In a pretty great gif. That’s all.
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No need to scramble to the fallout shelter, friends.
That massive boom you just heard is merely the sound of thousands of crafters’ minds being blown en masse by the University of Southhampton’s Knitting Reference Library, an extensive resource of books, catalogues, patterns, journals and magazines—over seventeen decades worth.
Viva la Handmade Revolution!
The basics of the form—knitting, purling, increasing, decreasing, casting on and off—have remained remarkably consistent throughout the generations. No wonder there’s an enduring tradition of learning to knit at grandma’s knee…
What has evolved is the nature of the finished products.
Miss Lambert’s “Baby Quilt in Stripes of Alternate Colors” from her 1847 Knitting Book could still hold its own against any other handcrafted shower gift, but even the most hardcore modern crafter would find it challenging to find takers for her “Carriage Sock,” which is meant to be worn over the shoe.
Ditto the “Woolen Helmets” in Helping the Trawlers, a 32-page pamphlet published by the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. The hope was that civic-minded knitters might be moved to donate handmade socks, mittens, and other items to combat the chill faced by poor working men facing the elements on freezing decks.
Not surprisingly, the eager volunteer knitting force gravitated toward the pamphlet’s most baroque item, putting the publisher in a delicate position:
Owing, perhaps, to their novelty, a great many friends commence working for the Society by making these articles and the Uhlan caps, and we are apt, on this account, to get rather more of them than we require for our North Sea work. The Labrador fishermen value the helmets equally with their North Sea breathren, and thus there is an ample output for them, but we shall be glad if friends will bear the hint in mind, and make some of the other things in preference to the helmets and Uhlan caps.
All of the books in the Knitting Reference Library are open access, though many of the patterns and magazines are dependent on copyright clearance. Give a prowl, and you’ll find that a few of the older patterns are available as downloadable, printable PDFs , such as this handsome gent’s cable knit pullover or the tricky 50’s bison cardigan, below.
Even without step-by-step instructions, the pattern envelopes’ cover images can still provide inspiration…and no small degree of amusement. Some enterprising librarian should get cracking on a sub-collection, Fashion Crimes Against Male Knitwear Models, 1960–1980:
There’s even something for the latter day Labrador trawler...
The entire collection can be viewed here. For viewing and printing patterns, we recommend selecting “PDF” from the list of download options.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
How to market a book like Lolita, which, upon its publication in 1955, promptly found itself banned in France, Britain, New Zealand, Argentina and other countries? Carefully. At least at first.
Over at Covering Lolita, you can see an archive of the designs that have adorned the cover of the famously controversial book. It all starts with the original 1955 edition, which was the most vanilla cover imaginable. Lolita and Humbert Humbert — they were nowhere to be seen.
By the 1960s, publishers got a little less gun shy, and the covers, more risqué. See this 1964 Turkish version as an example. Or the second image above, a Danish cover from 1963.
So what cover did Nabokov personally favor? Glad you asked. Long ago, we showed you some footage of Nabokov marveling over different “Lolita” cover designs. And, in it, he points to his favorite: a French sketch from 1963, which appears up top.
This just a small sampling of what you will find in the Covering Lolita Archive, a gallery that currently contains 210 book and media covers from 40 countries, spanning 58 years.
The archive brings you right up to 2014. (2015 and 2016 will likely be accounted for pretty soon.) If you have a favorite design, please let us know in the comments section below.
Note: You can download essential works by Vladimir Nabokov as free audiobooks (including Jeremy Irons reading Lolita) if you sign up for a 30-Day Free Trial with Audible. Find more information on that program here.
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!
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Here we have a poster for a film many of you will have heard of, and some of you will have watched right here on Open Culture: Stalker, widely considered the most masterful of Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s career full of masterpieces. Needless to say, the film has inspired no small amount of cinephile enthusiasm in the 37 years since its release, and if it has inspired the same in you, what better way to express it than to hang its poster on your wall? And why not take it to the next level by hanging a Stalker poster from another country, such as the Italian one here?
