On May 31

1594, a great Italian Renaissance painter Tintoretto died. As an apprentice to Titian (see on this blog), Tintoretto had a similar style of portraying women as robust, with 'meat' and a bit overweight by today's standards... Rubens (1577-1640) also had the same style... It is very interesting how over time the image of women has changed. Now the goal is to be skinny, athletic, muscular, with no excess fat... But do we need to become slaves to such (mis)conceptions?.. Women especially become so insecure and completely enslaved by such misperceptions? Does beauty need to be confined to one singular image? I really hope not...

Above is 'Susanna and Elders' by Tintoretto.
Below is Rubens' 'Three Graces'.

1961, South Africa became an independent republic.

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa in 1923... In 1991 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature... In the Banquet Speech she said (here):

Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations. We writers do not have the encouragement and mateyness I imagine, and even observe, among people whose work is a group activity. We are not orchestrated; poets sing unaccompanied, and prose writers have no cue on which to come in, each with an individual instrument of expression to make the harmony or dissonance complete. We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone. From this paradoxical inner solitude our writing is what Roland Barthes called 'the essential gesture' towards the people among whom we live, and to the world; it is the hand held out with the best we have to give.

When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'. It was the dream of my contemporaries, white and black, to venture there as the only way to enter the world of artists. It took the realization that the colour bar - I use that old, concrete image of racism - was like the gate of the law in Kafka's parable, which was closed to the supplicant throughout his life because he didn't understand that only he could open it. It took this to make us realize that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place.

If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.