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Frans Hals

Frans Hals the Elder (,,  ; c. 1582 – 26 August 1666) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He lived and worked in Haarlem, a city in which the local authority of the day frowned on religious painting in places of worship but citizens liked to decorate their homes with works of art. Hals was highly sought after by wealthy burgher commissioners of individual, married-couple, family, and institutional-group portraits. He also painted tronies for the general market.

There were two quite distinct schools of portraiture in 17th-century Haarlem: the neat (represented, for example, by Verspronck); and a looser, more painterly style at which Frans Hals excelled. Some of Hals's portrait work is characterised by a subdued palette, reflecting the politely serious tones of his fashionable clients' wardrobe. In contrast, the personalities he paints are full of life, typically with a friendly glint in the eye or the glimmer of a smile on the lips.

Hals was born in the Spanish-occupied southern Netherlands (probably at Antwerp) but, because of the chaos wrought there by the Spanish at that time, his family moved to Haarlem when he was little. Many of his Haarlem clients were also émigrés from the South.

Biography
Hals was born in 1582 or 1583 in Antwerp, then in the Spanish Netherlands, as the son of cloth merchant Franchois Fransz Hals van Mechelen (c. 1542–1610) and his second wife Adriaentje van Geertenryck. Like many, Hals's parents fled during the Fall of Antwerp (1584–1585) from the south to Haarlem in the new Dutch Republic in the north, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Hals studied under Flemish émigré Karel van Mander, whose Mannerist influence, however, is barely noticeable in Hals's work.

In 1610, Hals became a member of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and he started to earn money as an art restorer for the town council. He worked on their large art collection, which Karel van Mander had described in his Schilderboeck ("Painter's Book") published in Haarlem in 1604. The most notable works were those of Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Jan van Scorel, and Jan Mostaert that hung in the St John's Church in Haarlem. The restoration work was paid for by the council. The council had confiscated all Catholic religious art in the Haarlemse Noon, although it did not formally possess the entire collection until 1625, when the city fathers had decided which were suitable for the town hall. The remaining art, which was considered too Roman Catholic, was sold to Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, a fellow guild member, on condition that he remove it from Haarlem. It was in this cultural context that Hals began his career in portraiture, since the market had disappeared for religious themes.

The earliest known example of Hals's art is the portrait of Jacobus Zaffius (1611). His 'breakthrough' came with the life-sized group portrait The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616. His most famous sitter was René Descartes, whom he painted in 1649.

Frans Hals married his first wife Anneke Harmensdochter around 1610. Frans was of Catholic birth, however, so their marriage was recorded in the city hall and not in church. Unfortunately, the exact date is unknown because the older marriage records of the Haarlem city hall before 1688 have not been preserved. Anneke was born 2 January 1590 as the daughter of bleacher Harmen Dircksz and Pietertje Claesdr Ghijblant, and her maternal grandfather, linen producer Claes Ghijblant of Spaarne 42, bequeathed the couple the grave in the Grote Kerk church where both are buried, though Frans took over 40 years to join his first wife there. Anneke died in 1615, shortly after the birth of their third child and, of the three, Harmen survived infancy and one had died before Hals's second marriage. As biographer Seymour Slive has pointed out, older stories of Hals abusing his first wife were confused with another Haarlem resident of the same name. Indeed, at the time of these charges, the artist had no wife to mistreat, as Anneke had died in May 1615. Similarly, historical accounts of Hals's propensity for drink were largely based on embellished anecdotes of his early biographers like Arnold Houbraken; there is no direct evidence that Hals did drink heavily. After his first wife died, Hals took on the young daughter of a fishmonger to look after his children and, in 1617, he married Lysbeth Reyniers. They married in Spaarndam, a small village outside the banns of Haarlem, because she was already eight months pregnant. Hals was a devoted father, and they went on to have eight children.

Contemporaries such as Rembrandt moved their households according to the caprices of their patrons, but Hals remained in Haarlem and insisted that his customers come to him. According to the Haarlem archives, a schutterstuk that Hals started in Amsterdam was finished by Pieter Codde because Hals refused to paint in Amsterdam, insisting that the militiamen come to Haarlem to sit for their portraits. For this reason, we can be sure that all sitters were either from Haarlem or were visiting Haarlem when they had their portraits made.

Hals's work was in demand through much of his life, but he lived so long that he eventually went out of style as a painter and experienced financial difficulties. In addition to his painting, he worked as a restorer, art dealer, and art tax expert for the city councilors. His creditors took him to court several times, and he sold his belongings to settle his debt with a baker in 1652. The inventory of the property seized mentions only three mattresses and bolsters, an armoire, a table, and five pictures (these were by himself, his sons, van Mander, and Maarten van Heemskerck). Left destitute, he was given an annuity of 200 florins in 1664 by the municipality.

The Dutch nation fought for independence during the Eighty Years' War, and Hals was a member of the local schutterij, a military guild. He included a self-portrait in his 1639 painting of the St Joris company, according to its 19th-century painting frame. (It has not been possible to confirm this.) It was not common for ordinary members to be painted, as that privilege was reserved for the officers. Hals painted the company three times. He was also a member of a local chamber of rhetoric, and in 1644 he became chairman of the Guild of St Luke.

Frans Hals died in Haarlem in 1666 and was buried in the Grote Kerk church. He had been receiving a city pension, which was highly unusual and a sign of the esteem with which he was regarded. After his death, his widow applied for aid and was admitted to the local almshouse, where she later died.

Artistic career
Hals is best known for his portraits, mainly of wealthy citizens such as Pieter van den Broecke and Isaac Massa, whom he painted three times. He also painted large group portraits for local civic guards and for the regents of local hospitals. He was a Dutch Golden Age painter who practiced an intimate realism with a radically free approach. His pictures illustrate the various strata of society: banquets or meetings of officers, guildsmen, local councilmen from mayors to clerks, itinerant players and singers, gentlemen, fishwives, and tavern heroes. In his group portraits, such as The Banquet of the Officers of the St Adrian Militia Company in 1627, Hals captures each character in a different manner. The faces are not idealized and are clearly distinguishable, with their personalities revealed in a variety of poses and facial expressions.

Hals was fond of daylight and silvery sheen, while Rembrandt used golden glow effects based upon artificial contrasts of low light in immeasurable gloom. Hals seized a moment in the life of his subjects with rare intuition. What nature displayed in that moment he reproduced thoroughly in a delicate scale of color and with mastery over every form of expression. He became so clever that exact tone, light and shade, and modeling were obtained with a few marked and fluid strokes of the brush. He became a popular portrait painter and painted the wealthy of Haarlem on special occasions. He won many commissions for wedding portraits (the husband is traditionally situated on the left, and the wife situated on the right). His double portrait of the newly married Olycans hang side by side in the Mauritshuis, but many of his wedding portrait pairs have since been split up and are rarely seen together.

Portrait painter
Later in his life, his brush strokes became looser, fine detail becoming less important than the overall impression. His earlier pieces radiated gaiety and liveliness, while his later portraits emphasized the stature and dignity of the people portrayed. This austerity is displayed in Regents of the St Elizabeth Hospital in 1641 and, two decades later, The Regents and Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse (c. 1664), which are masterpieces of color, though in substance all but monochromes. His restricted palette is particularly noticeable in his flesh tints, which became greyer from year to year, until finally the shadows were painted in almost absolute black, as in the Tymane Oosdorp.

This tendency coincides with the period when Hals gained fewer commissions from the wealthy, and some historians have suggested that a reason for his predilection for black and white pigment was the low price of these colors as compared with the costly lakes and carmines. Both conclusions are probably correct, however, because Hals did not travel to his sitters, unlike his contemporaries, but let them come to him. This was good for business because he was exceptionally quick and efficient in his own well-fitted studio, but it was bad for business when Haarlem fell on hard times. As a portrait painter, Hals had scarcely the psychological insight of a Rembrandt or Velázquez, though in a few works, like the Admiral de Ruyter, the Jacob Olycan, and the Albert van der Meer paintings, he reveals a searching analysis of character which has little in common with the instantaneous expression of his character portraits. In these, he generally sets upon the canvas the fleeting aspect of the various stages of merriment, from the subtle, half ironic smile that quivers round the lips of the curiously misnamed Laughing Cavalier to the grin of the Malle Babbe. To this group of pictures belong the Lute Player, the Gypsy Girl and the Laughing Fisherboy, whilst the Marriage Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen and the somewhat confused group of the Beresteyn Family at the Louvre show a similar tendency. Far less scattered in arrangement than this Beresteyn group, and in every respect one of the most masterly of Hals's achievements is the group called The Painter and his Family, which was almost unknown until it appeared at the winter exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1906.

According to the Frans Hals catalogue raisonné, 1974, 222 known paintings can be ascribed to Hals. This list was compiled by Seymour Slive in 1970−1974 who also wrote an exhibition catalogue in 1989 and produced an update to his catalogue raisonné work in 2014. In 1989, another authority on Hals, Claus Grimm, disagreed with Slive and published a shorter œuvre of 145 paintings in his Frans Hals. Das Gesamtwerk.

