When Robert Rauschenberg Asked Willem De Kooning for One of His Paintings … So That He Could Erase It

in Art | May 24th, 2018

How to make a name for one­self in the art world? Every up-and-com­ing artist has to face that intim­i­dat­ing ques­tion in one way or anoth­er, but Robert Rauschen­berg, now remem­bered as a lead­ing light of the pop art move­ment, came up with a par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable answer. When in 1953 he got the coun­ter­in­tu­itive idea to make a draw­ing not by draw­ing, but by eras­ing, he at first tried eras­ing images he’d drawn him­self. This brought him to the real­iza­tion that not only should his eras­ing con­sti­tute more than half the process — “I want­ed it to be the whole,” he lat­er said — but that, to make a real artis­tic impact, he’d have to erase the work of some­one impor­tant.

The log­i­cal choice at the time: Willem de Koon­ing, then already con­sid­ered a mas­ter of abstract expres­sion­ism. “I bought a bot­tle of Jack Daniels and went up and knocked on his door, pray­ing the whole time that he would­n’t be home,” says Rauschen­berg in the inter­view clip above, “but he was home.” Even­tu­al­ly he sold the old­er and more emi­nent artist on the idea of tak­ing a draw­ing, eras­ing it, and turn­ing that into art of his own, a pitch no doubt assist­ed by Rauschen­berg and de Koon­ing’s already friend­ly rela­tion­ship. (The already vast dif­fer­ence between their artis­tic styles also took the notion of artis­tic pat­ri­cide out of the ques­tion.)

De Koon­ing at first resist­ed, but then dou­bled down: “I want it to be some­thing I’ll miss,” Rauschen­berg remem­bers him say­ing before pick­ing out the sac­ri­fice. Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing, the result of two months of eras­ing and count­less spent erasers, “essen­tial­ly remained an under­ground, art world phe­nom­e­non for more than ten years after it was com­plet­ed.” So writes SFMOMA cura­tor Sarah Roberts in an essay on the piece. “Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, it was exclud­ed from numer­ous impor­tant solo and group exhi­bi­tions in the late 1950s and ear­ly 1960s, cru­cial years when Rauschenberg’s rep­u­ta­tion was becom­ing estab­lished inter­na­tion­al­ly.”

But slow­ly, over the years, word spread through the art media and social scenes, and now the 27-year-old Rauschen­berg’s brazen artis­tic act has a place among the prog­en­i­tors of con­cep­tu­al art. “Yes, the era­sure was an act of destruc­tion,” writes Roberts, “but as a cre­ative ges­ture it was also an act of rev­er­ence or even devotion—to de Koon­ing, to draw­ing, to art his­to­ry, and to the idea of tak­ing a risk and being open to what­ev­er comes as a result.” Though prac­ti­cal­ly unknown for quite a long time, Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing can now hard­ly be for­got­ten — which takes eras­ing a respect­ed fore­bear’s work off the table as a means of name-mak­ing for young artists today, each of whom will have to find their own way to set off a slow-burn shock.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Infer­no (1958–60)

New Robert Rauschen­berg Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Lets You Down­load Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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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The Art of Europe’s Forgotten Avant-Garde Artists Now Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, Art, History | May 23rd, 2018

Eco­nom­i­cal­ly deplet­ed but filled with the desire to pose ques­tions about the future in rad­i­cal­ly new ways, post­war Europe would prove fer­tile ground for the devel­op­ment of avant-garde art. Though that envi­ron­ment pro­duced a fair few stars over the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, their work rep­re­sents only the tip of the ice­berg: bring­ing the rest out of the depths and onto the inter­net has con­sti­tut­ed the last few years’ work for For­got­ten Her­itage. A col­lab­o­ra­tion between insti­tu­tions in Poland, Bel­gium, Croa­t­ia, Esto­nia, and Ger­many sup­port­ed by Cre­ative Europe, the project offers a data­base of Euro­pean avant-garde art — includ­ing many works still dar­ing, sur­pris­ing, or just plain bizarre — nev­er prop­er­ly pre­served and made avail­able until now.