We found it on Posteritati, a New York movie poster gallery whose online store also functions as a digital archive of over 40,000 of these commercial-cinematic works of art, all conveniently sorted into categories: not just Tarkovsky posters, but posters from the former East Germany and Iran, posters from the Czech New Wave, and posters designed by the Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo (whose works, said no less an observer of the human condition than Yukio Mishima, “reveal all of the unbearable things which we Japanese have inside ourselves”). And that’s just a small sampling of what Posteritati has to offer. If you dig deep enough, you can even find posters from Poland and the Czech Republic with cats in them.
Avid Open Culture readers might find Posteritati’s philosophy section especially worthwhile, containing as it does posters for movies we’ve previously featured and movies about thinkers we like to write about, like Derrida, Examined Life, Wittgenstein, and of course the Slavoj Žižek-starring The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology and Žižek!
They also sell posters at the site, though even the ones not in stock remain available to view as images: just toggle the “IN STOCK ONLY” switch to the OFF position, and you can then see all of the posters in the collection. No matter what your cinematic, intellectual, or aesthetic interests, you’ll find at least a few posters that pique your interest. The Japanese poster for Orson Welles’ F for Fake just above, for instance, represents a near-perfect intersection of most of my own interests. Just as well Posteritati doesn’t have it in stock — I’d probably pay anything.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
First published in three volumes in 1914, only 24 years after his death, the letters of Vincent Van Gogh have captivated lovers of his painting for over a century for the insights they offer into his creative bliss and anguish. They have also long been accorded the status of literature. “There is scarcely one letter by Van Gogh,” wrote W.H. Auden, “which I do not find fascinating.”
That first published collection consisted only of the painter’s 651 letters to his younger brother, Theo, who died six months after Vincent. Compiled and published by Theo’s wife, Johanna, Van Gogh’s correspondence became instrumental in spreading his fame as both an artist and as a chronicler of deep emotional experiences and religious and philosophical convictions.
Now available in a six-volume scholarly collection of 819 letters Vincent wrote to Theo and various family members and friends—as well as 83 letters he received—the full correspondence shows us a man who “could write very expressively and had a powerful ability to evoke a scene or landscape with well-chosen words.” So write the Van Gogh Museum, who also host all of those letters online, with thoroughly annotated English translations, manuscript facsimiles, and more. The collection dates from 1872—with a few mundane notes written to Theo—to Van Gogh’s last letter to his brother in July of 1890. “I’d really like to write to you about many things,” Vincent begins in that final communication, “but sense the pointlessness of it.” He ends the letter with an equally ominous sentiment: “Ah well, I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered in it.”
In-between these very personal windows onto Van Gogh’s state of mind, we see the progression of his career. Early letters contain much discussion between him and Theo about the business of art (Vincent worked as an art dealer between 1869 and 1876). Endless money worries preoccupy the bulk of Vincent’s letters to his family. And there are later letters between Vincent and Paul Gaugin and painter Emile Bernard, almost exclusively about technique. Since he was “not in a dependent position” with artist friends as he was with family, in the few letters he exchanged with his peers, points out the Van Gogh Museum, “the sole focus was on art.”
And as you can see here, Van Gogh would not only “evoke a scene or landscape” with words, but also with many dozens of illustrations. Many are sketches for paintings in progress, some quick observations and rapid portraits, and some fully-composed scenes. Van Gogh’s sketches “basically served one purpose, which was to give the recipient an idea of something that he was working on or had finished.” (See the sketch of his room in an 1888 letter to Gauguin at the top of the post.) In early letters to Theo, the sketches—which Vincent called “scratches”—also served to convince his younger brother and patron of his commitment and to demonstrate his progress. You can peruse all of the letters at your leisure here. Click on “With Sketches” to see the letters featuring illustrations.
And for much more context on the history of Van Gogh’s correspondence, see the Van Gogh Museum’s site for biographical information, essays on Van Gogh’s many themes, his rhetorical style, and the state and appearance of the manuscripts.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
All of us who saw Jurassic Park as kids, no matter how much skepticism we’d precociously developed, surely spent at least a moment wondering if science could actually bring dinosaurs back to life by pulling the DNA out of their blood trapped in amber-preserved mosquitoes. It turns out that it can’t — at least not yet! — but even so, we had to admit that Steven Spielberg and his CGI-savvy collaborators (not to mention their huge budget) achieved, on screen, the next best thing. Even so, people have long disagreed about whether to call the visual resurrection of dinosaurs in the service of a blockbuster adventure movie a work of art.
