How to Paint Like Yayoi Kusama, the Avant-Garde Japanese Artist

in Art, Online Courses | April 18th, 2023

When Yayoi Kusama first arrived in New York, in the late nineteen-fifties, she must have sensed that she was in a practically ideal time and place to make abstract art. That would explain why she subsequently began creating a series of large paintings we now know as Infinity Nets, all of which consist solely of patterns of polka dots — or at least what look like patterns, and what look like polka dots, when viewed from a distance. Up close, there’s something quite different going on, something altogether more organic, irregular, and ever-shifting. and the best method of understanding it is to pick up a brush and paint an infinity net of your own.

You can learn how to do that by watching the video above, which comes from Coursera and the Museum of Modern Art’s online course “In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting.” In it, painter Corey D’Augustine goes through all the steps of executing a finished canvas in the style of Kusama’s Infinity Nets, which requires little conventional technical skill, but a great deal of patience.

D’Augustine suggests that you “lose yourself in the serial activity” of painting all these tiny shapes “as a way to quiet the mind.” Get deep enough into it, and “you won’t be thinking about your job or your children or whatever it is, whatever kind of stresses you have on your mind normally.

This therapeutic view isn’t a million miles from what Kusama has said of her own motivations for creating art. Even before launching into the Infinity Nets proper, she was painting polka-dot fields out of inspiration given to her by the hallucinations she’d been suffering since the age of ten. Now, at the age of 94, she’s long been a world-renowned artist, one who voluntarily resides at a mental-health facility when not at work in her studio further exploring the very same visual concepts with which she began. You can learn more about Kusama’s life from the material we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, and if you want to go all the way into her world, there’s always her autobiography, Infinity Net.

The MoMA Teaches You How to Paint Like Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning & Other Abstract Painters

New Hilma af Klint Documentary Explores the Life & Art of the Trailblazing Abstract Artist

Japanese Computer Artist Makes “Digital Mondrians” in 1964: When Giant Mainframe Computers Were First Used to Create Art

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beauty of Traditional Japan

Steve Martin on How to Look at Abstract Art

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Wes Anderson Re-Creates The Truman Show, Armageddon & Out of Sight as Stage Plays Performed by the Cast of Rushmore (1999)

in Comedy, Film, Television | April 18th, 2023

Nominees of the 1999 MTV Movie Awards included Adam Sandler, Liv Tyler, Chris Tucker, and Jennifer Love Hewitt to mention just a few of the names in a veritable who’s-who of turn-of-the-millennium American pop culture. But for the teenage cinephiles watching that night, the highlight of the broadcast was surely a set of brief skits performed by “the Max Fischer Players.” Directed by Wes Anderson, who had been named Best New Filmmaker during the ceremony of three years before, they present low-budget but high-spirited interpretations of three of the motion pictures up for honors: Out of Sight, The Truman Show, and Armageddon.

Having been a teenage cinephile myself at the time, I can tell you that none of those movies made as much an impact on me as Anderson’s own Rushmore, which introduced the hyper-ambitious young slacker Max Fischer to the world. In it, Max and his players adapt Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, and later put on an elaborate (and explosive) pastiche of various Vietnam War pictures.

Twenty-five years ago, few of us had identified in the painstakingly ramshackle look and feel of these productions the seed of what would grow into Anderson’s signature aesthetic. But it was clear that, if the Max Fischer Players method were applied to the Hollywood blockbusters of the day, amusing incongruity would result.