For­got­ten Her­itage’s About page describes the pro­jec­t’s goal as the cre­ation of “an inno­v­a­tive online repos­i­to­ry fea­tur­ing digi­tised archives of Pol­ish, Croa­t­ian, Eston­ian, Bel­gian and French artists of the avant-garde move­ment occur­ring in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” meant to even­tu­al­ly con­tain “approx­i­mate­ly 8 thou­sand of sort­ed and clas­si­fied archive entries, includ­ing descrip­tive data.”

Cur­rent­ly, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Claire Voon, its site “offers vis­i­tors around 800 records to explore, from doc­u­men­ta­tion of art­works to texts.  The major­i­ty of works stem from to the ’60s and ’70s, as a time­line illus­trates, with the most recent piece dat­ing to 2005. This inter­ac­tive fea­ture, which has embed­ded links to indi­vid­ual artists’s biogra­phies and exam­ples of their art­works, is one way to explore the well-designed archive.”

For­got­ten Her­itage thus makes it easy to dis­cov­er artists pre­vi­ous­ly dif­fi­cult for even the avant-garde enthu­si­ast to encounter. Vis­i­tors can also browse the grow­ing archive by the medi­um of the work: paint­ing (like Jüri Arrak’s Artist, 1972, seen at the top of the post), instal­la­tion (Woj­ciech Bruszewski’s Visu­al­i­ty, 1980), film (Anna Kuter­a’s The Short­est Film in the World, 1975), “pho­to with inter­ven­tion” (Edi­ta Schu­bert’s Pho­ny Smile, 1997), Olav Moran’s “Konk­tal” and many more besides.

Voon cites Mari­ka Kuźmicz’s esti­mate that about 40 per­cent of it, most­ly from Bel­gian and Eston­ian artists, has nev­er before been avail­able online. Debates about whether an avant-garde still exists, in Europe or any­where else, will sure­ly con­tin­ue among observers of art, but as a vis­it to For­got­ten Her­itage’s dig­i­tal archives reveals, the avant-garde of decades past, when redis­cov­ered, retains no small amount of artis­tic vital­i­ty today.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Euro­peana Col­lec­tions, a Por­tal of 48 Mil­lion Free Art­works, Books, Videos, Arti­facts & Sounds from Across Europe

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

Enter Dig­i­tal Archives of the 1960s Fluxus Move­ment and Explore the Avant-Garde Art of John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Cale, Nam June Paik & More

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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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Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illustrations of Dante’s Inferno (1958–60)

in Art, Literature | May 23rd, 2018

Per­haps more than any oth­er post­war avant-garde Amer­i­can artist, Robert Rauschen­berg matched, and maybe exceed­ed, Mar­cel Duchamp’s puck­ish irrev­er­ence. He once bought a Willem de Koon­ing draw­ing just to erase it and once sent a telegram declar­ing that it was a por­trait of gal­lerist Iris Clert, “if I say so.” Rauschen­berg also excelled at turn­ing trash into trea­sure, repur­pos­ing the detri­tus of mod­ern life in works of art both play­ful and seri­ous, con­tin­u­ing to “address major themes of world­wide con­cern,” wrote art his­to­ri­an John Richard­son in a 1997 Van­i­ty Fair pro­file, “by uti­liz­ing tech­nol­o­gy in ever more imag­i­na­tive and inven­tive ways…. Rauschen­berg is a painter of history—the his­to­ry of now rather than then.”

What, then, pos­sessed this artist of the “his­to­ry of now” to take on a series of draw­ings between 1958 and 1960 illus­trat­ing each Can­to of Dante’s Infer­no? “Per­haps he sensed a kin­dred spir­it in Dante,” writes Gre­go­ry Gilbert at The Art News­pa­per, “that encour­aged his ver­nac­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tions of the clas­si­cal text and his rad­i­cal mix­ing of high and low cul­tures.”