It is not known whether Hals ever painted landscapes, still lifes or narrative pieces, but it is unlikely. His debut for Haarlem society in 1616 with his large group portrait for the St George militia shows all three disciplines, but if that painting was his signboard for future commissions, it seems he was subsequently only hired for portraits. Many artists in the 17th century in Holland opted to specialise, and Hals also appears to have been a pure portrait specialist.

Painting technique
Hals was a master of a technique that utilized something previously seen as a flaw in painting, the visible brushstroke. The soft curling lines of Hals's brush are always clear upon the surface: "materially just lying there, flat, while conjuring substance and space in the eye." In this way his style was similar to Édouard Manet; in fact, Hals was described by author Raymond Cogniat as "the Manet of his day." Lively and exciting, the technique can appear "ostensibly slapdash" – people often think that Hals 'threw' his works 'in one toss' (aus einem Guss) onto the canvas. This impression is not correct. Hals did occasionally paint without underdrawings or underpainting (alla prima), but most of the works were created in successive layers, as was customary at that time. Sometimes a drawing was made with chalk or paint on top of a grey or pink undercoat, and was then more or less filled in, in stages. It does seem that Hals usually applied his underpainting very loosely: he was a virtuoso from the beginning. This applies, of course, particularly to his genre works and his somewhat later, mature works. Hals displayed tremendous daring, great courage and virtuosity, and had a great capacity to pull back his hands from the canvas, or panel, at the moment of the most telling statement. He didn't 'paint them to death', as many of his contemporaries did, in their great accuracy and diligence whether requested by their clients or not.

In the 17th century his first biographer, Schrevelius wrote: "An unusual manner of painting, all his own, surpassing almost everyone," on Hals's painting methods. For that matter, schematic painting was not Hals's own idea (the approach already existed in 16th century Italy), and Hals was probably inspired by Flemish contemporaries, Rubens and Van Dyck, in his painting method. Haarlem resident Theodorus Schrevelius was struck by the vitality of Hals's portraits which reflected 'such power and life' that the painter 'seems to challenge nature with his brush'.

Influence
Frans influenced his brother Dirck Hals (born at Haarlem, 1591–1656), who was also a painter. Additionally, five of his sons became painters:
 * Harmen Hals (1611–1669)
 * Frans Hals the Younger (1618–1669)
 * Jan Hals (1620–1654)
 * Reynier Hals (1627–1672)
 * Nicolaes Hals (1628–1686)

Though most of his sons became portrait painters, some of them took up still-life painting or architectural studies and landscapes. Still-lifes formerly attributed to his son Frans II have since been re-attributed to other painters, however. Hals painted a young woman reaching into a basket in a still life market scene by Claes van Heussen.

Other contemporary painters who took inspiration from Hals were, with the main cities they were based in:
 * Jan Miense Molenaer (1609–1668), Haarlem and Amsterdam
 * Judith Leyster (wife of Molenaer, 1609–1660), Haarlem and Amsterdam
 * Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), Haarlem
 * Adriaen Brouwer (1605–1638), mostly Antwerp
 * Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck (1597–1662), Haarlem
 * Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613–1670), Amsterdam
 * Cornelis de Bie (1621–1664), Amsterdam

Hals had a large workshop in Haarlem and many students, though 19th century biographers questioned some of his pupils, since their painting styles were so dissimilar to Hals. In his De Groote Schouburgh (1718–21), Arnold Houbraken mentions Philips Wouwerman, Adriaen Brouwer, Pieter Gerritsz van Roestraten, Adriaen van Ostade and Dirck van Delen as students. Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne was also a student, according to his diary with notes left by his son Laurens Vincentsz van der Vinne. Roestraten was not only a student (the Haarlem archives contain a notarised document, which supports this fact), but he also became a son-in-law of Hals when he married his daughter Adriaentje. The Haarlem portrait painter, Johannes Verspronck, one of about 10 competing portraitists in Haarlem at the time, possibly studied for some time with Hals.

In terms of style, the closest to Hals's work is the handful of paintings that are ascribed to Judith Leyster, which she often signed. She also 'qualifies' as a possible student, as does her husband, the painter Jan Miense Molenaer.

In the 19th century, his technique influenced the work of impressionists and realists including Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Charles-François Daubigny, Max Liebermann, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Gustave Courbet, and in the Netherlands, Jacobus van Looy and Isaac Israëls. Lovis Corinth named Hals as his biggest influence.

The post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: 'What a joy it is to see a Frans Hals, how different it is from the paintings – so many of them – where everything is carefully smoothed out in the same manner.' Hals chose not to give a smooth finish to his painting, as most of his contemporaries did, but mimicked the vitality of his subject by using smears, lines, spots, large patches of color and hardly any details.

Legacy
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica has an article on Frans Hals by "P.G.K.", who observes: Hals's reputation waned after his death and for two centuries he was held in such poor esteem that some of his paintings, which are now among the proudest possessions of public galleries, were sold at auction for a few pounds or even shillings. The portrait of Johannes Acronius realized five shillings at the Enschede sale in 1786. The Portrait of Willem van Heythuysen at the Alte Pinakothek sold in 1800 for £4: 5s (£4.25 in decimal notation).

Nevertheless, Hals's art did not go altogether unappreciated in the time between his death in 1666 and the 1860s. In his Groote Schouburgh (1718–1721), Arnold Houbraken recorded Hals's life and praised his style, adding that the figures in one of the large group portraits: ... zoo kragtig en natuurlyk geschildert zyn, dat zy de aanschouwers schynen te willen aanspreken ("... are painted so powerfully and naturally, they seem to want to talk to us"). Dutch artists known to have admired Hals enough to make copies of his paintings include Cornelis van Noorde (1731–1795) and Wybrand Hendricks (1744–1831). Empress Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–1796) acquired ten Hals works for her collection. Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) visited the Alte Pinakothek to copy Hals's work, and Hals's influence is apparent in Fragonard's portraits de fantaisie. Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) made study sketches after Hals. At the Royal Academy in London, Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) lectured on Hals in 1774, praising his handling of faces and the consequent remarkable individuality of his portraits. Reynolds was less enthusiastic about Hals's characteristic loose finish, which he thought betrayed impatience. Subsequently, in 1781 Reynolds visited the Hals collection then at Haarlem Town Hall (now at the Frans Hals Museum) and soon after bought two Hals works. Reynolds's biographer James Northcote (1736–1831), who was a fellow portraitist, remarked that Hals could have caught a bird in flight, grasping it, as it were, from life – something he said Titian would not have been capable of.

Starting at the middle of the 1860s his prestige rose again thanks to the efforts of critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger. With his rehabilitation in public esteem came the enormous rise in value, and, at the Secretan sale in 1889, the portrait of Pieter van den Broecke was bid up to 4,420 francs, while in 1908 the National Gallery paid £25,000 for the large family group from the collection of Lord Talbot de Malahide.

Hals's work remains admired, particularly with young painters who can find many lessons about practical technique from his unconcealed brushstrokes. Hals's works have found their way to countless cities all over the world and into museum collections. From the late 19th century, they were collected everywhere—from Antwerp to Toronto, and from London to New York. Many of his paintings were then sold to American collectors.

Several of his most important works are owned by the town council of Haarlem. They are now at the Frans Hals Museum in the Groot Heiligland, Haarlem. Before 1913 they hung in the Town Hall, where impressionists went to see them.

The Hals crater on Mercury is named in his honour.

Hals was pictured on the Netherlands' 10-guilder banknote of 1968.

The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616 appears on the restaurant wall in the 1989 Peter Greenaway film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

Public collections (selection)

 * Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem
 * Frick Collection, New York City
 * Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen
 * Louvre, Paris
 * Mauritshuis, The Hague
 * Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
 * Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam;
 * Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
 * Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
 * Kenwood House
 * Wallace Collection, London

title: Frans Hals


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Grasse

Grasse (Provençal Grassa in classical norm or Grasso in Mistralian norm ; traditional Grassa) is the only subprefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur region on the French Riviera. In 2017, the commune had a population of 50,396.

Considered the world's capital of perfume, Grasse obtained two flowers in the Concours des villes et villages fleuris and was made Ville d'Art et d'Histoire (City of Art and History).

Festivals
There is an annual Fête du Jasmin or La Jasminade, at the beginning of August. The first festival was on August 3–4, 1946. Decorated floats drive through the town, with young women in skimpy costumes on board, throwing flowers into the crowd. Garlands of jasmine decorate the town centre, and the fire department fills a fire truck with jasmine-infused water to spray on the crowds. There are fireworks, free parties, folk music groups and street performers. There is also an annual international exhibition of roses ("Expo Rose") held in May each year.

Transport
Grasse station offers railway connections with Cannes, Nice and Ventimiglia. From 1909 to 1938, the town centre was connected to the railway station by the Grasse Funicular.

