Each card comes with publication information. Images of the flip sides reveal that the sender often considered the publishers’ preprinted sentiments correspondence enough. (It’s something of a relief to realize that social media did not invent this kind of shorthand.)
Bunnies are not the only fruit here… seasonal flora and fauna abound, in addition to more explicitly religious iconography.
Early 20th century modernism often seems to come out of nowhere, especially when our exposure to it comes in the form of a survey of singular great works. Each sculpture, film, or painting can seem sui generis, as though left by an alien civilization for us to find and admire.
But when you spend a great deal more time with modern art—looking over artists’ entire body of work and seeing how various schools and individuals developed together—it becomes apparent that all art, even the most radical or strange, evolves in dialogue with art, and that no artist works fully in isolation.
Take, for example, Monet’s Japanese Footbridge, above, from 1920. It’s a scene from his garden the early impressionist had painted many times over the decades. In this, one of his final paintings of the bridge, we see a riot of reds, oranges, and yellows in gestural brushstrokes that almost obscure the scene entirely. Though we know Monet had failing eyesight due to cataracts, a condition that lead to the vivid colors he saw in this period, it’s hard not to see some homage to Van Gogh, upon whose work Monet’s had a tremendous influence.
Above, we have Georgia O’Keeffe’s Lake George, Coat and Red from 1919, which abstracts the vivid patches of color characteristic of Edouard Manet’s work and the fauvism of Henri Matisse, both of whom greatly influenced American modernists like O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Charles Demuth. These paintings reside at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), along with many thousands more that show us the development and interrelationship of modern art in Europe and America. And you can see close to half of them, whether they’re on display or not, at the MoMA’s digital collection.
This online collection houses 90,000 works of art in all, to be precise. You can see, for example, Giorgio de Chirico’s The Song of Love, above, a typical painting for the surrealist that shows how much influence he had on the later Salvador Dali, who was only ten years old at the time of this work. At the top of the post, Fernand Leger’s Three Women, from 1921, shows the futurist and later pop art French painter in conversation with Picasso and Henri Rousseau.
From today on everybody around the world can access, study, print or remix a 3D dataset of Nefertiti’s head in high resolution. This data is accessible under a public domain without any charge, this torrent provides you a STL-file (100 MB)…
“Nefertiti Hack” goes on to say: “ ‘The Other Nefertiti’ is an artistic intervention by the two German artists Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles. Al-Badri and Nelles scanned the head of Nefertiti clandestinely in the Neues Museum Berlin without permission of the Museum and they hereby announce the release of the 3D data of Nefertiti’s head under a Creative Commons Licence.… With regard to the notion of belonging and possession of objects of other cultures, the artists’ intention is to make cultural objects publicly accessible.”
As if not already controversial, this act of artistic vigilantism recently became more contentious when 3D scanning experts started questioning whether Al-Badri and Nelles could have produced such high quality scans with a Kinect hidden under a jacket (shown on a video here). It seems implausible, they say. And it has left some wondering, writes The New York Times, whetherAl-Badri and Nelles “somehow acquired the museum’s own scan of the bust, scanned a high-quality copy or produced the scan by some other means.” The answer is not yet clear.
In the meantime, according to Hyperallergic, the artists themselves used their scans “to create a 3D-printed, one-to-one polymer resin model” of the Nefertiti bust, which, they claim, “is the most precise replica of the bust ever made.” And that bust “will reside permanently in the American University of Cairo later this year as a stand-in for the original, 3,300-year-old work that was removed from its country of origin shortly after its discovery in 1912 by German archaeologists in Amarna.”
If there are updates to the story, I am sure Hyperallergic will have them.
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I just last week returned from a visit to Tokyo, where I did what I always do there: shop for magazines. Despite not paying the magazine shelves a whole lot of attention in Korea, where I live, and practically none at all in America, where I’m from, I can’t resist lingering for hours over the ones in Japan, a country whose print publishing industry seems much stronger than that of any other, and whose publications showcase the culture’s formidable design sensibility that has only grown more compelling over the centuries.