Crit­ic Charles Dar­went reads Rauschenberg’s moti­va­tions through a Freudi­an lens, his Infer­no series a sub­li­ma­tion of his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and repres­sive child­hood: “The young Rauschen­berg… came to see Mod­ernist art as a vari­ant of his Tex­an par­ents’ fun­da­men­tal Chris­tian­i­ty.”

The most straight­for­ward account has Rauschen­berg con­ceiv­ing the project in order to be tak­en more seri­ous­ly as an artist. Such bio­graph­i­cal expla­na­tions tell us some­thing about the work, but we learn as much or more from look­ing at the work itself, which hap­pens to be very much a his­to­ry of now at the end of the 1950s. Though Rauschen­berg based the illus­tra­tions on John Ciardi’s 1954 trans­la­tion of the Divine Com­e­dy, they were not meant to accom­pa­ny the text but to stand on their own, the Ital­ian epic—or its famous first third—providing a back­drop of ready-made iron­ic com­men­tary on images Rauschen­berg ripped from news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines such as Life and Sports Illus­trat­ed.

“To cre­ate these col­lages,” explains MIT’s List Visu­al Arts Cen­ter, “he would use a sol­vent to adhere the images to his draw­ing sur­face, then over­lay them with a vari­ety of media, includ­ing pen, gouache (an opaque water­col­or), and pen­cil.” Steeped in a Cold War atmos­phere, the illus­tra­tions incor­po­rate fig­ures like John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who, in the 50s, Gilbert writes, “served as one of Joseph McCarthy’s polit­i­cal hench­men dur­ing the Red Scare.” We see in Rauschenberg’s col­lage draw­ings allu­sions to the Civ­il Rights move­ment and the decade’s anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia as well its reac­tionary sex­u­al pol­i­tics. “Polit­i­cal and sex­u­al con­tent… need­ed to be cod­ed,” Gilbert claims, in such an “ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive era.”

For exam­ple, we see a like­ly ref­er­ence to the artist’s gay iden­ti­ty in the Can­to XIV illus­tra­tion, above. The text “describes the pun­ish­ment of the Sodomites, who are con­demned for eter­ni­ty to walk across burn­ing sand. Rauschen­berg depicts the theme through a homo­erot­ic image of a male nude… jux­ta­posed with a red trac­ing of the artist’s own foot.” Maybe Dar­went is right to sup­pose that had Dante’s poem not exist­ed, Rauschen­berg “would have been the man to invent it”—or to invent its mid-20th cen­tu­ry visu­al equiv­a­lent. He draws atten­tion to the poem’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal cen­ter, its sub­ver­sive humor, and its den­si­ty of ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary 15th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian pol­i­tics, adapt­ing all of these qual­i­ties for moder­ni­ty.

But the illus­tra­tion of Can­to XIV—depicting “The Vio­lent Against God, Nature, and Art”—also encodes Rauschenberg’s vio­lent tram­pling of artis­tic con­ven­tion. Many crit­ics see this series as the artist’s reac­tion against Abstract Expres­sion­ism (like that of De Koon­ing). And while he “may have felt a cre­ative kin­ship with Dante,” writes Gilbert, “he also admit­ted to the art crit­ic Calvin Tomkins his impa­tience with the poet’s self-right­eous moral­i­ty, a state­ment like­ly direct­ed against this Can­to.” Like his 1953 Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing, Rauschenberg’s Infer­no draw­ings also per­form an act of erasure—or the cre­ation of a palimpsest, with Dante’s poem scratched over by the artist’s wild, child­like strokes.

In recog­ni­tion of the way these illus­tra­tions repur­pose, rather than accom­pa­ny, the Infer­no, MoMA recent­ly com­mis­sioned an edi­tion of Rauschenberg’s 34 draw­ings, accom­pa­nied not by the straight trans­la­tion by Cia­r­di but poems by Kevin Young and Robin Coste Lewis, whose por­tion of the book is titled “Dante Comes to Amer­i­ca: 20 Jan­u­ary 17: An Era­sure of 17 Can­tos from Ciardi’s Infer­no, after Robert Rauschen­berg.” Rather than view­ing the illus­tra­tions against Dante’s work itself, we can read their par­tic­u­lar Amer­i­can pro­to-pop art char­ac­ter against lit­er­ary “era­sures” like Lewis’s “Can­to XXIII,” below. See the full series of Rauschenberg’s 34 illus­tra­tions at the Rauschen­berg Foun­da­tion web­site here.