These skits prominently feature Mason Gamble and Sara Tanaka, both of whom retired from acting a few years after giving their memorable performances in Rushmore. But Jason Schwartzman, who will no doubt forever be identified with Max Fischer, has remained an active member of Anderson’s own group of players, and even plays a starring role once again in Anderson’s new film Asteroid City, which comes out this summer. The Max Fisher Players’ parodies were included on the DVD of Rushmore released by the Criterion Collection — an honor still denied, one might add, to the recipient of the 1999 MTV Movie Award for Best Movie, There’s Something About Mary. (But not to Armageddon, which just goes to show how unpredictable the favor of cinephilia can be.)

via Reddit

Wes Anderson Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Distinctive Filmmaking Style

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Commercials: A Playlist of 8 Short Andersonian Works

Wes Anderson Goes Sci-Fi in 1950s America: Watch the Trailer for His New Film Asteroid City

Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inaugural Broadcast (August 1, 1981)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Introduction to the Painting That Changed Georgia O’Keeffe’s Career: Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills

in Art | April 17th, 2023

Public recognition is an all too rare reward for many artists, but it carries with it a risk of being widely misunderstood.

Georgia O’Keeffe gained renown for her large-scale flower paintings in the 1920s, selling six images of calla lilies for $25,000.

Her husband Alfred Stieglitz, an influential photographer and gallery owner 24 years her senior, created a sensation when he exhibited these floral images alongside his sensuous nude portraits of her, fomenting an erotic association that has been near impossible to shake.

O’Keefe maintained that the close-up flower views were abstractions, similar in spirit to the modernist photographs of her husband’s contemporaries Edward Weston and Paul Strand, but as art historian Randall C. Griffin points out, Stieglitz was inclined to see things differently.

Stieglitz and his circle belonged to a tradition that used themes of sexuality in their art as a declaration of being avant-garde. Stieglitz read virtually all of Freud’s books, as well as Havelock Ellis’s six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which argues that art is driven by sexual energy. Thus, for Stieglitz, sex was a liberating source of creativity. O’Keeffe may or may not have thought of Freud when she painted her flowers, but the psychologist’s writings were a cultural touchstone at the time, with his ideas widely known in a simplified fashion.

Curator James Payne, creator of the Great Art Explained web series, brings this context to his examination of O’Keeffe’s 1935 painting Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills.

By the time she began work on it, O’Keeffe had forged a deep, spiritual connection to the New Mexican desert. Its alien landscape offered respite from Stieglitz’s extra-marital affairs and the mental health issues that had plagued her in New York.

The Southwest provided abundant fresh subject matter. She drove her Ford Model A for miles across the desert, stopping to collect the bleached bones of animals who had perished under drought conditions. Unlike Farm Security Agency photographers such as Arthur Rothstein, O’Keeffe was not interested in using these bones to document the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, or even to meditate on mortality:

The bones do not symbolize death to me. They are shapes that I enjoy. It never occurs to me that they have anything to do with death. They’re very lively.…They please me, and I have enjoyed them very much in relation to the sky.

Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses is a lovely still life, a study in white. The same skull shows up transposed (in Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue) against a red, white, and blue background.

“I’ll tell you what went on in my so-called mind when I did my paintings of animal skulls” she told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins in a 1974 interview:

There was a lot of talk in New York then—during the late twenties and early thirties—about the Great American Painting. It was like the Great American Novel. People wanted to ‘do’ the American scene. I had gone back and forth across the country several times by then, and some of the current ideas about the American scene struck me as pretty ridiculous. To them, the American scene was a dilapidated house with a broken-down buckboard out front and a horse that looked like a skeleton. I knew America was very rich, very lush. Well, I started painting my skulls about this time. First, I put a horse’s skull against a blue-cloth background, and then I used a cow’s skull. I had lived in the cattle country—Amarillo was the crossroads of cattle shipping, and you could see the cattle coming in across the range for days at a time. For goodness’ sake, I thought, the people who talk about the American scene don’t know anything about it. So, in a way, that cow’s skull was my joke on the American scene, and it gave me pleasure to make it in red, white, and blue.

Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills presents a more nuanced vision than Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, and represents a turning point in O’Keeffe’s art.

As Payne observes, the dark clouds gathered above the red hills visible from her desert ranch promise a much longed-for rain.

The hollyhock she plucked from her garden is a symbol of rebirth and fertility.

