Masterpiece, Runyararo Mapfumo’s short film above, will feel very familiar to anyone who has struggled for words to share with a friend after his or her underwhelming Off-Off-Broadway solo show, open mic performance, or art installation…
Equally familiar, from the reverse angle, to any artist who’s ever invited a trusted friend to view his or her passion project, hoping for approval or at the very least, interest… something more robust than the paltry crumbs the friend manages to eek out under pressure.
A British Film Institute London Film Festival selected short, Masterpiece focuses on a tight group of male friends… one of whom has reached beyond the communal comfort zone in the service of his art. His earnestness confounds his old pals, who clown around outside the gallery where they’ve gathered for an after hours preview of his work, one staunchly asserting that he only showed up because his mum made him, and also, he was told there’d be free food.
Once inside the friends are left alone to puzzle out his masterpiece. What to say? Maybe they should draw parallels to the current socio-political situation? Perhaps they could tell their friend his work is reminiscent of German Expressionism?
Yoko Ono or Marcel Duchamp would have made a more apt comparison, as writer-director Mapfumo is surely aware. Masterpiece is notable for more than just its pitch-perfect take on artist vs. befuddled but still supportive friends. As Mapfumo told Directors Notes:
I’ve been told time and time again to “write what you want to see.” I started thinking about what that meant to me in a everyday context. These characters are black men that I recognize…I didn’t want the conflict to revolve around their identity but rather through their observations.
Back in 2014 we featured a short primer and documentary on the life and work of Aleister Crowley, also known — at least to the British press of the time — as “the wickedest man in the world.” The name rings a bell to just about everyone, and for many of us summons up vague notions of a life dedicated to the promotion of alternative morality or paganism or trickery or some kind of relished evil, but how many of us can name one of Crowley’s works? The best-known occultist-artist-mountaineer of the early 20th century left behind a rich and colorful legacy, and here we have one of its most tangible products: the Thoth tarot deck.
Crowley worked on the deck, says Learntarot.com (itself drawing from Stuart Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of Tarot), from 1938 to 1943, according to principles laid out in his Book of Thoth. The artist, Lady Frieda Harris, “worked with Crowley’s rough sketches to produce images that would be faithful to his interpretations and her own vision.” You can purchase copies of the Thoth Tarot Deck here.
Raven’s Tarot Site offers a piece of correspondence from Harris to Crowley dating from 1940, around the middle of the project. “I do not pretend to apprehend it, only it is like music, and the only kind of writing I want to read,” she writes of his famously difficult-to-comprehend but (under the right circumstances) entertaining writing on the occult, “only it makes me feel as if I lived in a desert and I am mighty thirsty.”
Crowley had — and nearly 70 years after his death, still has — that effect on some people. He inspired Harris, who would become one of the standout disciples, to produce a work of divinatory art whose aesthetics reflect as much his own as those of the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner. Now best known for his role in developing the Waldorf system of childhood education, Steiner also came up with a philosophical system called anthroposophy that posits the human ability to contact the spiritual realm. It may lack the same dangerous and flamboyant black-magic (or rather, black-magick) appeal of Crowley’s visions, but both men, in their own way, spent a lifetime striving for ways to tap into a world hidden beneath the surface of existence. For those with an interest in that sort of thing, turning over a few tarot cards remains one of the easiest ways to knock on its door.
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.
“I was out walking with two friends – the sun began to set – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an endless scream passing through nature.”― Edvard Munch
That’s how painter Edvard Munch described the dread-filled scene that led him to paint “The Scream” in 1910. As Dr. Noelle Paulson notes over at Smarthistory, except for da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Munch’s painting “may be the most iconic human figure in the history of Western art. Its androgynous, skull-shaped head, elongated hands, wide eyes, flaring nostrils and ovoid mouth have been engrained in our collective cultural consciousness.”
“The Scream” might also be one of the more fetishized and commodified paintings we’ve seen to date. These days, you’ll find “The Scream” on t‑shirts, jigsaw puzzles, and non-slip jar grippers. And, thanks to a Japanese company called Good Smile, you can now buy The Scream Action figure. It has posable joints, allowing you to put the figure into different poses (witness above). Or you can stand it alongside the other art history figures in Good Smile’s collection–da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Rodin’s The Thinker, and The Venus de Milo. Oh, the fun you could have this weekend.