Can­to XXIII.
by Robin Coste Lewis

                “I Go with The Body That Was Always Mine”

Silent, one fol­low­ing the oth­er,
the Fable hunt­ed us down.
O weary man­tle of eter­ni­ty,
turn left, reach us down
into that nar­row way in silence.

Col­lege of Sor­ry Hyp­ocrites, I go
with the body that was always mine,
bur­nished like coun­ter­weights to keep
the peace. One may still see the sort of peace

we kept. Mar­vel for a while over that:
the cross in Hel­l’s eter­nal exile.
Some­where there is some gap in the wall,
pit through which we may climb

to the next brink with­out the need
of sum­mon­ing the Black Angels
and forc­ing them to raise us from this sink.
Near­er than hope, there is a bridge

that runs from the great cir­cle, that cross­es
every ditch from ridge to ridge.
Except—it is broken—but with care.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

New Robert Rauschen­berg Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Lets You Down­load Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

Hear Dante’s Infer­no Read Aloud by Influ­en­tial Poet & Trans­la­tor John Cia­r­di (1954)

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

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

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The Art of Sci-Fi Book Covers: From the Fantastical 1920s to the Psychedelic 1960s & Beyond

in Art, Books, Sci Fi | May 21st, 2018

If you’ve nev­er seen Gen­tle­men Bron­cos, the lit­tle-seen third fea­ture by the Napoleon Dyna­mite-mak­ing hus­band-and-wife team Jared and Jerusha Hess, I high­ly rec­om­mend it. You must, though, enjoy the pecu­liar Hess sense of humor, a blend of the almost objec­tive­ly detached and the hearti­ly sopho­moric fixed upon the pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of deeply unfash­ion­able sec­tions of work­ing-class Amer­i­ca. In Gen­tle­men Bron­cos it makes itself felt imme­di­ate­ly, even before the film’s sto­ry of a young aspir­ing sci­ence fic­tion writer in small-town Utah begins, with a tour de force open­ing cred­its sequence made up of homages to the pulpi­est sci-fi book cov­ers of, if not recent decades, then at least semi-recent decades.

The style of these cov­er images, though ris­i­ble, no doubt look rich with asso­ci­a­tions to any­one who’s spent even small part of their lives read­ing mass-mar­ket sci-fi nov­els. To see more than a few high­er exam­ples, watch “The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers,” the Nerd­writer video essay above that digs into the his­to­ry of that enor­mous­ly inven­tive yet sel­dom seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered artis­tic sub­field.

Its begins with the world’s first sci­ence-fic­tion mag­a­zine Amaz­ing Sto­ries (an online archive of which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) and its pieces of fan­tas­ti­cal, eye-catch­ing cov­er art by Aus­tria-Hun­gary-born illus­tra­tor Frank R. Paul. In the mid-1920s, says the Nerd­writer, “these cov­ers were prob­a­bly among the strangest art that the aver­age Amer­i­can ever got to see.”

It would get stranger. The Nerd­writer fol­lows the devel­op­ment of sci-fi cov­er art from the hey­day of the Paul-illus­trat­ed Amaz­ing Sto­ries to the intro­duc­tion of mass-mar­ket paper­back books in the late 1930s to Pen­guin’s exper­i­men­ta­tion with exist­ing works of mod­ern art in the 1960s to the com­mis­sion­ing of new, even more bizarre and evoca­tive works by all man­ner of pub­lish­ers (some of them sci-fi spe­cial­ists) there­after. “You can walk into any used book store any­where and get five of these old pulp books for a dol­lar each,” the Nerd­writer reminds us. “And then the art is with you; it’s in your home. As you read the sto­ries, it’s on your bed­side table. It’s art you hold with your hands. It’s not pre­cious: it’s bent, fold­ed, and creased. And above all, it’s weird.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Enter the Pulp Mag­a­zine Archive, Fea­tur­ing Over 11,000 Dig­i­tized Issues of Clas­sic Sci-Fi, Fan­ta­sy & Detec­tive Fic­tion