But what if we used the even more powerful data analysis and computer graphics technology now at our disposal specifically for the purpose of generating a masterpiece, or at least a piece by a master — by Rembrandt, say? A project called The Next Rembrandt has aimed to do just that with its attempt “to distill the artistic DNA of Rembrandt” using everything from building and analyzing “an extensive analysis of his paintings [ … ] pixel by pixel,” to performing a demographic study determining his conclusive portrait subject (“a Caucasian male with facial hair, between the ages of thirty and forty, wearing black clothes with a white collar and a hat, facing to the right”), to creating a height map to mimic his physical brush strokes.
“You could say that we use technology and data like Rembrandt used his paints and his brushes to create something new.” Those bold words come from Ron Augustus, Microsoft’s director of small- and medium-sized business markets, in the promotional video at the top of the post. His employer acts as one of two partners involved in The Next Rembrandt, the other being the Dutch bank ING — hence, presumably, the choice of painter to resurrect. Their combined resources have produced a wholly theoretical, but in a physical sense very real, new “Rembrandt” portrait, meticulously 3D-printed at 148 megapixels in thirteen layers of paint-based UV ink.
Despite its impressive plausibility, nobody expects the fruit of the Next Rembrandt project’s considerable labors, unveiled yesterday in Amsterdam, to hang in the Rijksmuseum next to The Night Watch. But it can, properly considered, teach us all a great deal about what, in the words of ING executive creative director Bas Korsten, “made Rembrandt Rembrandt.” And like any cutting-edge stunt, it also gives us a glimpse into what technology will sooner or later make possible for us all. How long could we possibly have to wait before we can 3D-print, on canvas with oil paint, portraits of ourselves as Rembrandt almost certainly would have painted us — or our very own Night Watch, indistinguishable from the original? Truly, we stand on the cusp of a golden age of forgery.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Abstract art, spurred into being by the emergence of photography, had by 1912 begun to face an even more technically adroit competitor for the public’s eye: film. Marcel Duchamp responded by superimposing all of the discrete moments that make up a film reel into one astonishing image that is both static and always in motion. Over one hundred years after its composition, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (below) still amazes viewers with its absolute novelty. He was asked to withdraw the painting from a cubist exhibition when the committee pronounced it “ridiculous.”
Five years later, feeling with his fellow Dadaists that the avant-garde had grown too cozy with the establishment, and too precious in its approach and reception, Duchamp submitted a signed urinal for an exhibition, the first of many replicas to occupy galleries for the past one-hundred years—and a provocation once voted the most influential modern art work ever. Like some sort of trickster god, Marcel Duchamp possessed transformative powers, which also had the effect of driving everyone around him crazy. There seem to be no two ways about it: people either think Duchamp is a genius, or they consider him a fraud.
Like most of his Dada contemporaries, Duchamp left no medium untouched, from painting, to sculpture, to film. And when it came to music, Ubuweb informs us, he enthusiastically applied himself, between the years 1912 and 1915, to “two works of music and a conceptual piece—a note suggesting a musical happening.” Like all of his creative work—love it or hate it—his compositions “represent a radical departure from anything done up until that time.” Also like his other works, his music gleefully trespassed formal boundaries, anticipating “something that then became apparent in the visual arts,” amateur experimentation. Duchamp respected no school and no canon of taste, and his “lack of musical training could have only enhanced his exploration.”
The methods employed were, of course, conceptual, and seriously playful. In “Erratum Musical,” written for three voices, “Duchamp made three sets of 25 cards, one for each voice, with a single note per card. Each set of cards was mixed in a hat; he then drew out the cards from the hat one at a time and wrote down the series of notes indicated by the order in which they were drawn.” The second piece, directly above, “La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even. Erratum Musical),” contains instructions for a “mechanical instrument.” It is also “unfinished and is written using numbers instead of notes.”