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People all over the world enjoy Japanese tea, but few of them have witnessed a proper Japanese tea ceremony — and seeing as a proper Japanese tea ceremony can last up to four hours, many probably imagine they don’t have the endurance. But Japanese tea culture holds up meticulousness as a high virtue for the preparer, the drinker, and even more so the craftsman who makes the tea ware both of them use. In the video above, you can see one such master named Shimizu Genji at work in his studio in Tokoname, a city known as a ceramics center for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Shimizu, writes the proprietor of pottery site Artisticnippon.com about a visit to his workshop, “throws a block of clay onto the wheel, creating the teapot’s body, handle, spout and lid one after another, all from the same block. It really is quite mesmerising and awe-inspiring to watch.”
Once he assembles these formidably solid-looking but deceptively light pieces, he dries them out over three days, a process that offers “just one example of the time and care invested in the crafting of exquisite Tokoname teapots.” Finally comes the seaweed, of which certain pieces get a layer applied before firing. Afterward, the traces left by the seaweed create a “charred” patterning called mogake.
We would surely welcome any of Shimizu’s products, or those by the other respected practitioners of his tradition, into our home. But as with all Japanese crafts honed over countless generations, the process counts for just as much as the product, or even more so. Take, for instance, Shimizu’s process as captured by this video: we appreciate the concentration, deliberation, and sensitivity shown at each and every stage, and the pieces of the teapot as they come into existence don’t look half bad either. But if we become too attached to the final result we’ve been anticipating over these fourteen minutes — well, suffice it to say that the master craftsman has a lesson in impermanence in store for us.
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.
Once the primary domain of well-appointed professors with institutional connections and the budget to fly around the world, the discipline can soon be pursued by anyone with an internet connection, though there is, of course, no virtual substitute yet for engaging with art in three-dimensions. Claire Voon explains at Hyperallergic, “Pharos’s database is primarily aimed at scholars—although it is freely available for all to use—and is dedicated to uploading a work’s attribution and provenance as well as conservation, exhibition, and bibliographic histories.” All of the information, in other words, required for serious research.
While the current institutions are all based in North America and Europe, the “database will eventually expand,” writes Voon, “to include records from more photoarchives around the world.” Scholars and art lovers worldwide may not necessarily think of these treasures as kissable “sleeping beauties,” but their plentiful appearance in such rich detail and easy accessibility may indeed seem like a fairy tale come true.
When we think of political propaganda, we do not typically think of French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. There’s something debased about the term—it stinks of insincerity, staginess, emotional manipulation, qualities that cannot possibly belong to great art. But let us put aside this prejudice and consider David’s 1787 The Death of Socrates. Created two years before the start of the French Revolution, the painting “gave expression to the principle of resisting unjust authority,” and—like its source, Plato’s Phaedo—it makes a martyr of its hero, who is the soul of reason and a thorn in the side of dogma and tradition.
Nonetheless, as Evan Puschak, the Nerdwriter, shows us in the short video above, The Death of Socrates situates itself firmly within the traditions of European art, drawing heavily on classical sculptures and friezes as well as the greatest works of the Renaissance. There are echoes of da Vinci’s Last Supper in the number of figures and their placement, and a distinct reference of Raphael’s School of Athens in Socrates’ upward-pointing finger, which belongs to Plato in the earlier painting. Here, David has Plato, already an old man, seated at the foot of the bed, the scene arranged behind him as if “exploding from the back of his head.”
Socrates, says Puschak, “has been discussing at length the immortality of the soul, and he doesn’t even seem to care that he’s about to take the implement of his death in hand. On the contrary, Socrates is defiant… David idealizes him… he would have been 70 at the time and somewhat less muscular and beautiful than painted here.” He is a “symbol of strength over passion, of stoic commitment to an abstract ideal,” a theme David articulated with much less subtlety in an earlier painting, The Oath of the Horatii, with its Roman salutes and bundled swords—a “severe, moralistic canvas,” with which the artist “effectively invented the Neoclassical style.”
In The Death of Socrates, David refines his moralistic tendencies, and Puschak ties the composition loosely to a sense of prophecy about the coming Terror after the storming of the Bastille. The Nerdwriter summation of the painting’s angles and influences does help us see it anew. But Puschak’s vague historicizing doesn’t quite do the artist justice, failing to mention David’s direct part in the wave of bloody executions under Robespierre.