Pulp Cov­ers for Clas­sic Detec­tive Nov­els by Dashiell Ham­mett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie & Ray­mond Chan­dler

36 Abstract Cov­ers of Vin­tage Psy­chol­o­gy, Phi­los­o­phy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Down­load 650 Sovi­et Book Cov­ers, Many Sport­ing Won­der­ful Avant-Garde Designs (1917–1942)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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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Tom Wolfe’s Groundbreaking Work, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Gets Released as a Limited Collector’s Edition, with Each Copy Signed by the Author 

in Art, Literature | May 21st, 2018

Taschen recent­ly released a col­lec­tor’s edi­tion of The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test to com­mem­o­rate the 50th anniver­sary of Tom Wolfe’s rol­lick­ing account of Ken Kesey and the Mer­ry Pranksters’ acid-fueled road trip across the Unit­ed States, aboard the psy­che­del­ic school bus known as “Fur­ther.” With the pass­ing of Tom Wolfe last week, the release of the col­lec­tor’s edi­tion takes on some added impor­tance.

When The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test first came out in 1968, Eliot Fre­mont-Smith wrote in The New York Times that “it is not sim­ply the best book on the hip­pies, it is the essen­tial book.” The book “is print­ed in black and white, but the words come through in crazy Day-Glo–fluorescent, psy­che­del­ic, at once ener­getic and epicene.”

The new Taschen edi­tion is some­thing dif­fer­ent. The abridged text is pub­lished in “tra­di­tion­al let­ter­press, with fac­sim­i­le repro­duc­tions of Wolfe’s man­u­script pages, as well as Ken Kesey’s jail­house jour­nals, hand­bills, and under­ground mag­a­zines of the peri­od.” “Inter­weav­ing the prose and ephemera are pho­to­graph­ic essays from Lawrence Schiller, whose cov­er­age of the acid scene for Life mag­a­zine helped inspire Wolfe to write his sto­ry, and Ted Streshin­sky, who accom­pa­nied Wolfe while report­ing for the New York Her­ald Tri­bune.” There are also pho­tographs by poet Allen Gins­berg.

In total, Taschen has pro­duced 1,968 signed copies of the col­lec­tor’s edi­tion, each signed by Tom Wolfe him­self. The cost is set at $350.

If you nev­er spent time with The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test and want to read a sim­ple paper­back edi­tion that costs less than $10, you can find a copy here.

Note: We belong to the Taschen affil­i­ate pro­gram. So if you get a copy of the col­lec­tor’s edi­tion, it ben­e­fits not just you and Taschen. It ben­e­fits Open Cul­ture too. So con­sid­er it win-win-win.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Tom Wolfe (RIP) Tell Studs Terkel All About Cus­tom-Car Cul­ture, the Sub­ject of His Sem­i­nal Piece of New Jour­nal­ism (1965)

The Acid Test Reels: Ken Kesey & The Grate­ful Dead’s Sound­track for the 1960s Famous LSD Par­ties

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed

Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD (1963)

Ken Kesey Talks About the Mean­ing of the Acid Tests

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Doc Martens Boots Now Come Adorned with Traditional Japanese Art

in Art, Design, Fashion, Life | May 18th, 2018

In wake of a recent prom cheongsam dust up, it remains to be seen whether Doc Martens’ spe­cial edi­tion East­ern Art shoes and boots will be regard­ed as a mis­step.

Dr. Martens’ Artist Series paid trib­ute to West­ern heavy hit­ters like Hierony­mus Bosch, William Hog­a­rth, JMW Turn­er, and William Blake.

Those eye-catch­ing kicks may have inspired more than a few fash­ion-con­scious punks to delve into art his­to­ry, but what will consumers—and more impor­tant­ly activists on the alert for cul­tur­al appropriation—make of the East­ern Art line?