Perfume

Grasse has had a prospering perfume industry since the end of the 18th century. Grasse is the centre of the French perfume industry and is known as the world's perfume capital (la capitale mondiale des parfums). Many "noses" (or, in French, "les nez" (plural)/"le nez" (singular)) are trained or have spent time in Grasse to distinguish over 2,000 kinds of scents. Grasse produces over two-thirds of France's natural aromas (for perfume and for food flavourings). This industry turns over more than 600 million euros a year. Grasse's particular microclimate encouraged the flower farming industry. It is warm and sufficiently inland to be sheltered from the sea air. There is an abundance of water, thanks to its location in the hills and the 1860 construction of the Siagne canal for irrigation purposes. The town is 350 m above sea level and 20 km from the coast (Côte d'Azur). Jasmine, a key ingredient of many perfumes, was brought to southern France by the Moors in the 16th century. Twenty-seven tonnes of jasmine are now harvested in Grasse annually. There are numerous old 'parfumeries' in Grasse, such as Galimard, Molinard and Fragonard, each with tours and a museum.

The trade in leather and tanning work developed during the twelfth century around the small canal that runs through the city. This activity produced a strong unpleasant odour. At the time of the Renaissance perfume manufacturers began production of gloves, handbags and belt (clothing), to meet the new fashion from Italy with the entourage of Queen Catherine de Medici.

The countryside around the city began to grow fields of flowers, offering new scents from the city. In 1614, the king recognized the new corporation of "glovers perfumers". In the middle of the eighteenth century, the perfumery was experiencing a very important development. Leading companies dating from this period includes the oldest French perfumerie, and third oldest parfumerie in Europe, Galimard established in 1747. Introduction of new production methods turned perfume making into a real industry that could adapt to new market demands.

In the nineteenth century, the raw materials began to be imported from abroad. During the twentieth century the creation of synthetic products brought the democratization & affordability of perfumes and their spin-offs; (shampoos and deodorants, cream (pharmaceutical) and detergents, food flavouring for cookies, ice cream and dairy products, beverages, convenience foods, confectionery, preserves and syrups). In 1905, six hundred tons of flowers were harvested while in the 1940s, five thousand tons were produced annually. However, in early 2000, production was less than 30 tons for all flowers combined.

Historical activity
In the Middle Ages, Grasse specialised in leather tanning. Once tanned, the hides were often exported to Genoa or Pisa, cities that shared a commercial alliance with Grasse. Several centuries of this intense activity witnessed many technological advances within tanning industries. The hides of Grasse acquired a reputation for high quality. But the leather smelled bad, something that did not please the glove wearing nobility. This is when Jean de Galimard, a tanner in Grasse, came up with the idea of scented leather gloves. He offered a pair of scented gloves to Catherine de' Medici, who was seduced by the gift. Thereafter, the product spread through the Royal Court and high society, and this made a worldwide reputation for Grasse. The seventeenth century became the heyday of "Glovers Perfumers"; however, high taxes on leather and competition from Nice brought a decline for the leather industry in Grasse, and production of leather fragrance ceased. The rare scents from the Grasse (lavender, myrtle, jasmine, rose, orange blossom and wild mimosa) did win the title for the Grasse as the perfume capital of the world. Harvesting jasmine was a labour-intensive business only a few decades ago. Flowers had to be hand picked at dawn, when their scent is the most developed and immediately to be treated by cold enfleurage.

Modern industry
A network of sixty companies employs 3,500 people in the city and surrounding area. Additionally about 10,000 residents of Grasse are indirectly employed by the perfume industry. Almost half of the business tax for the city comes from the perfume sector and that is ahead of tourism and services. The main activity of perfumery in Grasse is in the production of natural raw materials (essential oils, concretes, absolutes, resinoids and molecular distillation) and the production of concentrate, also called the juice. A concentrate is the main product that when diluted in at least 80% alcohol provides a perfume. Also food flavourings, which have developed since the 1970s, account for over half of production output today.

This represents almost half of the production of French perfumes and aromas and around 7-8% of total global activity. However, during the 1960s and 1970s large international groups gradually bought up local family factories (Chiris, Givaudan-Roure and Lautier, for example). Soon after their production was often relocated overseas. Just 30 years ago most companies were focused on the production of raw materials. However an overwhelming majority of the modern fragrances contain synthetic chemicals in part or in whole. Grasse perfume companies have therefore adapted by turning to aromatic synthesis and especially to food flavourings and successfully ended a long stagnation. The Grasse perfume industry cannot compete against large chemical multinationals, but it benefits greatly from the advantage of its knowledge of raw materials, facilities, contractors, etc. In addition, major brands such as Dior and Chanel have their own plantations of roses and jasmine in the vicinity of Grasse.

Perfumeries
Three perfumeries, Fragonard, Molinard and Galimard opened their doors to the public and offer free tours that explain the processes of producing a perfume. It is possible to create one's own perfume, eau de perfume or eau de toilette and participate in all stages of manufacture from picking flowers to bottling.

 * Galimard Perfumery, established in 1747 by Jean de Galimard, provided the Royal Court with ointments and perfumes. It is the third oldest perfume company in the world after Farina gegenüber and Floris of London and was revived after the war by Gaston de Fontmichel and Joseph Roux.
 * Molinard was established in 1849 and their perfume bottles were made of Baccarat crystal and Lalique glass. Clients can create their own personalised perfume during the Tarinology fragrance course workshop.
 * The Fragonard Perfumery was established in 1926 in one of the oldest factories in the city. Its museum Villa Musée Fragonard displays rare objects that explain the history of perfumery, covering 5,000 years.
 * International Perfume Museum. Opened in 1989, the museum traces the evolution of techniques during the 5,000 year history of perfumery and the large contribution of the Grasse area to perfume making. It was renovated and expanded (doubling in size) between 2007 and 2008.
 * Perfume Art Creation, perfumed art-producing company combining authentic fragrances from Grasse, and an art gallery based in Zollikerberg, Switzerland. Its fragrance-infused artworks and paintings are the copyright concept of Perfume Art Creation, which allows the viewer visually to explore the artwork, to smell it, allowing for holistic stimulation of the senses. Working and creating commonly with the artists, the paintings are infused with the preferred collector's perfume and scent, and his or her individual or corporate fragrance is introduced into the art.

Religion
The town is home to Grasse Cathedral, the seat of the Roman Catholic former Diocese of Grasse which was headed by the Bishops of Grasse.

Education
The town is home to the Lycée Amiral-de-Grasse and since 2019 one of two seats of the higher education engineering college ECAM-EPMI.

Sport
RC Grasse is the local football club, whereas RO Grasse the local rugby union club.

In popular culture
The town is the setting in the final chapters of the novel Perfume by Patrick Süskind. It was featured in the film based on the novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006).

Main sights
Three perfume factories offer daily tours and demonstrations, which draw in many of the region's visitors. In addition to the perfumeries, Grasse's other main attraction is the Cathedral, dedicated to Notre Dame du Puy and founded in the 11th century. In the interior, are three works by Rubens and one by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the French painter native of the town.

Notable people
Grasse was the birthplace of:

 * Louis Bellaud (1543–1588), also known as Bellaud de la Bellaudière, poet
 * Claude-Marie Courmes (1770–1865), trader, shipowner and politician. Mayor of Grasse, deputy for Var and General Councilor of Var Canton of Grasse-Nord.
 * Mélanie Bernier (born 1985), actress
 * Adam Bessa, (born 1992), actor
 * Frédéric Bourdillon (born 1991), French-Israeli basketball player in the Israel Basketball Premier League
 * Jacques Cavallier (born 1962), perfumer
 * Albert Charpin (1842–1924), painter
 * Olivier Cresp (born 1955), perfumer
 * Jean-Claude Ellena (born 1947), perfumer
 * Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard (1780–1850), painter and sculptor
 * Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), painter
 * Jean Claude Gandur (born 1949), businessman
 * Gazan de la Peyrière (1765–1845), general during the Napoleonic Wars
 * Valentine Goby (born 1974), writer
 * Marcel Journet (1868–1933), operatic baritone
 * Vincent Koziello (born 1995), footballer
 * Eugénie Le Sommer (born 1989), woman footballer
 * Pierre-Louis Lions (born 1956), mathematician
 * Gilles Marini (born 1976), actor
 * Michèle Mouton (born 1951), rally driver
 * Charles Pasqua (1927–2015), businessman and politician
 * Thomas Pinault (born 1981), footballer
 * Théo Pourchaire (born 2003), racing driver

Grasse was the death place of:
 * Dirk Bogarde (1921–1999), actor, lived in Grasse
 * Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), Russian writer, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1933; lived in Grasse
 * Christian Calmes (1913–1995), Luxembourgian civil servant, lawyer and historian
 * François Joseph Paul de Grasse (1723–1788) admiral, commanded of the French fleet at the Battle of the Chesapeake, which led directly to the Siege of Yorktown.
 * David Douglas Duncan (1916–2018), American photojournalist
 * Prince Eugen of Bavaria (1925–1997), member of the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach
 * Lolo Ferrari (1963–2000), dancer, actress and singer with breast implants
 * Édith Piaf (1915–1963), singer
 * Frederic Prokosch (1906–1989), American writer
 * Yvonne Rozille (1900–1985), film actress
 * Eugène Sémérie (1832–1884), positivist activist

