Biography of Henri Matisse… Miguel German Valdes… Winston Churchill… Michel Foucault…

Biography of Henri Matisse

(1869/12/31 - 1954/11/03)

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse
Leading French painter of fauvism

He was born on December 31, 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, North of France, in the bosom of a family of middle class.
He was the eldest son of a prosperous grain merchant. He grew up in Bohain-in-Vermandois, Picardie, France.
In 1887 he moved to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after obtaining his degree. He started to paint in 1889, when his mother handed materials for drawing and painting during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He then discovered his vocation and decided to become artist, deeply disappointing his father. Their training is slow and the alternate with trips to London and Italy. In 1892 he abandoned his career as lawyer and entered the School of fine arts of Paris.
His first style consisted of a conventional naturalism. He made many copies of pictures of the classical masters. He studied contemporary art, especially that of the impressionists, starting your own experimentation. He was influenced by Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, whose work he studied carefully since 1899 approximately.
Until 1904, period known as the dark, makes still lifes and landscapes of great structural solidity and planes of color, as you can see in dishes and fruit (1901) and Bois de Boulogne (1902). In 1904 PT luxury, calm and voluptuousness, which follows the neo-Impressionism, but already announced Fauvism, which will explode in the summer of 1905 at COLLIOURE where paints pictures which still closely follow the methods pointillist, as a woman with a parasol, to achieve absolute in other works, such as View of COLLIOUREfreedom and spontaneity. Around 1905 he had produced images whose chromatic daring break with all of the above. These works include green stripe (Madame Matisse, 1905, State Museum of art, Copenhagen), a portrait with expressionist notes of his wife. That same year Matisse exhibited together with painters of the same trend as André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. As a result of this exposure, the group is named as les fauves (literally 'wild beasts') by its strident use of color, distortion of forms and expressionist sense in the catchment of emotions.
Considered as a leader of the artistic radicalism, won the approval of critics and collectors, as the American writer Gertrude Stein and her family. Among the most important orders received is of the Russian collector who asked a few wall panels illustrating topics of dance and music: the music and dance (both finished in 1911; today at the Ermitage, Petersburgo).
From 1920 until his death, spent much time in the South of France, especially in nice, painting. They commissioned him the decoration of the Chapel of Santa Maria of the Rosary in Vence (near Cannes), which ended between 1947 and 1951. During his last years, was devoted todecoupage (technical papers gouacheados and trimmed), creating a bright colorful works.
With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noéllie Parayre, with whom he had two other sons, Jean (born in 1899) and Pierre (born in 1900). Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse.
Henri Matisse died in nice on November 3, 1954, an attack on the heart at the age of 84. He was buried in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near nice.

Biography of Miguel German Valdes

(1900-09-29 - 1983/05/14)

Miguel Alemán Valdés
Mexican politician, President of the Republic (1946-1952)

He was born on September 29, 1900 in Sayula, Veracruz (Mexico).
Son of general Miguel Alemán and Tomasa Valdés.
He began his studies in Orizaba, subsequently secondary education in the national school high school and finally attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1929) to study law.
In 1930 named him Deputy and in 1936 he began to serve as Senator and Governor. Candidato Secretarybetween 1940 and 1945, the year when resigned to stand for the presidential election, as a candidate of the Party of the Mexican Revolution, renamed in January 1946 with the name of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
In 1946 he was elected President of Mexico. During his tenure he initiated a program of industrialization, for which negotiated a major loan from the Bank of exports and imports of United States in 1947. The expansion of the network of roads and railwaysdeveloped, improved the supply of water from the city of Mexico and became a University City unique in the world, the capital by its style and dimensions.
His administration was accused of corruption, and economic problems appeared shortly after the end of its mandate. In his last years of life he returned to active politics and devoted himself to promoting tourism (chaired from 1961 the National Tourism Council) and supported the celebration of the Olympic Games in the city of Mexico (1968). He was a partner of one of the largest dealerships in Mexico: Televisa.
Miguel Alemán died in the City of Mexico on May 14, 1983.

Biography of Winston Churchill

(30/11/1874 - 1965/01/24)