Will Schofield, who runs the international and historical book design blog 50 Watts, knows this, and he also knows that Japanese design has been making magazine covers interesting since Japan first had magazines to cover. The images here come from two of his posts, Extraordinary early 20th century magazine covers from Japan and 25 Vintage Magazine Covers from Japan. The earlier ones, which he describes as a mixture of “charming children’s covers with the creepy modernist covers,” come from Bookcover Design in Japan 1910s-40s. “Published in 2005 by PIE Books,” writes Schofield, “this incredible book is already out-of-print and becoming hard to find (it was actually hard for me to find and I spend hours per day searching for rare books).”
As for the more recent post, he writes that it “began as a compilation of magazine covers from the website of a Japanese antiquarian dealer. I dug through all 1500 or so images and saved (like a good little digital hoarder) hundreds to feature, though only 8 made the first cut.”
Both posts together present a curated collection of nearly 50 mostly prewar Japanese magazine covers, still vivid and of a decidedly high artistic standards these 70 to 103 years later. On my own shopping trip, I picked up an issue of Free & Easy, my favorite men’s style magazine published anywhere — its final issue, incidentally, and one whose cover, despite depicting no less an American icon than Dick Tracy, admirably carries this tradition of Japanese magazine art one step further.
It has long been thought that the so-called “Golden Ratio” described in Euclid’s Elements has “implications for numerous natural phenomena… from the leaf and seed arrangements of plants” and “from the arts to the stock market.” So writes astrophysicist Mario Livio, head of the science division for the institute that oversees the Hubble Telescope. And yet, though this mathematical proportion has been found in paintings by Leonardo da Vinci to Salvador Dali—two examples that are only “the tip of the iceberg in terms of the appearances of the Golden Ratio in the arts”—Livio concludes that it does not describe “some sort of universal standard for ‘beauty.’” Most art of “lasting value,” he argues, departs “from any formal canon for aesthetics.” We can consider Livio a Golden Ratio skeptic.
Far on the other end of a spectrum of belief in mathematical art lies Le Corbusier, Swiss architect and painter in whose modernist design some see an almost totalitarian mania for order. Using the Golden Ratio, Corbusier designed a system of aesthetic proportions called Modulor, its ambition, writes William Wiles at Icon, “to reconcile maths, the human form, architecture and beauty into a single system.”
Praised by Einstein and adopted by a few of Corbusier’s contemporaries, Modulor failed to catch on in part because “Corbusier wanted to patent the system and earn royalties from buildings using it.” In place of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, Corbusier proposed “Modulor Man” (below) the “mascot of [his] system for reordering the universe.”
Perhaps now, we need an artist to render a “Fractal Man”—or Fractal Gender Non-Specific Person—to represent the latest enthusiastic findings of math in the arts. This time, scientists have quantified beauty in language, a medium sometimes characterized as so imprecise, opaque, and unscientific that the Royal Society was founded with the motto “take no one’s word for it” and Ludwig Wittgenstein deflated philosophy with his conclusion in the Tractatus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Speaking, in this sense, meant using language in a highly mathematical way.) Words—many scientists and philosophers have long believed—lie, and lead us away from the cold, hard truths of pure mathematics.
To determine whether the books had fractal structures, the academics looked at the variation of sentence lengths, finding that each sentence, or fragment, had a structure that resembled the whole of the book.
And it isn’t only Joyce. Through a statistical analysis of 113 works of literature, the researchers found that many texts written by the likes of Dickens, Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco, and Samuel Beckett had multifractal structures. The most mathematically complex works were stream-of-consciousness narratives, hence the ultimate complexity of Finnegans Wake, which Professor Stanisław Drożdż, co-author of the paper published at Information Sciences, describes as “the absolute record in terms of multifractality.” (The graph at the top shows the results of the novel’s analysis, which produced a shape identical to pure mathematical multifractals.)
