Behold Illustrations of Every Shakespeare Play Created by Artificial Intelligence

in Art, Technology, Theatre | November 11th, 2022


William Shakespeare’s plays have endured not just because of their inherent dramatic and linguistic qualities, but also because each era has found its own way of envisioning and re-envisioning them. The technology involved in stage productions has changed over the past four centuries, of course, but so has the technology involved in art itself. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture an archive of 3,000 illustrations of Shakespeare’s complete works going back to the mid-nineteenth century. That site was the PhD project of Cardiff University’s Michael Goodman, who has recently completed another digital Shakespeare project, this time using artificial intelligence: Paint the Picture to the Word.

“Every image collected here has been generated by Stable Diffusion, a powerful text-to-image AI,” writes Goodman on this new project’s About page. “To create an image using this technology a user simply types a description of what they want to see into a text box and the AI will then produce several images corresponding to that initial textual prompt,” much as with the also-new AI-based art generator DALL-E.




Each of the many images Goodman created is inspired by a Shakespeare play. “Some of the illustrations are expressionistic (King John, Julius Caesar), while some are more literal (Merry Wives of Windsor).” All “offer a visual idea or a gloss on the plays: Henry VIII, with the central characters represented in fuzzy felt, is grimly ironic, while in Pericles both Mariana and her father are seen through a watery prism, echoing that play’s concern with sea imagery.”

Selecting one of his many generated images per play, Goodman has created an entire digital exhibition whose works never repeat a style or a sensibility, whether with a dog-centric nineteen-eighties collage representing Two Gentlemen of Verona, a starkly near-abstract vision of Macbeth‘s Weird Sisters or Much Ado About Nothing rendered as a modern-day rom-com. Theater companies could hardly fail to take notice of these images’ potential as promotional posters, but Paint the Picture to the Word also demonstrates something larger: Shakespeare’s plays have long stimulated human intelligence, but they turn out to work on artificial intelligence as well. Visit Paint the Picture to the Word here.

Related content:

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Folger Shakespeare Library Puts 80,000 Images of Literary Art Online, and They’re All Free to Use

Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7 Famous Paintings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

DALL-E, the New AI Art Generator, Is Now Open for Everyone to Use

An AI-Generated Painting Won First Prize at a State Fair & Sparked a Debate About the Essence of 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.

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Cats in Japanese Woodblock Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Animals Came to Star in Its Popular Art

in Art, History | November 10th, 2022


Few countries love cats as much as Japan does, and none expresses that love so clearly in its various forms of art. Though not eternal, the Japanese inclination toward all things feline does extend deeper into history than some of us might assume. “In the sixth century, Buddhist monks travelled from China to Japan,” writes Philip Kennedy at Illustration Chronicles. On these journeys, they brought scriptures, drawings, and relics – items that they hoped would help them introduce the teachings of Buddhism to the large island nation.” They also brought cats, in part as carriers of good luck and in part for their ability to “guard the sacred texts from the hungry mice that had stowed on board their ships.”


Buddhism made a lasting mark on Japanese culture, but those cats practically overtook it. “Today, cats can be found nearly everywhere in Japan,” Kennedy writes. “From special cafés and shrines to entire cat islands. Indeed the owners of one Japanese train station were so enamored with their cat that they appointed her stationmaster.”




By the mid-nineteenth century, the ukiyo-e woodblock print master Utagawa Kuniyoshi could keep a studio overrun with cats and not seem too terribly eccentric for it. “His fondness for felines crept into his work, and they appear in many of his finest prints. Sometimes they crop up as characters from well-known stories; other times, they are beautifully expressive studies.”

Kuniyoshi made his name illustrating tales of historical warriors, but his artistic capacity also encompassed “everything from landscapes and animals to ghostly apparitions and scenes from popular kabuki theatre.” When the Tokugawa Shogunate sensed its power declining in the 1840s, it banned such “luxuries” as the depictions of kabuki actors (as well as geisha).

