And now for something a little whimsical and fun.
Above, watch artist Garip Ay use a traditional Turkish art form, known as Ebru art, or marbling, to paint Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Self-Portrait’ on water. Marbling, Ay told ABC News, is “the practice of applying paint to the surface of thickened water and creating patterns and images by manipulating the paint.” “The water, in addition to being thickened by carrageenan powder, was colored black for this project.” Give the video four short minutes, and you can watch Ay’s project unfold. Find many more marbling videos on the artist’s website.
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From the 18th century onward, the genres of Gothic horror and fantasy have flourished, and with them the sensually visceral images now commonplace in film, TV, and comic books. These genres perhaps reached their aesthetic peak in the 19th century with writers like Edgar Allan Poe and illustrators like Gustave Dore. But it was in the early twentieth century that a more populist subgenre truly came into its own: “weird fiction,” a term H.P. Lovecraft used to describe the pulpy brand of supernatural horror codified in the pages of American fantasy and horror magazine Weird Tales—first published in 1923. (And still going strong!)
A precursor to EC Comics’ many lurid titles, Weird Tales is often considered the definitive early twentieth century venue for weird fiction and illustration.
But we need only look back a few years and to another continent to find an earlier publication, serving German-speaking fans — Der Orchideengarten (“The Garden of Orchids”), the very first horror and fantasy magazine, which ran 51 issues from January 1919 to November 1921.
The magazine featured work from its editors Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibulka, from better-known contemporaries like H.G. Wells and Karel Capek, and from forefathers like Dickens, Pushkin, Guy de Maupassant, Poe, Voltaire, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. “Although two issues of Der Orchideengarten were devoted to detective stories,” writes 50 Watts, “and one to erotic stories about cuckolds, it was a genuine fantasy magazine.” And it was also a gallery of bizarre and unusual artwork.
50 Watts quotes from Franz Rottensteiner’s description of the magazine’s art, which ranged “from representations of medieval woodcuts to the work of masters of the macabre such as Gustave Dore or Tony Johannot, to contemporary German artists like Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Otto Lennekogel, Karl Ritter, Heinrich Kley, or Alfred Kubin.” These artists created the covers and illustrations you see here, and many more you can see at 50 Watts, the black sun, and John Coulthart’s {feuilleton}.
“What strikes me about these black-and-white drawings,” like the dense, frenzied pen-and-ink scene above, Coulthart comments, “is how different they are in tone to the pulp magazines which followed shortly after in America and elsewhere. They’re at once far more adult and frequently more original than the Gothic clichés which padded out Weird Tales and lesser titles for many years.” Indeed, though the format may be similar to its successors, Der Orchideengarten’s covers show the influence of Surrealism, “some are almost Expressionist in style,” and many of the illustrations show “a distinct Goya influence.”
Popular fantasy and horror illustration has often leaned more toward the soft-porn of seventies airbrushed vans, pulp-novel covers, or the grisly kitsch of the comics. Rottensteiner writes in his 1978 Fantasy Book that this “large-format magazine… must surely rank as one of the most beautiful fantasy magazines ever published.” It’s hard to argue with that assessment. View, read (in German), and download original scans of the magazine’s first several issues over on this Princeton site.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote. Were he alive today, he might well regard the internet as becoming more paradisiacal all the time, at least in the sense that it keeps not just generating new texts, but absorbing existing ones and making them available free to readers.
And while his well-known story “The Library of Babel” envisions a magical or extremely high-tech library containing all possible texts (which the internet has started to make a reality), recent additions to the vast library of the internet have done him one better by incorporating not just pages of letters, but intricately designed and lavishly illustrated art texts as well.
Take the Getty Research Portal, which has just, for its fourth anniversary, unveiled a new design and a total volume count surpassing 100,000. “In assembling a virtual corpus of digitized texts on art, architecture, material culture, and related fields from numerous partners, the Portal aspires to offer a more expansive collection than any single library could provide,” writes project content specialist Annie Rana at the Getty’s blog The Iris. “Furthermore, with these freely downloadable materials, scholars and researchers can now be in possession of copies of rare books and other titles without having to travel to far-flung locales.”
Still, the selection of items looks quite international already. The post highlights a few items of high potential interest to Open Culture readers, such as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven illustrated by Edouard Manet and translated into French by Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as a monograph on, an exhibition catalog about the work of, and writings by the Russian abstract painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky. But even though the Getty Research Portal seems only to have plans to grow larger and larger, everyone browsing through it will surely find something suited to their artistic interests, from Paul Klee (top) to Roy Lichtenstein to Japanese architecture and everything in between; you have only to step through the portal to find it.
Over on his Tumblr, “The Professional Dork,” Bhautik Joshi has posted 2001: A Space Odyssey “rendered in the style of Picasso using deep neural network based style transfer.” And also Blade Runner in the style of ‘Starry Night’ by Van Gogh. All of this is done using Deep Neural Networks, a programming paradigm that allows a computer to learn from observational data (including the painting styles of iconic painters). To learn more about Neural Networks and Deep Learning, you can read this free ebook by Michael Nielsen, which will be added to our collection of 200+ Free Textbooks. Enjoy.