This study produced some inconsistencies, however. In the graph above, you can see how many of the titles surveyed ranked in terms of their “multifractality.” A close second to Joyce’s classic work, surprisingly, is Dave Egger’s post-modern memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and much, much further down the scale, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Proust’s masterwork, writes Phys.org, shows “little correlation to multifractality” as do certain other books like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The measure may tell us little about literary quality, though Professor Drożdż suggests that “it may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another.” Irish novelist Eimear McBride finds this “upshot” disappointing. “Surely there are more interesting questions about the how and why of writers’ brains arriving at these complex, but seemingly instinctive, fractals?” she told The Guardian.
Of the finding that stream-of-consciousness works seem to be the most fractal, McBride says, “By its nature, such writing is concerned not only with the usual load-bearing aspects of language—content, meaning, aesthetics, etc—but engages with language as the object in itself, using the re-forming of its rules to give the reader a more prismatic understanding…. Given the long-established connection between beauty and symmetry, finding works of literature fractally quantifiable seems perfectly reasonable.” Maybe so, or perhaps the Polish scientists have fallen victim to a more sophisticated variety of the psychological sharpshooter’s fallacy that affects “Bible Code” enthusiasts? I imagine we’ll see some fractal skeptics emerge soon enough. But the idea that the worlds-within-worlds feeling one gets when reading certain books—the sense that they contain universes in miniature—may be mathematically verifiable sends a little chill up my spine.
In the 1970s and 80s, a certain vivid, complex, and slightly frightening computer-graphics aesthetic rose in the zeitgeist. Though it has long passed into the realm of the retro, it remains imprinted on our minds, and we owe much of its look and feel to an artist named Lillian F. Schwartz. Trained in the art of Japanese calligraphy as a way of recovering from polio and later brought into the high technological ferment of late-1960s Bell Labs, Schwartz found herself well-placed to define what humanity would think of when they thought of the imagery generated by these promising new machines called computers.
Schwartz started creating a series of abstract films in the early 1970s, using not just computers but computers in combination with lasers, photographs, oil paints, and the full range of traditional film photography and editing gear.
You can watch 30 of her films on her web site, and at the top of this post you’ll find 1972’s Mutations. Schwartz’s site quotes the New York Times’ A.H. Weiler as describing its “changing dots, ectoplasmic shapes and electronic music” as “an eye-catching view of the potentials of the new techniques.”
Video-art fans will know the Paik video-synthesizer, or at least they’ll know Paik: Nam June Paik, that is, the Korean video artist who did plenty of artistic-technological pioneering of his own. Both he and Schwartz gave a great deal of thought to — and put a great deal of practice into — pushing the boundaries of technologies whose conventional uses the rest of us hadn’t quite learned yet. You can see Schwartz doing exactly that in The Artist and the Computer, the 1976 short documentary on her work, originally produced for AT&T, just above.
You can read more about Schwartz, back at Bell Labs and today, in the article “Art at the Edge of Tomorrow” by Jer Thorp. “I find it’s still an awesome experience to use a machine that — one can’t even fathom the speed,” she says in The Artist and the Computer as we watch her passing rows and rows of hulking mainframes with their racks of obscure peripherals and spinning reels of tape. “When you speak of nanoseconds, you can’t even grasp how fast these machines can work.” They work much faster now, of course, and we’ve grown used to it, even jaded about it — but Schwartz’s films capture our imaginations, in their inventive and eerie way, more than ever.
“If you remember the sixties,” goes the famous and variously attributed quotation, “you weren’t really there.” And, psychological after-effects of first-hand exposure to that era aside, increasingly many of us weren’t born anywhere near in time to take part.