To accommodate that demand, Kuniyoshi created humanoid cats endowed with features resembling well-known personages of the era. This in addition to his series Neko no ateji, or “cat homophones,” with cats arranged to spell the names of fish, and Cats Suggested As The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a feline parody of Hiroshige’s earlier Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Rat-eating aside, cats aren’t known as especially useful animals, but many a Japanese artist can attest to their inspirational value even today.

A collection of Kuniyoshi’s prints featuring cats can be found in the book, Cats in Ukiyo-e: Japanese Woodblock Print.

via Illustration Chronicles

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Two Cats Keep Trying to Get Into a Japanese Art Museum … and Keep Getting Turned Away: Meet the Thwarted Felines, Ken-chan and Go-chan

Discover the KattenKabinet: Amsterdam’s Museum Devoted to Works of Art Featuring Cats

In 1183, a Chinese Poet Describes Being Domesticated by His Own Cats

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.

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How a Mondrian Painting Has Accidentally Hung Upside-Down for 75 Years

in Art | October 31st, 2022

Piet Mondrian’s New York City I was recently discovered to have been hanging upside-down on display for the past 75 years, which made for a cultural story practically designed to go viral. Unsurprisingly, some of those keeping it in circulation have read it as proof positive of the fraudulence of “modern art.” How good could Mondrian be, after all, if nobody else over the past three-quarters of a century could tell that his painting wasn’t right-side-up? That isn’t a cogent criticism, of course: New York City I dates from 1941, by which time Mondrian’s work had long since become austere even by the standards of abstract art, employing only lines and blocks of color.

“The way the picture is currently hung shows the multicolored lines thickening at the bottom, suggesting an extremely simplified version of a skyline,” writes the Guardian‘s Philip Oltermann.




But “the similarly named and same-sized oil painting, New York City, which is on display in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, has the thickening of lines at the top,” and “a photograph of Mondrian’s studio, taken a few days after the artist’s death and published in American lifestyle magazine Town and Country in June 1944, also shows the same picture sitting on an easel the other way up.” It was just such clues that Susanne Meyer-Büser, curator of the art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia, put together to diagnose its current mis-orientation.

Regardless, New York City I will remain as it is. The eight-decade-old strips of painted tape with which Mondrian assembled its black, yellow, red, and blue grid “are already extremely loose and hanging by a thread,” said Meyer-Büser. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction.” The artist’s signature would normally be a distraction in an inverted work, but since he didn’t consider this particular work finished, he never actually signed it — and if he had, of course, it would have been hung correctly in the first place. In any case, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine having a rich aesthetic experience with an upside-down Mondrian; could we say the same about, for instance, an upside-down Last Supper?

Related content:

Watch the Dutch Paint “the Largest Mondrian Painting in the World”

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What Happens When a Cheap Ikea Print Gets Presented as Fine Art in a Museum

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.

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FAMOUS ARTIST DIES PENNILESS AND ALL ALONE: The Met Museum’s Fascinating Archive of Artists’ Death Notices

in Art, History, Life, Museums | October 31st, 2022

Oh to go behind the scenes at a world class museum, to discover treasures that the public never sees.

Among the most compelling – and unexpected –  at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are a pair of crumbing scrapbooks, their pages thick with yellowing obituaries and death notices for a wide array of late 19th and early 20th-century painters, sculptors, and photographers.

Some names, like Auguste Rodin or Jules Breton, are still familiar to many 21st-century art lovers.

Others, like Francis Davis Millet, who served as a Union Army drummer boy during the Civil War and perished on the Titanic, were much admired in their day, but have largely faded from memory.




The vast majority are requiems of a sort for those who toiled in obscurity. They may not have received much attention in life, but the circumstances of their deaths by suicide, murder, or bizarre accident had the whiff of the penny dreadful, a quality that could move a lot of newspapers. The deceased’s addresses were published, along with their names. Any tragic detail was sure to be heightened for effect, the tawdrier the better.