Their floating placement has drawn comparisons to Surrealism, but O’Keefe asserted that the composition “just sort of grew together”, telling art historian Katherine Kuh, “I was in the surrealist show when I’d never heard of surrealism. I’m not a joiner.”

Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills met with acclaim when it was shown at Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in 1936. The New Yorker hailed it as one of O’Keeffe’s most brilliant paintings in form and execution, and Stieglitz’s friend, painter Marsden Hartley, might well have intuited something about the direction O’Keeffe was heading in when he described the image as “a transfiguration:”

…as if the bone, divested of its physical usages—had suddenly learned of its own esoteric significance, had discovered the meaning of its own integration through the processes of disintegration, ascending to the sphere of its own reality, in the presence of skies that are not troubled, being accustomed to superior spectacles—and of hills that are ready to receive.

The Real Georgia O’Keeffe: The Artist Reveals Herself in Vintage Documentary Clips

Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art, a Short Documentary on the Painter Narrated by Gene Hackman

How Georgia O’Keeffe Became Georgia O’Keeffe: An Animated Video Tells the Story

Browse Paintings, Photos, Papers & More in the Archive of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, America’s Original Art Power Couple

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Discover the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, “the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar” (1416)

in Art, Books, History | April 17th, 2023

We don’t hear the phrase “very rich hours” as much as we used to, back when it was occasionally employed in the headlines of magazine articles or the titles of novels. Today, it’s much to be doubted whether even one in a hundred thousand of us could begin to identify its referent — or at least it was much to be doubted until an elaborate New York Times online feature appeared just last week. Written by art critic Jason Farago, “Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar” takes a close look at the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a late-medieval illuminated manuscript created (between 1412 and 1416) for the bibliophilic John, Duke of Berry by a trio of Flemish artists known as the Limbourg brothers.

The word “hours” in the title refers not to units of time, exactly, but to the prayers that believers must speak at certain hours: this is a book of hours, a hugely popular form of manuscript in the Middle Ages. But compared to most surviving books of hours, Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is, well, very rich indeed.

Farago calls it “the finest surviving manuscript of the fifteenth century, a monument of International Gothic book arts. Really, the thing is just stupefying. Its pictures combine astounding detail with exuberant, sometimes irrational spatial organization.” But “like every book of hours, it opens with a calendar. And here, on its first 12 spreads — with one full-page illustration per month — the Limbourgs did their most painstaking work.”

Here we have just five of the images from the calendar at the head of the Très Riches Heures. You can see the rest at the site of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which offers its “intimate Northern vision of nature with Italianate modes of figural articulation” in downloadable digital form. These detailed images constitute a window into not just medieval life (or at least an idealized version thereof), but also the medieval relationship to time. “Time appears to be a cycle,” writes Farago. “It repeats year after year.” And “months rather than years were the meat of these cycles. Seasons. Harvests. Feasts. Constellations.” All this “could be perceived with the senses. In snowfall, in star signs. In the bright colors you wore in May, in the furs you wore in December.”

On top of this palpably cyclical experience of time, monotheistic religions introduced the notion that “time progressed onward,” and indeed “offered a one-way ticket to the end of days.” Coexisting in the medieval mind, these two contrasting modes of perception gave rise to the sort of calendars created and used in that era. No finer example exists than the Très Riches Heures, created as it was not long — at least in historical time — before the approach of modernity, with its ever more finely divided and rigorously calibrated chronometric regimes. Our hours are much more clearly demarcated than the Duke of Berry’s; whether they’re richer is another question entirely.

Visit the New York Times’ feature on the beautiful medieval manuscript here. If you’re interested in delving deeper, also see the free book (courtesy of the Met Museum) The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry.

The Medieval Masterpiece the Book of Kells Has Been Digitized and Put Online

Discover the Sarajevo Haggadah, the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript That Survived the Inquisition, Holocaust & Yugoslav Wars

How Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beautiful, Centuries-Old Craft

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Manuscript in the World

Why Butt Trumpets & Other Bizarre Images Appeared in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover the Sarajevo Haggadah, the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript That Survived the Inquisition, Holocaust & Yugoslav Wars

in Art, History, Museums, Religion | April 14th, 2023

If you attended a seder this month, you no doubt read aloud from the Haggadah, a Passover tradition in which everyone at the table takes turns recounting the story of Exodus.