Other notables associated with Grasse:
 * Gérard Philipe (1922–1959), actor, brought up in Grasse
 * Alice Charlotte von Rothschild (1847–1922), patron of the arts; art collection was donated to the town of Grasse
 * H. G. Wells (1866–1946), British writer

Twin towns – sister cities
Grasse is twinned with:

 * 🇩🇪 Ingolstadt, Germany, since 1963
 * 🇮🇹 Carrara, Italy, since 1995
 * Vila Real, Portugal, since 1975
 * 🇪🇸 Murcia, Spain, since 1990
 * 🇺🇸 Marblehead, Massachusetts, USA, since 1986
 * 🇵🇱 Opole, Poland, since 1964
 * 🇧🇬 Kazanlak, Bulgaria
 * 🇮🇱 Pardes Hanna-Karkur, Israel

title: Grasse


text:
Bill Hicks

William Melvin Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian and satirist. His material—encompassing a wide range of social issues including religion, politics, and philosophy—was controversial and often steeped in dark comedy.

At the age of 16, Hicks began performing at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas. During the 1980s, he toured the U.S. extensively and made a number of high-profile television appearances, but he amassed a significant fan base in the UK, filling large venues during his 1991 tour. He also achieved some recognition as a guitarist and songwriter.

Hicks died of pancreatic cancer on February 26, 1994, at the age of 32. In subsequent years, his work gained significant acclaim in creative circles—particularly after a series of posthumous album releases—and he developed a substantial cult following. In 2007, he was number six on Channel 4's list of the "100 Greatest Stand-Up Comics", and rose to No. 4 on the 2010 list. In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked him number 13 on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.

Early life
Hicks was born in Valdosta, Georgia, the son of James Melvin "Jim" Hicks (1923–2006) and Mary (Reese) Hicks. He had an older sister, Lynn, and an older brother, Steve. The family lived in Alabama, Florida, and New Jersey, before settling in Houston, Texas, when Hicks was seven years old. He was drawn to comedy at an early age, emulating Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, and wrote routines with his friend Dwight Slade. While attending Stratford High School, he began performing comedy (mostly derivations of Woody Allen material) for his classmates. At home, he wrote his own one-liners and slid them under the bedroom door of Steve, who he thought was a genius, for critical analysis. Steve told him, "Keep it up. You're really good at this."

Early on, Hicks began to mock his family's Southern Baptist religious beliefs. He joked to the Houston Post in 1987, "We were Yuppie Baptists. We worried about things like, 'If you scratch your neighbor's Subaru, should you leave a note?'" Biographer Cynthia True described a typical argument with his father:

The elder Hicks would say, "I believe that the Bible is the literal word of God." And Bill would counter, "No, it's not, Dad." "Well, I believe that it is." "Well," Bill replied, "you know, some people believe that they're Napoleon. That's fine. Beliefs are neat. Cherish them, but don't share them like they're the truth."

He was close with his family his whole life, though, and he did not reject spiritual ideology itself, and throughout his life, he sought various alternative methods of experiencing it. Kevin Slade, elder brother of Dwight, introduced him to Transcendental Meditation and other forms of spirituality. Over one Thanksgiving weekend, he took Hicks and Dwight to a Transcendental Meditation residence course in Galveston. Worried about his rebellious behavior, his parents took him to a psychoanalyst at age 17. According to Hicks, the analyst took him aside after the first group session and told him, "You can continue coming if you want to, but it's them, not you."

Beginnings
Hicks was associated with the Texas Outlaw Comics group developed at the Comedy Workshop in Houston in the 1980s.

California and New York
By January 1986, Hicks was using recreational drugs and his financial resources had dwindled. His career received another upturn in 1987, however, when he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedians Special. The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years, performed about 300 times a year. On the album Relentless, he jokes that he quit using drugs because "once you've been taken aboard a UFO, it's kind of hard to top that", although in his performances, he continued to enthusiastically praise the virtues of LSD, marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms.

He eventually fell back to chain smoking, a theme that figured heavily in his performances from then on. His nicotine addiction, love of smoking, and occasional attempts to quit became a recurring theme in his act throughout his later years.

In 1988, Hicks signed with his first professional business manager, Jack Mondrus.

On the track "Modern Bummer" of his 1990 album Dangerous, Hicks says he quit drinking alcohol in 1988.

In 1989, he released his first video, Sane Man; a remastered version with 30 minutes of extra footage was released in 1999.

Early fame
In 1990, Hicks released his first album, Dangerous, performed on the HBO special One Night Stand and at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. Hicks was later engaged to his manager, Colleen McGarr, who booked him there. He was also part of a group of American stand-up comedians performing in London's West End in November. Hicks was a huge hit in the UK and Ireland and continued touring there throughout 1991. That year, he returned to Just for Laughs and filmed his second video, Relentless.

Hicks made a brief detour into musical recording with the Marble Head Johnson album in 1992, collaborating with Houston high school friend Kevin Booth and Austin, Texas, drummer Pat Brown. During the same year, he toured the UK, where he recorded the Revelations video for Britain's Channel 4. He closed the show with his soon-to become-famous philosophy regarding life, "It's Just a Ride." Also in that tour, he recorded the stand-up performance released in its entirety on a double CD titled Salvation. Hicks was voted "Hot Standup Comic" by Rolling Stone magazine in 1993.

Hicks and Tool
Progressive metal band Tool invited Hicks to open a number of concerts in its 1993 Lollapalooza appearances, where Hicks once asked the audience to look for a contact lens he had lost. Thousands of people complied.

Members of Tool felt that Hicks and they "were resonating similar concepts". Intending to raise awareness about Hicks's material and ideas, Tool dedicated their triple-platinum album Ænima (1996) to Hicks. Both the lenticular casing of the Ænima album packaging and the chorus of the title track "Ænema" make reference to a sketch from Hicks's Arizona Bay album, in which he contemplates the idea of Los Angeles falling into the Pacific Ocean. Ænima's final track, "Third Eye", contains samples from Hicks's Dangerous and Relentless albums.

An alternate version of the Ænima artwork shows a painting of Bill Hicks, calling him "Another Dead Hero", and mentions of Hicks are found both in the liner notes and on the record.

Censorship and aftermath
In 1984, Hicks had been invited to appear on Late Night with David Letterman for the first time. He had a joke that he used frequently in comedy clubs about how he caused a serious accident that left a classmate using a wheelchair. NBC had a policy that no jokes about the handicapped could be aired, making his stand-up routine difficult to perform without mentioning words such as "wheelchair".

On October 1, 1993, Hicks was scheduled to appear on Late Show with David Letterman on CBS, where Letterman had recently moved. It was his 12th appearance on a Letterman late-night show, but his entire performance was removed from the broadcast. At that point, it was the only occasion where a comedian's entire routine was cut after taping. His stand-up routine was removed from the show, Hicks said, because Letterman's producers believed the material, which included jokes involving religion and the anti-abortion movement, was unsuitable for broadcast. Producer Robert Morton initially blamed CBS, which denied responsibility; Morton later conceded it was his decision. Although Letterman later expressed regret at the way the situation had been handled, Hicks did not appear on the show again. Hicks was undergoing chemotherapy at the time of his final Late Show appearance, unbeknownst to Letterman and most others outside of Hicks's family. He would die less than four months later.

Letterman aired the censored routine in its entirety on January 30, 2009. Hicks's mother, Mary, was present in the studio and appeared on-camera as a guest. Letterman took responsibility for the original decision to remove Hicks's set from the 1993 show. "It says more about me as a guy than it says about Bill," he said, after the set aired, "because there was absolutely nothing wrong with that".

Denis Leary's plagiarism
For many years, Hicks was friends with fellow comedian Denis Leary, but in 1993, he was angered by Leary's album No Cure for Cancer, which featured lines and subject matter similar to his own routine. According to American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story by Cynthia True, upon hearing the album Hicks was furious. "All these years, aside from the occasional jibe, he had pretty much shrugged off Leary's lifting. Comedians borrowed, stole stuff, and even bought bits from one another. Milton Berle and Robin Williams were famous for it. This was different. Leary had practically taken line for line huge chunks of Bill's act and recorded it." The friendship ended abruptly as a result.

At least three stand-up comedians have gone on the record stating they believe Leary stole Hicks's material, as well as his persona and attitude. In an interview, when Hicks was asked why he had quit smoking, he answered, "I just wanted to see if Denis would, too." In another interview, Hicks said, "I have a scoop for you. I stole his [Leary's] act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did." During a 2003 Comedy Central Roast of Leary, comedian Lenny Clarke, a friend of Leary's, said a carton of cigarettes was backstage from Hicks, with the message, "Wish I had gotten these to you sooner." This joke was cut from the final broadcast.