The com­pa­ny web­site describes the inau­gur­al design as:

…a new homage to tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese art with a fresh, con­tem­po­rary … spin. Fea­tur­ing detailed hand-drawn paint­ings, the art is dig­i­tal­ly print­ed on a tex­tured leather designed to emu­late tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese parch­ment, while gold-tone eye­lets and stud­ding com­plete the look.

One won­ders what led the footwear giant to go with a mish­mash “inspired by” approach, when there are so many won­der­ful Edo peri­od artists who mer­it a boot of their own?

Kat­sushi­ka Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fish­er­man’s Wife (see here) would make for an unfor­get­table toe cap…

Kita­gawa Uta­maro could shod heels and ankles with the float­ing world.

Tawaraya Sōtat­su’s work would eas­i­ly trans­fer from screen to shoe.

Thus far, the lone com­plaints have cen­tered on the pain of break­ing in the new boots, a badge of hon­or among long­time wear­ers of the company’s best-sell­ing 1460 Pas­cal style.

Asia Trend reports that Doc Martens has two shops in Japan, with plans to open more.

If you’re inclined to stomp around in a pair of Dr. Martens 1460 Pas­cal East­ern Art boots or 1461 Oxfords, best place your order soon, as these spe­cial edi­tions have a way of sell­ing out quick­ly.

via MyMod­ern­Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Doc Martens Now Come Adorned with William Blake’s Art, Thanks to a Part­ner­ship with Tate Britain

Doc Martens Boots Adorned with Hierony­mus Bosch’s “Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights”

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The 16,000 Artworks the Nazis Censored and Labeled “Degenerate Art”: The Complete Historic Inventory Is Now Online

in Art, History | May 14th, 2018

The Nazis may not have known art, but they knew what they liked, and much more so what they did­n’t. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture the “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937, put on by Hitler’s par­ty four years after it rose to pow­er. Fol­low­ing on a show of only Nazi-approved works — includ­ing many depic­tions of clas­si­cal­ly Ger­man­ic land­scapes, robust sol­diers in action, blonde nudes — it toured the coun­try with the intent of reveal­ing to the Ger­man peo­ple the “insult to Ger­man feel­ing” com­mit­ted by Entartete Kun­st (Degen­er­ate art), a Nazi-defined cat­e­go­ry of art cre­at­ed by the likes of Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Max Beck­mann, George Grosz, and oth­ers, a ros­ter heavy on the abstract, the expres­sion­is­tic, and the Jew­ish.

Now, thanks to the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, we know exact­ly which works of art the Nazis con­demned. “The V&A holds the only known copy of a com­plete inven­to­ry of ‘Entartete Kun­st’ con­fis­cat­ed by the Nazi regime from pub­lic insti­tu­tions in Ger­many, most­ly dur­ing 1937 and 1938,” says the muse­um’s site.

“The list of more than 16,000 art­works was pro­duced by the Reichsmin­is­teri­um für Volk­saufk­lärung und Pro­pa­gan­da (Reich Min­istry for Pub­lic Enlight­en­ment and Pro­pa­gan­da) in 1942 or there­abouts. It seems that the inven­to­ry was com­piled as a final record, after the sales and dis­pos­als of the con­fis­cat­ed art had been com­plet­ed in the sum­mer of 1941.”

You can read and down­load the entire doc­u­ment, which pro­vides “cru­cial infor­ma­tion about the prove­nance, exhi­bi­tion his­to­ry and fate of each art­work,” in PDF form at the V&A’s page about it.

