Picasso Makes Wonderful Abstract Art

in Art, Film | November 24th, 2015

Pablo Picasso, as you may know, produced a fair few memorable works in his long lifetime. He also came up with a number of quotable quotes. “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction” has particularly stuck with me, but one does wonder what an artist who thinks this way actually does when he creates — or, rather, when he first destroys, then creates. Luckily for us, we can watch Picasso in action, in vintage footage from several different films–first, at the top of the post, in a clip from 1950’s Visite à Picasso by Belgian artist and filmmaker Paul Haesaerts (which you can watch online: part one, part two).

In it, Picasso paints on glass in front of the camera, thus enabling us to see the painter at work from, in some sense, the painting’s perspective. Just above, you can watch another, similarly filmed clip from Visite à Picasso.

Both of them show how Picasso could, without much in the way of apparent advance planning or thought, simply begin creating art, literally at a stroke — on which would follow another stroke, and another, and another. “Action is the foundational key to all success,” he once said, words even more widely applicable than the observation about creation as destruction, and here we can see his actions becoming art before our eyes.

It also happens in the clip above, though this time captured from a more standard over-the-shoulder perspective. “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls,” Picasso also said, and one senses something of that ablutionary ritual (and not just because of how little clothing the man has chosen to wear) in the footage below, wherein he lays down lines on a canvas the size of an entire wall. It comes from Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 documentary The Mystery of Picasso, which offers a wealth of close looks at Picasso’s process.

You can watch the film online here, or see a few Picasso paintings come together in time-lapse in the trailer above. “The paintings created by Picasso in this film cannot be seen anywhere else,” the crawl at the end of the trailer informs us. “They were destroyed upon completion of the film.” So it seems that at least some acts of creation, for Picasso himself, not only began with an act of destruction, but ended with one too.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Artist Turns a Crop Field Into a Van Gogh Painting, Seen Only From Airplanes

in Art | November 23rd, 2015

Formally Trained as an avant-garde, abstract expressionist painter, Stan Herd went on to become something a little different — an earthworks artist who takes fields where crops are grown and turns them into sprawling canvases on which he makes art of his own. It has been said about him: “Herd is an unusual artist. His medium is the earth itself; his palette consists of soil, wheat, sunflowers, and corn; his brush is a tractor; and his images can be seen only from an airplane.”

Image by The Minneapolis Institute of Art

Many of his early creations can be revisited in his 1994 book Crop Art and Other Earthworks. To see his latest work, just click play on the video above. Commissioned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, this earthwork features a rendering of an “Olive Tree” painting that Van Gogh completed as part of a larger series of Olive Tree paintings created while living in an asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889.

Mr. Herd started work on the project last spring, planting different crops in a field owned by Thomson Reuters. By fall, passengers flying into Minneapolis could catch a view of Herd’s Van Gogh–like the one you see above.

via This is Colossal

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Meet Congo the Chimp, London’s Sensational 1950s Abstract Painter

in Art | November 19th, 2015

A few years ago, I watched and enjoyed My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old abstract painter who became a brief art-world sensation, her canvases (which towered over the tiny artist) at one point selling for thousands of dollars apiece. Olmstead raised the bar high indeed for all subsequent preschool-aged art celebrities, but the world of unlikely painters in general has a fuller, stranger history. Witness, for instance, Congo the Chimp, the London Zoo’s artistic sensation of the 1950s, a noted animal artist who sold work to such noted non-animal artists as Picasso, Miró, and Dalí, the last of whom made a comparison with one of the best-known abstract painters of the day: “The hand of the chimpanzee is quasihuman; the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal!”

Congo, who began his art career the moment he happened to pick up a pencil, went on, writes the Telegraph’s Nigel Reynolds, to become “a television celebrity in the late 1950s as the star of Zootime, an animal programme presented from the London Zoo by Desmond Morris, the zoologist and anthropologist. He became even more of a cause célèbre when the Institute of Contemporary Arts mounted a large exhibition of his work in 1957.

Critics had a field day and debate about the meaning of art raged furiously.” You can see Morris, a surrealist painter himself, in addition to his zoological, anthropological, and televisual work, interacting with Congo in the 1950s and reflecting on the place of the chimpanzee artist in his own career in the clip at the top of the post. The newsreel below covers an exhibition called The Young Idea, which featured paintings not just from Congo but from such Marla Olmstead predecessors as three-year-old Timothy Vaughn and eighteen-month-old Graham Phillips. One of Congo’s paintings appears above.

