As in cuisine, where peasant food can become trendy and expensive overnight, so it is in fashion: how else to explain the way a humble working-class boot went from the factory floor to stylistic statement.
The original 1960’s Dr. Martens boot, the one with the cushioned sole, fancy tread, and yellow stitching, was designed to be affordable. That’s why the punks loved it, that’s why the ska/Two Tone guys and gals loved it, and that’s why rich rockers like Pete Townshend showed his solidarity by wearing them along with his boiler suit.
But that was then, and this is…the Tate Gallery of London’s specially commissioned series of arty Docs. The “1460” boot above shows details from Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” (the hellish third panel), which you have to admit is pretty cool. For the lover not the fighter among us, you can also go for the more debauched second panel from “Garden” printed on a “1461” style shoe.
So, yes, these limited edition boots are just slightly more than the original “smooth” style and not exactly cheap. But, on the other hand, this new phase of the company is a celebration of skirting complete obsolescence. While marketers love to say these brands “never go out of style,” they in fact did. According to their own website, Dr. Martens had such declining sales at the turn of the millennium that all but one factory closed. It was by commissioning artists to rebrand the boot in similar ways as the Tate Gallery that the company was able to turn things around and, best of all, keep manufacturing the boots in Britain.
Whether you should wear your high culture so low to the ground is for you to figure out once you get your hands on a pair. Again, there are still versions by William Blake and JMW Turner in steady supply.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Despite their enormous popularity, the enigmatic works of Dutch artist M.C. Escher have not, perhaps, received their due in the high art world. But he is beloved by college-dorm-room-decorators, Haight-Ashbury hippies, mathematicians, doctors, and dentists, who put his art on their walls, says Micky Pillar, former curator of the Escher Museum in The Hague, because “they think it’s a great way of getting people engaged and forgetting about reality.” Mathematical giants Roger Penrose and HSM Coxeter “were dazzled by Escher’s work as students in 1954,” notes The Guardian’s Maev Kennedy. Mick Jagger was a huge fan, though Escher turned him down when asked to draw an album cover, annoyed at being addressed by his first name (Maurits).
Escher, says Ian Dejardin—director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London—“may have been the only person in the world who had never heard of the Rolling Stones.” It wasn’t that he ignored the world around him, but that he focused his career on inventing another one, taking inspiration first from the Italian countryside and cityscapes, after settling in Rome, and later turning to what he called “mental imagery”: the paradoxical portraits, fantastical shifting shapes, and mind-bending patterns, so absorbing that people in waiting rooms forget their discomfort and anxiety when looking at them.
One of the most famous of such works, 1939’s Metamorphosis II, owes its creation to the historical pressures of Italian fascism and the geometric fascinations of Islamic art. After leaving Rome in 1935 as political tensions rose, Escher found himself inspired by his second visit to The Alhambra in Spain. Its “lavish tile work,” as the National Gallery of Art writes, “suggested new directions in the use of color and the flattened patterning of interlocking forms.” So intricate and technically dazzling is the four-meter-long print that it merits an in-depth look at its context and composition.
That’s exactly what you’ll find at a new “interactive documentary” on Metamorphosis II, by the makers of a similar feature on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. The online resource lets users scroll across the print, zooming in to an extraordinary level of detail, or zooming out to see how it transitions section by section, from the word “metamorphose,” to a checkerboard pattern, to lizards, honeycombs, bees, hummingbirds, fish, etc.. Along the way, you can click on little colored hexagons (that transform into cubes) and bring up short articles on Escher’s life and aspects of the work at hand. Each of these featurettes is narrated (in the English version) by British filmmaker and artist Peter Greenaway. Once you open one of these explanatory windows, a navigation tool (above) appears at the bottom of the screen.
We see how the various animals in Escher’s “systematic tessellations,” as he called them, were chosen by virtue of their shape as well as Escher’s interest in their life cycles and methods of organization. “Nature was a source of wondrous beauty for Escher,” the documentary explains. “In his journals and letters, he often wrote about what surprised, amazed or moved him” in the natural world. Some of the Metamorphosis II sections appeared in later works like 1943’s Reptiles. Escher drew attention both to the natural world’s variety and its genius for repeated patterns. But the movement from one animal to the next has nothing to do with zoology.