Daunt­ing though the inven­to­ry itself may seem, Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Jil­lian Stein­hauer points out “a way to con­nect many of these pieces to the present day: an online data­base main­tained by the Freie Uni­ver­sität Berlin. You can plug an artwork’s inven­to­ry num­ber from the Nazi log books direct­ly into their search engine, and it will pull up a record.” Here you see Max Beck­man­n’s Zwei Auto-Offiziere, El Lis­sitzky’s Proun R.V.N. 2, and Paul Klee’s Garten der Lei­den­schaft, just three exam­ples of the thou­sands upon thou­sands of images that Hitler and com­pa­ny con­sid­ered a threat to their regime. Today, the artis­tic mer­its of work by these and oth­er artists once labeled Entartete Kun­st have drawn more admir­ers than ever — though the very fact that the Nazis did­n’t like it con­sti­tutes a decent rea­son for appre­ci­a­tion as well.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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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Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vintage Documentary on the Two Great Art Movements, Dada & Surrealism (1978)

in Art, Film, History | May 7th, 2018

“Dada thrives on con­tra­dic­tions. It is cre­ative and destruc­tive. Dada denounces the world and wish­es to save it.” So says one nar­ra­tor of jour­nal­ist-film­mak­er Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Coun­cil of Great Britain doc­u­men­tary on not just the inter­na­tion­al avant-garde move­ment called Dada but the asso­ci­at­ed cur­rents of sur­re­al­ism churn­ing around that con­ti­nent dur­ing the first half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. “Dada want­ed to replace the non­sense of man with the illog­i­cal­ly sense­less. Dada is sense­less, like nature. Dada is for nature, and against art. Philoso­phers have less val­ue for Dada than an old tooth­brush, and Dada aban­dons them to the great lead­ers of the world.”

Of the many bold and often con­tra­dic­to­ry claims made about Dada, none describe it as eas­i­ly under­stood. But Dada has less to do with intel­lec­tu­al, aes­thet­ic, or polit­i­cal coher­ence than with a cer­tain ener­gy. That ener­gy could fire up the likes of André Bre­ton, Sal­vador Dalí, René Magritte, Gior­gio de Chiri­co, and many oth­er artists besides, chan­nel­ing frus­tra­tions with the state of post-World War I Europe into a sen­si­bil­i­ty that demand­ed rip­ping every­thing up and build­ing it all again, begin­ning with the very foun­da­tions of sense.

Gold and his col­lab­o­ra­tors on Europe After the Rain under­stand this, audio­vi­su­al­ly inter­pret­ing the lega­cy of Dada, which despite its short lifes­pan left behind a host of still-strik­ing works in text, image, and sculp­ture, in a vari­ety of ways.

“The movie is full of trea­sures,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Oliv­er Hall, includ­ing “BBC inter­views with Max Ernst and Mar­cel Duchamp from the Six­ties, a read­ing of Artaud’s ‘Address to the Dalai Lama,’ an account of Freud’s meet­ing with Dalí.” He adds that its “re-enact­ment of Breton’s dia­logue with an offi­cial of the Par­ti com­mu­niste français is illu­mi­nat­ing, and com­ple­ments the oth­er valu­able mate­r­i­al on the ‘Pope of Sur­re­al­ism’: his work with shell-shocked sol­diers in World War I, tri­als and expul­sions of oth­er Sur­re­al­ists, col­lab­o­ra­tion with Leon Trot­sky in Mex­i­co, less-than-hero­ic con­tri­bu­tions to the French Resis­tance, and study of the occult.” But then, the kind of mind that could launch a move­ment like Dada — which fifty years after its end remained fas­ci­nat­ing enough to inspire a doc­u­men­tary that itself holds its fas­ci­na­tion forty years on — is capa­ble, one sus­pects, of any­thing.

Watch the uncut ver­sion of Europe After the Rain above.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The ABCs of Dada Explains the Anar­chic, Irra­tional “Anti-Art” Move­ment of Dadaism

Read and Hear Tris­tan Tzara’s “Dada Man­i­festo,” the Avant-Garde Doc­u­ment Pub­lished 100 Years Ago (March 23, 1918)

Three Essen­tial Dadaist Films: Ground­break­ing Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Mar­cel Duchamp

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Music of the Dada Move­ment: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Cen­tu­ry Ago

Dress Like an Intel­lec­tu­al Icon with Japan­ese Coats Inspired by the Wardrobes of Camus, Sartre, Duchamp, Le Cor­busier & Oth­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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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