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Despite the small, narrative doodle posted to her Tumblr a couple of weeks back, inspirational teacher and cartoonist Lynda Barry clearly has no shortage of strategies for viewing art in a meaningful way.
She takes a Socratic approach with students and readers eager to forge a deeper personal connection to images.
She traces this tendency back forty years, to when she studied with Marilyn Frasca at Evergreen State College. Could Frasca have anticipated what she wrought when she asked the young Barry, “What is an image?”
For Barry, who claims to have spent over forty years trying to answer the above question, there will almost always be an emotional component. In a 2010 interview with The Paris Review, she addressed the ways in which art, visual and otherwise, can fill certain crucial holes:
In the course of human life we have a million phantom-limb pains—losing a parent when you’re little, being in a war, even something as dumb as having a mean teacher—and seeing it somehow reflected, whether it’s in our own work or listening to a song, is a way to deal with it.
The Greeks knew about it. They called it catharsis, right? And without it we’re fucked. I think this is the thing that keeps our mental health or emotional health in balance, and we’re born with an impulse toward it.
No wonder the snaggle-toothed dog woman on Barry’s Tumblr looks so anxious. She craves that elusive something that never much troubled Helen Hockinson’s museum-going comic matrons.
(Had revelation been on the menu, those ladies would have dutifully paged through the most highly recommended guidebook of the day, confident they’d find it within those pages.)
These days, the internet abounds with pointers on how to get the most from art.
Another critic, New York magazine’s firebrand, Jerry Saltz, recommends an aggressively tactile approach for those who would look at art like an artist. Get up close. Cop a feel. Try to see how any given piece is made. (He himself is given to contemplating art with his hips thrust forward and head tilted back as far as it will go, in duplication of Jasper Johns’ stance.)
Of course, some of us don’t mind a hint or two to help us feel we’re on the right track. Those in that camp might enjoy the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 82nd and 5th series, in which expert curators wax rhapsodic about their love of particular works in the collection.
You understand that this is just the tip of the proverbial ‘berg…
Readers, if you have any tips for achieving revelation through art, please share them by leaving a comment below.
And don’t forget to lift your shorter companion up so he can see better.
It’s easy to think of Expressionism—the art form that flourished in Germany during the early decades of the 20th century—as a kind of inchoate release of emotion onto the canvas. The name itself suggests the common idea of art as a means of “expressing oneself.” Often intensely childlike, such as the work of Paul Klee, or completely abstract, such as Wassily Kandinsky’s many geometric compositions, expressionist styles influenced artists throughout the century whom we tend to associate with emotion over reason, passion over restraint: Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francis Bacon.
But let us return to the movement’s roots and we see from its very beginnings that Expressionism was highly theoretical in its emotionalism. Its high priest, Kandinsky, pioneered non-representational painting, and explained his method in coolly analytical terms in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Expressionism—not only in painting, but in drama, sculpture, dance, film, and literature—early on communicated its ideas in a weekly magazine, Der Sturm (The Storm), founded in 1910 by artist and critic Herwarth Walden and running weekly until 1914, then quarterly from 1924 to 1932. In that time, the publication amassed quite a few issues, and you can read (in German) and download all 336 of them here.
You can also see some of the inspired cover designs Der Sturm used over its decades of publication. “The magazine became well known for the inclusion of woodcuts and linocuts,” writes the Guggenheim, “including works by Guggenheim collection artists Marc Chagall,Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oscar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, László Moholy-Nagy, and others.” The museum site features several of Der Sturm’s graphic designs by Moholy-Nagy, such as the cover above, and Monoskop adds the covers further up and at the top of the post, by Oscar Nerlinger and Oskar Kokoschka, respectively. Monoskop also provides a good deal of historical context for the magazine and the gallery it fostered, Galerie Der Sturm, “started by Walden to celebrate its 100th edition, in 1912.”
The gallery’s many exhibitions demonstrate how much Expressionism overlapped with a host of other modernist –isms of the period. It started “with an exhibition of Fauves and Der Blaue Reiter [a group including Kandinsky and Paul Klee that formed the core of first Expressionist painters], followed by the introduction in Germany of the Italian Futurists, Cubists and Orphists.” Edvard Munch exhibited there, as did Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Walden expanded the gallery’s activities after WWI to include lectures and a theater, and he began publishing books and portfolios by Expressionist artists. Just above see the cover of Walden’s own book Einblick in Kunst, and see several more book covers and a bibliography at Monoskop.