Escher delighted in playing “mind association games.” We learn that as a child, “he would lie in bed and think of two subjects for which he had to create a logical connection.” In one example he gave, he would attempt to find his way from “a tram conductor to a kitchen chair.” Metamorphosis II gives us a visual representation of such games, mental leaps that challenge our sense of the order of things. The documentary situates this fascinating work in a historical and aesthetic context that allows us to make sense of it while adding to our appreciation for its strangeness, offering several different ways of approaching the work, as well as an invitation to make your own.
One feature, the “Metamorphosis Machine,” lets you choose from a selection of starting and ending patterns. Then it fills in the transformation in the middle. The results are hardly Escher-quality, but they are a fun and accessible way of understanding the work of an artist whose vision can seem forbidding, with its impossible spaces and disorienting transformations. Enter the Metamorphosis II interactive documentary here.
With six days to go, 693 backers have pledged $15,676 to a Kickstarter campaign that’s hoping to raise a total of $26,158. Should they reach that goal, a company called Today Is Art Day will put into production a charming Dali figure. Standing five inches tall, the figure “comes with 3 sets of wacky interchangeable mustaches” and “deluxe mustaches made of stainless steel.” The Dalí figure “holds his signature melting clock,” and there are five Dalí masterpieces to display on a miniature easel. Apparently endorsed by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, the figure should go into production this August. Help Kickstart things here.
In 1956, Charles and Ray Eames unveiled a lounge chair that did something special. It took modern design and made it comfortable. It placed “the sitter into a voluptuous luxury that few mortals since Nero have known.” Below, you can revisit the original unveiling of the Eames Lounge Chair, which took place on the Home Show, an American daytime TV program hosted by Arlene Francis. And above, you can watch the making of the Eames Lounge Chair, which remains very much in production and demand today. It’s still a staple of the Herman Miller furniture collection. Some aspects of the production have gotten a bit more high tech, of course. And the original Brazilian rosewood has been replaced by a more sustainable Palisander rosewood. But the high-touch process remains otherwise largely the same. Originally priced at $310, the Eames Lounge Chair will now set you back $5,295.
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!
There may be no sweeter sound to the ears of Open Culture writers than the words “public domain”—you might even go so far as to call it our “cellar door.” The phrase may not be as musical, but the fact that many of the world’s cultural treasures cannot be copyrighted in perpetuity means that we can continue to do what we love: curating the best of those treasures for readers as they appear online. Public domain means companies can sell those works without incurring any costs, but it also means that anyone can give them away for free. “Anyone can re-publish” public domain works, notes Lifehacker, “or chop them up and use them in other projects.” And thereby emerges the remixing and repurposing of old artifacts into new ones, which will themselves enter the public domain of future generations.
Some of those future works of art may even become the next Great American Novel, if such a thing still exists as anything more than a hackneyed cliché. Of course, no one seriously goes around saying they’re writing the “Great American Novel,” unless they’re Philip Roth in the 70s or William Carlos Williams (top right) in the 20s, who both somehow pulled off using the phrase as a title (though Roth’s book doesn’t quite live up to it.) Where Roth casually used the concept in a light novel about baseball, Williams’ The Great American Novel approached it with deep concern for the survival of the form itself. His modernist text “engages the techniques of what we would now call metafiction,” writes literary scholar April Boone, “to parody worn out formulas and content and, ironically, to create a new type of novel that anticipates postmodern fiction.”
We will all, as of January 1, 2019, have free, unfettered access to Williams’ metafictional shake-up of the formulaic status quo, when “hundreds of thousands of… books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923” enter the public domain, as Glenn Fleishman writes at The Atlantic. Because of the complicated history of U.S. copyright law—especially the 1998 “Sonny Bono Act” that successfully extended a copyright law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mickey Mouse)—it has been twenty years since such a massive trove of material has become available all at once. But now, and “for several decades from 2019 onward,” Fleishman points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.”