There’s no definitive edition of the Haggadah. Every Passover host is free to choose the version of the familiar story they like best, to cut and paste from various retellings, or even take a crack at writing their own.

As David Zvi Kalman, publisher of the annual, illustrated Asufa Haggadah told the New York Times, “The Haggadah in America is like Kit Kats in Japan. It’s a product that accepts a wide variety of flavors. It’s probably the most accessible Jewish book on the market.”

21st century adaptations have included Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Seinfeld, Harry Potter, and Curb Your Enthusiasm themed Haggadot.

There are Haggadot tailored toward feminists, Libertarians, interfaith families, and advocates of the Black Lives Matter movement.

One of the oldest is the miraculously-preserved Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript created by anonymous artists and scribes in Barcelona around 1350.

Though it bears the coats of arms of two prominent families, its provenance is not definitively known.

Leora Bromberg of the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library notes that it is “especially striking for its colorful illuminations of biblical and Passover ritual scenes and its beautifully hand-scribed Sephardic letterforms:”

As precious as this Haggadah was, and still is, Haggadot are books that are meant to be used in festive and messy settings—sharing the table with food, wine, family and guests. The Sarajevo Haggadah was no exception to this; its pages show evidence that it was well used, with doodles, food and red wine stains marking its pages.

Some brave soul took care to smuggle this essential volume out with them when 1492’s Alhambra Decree expelled all Jews from Spain.

The manuscript’s travels thereafter are shrouded in mystery.

It survived the Roman Inquisition by virtue of its contents. As per a 1609 note jotted on one of its pages, nothing therein seemed to be aimed against the Church.

More handwritten notes place the book in the north of Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries, though its new owner is not mentioned by name.

Eventually, it found its way to the hands of a man named Joseph Kohen who sold it to the National Museum of Sarajevo in 1894.

It was briefly sent to Vienna, where a government official replaced its original medieval binding with cardboard covers, chopping its 142 bleached calfskin vellum down to 6.5” x 9” in order to fit them.

It had a narrow escape in 1942, when a high-ranking Nazi official, Johann Fortner, visited the museum, intent on confiscating the priceless manuscript.

The chief librarian, Dervis Korkut, a Muslim, secreted the Haggadah inside his clothing, reputedly telling Fortner that museum staff had turned it over to another German officer.

After that folklore takes over. Korkut either stowed it under the floorboards of his home, buried it under a tree, gave it to an imam in a remote village for safekeeping, or hid it on a shelf in the museum’s library.

Whatever the case, it reappeared in the museum, safe and sound, in 1945.

The museum was ransacked during 1992’s Siege of Sarajevo, but the thieves, ignorant of the Haggadah’s worth, left it on the floor. It was removed to an underground bank vault, where it survived untouched, even as the museum sustained heavy artillery damage.

The president of Bosnia presented it to Jewish community leaders during a Seder three years later.

Shortly thereafter, the head of Sarajevo’s Jewish Community sought the United Nations’ support to restore the Haggadah, and house it in a suitably secure, climate-controlled setting.

A number of facsimiles have been created, and the original codex once again resides in the museum where it is stored under the prescribed conditions, and displayed on rare special occasions, as “physical proof of the openness of a society in which fear of the Other has never been an incurable disease.”

UNESCO added it to its Memory of the World Register in 2017, “praising the courage of the people who, even in the darkest of times during World War II, appreciated its importance to Jewish Heritage, as well as its embodiment of diversity and intercultural harmony depicted in its illustration:”

Regardless of their own religious beliefs, they risked their lives and did all in their power to safeguard the Haggadah for future generations. Its destruction would be a loss for humanity. Protecting it is a symbol of the values which we hold dear.

