhibition by David Hockney still on sale in the gift shop. It was a simple charcoal drawing of a white armchair in front of a French window with flowing white curtains. Framed, it’s been hanging in all the various flats I’ve lived in since then (I just checked on eBay: it’s sold as a “rare museum poster” for about 200 euros). It never ceases to fill me with peace.
After that, I looked for Hockney in every museum of modern art I visited. I saw steps and pools, portraits and flowers, and while my first Hockney love was a black and white drawing, later I was mesmerized by his use of colour, like for instance the deep changing blues of his “Mount Fuji with Flowers” (also hanging on my walls). But never had I been so smitten as I was when I visited “A Bigger Picture”, the exhibition on show this spring – until April 9th – at the London Royal Academy. It captures you from the very first room: on the four walls, four gigantic paintings depict the same three trees at Thixandale in Yorkshire, in spring, winter, summer and fall. It serves as an introduction, because the theme of the whole exhibition is nature, and particularly trees, the ever-changing seasons, and the power of renewal. The intensity of these trees and their colours physically hit the viewer and set the mood.

“A Bigger Picture” is a story about the landscapes of Yorkshire, Hockney’s native land. But also about other landscapes the artist has painted in his long career – from the amazing red Grand Canyon views to some hauntingly beautiful roads in California, the place where he settled thirty years ago. In his later years, for a variety of reasons, the artist – born in 1937, you do the math- was drawn back to his roots, under the ever-changing Yorkshire skies. The beauty of nature in this corner of Northern England (much celebrated in literature, from the Bronte sisters to James Herriot’s veterinary stories) clearly captured him with a charm which was multiplied by his memories (as a boy, Hockney used to work as a farm hand during the summer).

Continue reading in The Global Dispaches and Spain info

April 2012- Mr. Hervé Crès, Provisional Administrator of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and Mr. Santiago Iñiguez, President of IE University have recently signed an exchange agreement that will promote academic excellence and foster cross-cultural understanding between the two institutions.

The exchange will take place between students of IE’s Master in International Relations, International MBA and Master of Finance and Sciences Po’s Master Programs.

The Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris is the second academic institution, after St Gallen University, to create formal collaborative ties with IE’s Master in International Relations this Spring.

“Exchange programs build bridges between universities and create opportunities for students to learn from their host institutions peers and professors. This can only be a mutually beneficial experience for all”, said IE School of Arts and Humanities Dean Arantza de Areilza.

TRIBUNA / El sistema universitario español, fundamental para el desarrollo del capital humano, el crecimiento y la innovación en nuestro país, requiere un profundo cambio para mejorar su eficiencia.

Por Rafael Puyol, Vicepresidente de IE Foundation

Si Ud. Tiene una manzana y yo tengo una manzana y las intercambiamos, entonces ambos seguimos teniendo una manzana. En cambio, si usted tiene una idea y yo tengo una idea y las intercambiamos, entonces ambos tendremos dos ideas». Cito esta frase de Bernard Shaw porque ilustra mi pretensión de ofrecer algunas reflexiones sobre la actual situación de la universidad española con el fin de compartirlas con los lectores y recibir de ellos los juicios y la crítica de mis argumentos. Los tiempos que vivimos son de recortes y austeridad, pero son  también un buen momento para la reflexión que debe ser realizada desde la prudencia y el convencimiento de que en éste, como en otros temas, nadie posee la verdad absoluta.

Creo que para enjuiciar el estado de la Universidad española debemos partir de la aceptación de que, a pesar de sus evidentes progresos, es una criatura imperfecta y manifiestamente mejorable. No deberíamos insistir más en que cualquier tiempo pasado fue peor y justificar nuestras insuficiencias con el argumento de que atender al reto de la cantidad, ralentizó nuestro viaje hacia la calidad y la excelencia. Mi intención aquí no es tanto señalar las virtudes sino destacar algunas imperfecciones del sistema definido entre otras cosas por una alta tasa de abandono escolar (30 %), una duración de los estudios superior a la establecida, un notable desequilibrio entre la formación recibida y el empleo realizado por los graduados, unos niveles de movilidad e internacionalización reducidos, unos sistemas imperfectos de selección de los docentes, unas relaciones con el mundo empresarial mejorables, una posición en los ránkings mediocre y una financiación insuficiente. Este censo apresurado de imperfecciones al que sin duda faltan capítulos, marca el camino de las posibles reformas.

Continuar leyendo en El Mundo

Rafael Moneo ha logrado el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes, que se ha fallado esta mañana en Oviedo. Un regalo de cumpleaños para el más respetado de los arquitectos españoles, que nació tal día como hoy hace 75 años en Tudela, Navarra. Suma este galardón a los más prestigiosos de su disciplina, entre otros el Pritzker (que logró en 1996), el Mies van der Rohe (2001) y el Nacional de Arquitectura (1961). Autor del Museo Romano de Mérida, de la ampliación de la estación de Atocha, la del Museo del Prado, de la catedral de Los Ángeles o del Kursaal de San Sebastián, sus líneas depuradas gozan de reconocimiento planetario.

Bajo la obra de Moneo late un sentido profundo del civismo y de la importancia del espacio urbano para la articulación de la ciudadanía. “Un niño en un pueblo como Tudela, en los años cuarenta, entendía perfectamente cuál era el sentido de una plaza o de qué modo las calles tenían su jerarquía en función del uso que les daba la gente”, dijo con ocasión de una entrevista publicada en El País Semanal en 2010.

Ya contaba con las distinciones más importantes de su disciplina

El jurado reconoce en su fallo que su obra “enriquece los espacios urbanos” y define a Moneo como “arquitecto español de dimensión universal” con una producción “serena y pulcra”. “Maestro reconocido en el ámbito académico y profesional, Moneo deja una huella propia en cada una de sus creaciones, al tiempo que conjuga estética con funcionalidad, especialmente en los interiores diáfanos que sirven de marco impecable a las grandes obras de la cultura y del espíritu”, señala el acta.

Los Premios Príncipe de Asturias están destinados, según los Estatutos de la Fundación, a galardonar “la labor científica, técnica, cultural, social y humana realizada por personas, instituciones, grupo de personas o de instituciones en el ámbito internacional”. Dentro de este espíritu, el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes se concederá a aquellos “cuya labor en la cinematografía, el teatro, la danza, la música, la fotografía, la pintura, la escultura, la arquitectura y otras manifestaciones artísticas constituya una aportación relevante al patrimonio cultural de la humanidad”.

Continuar leyendo en El País