Patrons, funding and sponsors
Related: art - commercial art - economy - advertising - audience - art - business - NEA (government funding) - product - producer - public
In Western art, artists' patrons have been the church in the Middle Ages, the courts in the Renaissance and the bourgeoisie (the new middle class) in the Enlightenment era. In addition to private patrons, in the 20th century governments and museums rose as new patrons. [May 2006]
Definition
Generally, patronage is the act of supporting or favoring some person, group, or institution. A patronage system has different characteristics depending on the area in which it is practiced. Generally it can be described as a system where someone in a powerful position (the Patron) offers handouts in return for support.
Classical musicians worked primarily under the patronage system: royalty or the church provided resources for composers. That is, patrons operated as sponsors. This kind of system continues across many fields of the arts. Though the nature of the sponsors has changed, the term patronage has a more neutral connotation than in politics. It may simply refer to direct support (often financial) of an artist, for example by grants. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patron#The_Arts [Jun 2005]
Sponsor
To sponsor something is to support an event, activity, person or organization by providing money or other resources in exchange for something, usually advertising or publicity, and always access to an audience. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsor [Jun 2005]
Art patrons
Parents and elderly relations have financed many an anti- establishment cultural revolution. Most of the leading French artists of the nineteenth century lived off family funds - usually generated by mercantile activity - for at least part of their careers. The list includes Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Seurat, Degas, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Moreau. French writers Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Gustave Flaubert went even further in their anti-establishment attitudes, again at their parents' expense. Even the most seclusive artists sometimes rely furtively on capitalist wealth. Marcel Proust sequestered himself in a cork-lined room to write, covering himself in blankets and venturing outside no more than fifteen minutes a day. Yet he relied on his family's wealth, obtained through the Parisian stock exchange. Paul Gauguin, who left the French art world for the tropical island of Tahiti, did so knowing that his pictures would appreciate in value in his absence, allowing for a triumphal return. Gauguin never ceased his tireless self-promotion, and during his Pacific stays he constantly monitored the value of his pictures in France. -- Tyler Cowen
Government funding of film
In search of the effects of state funding on film production.
For much of its history and in contrast to American cinema, European cinema has been funded by their national governments. How has this influenced European cinema?
But cinema production in Italy, Germany, France, Denmark, and Norway, all of which already had their own prosperous national cinema industries, was almost fatally interrupted by World War I (1914-1918), which brought European film production to a virtual halt. Unable to see the value of film production, either for propagandistic indoctrination or escapist entertainment, European governments ceased to support the production of indigenous films, and the American studios swept in to fill the gap. Indeed, the European cinema has never really recovered from this hiatus, which allowed the Hollywood studios to flood international markets with commercial genre films that soon became audience favorites, a pattern that persists to this day. --http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=23:61 [Jun 2006]
In Sweden, Ingmar Bergman began to direct a series of deeply personal films for Svensk Filmindustri, the state-owned film studio, which quickly became international art-house hits. Such classic Bergman films as Sommaren med Monika (1953; Summer with Monika), Sommarnattens leende (1955; Smiles of a Summer Night), and especially Det Sjunde inseglet (1957; The Seventh Seal) gained Bergman as the distinction of being a deeply individualistic director, who probed the depths of the human psyche. In addition, Bergman's works demonstrated that with state funded production, directors could make more personal and daring films that still appealed to audiences, unlike the Hollywood model, which was dominated from its inception by commercial considerations --http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=23:61 [Jun 2006]
See also: European cinema - arts funding
Marie-Laure de Noailles (1902 - 1970)
Unidentified photograph of Marie-Laure de Noailles
Marie-Laure, Vicomtesse de Noailles (31 October 1902 - 29 January 1970), was one of the 20th century's most daring and influential patrons of the arts, noted for her associations with Salvador Dalí, Balthus, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Jean-Michel Frank and others as well as her tempestuous life and eccentric personality.
She was born Marie-Laure Henriette Anne Bischoffsheim, the only child of Marie-Thérèse de Chevigné, a French aristocrat, and Maurice Bischoffsheim, a Paris banker of German Jewish and American Quaker descent. One of her great-great-great-grandfathers was the infamous Marquis de Sade, and her maternal grandmother, Laure de Sade, Countess de Chevigné, inspired at least one character in In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Her nephew, Count Philippe Lannes de Montebello, is presently (2004) the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. And her stepfather was the French playwright Francis de Croisset.
After a brief romance with the artist Jean Cocteau, Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim married, in 1923, Arthur Anne Marie Charles, Vicomte de Noailles (1891-1981), a younger son of the Antonin-Just-Léon-Marie de Noailles, 5th duc de Mouchy. They had two daughters, Laure Madeleine Thérèse Marie (Mme Bertrand de La Haye Josselin) and Nathalie Valentine Marie (Mme Alessandro Perrone). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Laure_de_Noailles [Dec 2004]
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