As the Met’s Managing Archivist, Jim Moske, who unearthed the scrapbooks four years ago while prowling for historic material for the museum’s 150th anniversary celebration, writes in Lit Hub:

Typical of the era’s crass tabloid journalism, they were crafted to wring maximum drama out of misfortune, and to excite and fix the attention of readers susceptible to raw emotional appeal and voyeurism. Their authors drew upon and reinforced stereotypes of artists as indigent, debauched, obsessed with greatness, eccentric, or suffering from mental illness.

It took Moske a fair amount of digging to identify the creator of these scrapbooks, one Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly.

D’Hervilly spent a decade working in various administrative capacities before being promoted to Assistant Curator of Paintings.  A dedicated employee and talented artist himself, D’Hervilly put his calligraphic skills to work crafting illuminated manuscript-style keepsakes for the families of recently deceased trustees and locker room signs.

In a recent lecture hosted by the Victorian Society of New York, Moske noted that D’Hervilly understood that the museum could use newspapers for self-documentation as well promotion.

To that end, the Met maintained accounts with a number of clippings bureaus, media monitoring services whose young female workers pored over hundreds of daily newspapers in search of target phrases and names.

Think of them as an analog, paid precursor to Google Alerts.

Many of the clippings in the scrapbook bear the initials “D’H” or D’Hervilly’s surname, scrawled in the same blue crayon the National Press Intelligence Company and other clippings bureaus used to underline the target phrase.

Moske theorizes that D’Hervilly may have been using the Met’s account to pursue a personal interest in collecting these types of notices:

Newly promoted to curate masterpiece paintings, had he given up for good his own artistic ambition? Was the composition of these morbid tomes a veiled acknowledgement of the passing away of his creative aspiration? Did he identify with the hundreds of uncelebrated artists whose fates the news clippings recorded in grim detail? Perhaps, instead, his intent was more mundane, and compiling them was an expedient for collecting useful biographical data as he catalogued pictures in the Met collection that were made by recently deceased artists.

Many of the hundreds of clippings he preserved appear to be the only traces remaining of these artists’ creative existence on this earth.

After D’Hervilly suffered a fatal heart attack while getting ready to leave for work on the morning April 7, 1919, his colleagues took over his pet project, adding to the scrapbooks for another next ten years.

In researching the scrapbooks’ author’s life, Moske was able to truffle up scant evidence of D’Hervilly’s extracurricular creative output – just one painting in a catalogue of an 1887 National Academy of Design exhibition – but a 1919 clipping, dutifully pasted (posthumously, of course) into one of the scrapbooks, identified the longtime Met employee as a “SLAVE OF DUTY AT ART MUSEUM”, who never took time off for holidays or even luncheon, preferring to eat at his desk.

via Lit Hub

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

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An Introduction to the Painting of Artemisia Gentileschi, the First Woman Admitted to Florence’s Accademia di Arte del Disegno (1593-1653)

in Art, Gender | October 28th, 2022

The works will speak for themselves. – Artemisia Gentileschi

The praise Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi garnered during her lifetime is astonishing.

Not because the work isn’t deserving of the attention, but rather, because she was a young woman in 17th-century Florence.

The first female to be accepted into Florence’s prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, she was collected by the Medicis and respected by her peers – almost all of them male.

Her style was as dramatic as the subjects she depicted.




One of her most compelling ones, covered in Allison Leigh’s animated TED-Ed lesson, above, comes from an apocryphal book of the Old Testament. It concerns Judith, a comely Jewish widow who, assisted by her maidservant, beheaded the loutish Assyrian general Holofernes, whose forces threatened her town.

This story has attracted many artists over time: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Cristofano Allori, Goya, Klimt, Franz von Stuck, and Caravaggio, the painter whom Artemisia most sought to emulate as a teen.

Artemisia visited Judith and Holofernes several times throughout her career.

Her first attempt, at around the age of 19 or 20, features two healthy-looking young women, their sleeves sensibly rolled so as not to dirty their bright dresses, a prospect that seems much more likely than it does in Caravaggio’s version, painted some 15 years early.