Finally, “Sculpture Musicale (Musical Sculpture)”—vocalized by John Cage above, and recreated with music boxes below—consists of “a note on a small piece of paper” and anticipates the “Fluxus pieces of the early 1960s.” While Dada artists nearly all experimented with music, mostly in the form of a kind of confrontational musical theater, Duchamp’s cerebral compositions push into the territory of purely conceptual exercises created through chance operation. In “Erratum Musical,” for example, “the three voices are written out separately, and there is no indication by the author, whether they should be performed separately or together as a trio.” The arrangement depends entirely on the time and place of performance and the intuitions of the interpreters.
The Rube Goldberg machine described by Duchamp’s second piece, along with the notation system of his own devising, makes it seem impossible to perform; likewise the entirely non-musical “Sculpture Musicale.” The recordings we have here represent only possible versions. Hear others at Ubuweb, along with several interviews with Duchamp in French and English.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Last year, we let you know that the first season of The Joy of Painting, the public-television paint-along show hosted by the neatly permed and persistently reassuring Bob Ross, had appeared free to watch online.
Produced by WNVC in Falls Church, Virginia, that season aired in 1983, and had some rough edges — the audible movements and murmurs of the crew in the background, the naturally improvisational Ross’ occasional stumble over one of his scripted lines — that would get thoroughly smoothed away as the program rapidly became an international TV institution, a process you can witness again for yourself now that Bob Ross’ Youtube channel has made available all 31 seasons free online.
Season Two
“Bob Ross died in 1995 at 52 after a battle with lymphoma,” writes the New York Times’ Foster Kamer, “but his cultural legacy has grown in his absence. He was around to witness the beginnings of his own cult status. In the early ’90s, he was big in Japan. And MTV, catering to the Gen X penchant for irony, ran a series of promotional advertisements that featured him.”
Gen Xers across America would surely all have caught glimpses of Ross — and more importantly, heard a few of his mesmerizingly delivered words — during late-night or midday channel-surfing sessions, but now, thanks to the increasing availability of The Joy of Painting’s archives on-demand and online, it’s made new fans even of those born after Ross had already departed.
Season Three
The show always made it easy for its viewers to paint as they watched, with Ross always taking the time to run down the short list of required tools, making tirelessly sure to emphasize that under no circumstances should they buy nylon brushes or clean those brushes with turpentine. As the production values increased, so did the number of colors on the palette, though they never expanded too far beyond the core set, which The Joy of Painting die-hards can rattle off like a mantra, of Bright Red, Phthalo Blue, Midnight Black, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow, Van Dyke Brown, Titanium White, Sap Green — and, as Ross himself might say, the “almighty” canvas-covering Magic White, the foundation of the “wet-on-wet” technique he learned from mentor, and later bitter rival, Bill Alexander.
Season Four
The New York Times article quotes Annette Kowalski, a onetime student of Ross who now helps run the Bob Ross, Inc. empire, on the host’s enduring appeal as a teacher: “If you listen closely to Bob’s programs, he never says ‘I’m going to teach you this. He never assumes that he knows more than you do. He says: ‘We’ll learn this together.’ And I think — even though people don’t realize it — I think that’s what his big turn-on is.” But it almost goes without saying that not everyone fascinated by the show, and maybe not even most people fascinated by the show, actually have any desire to paint themselves.
Season Five
So why do they still tune in, on whatever platform they might tune in on, and in such large numbers? The key must have something to do with Ross’ oft-repeated reminders to his viewers that, when it comes to the landscapes on their own canvases, “this is your world, your creation,” and in your world, “there are no set, firm rules — you find what works for you, and that’s what you do.” On The Joy of Painting, Ross created a world, or perhaps a reality, of his own, one where “anybody can paint; all you need is a dream in your heart and a little practice,” where “there are no mistakes, just happy accidents” (plentifully inhabited, of course, by “happy little trees”), and one which many found they enjoyed living in, brush in hand or not, even if only for 26 minutes at a time.
Season Six
We will continuing adding seasons to this list as they become available.
Season Seven
Season Eight
Season Nine
Season Ten
Season 11
Season 12
Season 13
Season 14
Season 15
Season 16
Season 17
Season 18
Season 19
Season 20
Season 21
Season 22
Season 23
Season 24
Season 25
Season 26
Season 27
Season 28
Season 29
Season 30
Season 31
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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