For those interested, the Sarajevo Haggadah figures centrally in the bestselling 2008 novel People of the Book, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. You can read an New Times review here.

Turning the Pages of an Illuminated Medieval Manuscript: An ASMR Museum Experience

The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Has Been Digitized and Put Online

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds

in Art, Books | April 14th, 2023

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a national panic). After the occurrence, reports Phil Klass, the actor remarked, “I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.”

Surely Welles knew that is precisely why the broadcast had the effect it did, especially in such an anxious pre-war climate. The 1898 novel also startled its first readers with its verisimilitude, playing on a late Victorian sense of apocalyptic doom as the turn-of-the-century approached.

But what contemporary circumstances eight years later, we might wonder, fueled the imagination of Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose 1906 illustrations of the novel you can see here? Wells himself approved of these incredible drawings, praising them before their publication and saying, “Alvim Corrêa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.”

Indeed they capture the novel’s uncanny dread. Martian tripods loom, ghastly and cartoonish, above blasted realist landscapes and scenes of panic. In one illustration, a grotesque, tentacled Martian ravishes a nude woman. In a surrealist drawing of an abandoned London above, eyes protrude from the buildings, and a skeletal head appears above them. The alien technology often appears clumsy and unsophisticated, which contributes to the generally terrifying absurdity that emanates from these finely rendered plates.

Alvim Corrêa was a Brazilian artist living in Brussels and struggling for recognition in the European art world. His break seemed to come when the War of the Worlds illustrations were printed in a large-format, limited French edition of the book, with each of the 500 copies signed by the artist himself.

Unfortunately, Corrêa’s tuberculosis killed him four years later. His War of the Worlds drawings did not bring him fame in his lifetime or after, but his work has been cherished since by a devoted cult following. The original prints you see here remained with the artist’s family until a sale of 31 of them in 1990. (They went up for sale again recently, it seems.) You can see many more, as well as scans from the book and a poster announcing the publication, at Monster Brains and the British Library site.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Edward Gorey Illustrates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inimitable Gothic Style (1960)

The War of the Worlds: Orson Welles’ 1938 Radio Drama That Petrified a Nation

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How to Spot a Communist by Using Literary Criticism: A 1955 Manual from the U.S. Military

in History, Literature | April 13th, 2023

In 1955, the United States was entering the final stages of McCarthyism or the Second Red Scare. During this low point in American history, the US government looked high and low for Communist spies. Entertainers, educators, government employees and union members were often viewed with suspicion, and many careers and lives were destroyed by the flimsiest of allegations. Congress, the FBI, and the US military, they all fueled the 20th century version of the Salem Witch trials, partly by encouraging Americans to look for Communists in unsuspecting places.

In the short Armed Forces Information Film above, you can see the dynamic at work. Some Communists were out in the open; however, others “worked more silently.” So how to find those hidden communists?

Not to worry, the US military had that covered. In 1955, the U.S. First Army Headquarters prepared a manual called How to Spot a Communist. Later published in popular American magazines, the propaganda piece warned readers, “there is no fool-proof system in spotting a Communist.” “U.S. Communists come from all walks of life, profess all faiths, and exercise all trades and professions. In addition, the Communist Party, USA, has made concerted efforts to go underground for the purpose of infiltration.” And yet the pamphlet adds, letting readers breathe a sigh of relief, “there are, fortunately, indications that may give him away. These indications are often subtle but always present, for the Communist, by reason of his “faith” must act and talk along certain lines.” In short, you’ll know a Communist not by how he walks, but how he talks. Asking citizens to become literary critics for the sake of national security, the publication told readers to watch out for the following:

While a preference for long sentences is common to most Communist writing, a distinct vocabulary provides the more easily recognized feature of the “Communist Language.” Even a superficial reading of an article written by a Communist or a conversation with one will probably reveal the use of some of the following expressions: integrative thinking, vanguard, comrade, hootenanny, chauvinism, book-burning, syncretistic faith, bourgeois-nationalism, jingoism, colonialism, hooliganism, ruling class, progressive, demagogy, dialectical, witch-hunt, reactionary, exploitation, oppressive, materialist.