A product of the Weimar Republic’s high culture, the German Expressionist movement largely came to an end, along with Der Sturm and its associated work, as the Nazis came to power. But the current of Expressionism moved powerfully through the century, inspiring among others the mid-century American Abstract Expressionists, who often broke away from detached, theoretical understandings of art and engaged in direct and sometimes brutal ways with paint and canvas. But one can’t imagine these later painters taking the subjective license they did without the groundwork laid by the tireless Kandinsky and his contemporaries or Walden’s expansive Der Sturm movement.
You can peruse the entire collection of Der Sturmhere.
Apologies to Stephen King, but when I think of The Shining, I think of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film. While King has long and vigorously objected to Kubrick’s liberties in adapting the story, I’d argue it’s one of those oft-listicled cases where the film is better than the book. Granted, the horror writer has made several justified criticisms of the film’s misogynistic portrayal of Shelly Duvall’s character, but he has also confessed to a total indifference to movies, telling Rolling Stone, “I see [film] as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.” In this instance, at least, he’s dead wrong. Movie lovers have been obsessing over every blessed detail of Kubrick’s The Shining for 36 years and show no signs of stopping.
Part of the reason the story works better on film than on the page is that The Shining is what one might call an architectural horror—its monster is a building, the Overlook Hotel, and Kubrick wisely exploited the idea to its maximum potential, adding an additional structure, the topiary maze, as a further instantiation of the story’s themes of isolation, entrapment, and existential dead ends. Video game designers—many the same age as the film’s young protagonist Danny when the movie came out—surely paid attention. The long takes of Danny’s exploration of the ominous, empty mountain lodge now, in hindsight, resemble any number of virtual console and PC worlds in many a first-person game.
Now joining the architecturally-obsessed reimaginings of The Shining is “Shining 360,” a project by digital artist Claire Hentschker. She describes it as:
a 30-minute audio-visual experiment for VR derived from the physical space within Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘The Shining.’ Using photogrammetry, 3D elements are extracted and extruded from the original film stills, and the subsequent fragments are stitched together and viewed along the original camera path.
In other words, the project allows viewers to move around, using 360-degree Youtube video, in a digitally fragmented space built out of the first 30 minutes of the film. Be aware that there are browser restrictions, but if you open the video in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, you’ll be able to navigate through the space using your mouse or the WASD keys.
It’s a very weird experience. The Overlook’s interior exists in contiguous 3D photographic blobs suspended in black nothingness—giving one the feeling of reaching the edge of some previously-believable video game world and finding out there’s nothing beyond it. And it’s made all the creepier by the near-exclusion of the very few people the hotel does contain—with the exception of a kind of residue of partial bodies—and by a droning, one-note ambient synthesizer score. This isn’t the first time Hentschker has used the film’s spatial uniqueness as computer art. In the short student video above from 2015, she introduces a wonky technical precursor to “Shining 360” that also thematically addresses the movie’s misogyny: “Mapping the Female Gaze in Horror Movies.”
At the time, the collection contained 2.6 million public domain images, but “eventually,” we noted in a previous post, “this archive will grow to 14.6 million images.” Well, it has almost doubled in size since our first post, and it now features over 5.3 million images, thanks again to Kalev Leetaru, who headed the digitization project while on a Yahoo-sponsored fellowship at Georgetown University.
Rather than using optical character recognition (OCR), as most digitization software does to scan only the text of books, Leetaru’s code reversed the process, extracting the images the Internet Archive’s OCR typically ignores. Thousands of graphic illustrations and photographs await your discovery in the searchable database. Type in “records,” for example, and you’ll run into the 1917 ad in “Colombia Records for June” (top) or the creepy 1910 photograph above from “Records of big game: with their distribution, characteristics, dimensions, weights, and horn & tusk measurements.” Two of many gems amidst utilitarian images from dull corporate and government record books.
Search “library” and you’ll arrive at a fascinating assemblage, from the fashionable room above from 1912’s “Book of Home Building and Decoration,” to the rotund, mournful, soon-to-be carved pig below from 1882’s “The American Farmer: A Complete Agricultural Library,” to the nifty Nautilus drawing further down from an 1869 British Museum of Natural History publication. To see more images from any of the sources, simply click on the title of the book that appears in the search results. The organization of the archive could use some improvement: as yet millions of images have not been organized into thematic albums, which would greatly streamline browsing through them. But it’s a minor gripe given the number and variety of free, public domain images available for any kind of use.
Moreover, Leetaru has planned to offer his code to institutions, telling the BBC, “Any library could repeat this process. That’s actually my hope, that libraries around the world run this same process of their digitized books to constantly expand this universe of images.” Scholars and archivists of book and art history and visual culture will find such a “universe of images” invaluable, as will editors of Wikipedia. “What I want to see,” Leetaru also said, “is… Wikipedia have a national day of going through this [collection] to illustrate Wikipedia articles.”
Short of that, individual editors and users can sort through images of all kinds when they can’t find freely available pictures of their subject. And, of course, sites like Open Culture—which rely mainly on public domain and creative commons images—benefit greatly as well. So, thanks, Internet Archive Book Images Collection! We’ll check back later and let you know when they’ve grown even more.
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