And so to the obvious question: But Is It Art? And assuming it is, writes John Valentine in The Philosopher, “what then follows from such a classification? What sort of difference does it or should it make in the way we approach and appreciate chimpanzee paintings? If they are art, what sort of critical or interpretive discourse about them should we engage in? Do we simply appreciate the lines, colours, and forms of Congo’s paintings and stop at that? Does it make any difference that the paintings were done by a member of a different species? Should species differences make any difference in artistic value?” It may not, at least commercially speaking: Congo may have had his moment six decades ago, but don’t think that means his work will come cheap; back in 2005, some of his paintings went up on the auction block and fetched more than $25,620.

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Masterpieces of Western Art with All Gluten Products Removed: See Works by Dalí, Cézanne, Van Gogh & Others

in Art, Creativity, Food & Drink, Technology | November 16th, 2015

left: Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid. right: Arthur Coulet, d’après Johannes Vermeer

It has been suggested plausibly that Vermeer’s kitchen maid is making bread porridge, which puts stale bread—there is an unusual amount of bread on the table—to good use by combining it with milk and a few other ingredients to make a filling mash or meal.

- Walter Liedtke, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

It’s a matter for conjecture. Perhaps Vermeer wanted to title his painting The Bread Porridge Maid, but caved to market research suggesting that Milkmaid would better appeal to what Liedtke calls “male viewer’s amorous musings.”

Recently, graphic artist Arthur Coulet made bread a focal point in Vermeer’s Milkmaid and other iconic works, ironically by Photoshopping it out.

His online Gluten Free Museum is a nod to détournement, manipulations of existing works born of Letterist International and the Situationists. Gone are the crusty loaves, fields golden with wheat, and anything containing grains that could cause discomfort to those afflicted by gluten intolerance or celiac disease.

Even the pitchfork in Grant Wood’s American Gothic gets the digital heave ho…with nothing to harvest, what’s the point?

Pieter Bruegel’s the Harvesters gets the most radical redo.

Cezanne’s Still Life with Bread and Eggs is now just Eggs…

…and Salvador Dali’s Eucharistic Still Life has been reduced to mere fishes.

By contrast, the picnickers in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe probably don’t even notice the omission.

See more, including work by Jean-François Millet, Vincent van Gogh, Caravaggio, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Jeff Koons in Coulet’s Gluten Free Museum.

A quick image search using the phrase “bread painting” suggests that much work remains to be done.

via So Bad So Good

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Salvador Dalí’s Melting Clocks Painted on a Latte

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is playing in New York City through November 20. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Edvard Munch’s The Scream Animated to the Psychedelic Sounds of Pink Floyd: The Winter Version

in Animation, Art | November 11th, 2015

Back in the spring, we featured Romanian animator Sebastian Cosor’s animation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream set to Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky.” But the wintertime has almost come, which necessitates not just a change in the clothes we wear, but a change in the animations of The Scream we watch. Fortunately, Cosor has already put together a seasonally appropriate version of his earlier video, which you can see above.

The setting of Munch’s original Scream painting can, with its depopulated landscape under a hot orange sky, look pretty hellish, even before you notice the agonized fellow writhing in the middle of it. Wouldn’t it feel altogether more pleasant under a snowfall? And the screamer himself — surely he’d give off a jollier vibe if he wore a Santa hat? Cosor has answered these questions and others in this humorous two-minute CGI film, which once again unites 1970s psychedelic rock with late-19th/early-2oth-century Norwegian painting.

Some may consider this a kind of desecration of an important work of art (whether they mean the Norwegian painting or the psychedelic rock), but even those who don’t might harbor one serious objection: isn’t the middle of November a bit early to haul out the Christmas stuff? Fair enough, as the holiday decorations in stores and public places do seem to appear a little earlier each year. But if we can’t make an exception for the case of a festive production as strange as this, for what can we make an exception?

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Dostoevsky Draws Doodles of Raskolnikov and Other Characters in the Manuscript of Crime and Punishment

in Art, Books, Literature | November 10th, 2015

Like many of us, Russian literary great Fyodor Dostoevsky liked to doodle when he was distracted. He left his handiwork in several manuscripts—finely shaded drawings of expressive faces and elaborate architectural features. But Dostoevsky’s doodles were more than just a way to occupy his mind and hands; they were an integral part of his literary method. His novelistic imagination, with all of its grand excesses, was profoundly visual, and architectural.

“Indeed,” writes Dostoevsky scholar Konstantin Barsht, “Dostoevsky was not content to ‘write’ and ‘take notes’ in the process of creative thinking.” Instead, in his work “the meaning and significance of words interact reciprocally with other meanings expressed through visual images.” Barsht calls it “a method of work specific to the writer.” We’ve shared a few of those manuscript pages before, including one with a doodle of Shakespeare.

Now we bring you a few more pages of doodles from the author of Crime and Punishment, a novel that, perhaps more so than any of his others, offers such vivid descriptions of its characters that I can still clearly remember the pictures I had of them in my mind the first time I read it in high school.