In other words, it’ll be Christmas all over again in January every year, and while you can browse the publication dates of your favorite works yourself to see what’s coming available in coming years, you’ll find at The Atlantic a short list of literary works included in next-year’s mass-release, including books by Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, and P.G. Wodehouse. Lifehacker has several more extensive lists, which we excerpt below:
Cecil B. DeMille’s (first, less famous, silent version of) The Ten Commandments
Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!, including that scene where he dangles off a clock tower, and his Why Worry?
A long line-up of feature-length silent films, including Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitalityand Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim
Short films by Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Our Gang (later Little Rascals)
Cartoons including Felix the Cat(the character first appeared in a 1919 cartoon)
Marlene Dietrich’s film debut, a bit part in the German silent comedy The Little Napoleon; also the debuts of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Fay Wray
Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers
Two of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder on the Links
The Prisoner, volume 5 of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (note that English translations have their own copyrights)
The Complete Works of Anthony Trollope
George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan
Short stories by Christie, Virginia Woolf, H.P. Lovecraft, Katherine Mansfield, and Ernest Hemingway
Poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Sukumar Ray, and Pablo Neruda
Works by Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jean Cocteau, Italo Svevo, Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, Maria Montessori, Lu Xun, Joseph Conrad, Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs
Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
Yokoyama Taikan’s Metempsychosis
Work by M. C. Escher, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, and Man Ray
Again, these are only partial lists of highlights, and such highlights…. Speaking for myself, I cannot wait for free access to the very best (and even worst, and weirdest, and who-knows-what-else) of 1923. And of 1924 in 2020, and 1925 and 2021, and so on and so on….
Here’s some very rare footage of the great Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paying a visit to exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, in Coyocoán, Mexico, in 1938.
The Trotskys had arrived the year before, after Rivera petitioned the government of President Lázaro Cárdenas to grant the controversial Marxist leader and theorist sanctuary in Mexico. When the Trotskys arrived on a Norwegian oil tanker at the port city of Tampico in January of 1937, Rivera was not well, but Kahlo boarded the ship to welcome the Trotskys and accompanied them on an armored train to Mexico City. She invited the Trotskys to stay at her family home, La Casa Azul (the Blue House) in Coyocoán, now a section of Mexico City. By the time this footage was taken by a visiting American named Ivan Heisler, Trotsky and Kahlo had either had, or were about to have, a brief affair, and the friendship between the two couples would soon fall apart. In early 1939 Trotsky moved to another house in the same neighborhood, where he was assassinated in August of 1940.
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!
On a recent trip to Portland, I found myself at the city’s flagship Pearl District Dr. Martens’ store and was instantly transported back to much younger days when I scrimped and saved to buy my first pair of “Docs” at the local DC punk boutique. Big and clunky, the boots and shoes have been associated with outsider and alternative culture for decades (and, sadly, through no fault of their own, with neo-Nazis, as a recent Portland controversy reminded). The brand has since applied its “AirWair” sole to styles much less evocative of leather-clad punks, but the originals–the eight-eye “1460” boot and three-eye “1461” shoe–will forever retain their iconic status, in the classic colors of black and “oxblood” red.
“Originally a modest work-boot that was even sold as a gardening shoe,” as the company’s history tells it, the nearly indestructible footwear first achieved cult status in working-class British subcultures in the early days of “glam, punk, Two Tone, and early goth.”
The flamboyance of the Dr. Martens’ clientele gave it license to experiment with unorthodox styles, like shiny patent leather in eye-popping colors, an animal print series and, most recently, an artist series, featuring 1460s and 1461s covered in leather reproductions of paintings by artists like Hieronymus Bosch, Giannicola Di Paolo, and William Hogarth (unfortunately all sold out on their website).
One of the recent additions to this pantheon seems like a perfect fit: the William Blake Docs, offering your “choice of gnostic kicks for a night out,” as Dangerous Minds quips. A partnership with Tate Britain, the boot version is wrapped in Blake’s Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils(c. 1826) and the shoe displays The House of Death(c. 1795). See both paintings below.