The controversy surrounding plagiarism is also mentioned in American Scream:

Leary was in Montreal hosting the "Nasty Show" at Club Soda, and Colleen [McGarr?] was coordinating the talent, so she stood backstage and overheard Leary doing material incredibly similar to old Hicks riffs, including his perennial Jim Fixx joke: "Keith Richards outlived Jim Fixx, the runner and health nut. The plot thickens." When Leary came offstage, Colleen, more stunned than angry, said, "Hey, you know that's Bill Hicks' material! Do you know that's his material?" Leary stood there, stared at her without saying a word, and briskly left the dressing room.

Material and style
Hicks's performance style was seen as a play on his audience's emotions. He expressed anger, disgust, and apathy while addressing the audience in a casual and personal manner, which he likened to merely conversing with his friends. He would invite his audiences to challenge authority and the existential nature of "accepted truth." One such message, which he often used in his shows, was delivered in the style of a news report (to draw attention to the negative slant news organizations give to any story about drugs):

Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration—that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.

American philosopher and ethnomycologist Terence McKenna was a frequent source of Hicks's most controversial psychedelic and philosophical counter-cultural material; he infamously acted out an abridged version of McKenna's "Stoned Ape" model of human evolution as a routine during several of his final shows.

Another of Hicks's most-delivered lines was given during a gig in Chicago during 1989 (later released as the bootleg I'm Sorry, Folks). After a heckler repeatedly shouted "Free Bird", Hicks screamed, "Hitler had the right idea; he was just an underachiever!" Hicks followed this remark with a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity.

Much of Hicks's routine involved direct attacks on mainstream society, religion, politics, and consumerism. Asked in a BBC interview why he cannot do a routine that appeals "to everyone", he said that such an act was impossible. He responded by repeating a comment that an audience member once made to him, "We don't come to comedy to think!", to which he replied, "Gee, where do you go to think? I'll meet you there!" When asked whether a "half way" point existed between audience expectations and his own, he said: "but my way is half-way between, I mean, this is a night club, and, you know, these are adults, and what do you expect?" Hicks was strongly against political correctness, and jokingly stated that the politically correct should be "hunted down and killed."

Hicks often discussed popular conspiracy theories in his performances, most notably the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He mocked the Warren Report and the official version of Lee Harvey Oswald as a "lone nut assassin." He also questioned the guilt of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian compound during the Waco Siege. Hicks ended some of his shows, especially those being recorded in front of larger audiences as albums, with a mock "assassination" of himself on stage, making gunshot sound effects into the microphone while falling to the ground.

Illness and death
On June 16, 1993, Hicks was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver. He still toured and also recorded his album, Arizona Bay, while receiving weekly chemotherapy.

Following his cancer diagnosis, Hicks often joked that any given performance could be his last. The public, however, was unaware of his condition, and only a few close friends and family members knew of the disease. He performed the final show of his career at Caroline's in New York on January 6, 1994; he moved back to his parents' house in Little Rock shortly thereafter.

In his last weeks, Hicks re-read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and made telephone calls to friends to say goodbye before he stopped speaking on February 14, 1994. He died on February 26 at the age of 32,  and was buried in the family grave plot in Magnolia Cemetery, Leakesville, Mississippi.

In early 1995, Hicks's family released a brief essay he had written weeks before his death: February 7, 1994 –

I was born William Melvin Hicks on December 16, 1961, in Valdosta, Georgia. Ugh. Melvin Hicks from Georgia. Yee Har! I already had gotten off to life on the wrong foot. I was always "awake," I guess you'd say. Some part of me clamoring for new insights and new ways to make the world a better place.

All of this came out years down the line, in my multitude of creative interests that are the tools I now bring to the Party. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me. I'd read these words and off I went—dreaming my own imaginative dreams. Exercising them at will, eventually to form bands, comedy, more bands, movies, anything creative. This is the coin of the realm I use in my words – Vision.

On June 16, 1993 I was diagnosed with having "liver cancer that had spread from the pancreas." One of life's weirdest and worst jokes imaginable. I'd been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realizing my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. "Why me!?" I would cry out, and "Why now!?"

Well, I know now there may never be any answers to those particular questions, but maybe in telling a little about myself, we can find some other answers to other questions. That might help our way down our own particular paths, towards realizing my dream of New Hope and New Happiness.

Amen

I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.

Legacy
Hicks' albums Arizona Bay and Rant in E-Minor were released posthumously in 1997 on the Voices imprint of the Rykodisc label. Dangerous and Relentless were re-released simultaneously.

At the time of his death, Hicks was working with comedian Fallon Woodland on a pilot episode of a new talk show, titled Counts of the Netherworld for Channel 4. The budget and concept had been approved, and a pilot was filmed. The Counts of the Netherworld pilot was shown at the various Tenth-Anniversary Tribute Night events around the world on February 26, 2004.

In a 2005 poll to find the Comedian's Comedian, comedians and comedy insiders voted Hicks 13th on their list of "The Top 20 Greatest Comedy Acts Ever". In "Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time" (2004), Hicks was ranked 19th. In March 2007, he was voted sixth on Britain's Channel 4 list of the 100 Greatest Stand-Up Comics, and rose to number four on the 2010 list.

Devotees have incorporated Hicks's words, image, and attitude into their own creations. By means of audio sampling, fragments of his rants, diatribes, social criticisms, and philosophies have found their way into many musical works, such as the live version of Super Furry Animals' "The Man Don't Give a Fuck" and Adam Freeland's "We Want Your Soul". His influence on the band Tool is well documented as he is sampled at the beginning of their song "Third Eye"Ænima (1996); he "appears" on the Fila Brazillia album Maim That Tune (1995) and on SPA's eponymously titled album SPA (1997), which are both dedicated to Hicks; the British band Radiohead's second album The Bends (1995) is also dedicated to his memory. Hicks' joke "It's always funny until someone gets hurt; then it's just hilarious" is used as a refrain on the Faith No More album King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime. American indie rock band Built to Spill's song "Planting Seeds" on its 2009 album There Is No Enemy alludes to Hicks's routine on advertising and marketing, which appears on the performance film Bill Hicks: Revelations. Singer/songwriter Tom Waits listed Rant in E-Minor as one of his 20 most cherished albums of all time.

Comedians who have cited Hicks as an inspiration include Joe Rogan, Dave Attell, Lewis Black, Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Russell Brand, Ron White, Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Dore, Lee Camp and Brendon Burns. The political cartoonist "Mr. Fish" described in 2022 how he learned from Hicks.

British actor Chas Early portrayed Hicks in the one-man stage show Bill Hicks: Slight Return, which premiered in 2004. The show was co-written by Early and Richard Hurst, and imagined Hicks's view of the world 10 years after his death.

Hicks is mentioned in the 1999 British film Human Traffic. In the movie, the young and hip club-going protagonist, "Jip", praises Hicks as an alternative thinker, and explains that he needs to get a regular infusion of Hicks's insights. Before leaving his house to start on the movie's main adventure, Jip states: "... first a daily injection of the late prophet Bill Hicks ... just to remind me not to take life too seriously." He then watches a clip of one of Hicks's rants about drugs, and how they had never affected him badly.

On February 25, 2004, British MP Stephen Pound tabled an early day motion titled "Anniversary of the Death of Bill Hicks" (EDM 678 of the 2003–04 session), the text of which reads:

That this House notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on 26th February 1994, at the age of 33 [sic]; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.

Hicks appeared in a flashback scene in writer Garth Ennis's Vertigo comic-book series Preacher, in the story "Underworld" in issue No. 31 (Nov. 1997).

Criticism
Some comedians and writers have been critical of Hicks's legacy since his death. Jimmy Carr, in his book The Naked Jape (co-written with Lucy Greeves), wrote that Hicks "was one of the most celebrated recent exponents of loud, impassioned political stand-up. When Hicks got it right, when he resisted the cheap shock tactics and hit his evangelical peak, it was awesome ... But the truth is that even Hicks missed his mark a lot of the time, resulting in an act that was neither funny nor moving." Stewart Lee said Hicks's "first two albums have dated badly, with their adolescent potshots at inoffensive figures from popular culture, and self-conscious rock'n'roll cool."

Dara Ó Briain has criticised what he calls "the hagiography that surrounds Bill Hicks", saying that "Hicks has become the poster boy for a rock-journalism view of comedy, one that thinks that the only decent comedy is a very angry kind. Which is absolute nonsense and has become a complete cliche in the industry."

Film and documentary

 * Annex Houston (1986) (bootleg): A video of an early stand-up performance live in Texas
 * Sane Man (1989): The first official video recorded Bill Hicks' show
 * Ninja Bachelor Party (1991): A low-budget comedy film produced by and starring Bill Hicks, Kevin Booth, and David Johndrow
 * One Night Stand (1991): A half-hour performance recorded for the HBO stand-up series
 * Relentless (1992): Recorded at the Centaur Theatre during the annual Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, despite the title, the CD version of Relentless was recorded at a separate performance, after the Just for Laughs festival had closed.
 * Revelations (1992): A live performance at the Dominion Theatre, London in November 1992.