David was an active supporter of the Revolution and designed “uniforms, banners, triumphal arches, and inspirational props for the Jacobin Club’s propaganda,” notes a Boston College account. He was also “elected a Deputy form the city of Paris, and voted for the execution of Louis XVI.” Historians have identified over “300 victims for whom David signed execution orders.” The severity of his earlier classical scenes comes into greater focus in The Death of Socrates around the central figure, a great man of history, one whose heroic feats and tragic sacrifices drive the course of all events worth mentioning.
Indeed, we can see David’s work as a visual precursor to philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle’s theories of “the heroic in history.” (Carlyle also happened to write the 19th century’s definitive history of the French Revolution.) In 1793, David took his visual great man theory and Neoclassical style and applied them for the first time to a contemporary event, the murder of his friendJean-Paul Marat, Swiss Jacobin journalist, by the Girondist Charlotte Corday. (Learn more in the Khan Academy video above.) This is one of three canvases David made of “martyrs of the Revolution”—the other two are lost to history. And it is here that we can see the evolution of his political painting from classical allegory to contemporary propaganda, in a canvas widely hailed, along with The Death of Socrates, as one of the greatest European paintings of the age.
We can look to David for both formal mastery and didactic intent. But we should not look to him for political constancy. He was no John Milton—the poet of the English Revolution who was still devoted to the cause even after the restoration of the monarch. David, on the other hand, “could easily be denounced as a brilliant cynic,” writes Michael Glover at The Independent. Once Napoleon came to power and began his rapid ascension to the self-appointed role of Emperor, David quickly became court painter, and created the two most famous portraits of the ruler.
We’re quite familiar with The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, in which the subject stands in an awkward pose, his hand thrust into his waistcoat. And surely know Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass, above. Here, the finger pointing upward takes on an entirely new resonance than it has in The Death of Socrates. It is the gesture not of a man nobly prepared to leave the world behind, but of one who plans to conquer and subdue it under his absolute rule.
Until I read J. R. R. Tolkien’sThe Lord of The Rings, my favorite book growing up was, by far, The Hobbit. Growing up in Russia, however, meant that instead of Tolkien’s English version, my parents read me a Russian translation. To me, the translation easily matched the pace and wonder of Tolkien’s original. Looking back, The Hobbit probably made such an indelible impression on me because Tolkien’s tale was altogether different than the Russian fairy tales and children’s stories that I had previously been exposed to. There were no childish hijinks, no young protagonists, no parents to rescue you when you got into trouble. I considered it an epic in the truest literary sense.
As with many Russian translations during the Cold War, the book came with a completely different set of illustrations. Mine, I remember regretting slightly, lacked pictures altogether. A friend’s edition, however, was illustrated in the typical Russian style: much more traditionally stylized than Tolkien’s own drawings, they were more angular, friendlier, almost cartoonish.
In this post, we include a number of these images from the 1976 printing. The cover, above, depicts a grinning Bilbo Baggins holding a gem. Below, Gandalf, an ostensibly harmless soul, pays Bilbo a visit.
Next, we have the three trolls, arguing about their various eating arrangements, with Bilbo hiding to the side.
Here, Gollum, née Smeagol, paddles his raft in the depths of the mountains.
Finally, here’s Bilbo, fulfilling his role as a burglar in Smaug’s lair.
For more of the Soviet illustrations of The Hobbit, head on over to Mashable.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in March, 2015
The poet Tibullus first described Rome as “The Eternal City” in the first century BC, and that evocative nickname has stuck over the thousands of years since. Or rather, he would have called it “Urbs Aeterna,” which for Italian-speakers would have been “La Città Eterna,” but regardless of which language you prefer it in, it throws down a daunting challenge before any historian of Rome. Each scholar has had to find their own way of approaching such a historically formidable place, and few have built up such a robust visual record as Rodolfo Lanciani, 4000 items from whose collection became available to view online this year, thanks to Stanford Libraries.
As an “archaeologist, professor of topography, and secretary of the Archaeological Commission,” says the collection’s about page, Lanciani, “was a pioneer in the systematic, modern study of the city of Rome.”
Having lived from 1845 to 1929 with a long and fruitful career to match, he “collected a vast archive of his own notes and manuscripts, as well as works by others including rare prints and original drawings by artists and architects stretching back to the sixteenth century.” After he died, his whole library found a buyer in the Istituto Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte (INASA), which made it available to researchers at the 15th-century Palazzo Venezia in Rome.
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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