The stairs in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art are very famous as the training ground of Rocky Balboa, in the 1976 movie Rocky, directed by John G. Avildsen. The stairs appear successively in Rocky II (directed by Sylverster Stallone in 1979), Rocky III (Sylverster Stallone, 1985), Rocky V (John G. Avildsen, 1990) and…
Shannon Rankin is an American artist born 1971 in California who lives and works presently in Rangeley, Maine, USA. She created several series of artworks with maps as raw material, maps she cuts, disintegrates, sticks, connects with threads, pins… As she writes on her homepage: « I deconstruct maps to create new geographies, suggesting the potential…
Everybody knows or thinks he knows Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world. But it is also a mysterious work that has given rise to many rumors and speculations. We propose here an original interpretation that considers the painting as a sophisticated spatial and cartographic arrangement. We first build our reasoning upon an…
Fantastic Mr Fox is a great animated film by Wes Anderson. It incorporates several space machineries, mostly master plans and battle plans. One of them takes the form of an animated map. The most original is certainly the picture painted by Felicity Fox to support the fight of « wild animals » against evil farmers. She uses…
In his geocriticism (‘géocritique’) approach, Bertrand Westphal (2007) attempts to reconnect the mimetic arts such as literature, cinema and painting to the real world through the spaces they represent. To do so, Westphal proposes a set of conceptual tools relevant to understanding how human spaces structure themselves ‘by and in the text, by and in…
« Le Jardin de la France » (The Garden of France) is one of the most famous Max Ernst’s paintings. It depicts a woman’s body lying between sandbanks and islands near the confluence of Indre and Loire rivers. The work is fully representative of surrealism by the collage of different elements of reality that creates this feeling…