Caravaggio’s Judith is brave, but maidenly, a bit reticent in her snowy frock.

Artemisia’s is a bad ass, sword casually balanced on her shoulder as she checks that the coast is clear before escaping with a basket containing her victim’s head. Although she prayed for the success of her endeavor, this is a woman who might not have needed god’s help to “crush the enemies” arrayed against her people.

Things get even more visceral in Artemisia’s third depiction, painted perhaps 10 years later, after she had married and moved to Florence.

Art historian Sister Wendy Beckett, an unabashed fan, describes the muscular and bloody scene in Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces:

Gentileschi shows Judith gripping the head and wielding the sword with a ferocity of concentration as she applies herself to the grisly but necessary task, like a practical housewife gutting a fish (there is none of that one stroke and it’s off, beloved of the male painter. The maid might feel qualms, not Judith… The horrified face of the butchered male is balanced by the grimly composed face of the butchering female.

Several years further on, Artemisia again imagined Judith’s flight, in a scene so theatrical, it could be a production still.

It’s easy to imagine that Artemisia’s talent was carefully cultivated by her artist father, Orazio Gentileschi, but when it comes to the ferocity of her depictions, the speculation tends to take on a darker cast.

The TED-Ed lesson brings up her rape as a teenager, at the hands of her father’s friend, fellow painter Agostono Tassi. Leigh also provides legal and societal context, something that is often missing from more sensational allusions to this traumatic event.

If you engage with the TED-Ed’s lesson plan more deeply, you’ll find a link to an article on novelist Joy McCullough’s research into 400-year-old court transcripts prior to describing Artemisia’s rape trial in 2019 Blood Water Paint, as well as historian Elizabeth S. Cohen‘s essay The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: a Rape as History:

Combining irresistibly sex, violence, and genius, like the story of Heloise and Abelard, the rape of Artemisia Gentileschi has been retold many times. So often indeed, and with such relish that this episode overshadows much discussion of the painter and has come to distort our vision of her. In the past as well as in the recent renewal of interest in Artemisia, biographers and critics have had trouble seeing beyond the rape. In her case, the old-fashioned notion that women are defined essentially by their sexual histories continues to reign, as if a girl who suffers assault must be understood as thereafter a primarily sexual creature.

Explore a gallery of Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings here.

As long as I live I will have control over my being. – Artemisia Gentileschi

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

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Watch Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil, a Documentary Streaming Free Online

in Art, Film | October 28th, 2022

As previously mentioned here on OC, the film distributor Kino Lorber has been quietly making complete art films available to stream on YouTube and its own website. In recent weeks, they’ve uploaded to YouTube the documentaries, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint and M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity. Now comes Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil, which they describe as follows:

In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role. In preparation for the exhibition, a team of Dutch art historians crisscrosses the globe to unravel the secrets of his art. They use special infrared cameras to examine the sketches beneath the paint, in the hope of discovering more about the artist’s intentions. They also attempt to establish which of the paintings can be attributed with certainty to Bosch himself, and which to his pupils or followers. The experts shuttle between Den Bosch, Madrid and Venice, cutting their way through the art world’s tangle of red tape, in a battle against the obstacle of countless egos and conflicting interests. Not every museum is prepared to allow access to their precious art works.

You can find Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil listed in our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our larger collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

To watch more free-to-stream Kino Lorber films, click here.

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DALL-E, the New AI Art Generator, Is Now Open for Everyone to Use

in Art, Technology | October 18th, 2022


If you spend any time at all on social media, you’ll have glimpsed the work of DALL-E, OpenAI’s now-famous artificial-intelligence engine that generate images from simple text descriptions. A velociraptor dressed like Travis Bickle, American Gothic starring Homer and Marge Simpson, that astronaut riding a horse on the moon: like any the-future-is-now moment, especially in recent years on the internet, DALL-E’s rise has produced a host of artifacts as impressive as they are ridiculous. Now you can try to top them in both of those dimensions yourself, since not just DALL-E but the new, improved, higher-resolution DALL-E 2 has just opened for public use.