A documentary titled American: The Bill Hicks Story, based on interviews with his family and friends, premiered on March 12, 2010, at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

Russell Crowe announced in 2012 that he would direct a Bill Hicks biopic. Crowe was originally thought to be playing the comedian, but Mark Staufer, the actor's schoolmate and writer on the film, suggested the part is now open for casting. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was frequently mentioned as a choice by fans. Production was expected to start in 2013, but, as of 2018, no further announcements regarding the film's progress have been made.

On October 28, 2018, it was announced that Richard Linklater is set to direct a biopic about Bill Hicks for the film production company Focus Features.

title: Bill Hicks


text:
Russell's paradox

In mathematical logic, Russell's paradox (also known as Russell's antinomy) is a set-theoretic paradox published by the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell in 1901. Russell's paradox shows that every set theory that contains an unrestricted comprehension principle leads to contradictions. The paradox had already been discovered independently in 1899 by the German mathematician Ernst Zermelo. However, Zermelo did not publish the idea, which remained known only to David Hilbert, Edmund Husserl, and other academics at the University of Göttingen. At the end of the 1890s, Georg Cantor – considered the founder of modern set theory – had already realized that his theory would lead to a contradiction, as he told Hilbert and Richard Dedekind by letter.

According to the unrestricted comprehension principle, for any sufficiently well-defined property, there is the set of all and only the objects that have that property. Let R be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. (This set is sometimes called "the Russell set".) If R is not a member of itself, then its definition entails that it is a member of itself; yet, if it is a member of itself, then it is not a member of itself, since it is the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. The resulting contradiction is Russell's paradox. In symbols:
 * $$\text{Let } R = \{ x \mid x \not \in x \} \text{, then } R \in R \iff R \not \in R$$

Russell also showed that a version of the paradox could be derived in the axiomatic system constructed by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege, hence undermining Frege's attempt to reduce mathematics to logic and calling into question the logicist programme. Two influential ways of avoiding the paradox were both proposed in 1908: Russell's own type theory and the Zermelo set theory. In particular, Zermelo's axioms restricted the unlimited comprehension principle. With the additional contributions of Abraham Fraenkel, Zermelo set theory developed into the now-standard Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (commonly known as ZFC when including the axiom of choice). The main difference between Russell's and Zermelo's solution to the paradox is that Zermelo modified the axioms of set theory while maintaining a standard logical language, while Russell modified the logical language itself. The language of ZFC, with the help of Thoralf Skolem, turned out to be that of first-order logic.

Informal presentation
Most sets commonly encountered are not members of themselves. Let us call a set "normal" if it is not a member of itself, and "abnormal" if it is a member of itself. Clearly every set must be either normal or abnormal. For example, consider the set of all squares in a plane. This set is not itself a square in the plane, thus it is not a member of itself and is therefore normal. In contrast, the complementary set that contains everything which is not a square in the plane is itself not a square in the plane, and so it is one of its own members and is therefore abnormal.

Now we consider the set of all normal sets, R, and try to determine whether R is normal or abnormal. If R were normal, it would be contained in the set of all normal sets (itself), and therefore be abnormal; on the other hand if R were abnormal, it would not be contained in the set of all normal sets (itself), and therefore be normal. This leads to the conclusion that R is neither normal nor abnormal: Russell's paradox.

Formal presentation
The term "naive set theory" is used in various ways. In one usage, naive set theory is a formal theory, that is formulated in a first-order language with a binary non-logical predicate $$\in$$, and that includes the axiom of extensionality:
 * $$\forall x \, \forall y \, ( \forall z \, (z \in x \iff z \in y) \implies x = y)$$

and the axiom schema of unrestricted comprehension:
 * $$ \exists y \forall x (x \in y \iff \varphi(x))$$

for any formula $$\varphi$$ with the variable $x$ as a free variable inside $$\varphi$$. Substitute $$x \notin x$$ for $$\varphi(x)$$ to get
 * $$ \exists y \forall x (x \in y \iff x \notin x)$$

Then by existential instantiation (reusing the symbol $$y$$) and universal instantiation we have
 * $$y \in y \iff y \notin y ,$$

a contradiction. Therefore, this naive set theory is inconsistent.

Philosophical implications
Prior to Russell's paradox (and to other similar paradoxes discovered around the time, such as the Burali-Forti paradox), a common conception of the idea of set was the "extensional concept of set", as recounted by von Neumann and Morgenstern:

"A set is an arbitrary collection of objects, absolutely no restriction being placed on the nature and number of these objects, the elements of the set in question. The elements constitute and determine the set as such, without any ordering or relationship of any kind between them."

In particular, there was no distinction between sets and proper classes as collections of objects. Additionally, the existence of each of the elements of a collection was seen as sufficient for the existence of the set of said elements. However, paradoxes such as Russell's and Burali-Forti's showed the impossibility of this conception of set, by examples of collections of objects that do not form sets, despite all said objects being existent.

Set-theoretic responses
From the principle of explosion of classical logic, any proposition can be proved from a contradiction. Therefore, the presence of contradictions like Russell's paradox in an axiomatic set theory is disastrous; since if any formula can be proved true it destroys the conventional meaning of truth and falsity. Further, since set theory was seen as the basis for an axiomatic development of all other branches of mathematics, Russell's paradox threatened the foundations of mathematics as a whole. This motivated a great deal of research around the turn of the 20th century to develop a consistent (contradiction-free) set theory.

In 1908, Ernst Zermelo proposed an axiomatization of set theory that avoided the paradoxes of naive set theory by replacing arbitrary set comprehension with weaker existence axioms, such as his axiom of separation (Aussonderung). (Avoiding paradox was not Zermelo's original intention, but instead to document which assumptions he used in proving the well-ordering theorem.) Modifications to this axiomatic theory proposed in the 1920s by Abraham Fraenkel, Thoralf Skolem, and by Zermelo himself resulted in the axiomatic set theory called ZFC. This theory became widely accepted once Zermelo's axiom of choice ceased to be controversial, and ZFC has remained the canonical axiomatic set theory down to the present day.

ZFC does not assume that, for every property, there is a set of all things satisfying that property. Rather, it asserts that given any set X, any subset of X definable using first-order logic exists. The object R defined by Russell's paradox above cannot be constructed as a subset of any set X, and is therefore not a set in ZFC. In some extensions of ZFC, notably in von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory, objects like R are called proper classes.

ZFC is silent about types, although the cumulative hierarchy has a notion of layers that resemble types. Zermelo himself never accepted Skolem's formulation of ZFC using the language of first-order logic. As José Ferreirós notes, Zermelo insisted instead that "propositional functions (conditions or predicates) used for separating off subsets, as well as the replacement functions, can be 'entirely arbitrary' [ganz beliebig]"; the modern interpretation given to this statement is that Zermelo wanted to include higher-order quantification in order to avoid Skolem's paradox. Around 1930, Zermelo also introduced (apparently independently of von Neumann), the axiom of foundation, thus—as Ferreirós observes—"by forbidding 'circular' and 'ungrounded' sets, it [ZFC] incorporated one of the crucial motivations of TT [type theory]—the principle of the types of arguments". This 2nd order ZFC preferred by Zermelo, including axiom of foundation, allowed a rich cumulative hierarchy. Ferreirós writes that "Zermelo's 'layers' are essentially the same as the types in the contemporary versions of simple TT [type theory] offered by Gödel and Tarski. One can describe the cumulative hierarchy into which Zermelo developed his models as the universe of a cumulative TT in which transfinite types are allowed. (Once we have adopted an impredicative standpoint, abandoning the idea that classes are constructed, it is not unnatural to accept transfinite types.) Thus, simple TT and ZFC could now be regarded as systems that 'talk' essentially about the same intended objects. The main difference is that TT relies on a strong higher-order logic, while Zermelo employed second-order logic, and ZFC can also be given a first-order formulation. The first-order 'description' of the cumulative hierarchy is much weaker, as is shown by the existence of countable models (Skolem's paradox), but it enjoys some important advantages."

In ZFC, given a set A, it is possible to define a set B that consists of exactly the sets in A that are not members of themselves. B cannot be in A by the same reasoning in Russell's Paradox. This variation of Russell's paradox shows that no set contains everything.

Through the work of Zermelo and others, especially John von Neumann, the structure of what some see as the "natural" objects described by ZFC eventually became clear: they are the elements of the von Neumann universe, V, built up from the empty set by transfinitely iterating the power set operation. It is thus now possible again to reason about sets in a non-axiomatic fashion without running afoul of Russell's paradox, namely by reasoning about the elements of V. Whether it is appropriate to think of sets in this way is a point of contention among the rival points of view on the philosophy of mathematics.