Sir Winston Churchill
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

English politician
He was born on 30 November 1874 at Blenheim Palace of St Andrew's, England.
His mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, slipped and fell while walking during a hunting. A few days later it broke waters aboard a carriage pulled by a pony and over rugged terrain.
According to another version, Lady Randolph, daughter of a New York financier, horse racing enthusiast, gave birth to a bloodied Winston in one of the rooms under the Palace after a gala of dance in his large library.
United by blood ties with the cream of the English nobility.
Through his father, it was directly descended from John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, the hero of the wars against Louis XIV of France. His father,Lord Randolph, was player and drinker, is almost certain that contracted syphilis which led him to a body paralysis that ended his life at the age of 46.
He was sent to the exclusive boarding school of Harrow where he showed a good aptitude for the language, but not it was perceived as a great intellectual. The third attempt to get entering the Royal Sandhurst Military Academy. In 1895, the year of the death of his father, joins the 4th Hussars, a Cavalry Regiment of elite for the children of the nobility.
With the mission to report on the Cuban independence war against Spain for the London newspaper The Daily Graphic, Winston began heading to New York and then to Havana. In 1896 he accompanied his regiment to the India as a journalist during an indigenous uprising in the Northwest border. The book where he recounts his experience, history of the expeditionary force of Malakand became a tremendous hit popular in the metropolis and threw him to a career as an author that would last the rest of his life.
In 1899 he took part in the boer war , becoming a national hero to escape after having been captured. In 1900 he returned to England and embarked on political life. At the age of 25 he was elected, for the first time as a parliamentary Member of the Conservative party. During his life he served under six sovereign and would become one of the all-time greatest politicians.
In 1904, he joined the Liberal Party. In 1908 he was elected you of Herbert Henry Asquithliberal Cabinet Minister of trade . In World War I his role was highly controversial due to problems in the Navy and its support the tragic Gallipoli campaign, so it was forced to present its resignation from the Admiralty. Subsequently, Churchill decided to join the coalition Government of Lloyd George (1917-1922).
In 1922, it is forced to leave Parliament due to the failure of the liberal party, returning in 1924 as Finance Minister in the Conservative Cabinet of Baldwin (1924-1929). Churchill warned of the danger of the German dictator Adolf Hitler and when exploding the World War II was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. After several years without being in Government, on May 10, 1940 offer you happen to Arthur Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister.
In the course of the difficult days of the second world war, Winston Churchill struggled to get military aid and moral support of the United States. When the Soviet Union and the United States entered the war in 1941, he formed the "Grand Alliance". In 1945 was a character admired around the world. His speeches devoted to it as one of the great orators of history: acquaintance as The few (the few), pronounced to breathe spirit pilots from the RAF, which retreated in the air with the Lufwaffe in August 1940 ("never so many had so much to so few"), or that of 1946, in which, at the University of Zurich He advocated European integration.
He rejected the popular demands of social reform during the postwar period, which led him to be defeated by the Labour party in the 1945 election. In 1951 he returned to become Prime Minister. In 1955 he resigned due among other things to their health problems.
His most famous works include The World War II (6 volumes, 1948-1953), history of the English speaking peoples (4 volumes, 1956-1958) and his memories (6 volumes, 1948-1954). In 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and was awarded the title of sir.
Winston Churchill died in London on January 24, 1965, when he was 90 years old.

Biography of Michel Foucault

(1926-10-15 - 1984/06/25)

Michel Foucault
French philosopher

He was born on October 15, 1926 in Poitiers in the bosom of a family of doctors.
He suffered from severe depression because of his homosexuality, trying to commit suicide on several occasions. Member of the French Communist Party from 1950 to 1953.
He studied Western philosophy and psychology at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Graduated by presenting a thesis on history of madness in classical times published in 1962. In the 1960s, he directed the departments of philosophy at the universities of Clermont - Ferrand and Vincennes.
He participated together with the students in protests and demonstrations of may 68 and, subsequently, was part of a Commission for the defense of life and the rights of immigrants. The Centre of their concern was humanistic, in such a way that it is man, in all its dimensions, absolute axis of his philosophy.
In the year 1970 was Professor history of systems ofthought. The main influences on his thought were the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. It became one of the main philosophers of the structuralist current of French thought. Their studies put into question the influence of the German political philosopher Karl Marx and the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
His thinking was developed in three stages, the first in madness and civilization (1960), who wrote while he was a reader at the University of Uppsala, in Sweden, studies, through the modification of the concept of "madness" and the opposition between reason and madness that is set from the 17TH century, the need for all cultures define what limits them i.e., what remains outside of themselves. In its second stage, he wrote the words and things (1966), which bears the subtitle archaeology of the human sciences, which says that all sciences that have as object the human being are the result of historical mutations that rearranged the previous knowledge, recreating an epistemological set which defines the limits and the conditions of its development in all domains. His last period began with the publication of discipline and punish, in 1975, where he wondered if imprisonment is a more humane punishment that torture, but deals more than the way in which society orders and controls individuals trained their bodies.
In his books, history of sexuality, volume I: introduction (1976), the use of pleasure (1984) and concern itself (1984), track the stages by which people have come to understand itself in Western societies as sexual beings, and related sexual concept that everyone has of itself with moral and ethical life of the individual.
Michel Foucault died on June 25, 1984 at 57 years of age, the hospital Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris. He suffered from a serious disease of the nervous system related to AIDS.