The Fable in The Arts
Jean Restout made a painting of La Fontaine's fable for the Hôtel de Soubise in 1738. This shows a traveller on horseback among mountains under a stormy sky. In his print of the same subject, Jean-Baptiste Oudry reverses the perspective to show the gods riding a cloud chariot with the horseback traveller merely a small figure below. This is also the perspective of Gustave Moreau's watercolour in the series he began painting about 1880. In modern times the fable has been made into a 3-minute animated film for children by the National Film Board of Canada (1972). It also figured as part of a 1987 set of Greek stamps.
In 2008 the English composer Bob Chilcott set the fable as one of the five pieces in his "Aesop's Fables" for piano and choir. The English composer Philip Godfrey has also composed a setting for children's choir and piano. La Fontaine's Phébus et Borée was choreographed in 2006 by Karine Ponties as part of Annie Sellem's composite ballet production of La Fontaine's fables as a 25-minute performance for a male and female dancer. Its creator has commented on the fable's theme that 'it demonstrates people's vulnerability to cosmic forces and the inner links there are between natural events and our life as humans.' But for the Scottish artist Jane Topping (b. 1972), who referenced "The North Wind and the Sun" in her 2009 installation, the fable is to be interpreted in the context of subliminal persuasion via images.
In 2011 Anat Pollack used solo ballet as part of her video installation "The North Wind and the Sun", addressing much the same themes as Karine Ponties and Jane Topping. Her artistic statement points out that 'Advanced communication and information systems are altering how information is interpreted and perceived. Interactions within our environments are increasingly information based, ephemeral, and less concrete. To understand how these changes are impacting our personal and social spaces, I have focused on a study of information processing, and the way that memory functions to locate the individual within their world.' All are concerned with the subtle means by which individuals can be manipulated. From this wary point of view, the sun's way of communication may differ in kind but has the same end in view.
Read more about this topic: The North Wind And The Sun
Famous quotes containing the words fable and/or arts:
“But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company;
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.”
—Unknown. Pangur Ban (l. 25–28)