Other solutions to Russell's paradox, with an underlying strategy closer to that of type theory, include Quine's New Foundations and Scott–Potter set theory. Yet another approach is to define multiple membership relation with appropriately modified comprehension scheme, as in the Double extension set theory.

History
Russell discovered the paradox in May or June 1901. By his own account in his 1919 Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he "attempted to discover some flaw in Cantor's proof that there is no greatest cardinal". In a 1902 letter, he announced the discovery to Gottlob Frege of the paradox in Frege's 1879 Begriffsschrift and framed the problem in terms of both logic and set theory, and in particular in terms of Frege's definition of function:

"There is just one point where I have encountered a difficulty. You state (p. 17 [p. 23 above]) that a function too, can act as the indeterminate element. This I formerly believed, but now this view seems doubtful to me because of the following contradiction. Let w be the predicate: to be a predicate that cannot be predicated of itself. Can w be predicated of itself? From each answer its opposite follows. Therefore we must conclude that w is not a predicate. Likewise there is no class (as a totality) of those classes which, each taken as a totality, do not belong to themselves. From this I conclude that under certain circumstances a definable collection [Menge] does not form a totality."

Russell would go on to cover it at length in his 1903 The Principles of Mathematics, where he repeated his first encounter with the paradox:

"Before taking leave of fundamental questions, it is necessary to examine more in detail the singular contradiction, already mentioned, with regard to predicates not predicable of themselves. ... I may mention that I was led to it in the endeavour to reconcile Cantor's proof...."

Russell wrote to Frege about the paradox just as Frege was preparing the second volume of his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. Frege responded to Russell very quickly; his letter dated 22 June 1902 appeared, with van Heijenoort's commentary in Heijenoort 1967:126–127. Frege then wrote an appendix admitting to the paradox, and proposed a solution that Russell would endorse in his Principles of Mathematics, but was later considered by some to be unsatisfactory. For his part, Russell had his work at the printers and he added an appendix on the doctrine of types.

Ernst Zermelo in his (1908) A new proof of the possibility of a well-ordering (published at the same time he published "the first axiomatic set theory") laid claim to prior discovery of the antinomy in Cantor's naive set theory. He states: "And yet, even the elementary form that Russell9 gave to the set-theoretic antinomies could have persuaded them [J. König, Jourdain, F. Bernstein] that the solution of these difficulties is not to be sought in the surrender of well-ordering but only in a suitable restriction of the notion of set". Footnote 9 is where he stakes his claim:

"91903, pp. 366–368. I had, however, discovered this antinomy myself, independently of Russell, and had communicated it prior to 1903 to Professor Hilbert among others."

Frege sent a copy of his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik to Hilbert; as noted above, Frege's last volume mentioned the paradox that Russell had communicated to Frege. After receiving Frege's last volume, on 7 November 1903, Hilbert wrote a letter to Frege in which he said, referring to Russell's paradox, "I believe Dr. Zermelo discovered it three or four years ago". A written account of Zermelo's actual argument was discovered in the Nachlass of Edmund Husserl.

In 1923, Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed to "dispose" of Russell's paradox as follows:

The reason why a function cannot be its own argument is that the sign for a function already contains the prototype of its argument, and it cannot contain itself. For let us suppose that the function F(fx) could be its own argument: in that case there would be a proposition F(F(fx)), in which the outer function F and the inner function F must have different meanings, since the inner one has the form O(fx) and the outer one has the form Y(O(fx)). Only the letter 'F' is common to the two functions, but the letter by itself signifies nothing. This immediately becomes clear if instead of F(Fu) we write '''(do) : F(Ou). Ou = Fu'''. That disposes of Russell's paradox. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.333)

Russell and Alfred North Whitehead wrote their three-volume Principia Mathematica hoping to achieve what Frege had been unable to do. They sought to banish the paradoxes of naive set theory by employing a theory of types they devised for this purpose. While they succeeded in grounding arithmetic in a fashion, it is not at all evident that they did so by purely logical means. While Principia Mathematica avoided the known paradoxes and allows the derivation of a great deal of mathematics, its system gave rise to new problems.

In any event, Kurt Gödel in 1930–31 proved that while the logic of much of Principia Mathematica, now known as first-order logic, is complete, Peano arithmetic is necessarily incomplete if it is consistent. This is very widely—though not universally—regarded as having shown the logicist program of Frege to be impossible to complete.

In 2001 A Centenary International Conference celebrating the first hundred years of Russell's paradox was held in Munich and its proceedings have been published.

Applied versions
There are some versions of this paradox that are closer to real-life situations and may be easier to understand for non-logicians. For example, the barber paradox supposes a barber who shaves all men who do not shave themselves and only men who do not shave themselves. When one thinks about whether the barber should shave himself or not, a similar paradox begins to emerge.

An easy refutation of the "layman's versions" such as the barber paradox seems to be that no such barber exists, or that the barber is not a man, and so can exist without paradox. The whole point of Russell's paradox is that the answer "such a set does not exist" means the definition of the notion of set within a given theory is unsatisfactory. Note the difference between the statements "such a set does not exist" and "it is an empty set". It is like the difference between saying "There is no bucket" and saying "The bucket is empty".

A notable exception to the above may be the Grelling–Nelson paradox, in which words and meaning are the elements of the scenario rather than people and hair-cutting. Though it is easy to refute the barber's paradox by saying that such a barber does not (and cannot) exist, it is impossible to say something similar about a meaningfully defined word.

One way that the paradox has been dramatised is as follows: Suppose that every public library has to compile a catalogue of all its books. Since the catalogue is itself one of the library's books, some librarians include it in the catalogue for completeness; while others leave it out as it being one of the library's books is self evident. Now imagine that all these catalogues are sent to the national library. Some of them include themselves in their listings, others do not. The national librarian compiles two master catalogues—one of all the catalogues that list themselves, and one of all those that do not.

The question is: should these master catalogues list themselves? The 'catalogue of all catalogues that list themselves' is no problem. If the librarian does not include it in its own listing, it remains a true catalogue of those catalogues that do include themselves. If he does include it, it remains a true catalogue of those that list themselves. However, just as the librarian cannot go wrong with the first master catalogue, he is doomed to fail with the second. When it comes to the 'catalogue of all catalogues that do not list themselves', the librarian cannot include it in its own listing, because then it would include itself, and so belong in the other catalogue, that of catalogues that do include themselves. However, if the librarian leaves it out, the catalogue is incomplete. Either way, it can never be a true master catalogue of catalogues that do not list themselves.

Russell-like paradoxes
As illustrated above for the barber paradox, Russell's paradox is not hard to extend. Take:
 * A transitive verb $⟨V⟩$, that can be applied to its substantive form.

Form the sentence:
 * The $⟨V⟩$er that $⟨V⟩$s all (and only those) who do not $⟨V⟩$ themselves,

Sometimes the "all" is replaced by "all $⟨V⟩$ers".

An example would be "paint":
 * The painter that paints all (and only those) that do not paint themselves.

or "elect"
 * The elector (representative), that elects all that do not elect themselves.

In the Season 8 episode of The Big Bang Theory, "The Skywalker Intrusion", Sheldon Cooper analyzes the song "Play That Funky Music", concluding that the lyrics present a musical example of Russell's Paradox.

Paradoxes that fall in this scheme include:
 * The barber with "shave".
 * The original Russell's paradox with "contain": The container (Set) that contains all (containers) that do not contain themselves.
 * The Grelling–Nelson paradox with "describer": The describer (word) that describes all words, that do not describe themselves.
 * Richard's paradox with "denote": The denoter (number) that denotes all denoters (numbers) that do not denote themselves. (In this paradox, all descriptions of numbers get an assigned number. The term "that denotes all denoters (numbers) that do not denote themselves" is here called Richardian.)
 * "I am lying.", namely the liar paradox and Epimenides paradox, whose origins are ancient
 * Russell–Myhill paradox

Related paradoxes

 * The Burali-Forti paradox, about the order type of all well-orderings
 * The Kleene–Rosser paradox, showing that the original lambda calculus is inconsistent, by means of a self-negating statement
 * Curry's paradox (named after Haskell Curry), which does not require negation
 * The smallest uninteresting integer paradox
 * Girard's paradox in type theory

title: Russell's paradox


text:
Simpson's paradox

Simpson's paradox is a phenomenon in probability and statistics in which a trend appears in several groups of data but disappears or reverses when the groups are combined. This result is often encountered in social-science and medical-science statistics, and is particularly problematic when frequency data are unduly given causal interpretations. The paradox can be resolved when confounding variables and causal relations are appropriately addressed in the statistical modeling (e.g., through cluster analysis ).

Simpson's paradox has been used to illustrate the kind of misleading results that the misuse of statistics can generate.

Edward H. Simpson first described this phenomenon in a technical paper in 1951, but the statisticians Karl Pearson (in 1899 ) and Udny Yule (in 1903 ) had mentioned similar effects earlier. The name Simpson's paradox was introduced by Colin R. Blyth in 1972. It is also referred to as Simpson's reversal, the Yule–Simpson effect, the amalgamation paradox, or the reversal paradox.

Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg argues that Simpson's paradox is misnamed as "there's no contradiction involved, just two different ways to think about the same data" and suggests that its lesson "isn't really to tell us which viewpoint to take but to insist that we keep both the parts and the whole in mind at once."

UC Berkeley gender bias
One of the best-known examples of Simpson's paradox comes from a study of gender bias among graduate school admissions to University of California, Berkeley. The admission figures for the fall of 1973 showed that men applying were more likely than women to be admitted, and the difference was so large that it was unlikely to be due to chance.

However, when taking into account the information about departments being applied to, the different rejection percentages reveal the different difficulty of getting into the department, and at the same time it showed that women tended to apply to more competitive departments with lower rates of admission, even among qualified applicants (such as in the English department), whereas men tended to apply to less competitive departments with higher rates of admission (such as in the engineering department). The pooled and corrected data showed a "small but statistically significant bias in favor of women".

The data from the six largest departments are listed below:

The entire data showed total of 4 out of 85 departments to be significantly biased against women, while 6 to be significantly biased against men (not all present in the 'six largest departments' table above). Notably, the numbers of biased departments were not the basis for the conclusion, but rather it was the gender admissions pooled across all departments, while weighing by each department's rejection rate across all of its applicants.

Kidney stone treatment
Another example comes from a real-life medical study comparing the success rates of two treatments for kidney stones. The table below shows the success rates (the term success rate here actually means the success proportion) and numbers of treatments for treatments involving both small and large kidney stones, where Treatment A includes open surgical procedures and Treatment B includes closed surgical procedures. The numbers in parentheses indicate the number of success cases over the total size of the group.

The paradoxical conclusion is that treatment A is more effective when used on small stones, and also when used on large stones, yet treatment B appears to be more effective when considering both sizes at the same time. In this example, the "lurking" variable (or confounding variable) causing the paradox is the size of the stones, which was not previously known to researchers to be important until its effects were included.

Which treatment is considered better is determined by which success ratio (successes/total) is larger. The reversal of the inequality between the two ratios when considering the combined data, which creates Simpson's paradox, happens because two effects occur together: Based on these effects, the paradoxical result is seen to arise because the effect of the size of the stones overwhelms the benefits of the better treatment (A). In short, the less effective treatment B appeared to be more effective because it was applied more frequently to the small stones cases, which were easier to treat.
 * 1) The sizes of the groups, which are combined when the lurking variable is ignored, are very different. Doctors tend to give cases with large stones the better treatment A, and the cases with small stones the inferior treatment B. Therefore, the totals are dominated by groups 3 and 2, and not by the two much smaller groups 1 and 4.
 * 2) The lurking variable, stone size, has a large effect on the ratios; i.e., the success rate is more strongly influenced by the severity of the case than by the choice of treatment. Therefore, the group of patients with large stones using treatment A (group 3) does worse than the group with small stones, even if the latter used the inferior treatment B (group 2).

Batting averages
A common example of Simpson's paradox involves the batting averages of players in professional baseball. It is possible for one player to have a higher batting average than another player each year for a number of years, but to have a lower batting average across all of those years. This phenomenon can occur when there are large differences in the number of at bats between the years. Mathematician Ken Ross demonstrated this using the batting average of two baseball players, Derek Jeter and David Justice, during the years 1995 and 1996:

In both 1995 and 1996, Justice had a higher batting average (in bold type) than Jeter did. However, when the two baseball seasons are combined, Jeter shows a higher batting average than Justice. According to Ross, this phenomenon would be observed about once per year among the possible pairs of players.

Vector interpretation
Simpson's paradox can also be illustrated using a 2-dimensional vector space. A success rate of $\frac{p}{q}$ (i.e., successes/attempts) can be represented by a vector $$\vec{A} = (q, p)$$, with a slope of $\frac{p}{q}$. A steeper vector then represents a greater success rate. If two rates $\frac{p_1}{q_1}$ and $\frac{p_2}{q_2}$  are combined, as in the examples given above, the result can be represented by the sum of the vectors $$(q_1, p_1)$$ and $$(q_2, p_2)$$, which according to the parallelogram rule is the vector $$(q_1 + q_2, p_1 + p_2)$$, with slope $\frac{p_1 + p_2}{q_1 + q_2}$.

Simpson's paradox says that even if a vector $$\vec{L}_1$$ (in orange in figure) has a smaller slope than another vector $$\vec{B}_1$$ (in blue), and $$\vec{L}_2$$ has a smaller slope than $$\vec{B}_2$$, the sum of the two vectors $$\vec{L}_1 + \vec{L}_2$$ can potentially still have a larger slope than the sum of the two vectors $$\vec{B}_1 + \vec{B}_2$$, as shown in the example. For this to occur one of the orange vectors must have a greater slope than one of the blue vectors (here $$\vec{L}_2$$ and $$\vec{B}_1$$), and these will generally be longer than the alternatively subscripted vectors – thereby dominating the overall comparison.

Correlation between variables
Simpson's reversal can also arise in correlations, in which two variables appear to have (say) a positive correlation towards one another, when in fact they have a negative correlation, the reversal having been brought about by a "lurking" confounder. Berman et al. give an example from economics, where a dataset suggests overall demand is positively correlated with price (that is, higher prices lead to more demand), in contradiction of expectation. Analysis reveals time to be the confounding variable: plotting both price and demand against time reveals the expected negative correlation over various periods, which then reverses to become positive if the influence of time is ignored by simply plotting demand against price.

Psychology
Psychological interest in Simpson's paradox seeks to explain why people deem sign reversal to be impossible at first. The question is where people get this strong intuition from, and how it is encoded in the mind.

Simpson's paradox demonstrates that this intuition cannot be derived from either classical logic or probability calculus alone, and thus led philosophers to speculate that it is supported by an innate causal logic that guides people in reasoning about actions and their consequences. Savage's sure-thing principle is an example of what such logic may entail. A qualified version of Savage's sure thing principle can indeed be derived from Pearl's do-calculus and reads: "An action A that increases the probability of an event B in each subpopulation Ci of C must also increase the probability of B in the population as a whole, provided that the action does not change the distribution of the subpopulations." This suggests that knowledge about actions and consequences is stored in a form resembling Causal Bayesian Networks.

Probability
A paper by Pavlides and Perlman presents a proof, due to Hadjicostas, that in a random 2 × 2 × 2 table with uniform distribution, Simpson's paradox will occur with a probability of exactly $1/60$. A study by Kock suggests that the probability that Simpson's paradox would occur at random in path models (i.e., models generated by path analysis) with two predictors and one criterion variable is approximately 12.8 percent; slightly higher than 1 occurrence per 8 path models.

Simpson's second paradox
A second, less well-known paradox was also discussed in Simpson's 1951 paper. It can occur when the "sensible interpretation" is not necessarily found in the separated data, like in the Kidney Stone example, but can instead reside in the combined data. Whether the partitioned or combined form of the data should be used hinges on the process giving rise to the data, meaning the correct interpretation of the data cannot always be determined by simply observing the tables.

Judea Pearl has shown that, in order for the partitioned data to represent the correct causal relationships between any two variables, $$X$$ and $$Y$$, the partitioning variables must satisfy a graphical condition called "back-door criterion": This criterion provides an algorithmic solution to Simpson's second paradox, and explains why the correct interpretation cannot be determined by data alone; two different graphs, both compatible with the data, may dictate two different back-door criteria.
 * 1) They must block all spurious paths between $$X$$ and $$Y$$
 * 2) No variable can be affected by $$X$$

When the back-door criterion is satisfied by a set Z of covariates, the adjustment formula (see Confounding) gives the correct causal effect of X on Y. If no such set exists, Pearl's do-calculus can be invoked to discover other ways of estimating the causal effect. The completeness of do-calculus can be viewed as offering a complete resolution of the Simpson's paradox.

Criticism
One criticism is that the paradox is not really a paradox at all, but rather a failure to properly account for confounding variables or to consider causal relationships between variables.

Another criticism of the apparent Simpson's paradox is that it may be a result of the specific way that data is stratified or grouped. The phenomenon may disappear or even reverse if the data is stratified differently or if different confounding variables are considered. Simpson's example actually highlighted a phenomenon called noncollapsibility, which occurs when subgroups with high proportions do not make simple averages when combined. This suggests that the paradox may not be a universal phenomenon, but rather a specific instance of a more general statistical issue.

Critics of the apparent Simpson's paradox also argue that the focus on the paradox may distract from more important statistical issues, such as the need for careful consideration of confounding variables and causal relationships when interpreting data.

Despite these criticisms, the apparent Simpson's paradox remains a popular and intriguing topic in statistics and data analysis. It continues to be studied and debated by researchers and practitioners in a wide range of fields, and it serves as a valuable reminder of the importance of careful statistical analysis and the potential pitfalls of simplistic interpretations of data.

title: Simpson's paradox