My visualizations of the angry, desperate student Raskolnikov and the sleazy sociopathic Svidrigailov do not exactly resemble the faces doodled at the the top of the post, but that is how their author saw them, at least in this early, manuscript stage of the novel.

The other faces here may be those of Sonya, police investigator Porfiry Petrovich, recidivist alcoholic father Semyon Marmelodov, and other characters in the novel, though it’s not clear exactly who’s who.

Dostoevsky had much in common with his novel’s protagonist when he began the novel in 1865. Reduced to near-destitution after gambling away his fortune, the writer was also in desperate straits. The story, writes literary critic Joseph Franks, was “originally conceived as a long short story or novella to be written in the first person,” like the feverish novella Notes From the Underground. In Dostoevsky’s manuscript notebooks, “extensive fragments of this original work are to be found here intact.”

Franks quotes scholar Edward Wasiolek, who published a translation of the notebooks in 1967: “They contain drawings, jottings about practical matters, doodling of various sorts, calculations about pressing expenses, sketches, and random remarks.” In short, “Dostoevsky simply flipped his notebooks open any time he wished to write,” or to practice his calligraphy, as he does on many pages.

The pages of the Crime and Punishment notebooks resemble all of the manuscript pages of his novels in their ornamental haphazardness. You can see many more examples from novels like The Idiot, The Possessed, and A Raw Youth at the Russian site Culture, including the sketchy self portrait below, next to a few sums that indicate the author’s perpetual preoccupation with his troubled economic affairs.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Emily Bronte Sand Sculpture

in Art, Literature | November 10th, 2015

Creative commons image by Tim Green on Flickr Commons

In the town of Bradford, near Leeds in the UK, they’ve imported more than 30 tons of sand to build nine sand sculptures across the city, as part of what’s called the Discovering Bradford project. Above, you can see one that caught our eye, thanks to the Vintage Anchor twitter stream. It’s a life-size sand sculpture of Emily Brontë, created by Jamie Wardley, an artist who belongs to the collective, Sand in Your Eye. Brontë was born in Thornton, a short hop, skip and a jump away from Bradford. For more culturally-inspired sand creations, see the Relateds below.

via Vintage Anchor/Keighley News

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Man Ray’s Portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp & Many Other 1920s Icons

in Art, Literature, Photography | November 5th, 2015

When photographers specialize in portraits of famous people, they often speak of finding a visual way to reveal their oft-photographed subject’s rarely exposed nature; to bring their depths, in other words, to the surface. Man Ray (1890–1976), the Surrealist photographer and artist, had his own way of doing most everything, and he certainly had his own approach to celebrity portraiture. Take, for example, his 1923 shot of Ernest Hemingway above, taken just a couple years after both the writer and photographer joined the moveable feast of Paris, which Man Ray would call home for most of his career.

That same year and in that same urban bohemia, Man Ray photographed another famed man of letters, the modernist poet Ezra Pound. You can see the somewhat more conventional-looking result of that encounter just above. Below, we have a far less conventional-looking portrait from 1922, which takes as its subject the dancer Bronislava Nijinska, who perhaps only counts as famous to you if you know the history of 20th-century ballet — but I say anyone willing to appear in a portrait looking that frightening has earned all the fame they can get.

Marcel Duchamp, who appears below, sat for Man Ray in 1921 looking less scary than silly, but as one of the wittiest and most artistically forward-thinking figures of the era, he surely got the joke. These appear in the book Man Ray: Paris — Hollywood — Paris, which collects 500 of the portraits Man Ray left in his archives when he died in 1976, all of “members of Dadaist and Surrealist circles, of artists and painters, of writers and US emigrants of the Lost Generation, of aristocrats, and paragons of the worlds of fashion and theater.”

You can sample more such works, which capture as only Man Ray would the natures of such icons as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Lee Miller, at Mondo Blogo. You can also find many more works, in general, by Man Ray on the MoMA’s website.

via Flavorwire

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Picasso Makes Wonderful Abstract Art

Artist Turns a Crop Field Into a Van Gogh Painting, Seen Only From Airplanes

Meet Congo the Chimp, London’s Sensational 1950s Abstract Painter

Masterpieces of Western Art with All Gluten Products Removed: See Works by Dalí, Cézanne, Van Gogh & Others

Edvard Munch’s The Scream Animated to the Psychedelic Sounds of Pink Floyd: The Winter Version

Dostoevsky Draws Doodles of Raskolnikov and Other Characters in the Manuscript of Crime and Punishment

The Emily Bronte Sand Sculpture

Man Ray’s Portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp & Many Other 1920s Icons

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