Those of us from the wrong place or the wrong time have had to draw what understanding of the sixties we could from that much-mythologized period’s music and movies, as well as the cloudy reflections of those who lived through it (or claimed to). But now we can get a much more direct sense through the complete digital archives of Oz, sometimes called the most controversial magazine of the sixties.
In The Guardian, Chitra Ramaswamy describes the London magazine as “the icon – and the enfant terrible – of the underground press. Produced in a basement flat off Notting Hill Gate, Oz was soon renowned for psychedelic covers by pop artist Martin Sharp, cartoons by Robert Crumb, radical feminist manifestos by Germaine Greer, and anything else that would send the establishment apoplectic. By August 1971, it had been the subject of the longest obscenity trial in British history. It doesn’t get more 60s than that.” Even its print run, which began in 1967 and ended in 1973, perfectly brackets the period people really talk about when they talk about the sixties.
The online archive has gone up at the web site of the University of Wollongong, who two years ago put up a similar digital collection of all the issues of Oz’s eponymous satirical predecessor produced in Sydney. “Please be advised,” notes the front page, “this collection has been made available due to its historical and research importance. It contains explicit language and images that reflect attitudes of the era in which the material was originally published, and that some viewers may find confronting.” And while Oz today wouldn’t likely get into the kind of deep and high-profile legal trouble it did back then — in addition to the famous 1971 trial for the London version, the Sydney one got hit with two obscenity charges during the previous decade — the sheer transgressive zeal on display all over the magazine’s pages in its heyday still impresses.
“Fifty years later, it’s important as a capsule of the times, but also as a work of art,” says Michael Organ, a library manager at the university, in the Guardian article. “Oz is a record of the cultural revolution. Many of the issues it raised, such as the environment, sexuality and drug use, are no longer contentious. In fact, they have now become mainstream.”
All this goes for the deliberately provocative editorial content — the stuff some viewers may find “confronting” — as well as the incidental content: ads for novels by Henry Miller and Jean Genet, “dates computer matched to your personality and tastes,” a machine promising “a hot line to infinity/journey through the incredible landscapes of your mind/kaleidoscopic moving changing image on which your mind projects its own changing/stun yourself & astonish friends,” and the “liquid luxury” of the Aquarius Water Bed. It does not, indeed, get more sixties than that. Enter the Oz archive here.
Théophile Steinlen’s poster for Le Chat Noir, Leonetto Cappiello’s advertisement for Café Martin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s portraits of the cabaret singer Aristide Bruant — through these and other much-reproduced and often-seen images, we’ve all gained some familiarity, however unconscious, with the art of the fin de siècle French print.
But even so, most of us have seen only a small fraction of all the striking works of art a late-nineteenth-century Parisian would have encountered on the streetscape every day. Until they invent a time machine to drop us straight into the cultural vibrancy of that time and place, we’ve got the next best thing in the form of the Van Gogh Museum’s online French print collection.
“In France, until the mid-nineteenth century, the art of printmaking had been used primarily to reproduce existing works of art in print, such as paintings and sculptures, so that they could be available for a broad public,” says the museum’s announcement of the online collection, which opened in February.
But in the second half of the nineteenth century, “as artists began to experiment with the medium as a fertile mode of creative expression, each print came to be considered a work of art in its own right.” In the aesthetically explosive years between 1890 to 1905, “a new generation of artists took up the art of printmaking as a modern medium,” driven by a “fascination for modern life, including the scintillating Paris nightlife, Japanese woodblock prints, and the intimate domestic lifestyle of the well-to-do bourgeois.”
The online collection offers not just high-resolution images of nearly 1800 prints, posters, and books from this movement, but information that “reveals and elaborates on innumerable artistic and historical connections using interactive tags and hyperlinks,” shedding light on the “tightly knit community” of the Parisian print world, whose “each individual print is connected with countless other prints in many different ways,” from shared influences to subjects to artistic techniques to types of paper — and even to clients, who quickly realized the commercial value of all the eye-catching qualities pioneered in this revolution in reproducible visual art.
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