“How do you use DALL-E 2?” You might well ask, and Creative Bloq has a guide for you. “The tool generates art based on text prompts,” it explains. “On the face of it, that couldn’t be more simple. Once you’ve completed the DALL-E 2 sign up to open an account, you use the program in your browser on the DALL-E 2 website. You type in a description of what you want, and DALL-E will create the image.”




Of course, some prompts produce more visually interesting results than others. The guide recommends that you consult the DALL-E 2 prompt book, which gets into how best to phrase your descriptions in order to inspire the richest combinations of subject, texture, style, and form.

“Even the creators of DALL-E 2 don’t know what the tool knows and doesn’t know. Instead, users have to work out what it’s capable of doing and how to get it to do what they want.” And indeed, that’s the part of the fun. DALL-E’s own interface recommends that you “start with a detailed description,” and with a little experimentation you’ll discover that specificity is key. The renderings of “an eight-bit Nintendo game designed by Hiroshige” and “a cyberpunk downtown Los Angeles scene painted by Rembrandt” strike me as credible enough for a first effort, but adding just a few more words opens up entirely new realms of surprise and incongruity.

Just above, we have two of DALL-E’s infinitely many possible attempts to visualize “the cover of an old Ernest Hemingway pulp novel about the adventures of David Bowie.” Though the designs look entirely plausible, the titles highlight the technology’s already-notorious inability to come up with intelligible text. Other limitations of the newly public DALL-E, according to Ars Technica’s Benj Edwards, include the requirement to provide your phone number and other information in order to sign up, the ownership of the generated images by OpenAI, and the necessity to purchase “credits” to generate more images after you’ve run through your initial free 50. Still, there’s nothing quite like typing in a few words and summoning up works of art no one has ever seen before to make you feel like you’re living in the twenty-first century. You can sign up here.

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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.

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Why Monet Painted The Same Haystacks 25 Times

in Art, History | October 6th, 2022

In the nineteen-twenties, as George Orwell remembers it, “Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population.” Along stretches of the Seine, “it was almost impossible to pick one’s way between the sketching-stools.” Legitimate or otherwise, these artists were genuine descendants of Claude Monet, at least in the sense that the latter pioneered painting en plein air, distilling art directly from the world all around him.

“When artists had to grind their own pigments or buy paints contained in fragile pig bladders,” says Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak in the video essay above, “it was much easier to work in a studio. The advent of tubes of paint, like these flexible zinc tubes invented by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a portability that made outdoor painting easy and feasible.” As usual in modernity, a development in technology enabled a development in culture, but to show what kind of possibilities had been opened up took an artist of rare vision as well as rare brazenness: more specifically, an artist like Monet.




“Obsessed, most of all, with light and color, and the ways they register in the human mind,” Monet “rejected the popular conventions of his time, which prioritized line, color, and blended brushstrokes that concealed the artist’s hand in favor of several short, thick applications of solid color placed side by side, largely unblended.” His paintings, which we now credit with launching the Impressionist movement, show us not so much colors as “color relationships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the canvas.” But then, so does real life, whose constantly changing light ensures that “every few minutes, we experience a subtly different color palette.”

For Puschak, nowhere is Monet’s artistic enterprise more clearly demonstrated than in the so-called “Haystacks.” The series consists of 25 paintings depicting just what that name suggests (and which, belonging to Monet’s neighbor in Giverny, were well placed to catch his eye), each painted at a different time of day. Each image represents Monet’s attempt to capture the light colors just as he perceived them at a particular moment, straight from nature. Taken together, they constitute “maybe the definitive expression of the Impressionist movement” — as well as a reminder that, haystack or water lily, we never truly set eyes on the same thing twice.

You can now purchase a copy of the Nerdwriter’s new book, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions.

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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.

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