This list, selected at random, could be extended almost indefinitely. While all of the above expressions are part of the English language, their use by Communists is infinitely more frequent than by the general public…

Rather chillingly, the pamphlet also warned that Communists revealed themselves if and when they talked about “McCarthyism,” “violation of civil rights,” “racial or religious discrimination” or “peace.” In other words, they were guilty if they suggested that the government was overstepping its bounds.

According to Corliss Lamont’s book, Freedom Is As Freedom Does, the First Army withdrew the pamphlet after Murray Kempton slammed it in The New York Post and The New York Times wrote its own scathing op-ed. In 1955, the press could take those risks. The year before, Joseph Welch had faced up to Joe McCarthy, asking with his immortal words, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared our site in 2013.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Bertolt Brecht Testifies Before the House Un-American Activities Committee (1947)

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The History of Ancient Japan: The Story of How Japan Began, Told by Those Who Witnessed It (297‑1274)

in History | April 13th, 2023

Here in the twenty-first century, many of us around the world think of Japan as essentially unchanging. We do so not without cause, given how much of what goes on there, including the operation of certain businesses, has been going on for centuries and centuries. But the political, cultural, religious, economic, and ethnic composition of the civilization we’ve long known as Japan has, in fact, transformed a great deal over the course of its existence. Some of the most dramatic changes occurred between the third and thirteenth centuries, the span of time covered by the video above.

“How Japan Began” comes from Voices of the Past, a Youtube channel previously featured here on Open Culture for its videos on a first-hand account of the destruction of Pompeii, an ancient Chinese historian’s description of the Roman Empire, and how the first Japanese visitor to the United States and Europe saw life there.

In telling the story of how ancient Japan (though mostly in a time span that falls within Europe’s Middle Ages) assumed something like its current form, the video adheres to its usual method of directly incorporating as many primary or close-to-primary sources as possible: the Chinese Records or History of the Three Kingdoms, eighth-century court edicts and national histories, the thirteenth-century émigré Chinese Buddhist monk Mugaku Sogen.

As for the rest of the narration, Voices of the Past credits Thomas Lockley, co-author of the book African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan. Yasuke, whom we’ve also featured before, arrived in Japan in 1579, three centuries after the events chronicled in “How Japan Begin” — and thus quite deep indeed into the history of a volatile land of religious shifts, political ambitions, and (voluntary or involuntary) cultural exchanges, all amid an internal state oscillating between fragmentation and consolidation as well as an ever-changing relationship to the world at large. We can’t say what mixture of stability and instability will characterize Japan’s next millennium, but we can hope its future chroniclers are up to the task.

When a UFO Came to Japan in 1803: Discover the Legend of Utsuro-bune

The 17th Century Japanese Samurai Who Sailed to Europe, Met the Pope & Became a Roman Citizen

Hear the First Japanese Visitor to the United States & Europe Describe Life in the West (1860–1862)

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Color Photos: See the Stereoscopic Photography of T. Enami

A Japanese Illustrated History of America (1861): Features George Washington Punching Tigers, John Adams Slaying Snakes & Other Fantastic Scenes

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How to Paint Like Yayoi Kusama, the Avant-Garde Japanese Artist

Wes Anderson Re-Creates The Truman Show, Armageddon & Out of Sight as Stage Plays Performed by the Cast of Rushmore (1999)

An Introduction to the Painting That Changed Georgia O’Keeffe’s Career: Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills

Discover the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, “the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar” (1416)

Discover the Sarajevo Haggadah, the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript That Survived the Inquisition, Holocaust & Yugoslav Wars

Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds

How to Spot a Communist by Using Literary Criticism: A 1955 Manual from the U.S. Military

The History of Ancient Japan: The Story of How Japan Began, Told by Those Who Witnessed It (297‑1274)

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