Like another new addition to the artist series—with artwork from J.M.W. Turner—the Blake Dr. Martens draw on the work of a violently original English artist with solidly working-class roots. Unlike his contemporary Turner, Blake spent most of his days in obscurity, creating a DIY visual and poetic mythology rich enough to counter the religious and philosophical hegemony of the day, which was a totally punk rock thing to do in the 18th century.
“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s,” Blake wrote. Does the stamping of his iconoclastic artwork on a culturally iconic, commercially successful boot (and shoe, and leather satchel, and T‑shirt) mean that he’s been absorbed into exactly the kind of system he spent his life opposing? Isn’t that just punk’s eternal dilemma.…
See a short film from Tate Britain celebrating their collaboration with Dr. Martens at the shoemaker’s website and see much more William Blake in the Related Content links below.
If you want to snag your own William Blake Dr. Martens, you can find the 3‑Eye Oxfords and 1460 Boot on Amazon.
When you think Chinese Revolution, surely you think of Mao Zedong and the People’s Republic coming to power in 1949, a history that overshadows an earlier seismic event that overthrew the last imperial dynasty and brought the short-lived Republic of China into being. If your sense of this history is somewhat vague, you’re not alone—even those who know the events and the principle actors well are hesitant to ascribe any definitive interpretations to the 1911, or Xinhai, Revolution. “Significant thinkers and activists have… remained hesitant in their final judgment on it,” writes Oxford University’s Rana Mitter: “Its meaning continues to be highly contested… separated from any one path of historical interpretation.”
There is a general consensus, at least, among historians of the period and contemporary chroniclers alike that the Xinhai Revolution was foremost a struggle to modernize the country and get free of colonialist encroachments on Chinese self-determination. As in Russia around the same time, the concept of political modernization had many different meanings to the competing factions seeking to supplant the moribund imperial system.
“Some hoped for a constitutional framework, i.e., parliamentary monarchy,” notes University of Kansas professor Anna M. Cienciala, “while others worked for a democratic republic. Most wanted the abolition of the feudal-Confucian system; all wanted the abolition of foreign privilege and the unification of their vast country.”
This last hope would be dashed. The strongest faction succeeded in gaining support from wealthy Chinese living abroad, who funded the efforts of revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, a medical doctor raised in Hawaii who began in the late 19th century “to devote himself to political work for the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty” in order to “create a strong, unified, modern, Chinese republic” with a socialist economy. Despite support from the military, the Republic established in 1912 “proved a miserable failure,” Cienciala argues, and the country fragmented under the rule of various warlords, then suffered through several more upheavals and an attempted Qing restoration in the ensuing decades while the Communists consolidated power.
Looking back at the events at the time, historian Peter Zarrow has attempted to trace “the moment when the Wuchang Uprising became the ‘revolution’… that is when general opinion began to regard it as a movement that could overthrow the Qing and establish a new government.” Opinions were largely shaped, he writes, by Shanghai newspapers covering what Britannica Blog calls “a hastily and locally organized mutiny” that first began in one of the three areas that make up the city of Wuhan. In creating the narrative of events, news agencies “immediately printed illustrated sheets for a Chinese public avid for the latest news.” So writes the Princeton University Digital Library, who house a collection of 30 such prints, likely “based on upon artists’ imagination.”
News agency reports of the Wuchang Uprising and subsequent battles in cities across China “generally support the Revolution as a modernizing party, and hence some demonization of the enemy occurs in the prints, as was usual for propaganda prints of that and earlier periods.” What is notable is the degree to which broad themes of “modernity” and “nation” show up, creating a triumphant sense of unity that seems to have been exaggerated.
But this is the way propaganda works, in 1911 and today—“manufacturing consent,” to take Noam Chomsky’s phrase. It’s fascinating to see it work in images that seem so quaint to us today, but which, at the time, pushed forward a revolutionary break with over two thousand years of dynastic rule.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
