Appreciators of the finest works in cinema history often liken their images to paintings. In the case of Akira Kurosawa, maker of quite a few entries on that grand list of the finest works in cinema history, that makes professional sense: he began as a painter, only later turning filmmaker. “When I changed careers,” he writes, “I burnt all the pictures that I had painted up until then. I intended to forget painting once and for all. As a well-known Japanese proverb says, ‘If you chase two rabbits, you may not catch even one.’ I did no art work at all once I began to work in cinema. But since becoming a film director, I have found that drawing rough sketches was often a useful means of explaining ideas to my staff.”
That comes quoted on “Akira Kurosawa: From Art to Film,” a roundup of such paintings by the Emperor (a nickname Kurosawa earned through his on-set manner), set beside the resulting frames from his movies. “As a painter and filmmaker, Kurosawa stuck to his own style,” writes Popmatters’ Ian Chant in an examination of this facet of his career, “informed heavily by traditional Japanese painting as well as European impressionists and expressionists, another arena of art where he answered to both eastern and western influences. These painstakingly crafted paintings formed the visual backbone of some of Kurosawa’s most lasting achievements.”
The most vivid examples of canvas-turned-celluloid come from Kurosawa’s later works, such as 1980’s Kagemusha, 1985’s Ran, 1990’s Dreams, and 1993’s Madadayo, selections from each of which you see in this post. “I cannot help but be fascinated by the fact that when I tried to paint well, I could only produce mediocre pictures,” continues the Emperor himself. “But when I concentrated on delineating the ideas for my films, I unconsciously produced works that people find interesting.” Holding the painted work up against his film work, only the strictest cinema purist could deny that, ultimately, Kurosawa caught both rabbits.
If you were to ask me in my callow years as a young art student to name my favorite painter, I would have answered without a moment’s hesitation: Wassily Kandinsky. His theoretical bent, his mysticism, his seemingly near total creative independence…. There were times when Kandinsky the thinker, writer, and teacher appealed to me even more than Kandinsky the painter. This may go a ways toward explaining why I left art school after my first year to pursue writing and teaching. But nowadays, having seen a tiny bit more of the world and its bountiful artistic treasures, I might pause for just a moment if asked about my favorite painter… then I’d answer: Wassily Kandinsky.
If you want to see the pioneering abstract expressionist’s art in the United States, your best bet is to get yourself to New York’s famed Guggenheim, which has a veritable treasure chest of Kandinsky’s work that documents his transition from paintings and woodcuts inspired by Russian folk art and French fauvism to completely non-representational canvases made entirely of intersecting lines, shapes, and colors—his own private symbology.
But if you can’t make it to New York, then just head on over to the Guggenheim’s online collection, where the museum has digitized “nearly 1600 artworks by more than 575 artists.” This is the most sweeping move toward greater accessibility since the private collection went public in 1937. You’ll find early representational Kandinskys; transitional Kandinskys like Sketch for Composition II from 1909-10 (top)—with still recognizable favorite motifs of his, like the horse and rider embedded in them; and you’ll find much more abstract Kandinskys like 1913’s Light Picture, above, showing his move even farther away from Matisse and Russian folks and closer to an inimitable individual aesthetic like that of Joan Miró or Paul Klee.
Speaking of Klee, another of my favorites, you’ll also find the sketch above, from 1895, before he began his formal training in Munich. It’s a far cry from his mature style—a primitive minimalism that drew inspiration from children’s art. If you know anyone who looks at abstract art and says, “I could do that,” show them the drawing above and ask if they could do this. Painters like Kandinsky and Klee, who worked and exhibited together, first learned to render in more rigorously formal styles before they broke every rule and made their own. It’s a necessary part of the discipline of art.
Of the three artists I’ve mentioned thus far, it is perhaps Miró who moved farthest away from any semblance of classical training. In works like Personage (above), the Spanish surrealist achieved his “assassination of painting” and the realist bourgeois values he detested in European art. Piet Mondrian, another artist who completely radicalized painting, did so by moving in the opposite direction, towards a formalism so exacting as to be almost chilling. But like all modern artists, Mondrian learned the classical rules before he tore them up for good, as evidenced by his drawing below, Chrysanthemum, from 1908-09.
Of course you won’t only find artists from the early twentieth century in the Guggenheim’s online collection. This just happens to be one of my favorite periods, and the Guggenheim is most famous for its modernist collection. But you’ll also find work from more contemporary provocateurs like Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei, as well as from early nineteenth century proto-impressionists like Camille Pissarro. (See Pissarro’s 1867 The Hermitage at Pontoise below.) And if you find yourself wanting more context, the Guggenheim has made it easy to give yourself a thorough education in modern art. As we’ve noted before, between 2012 and 2014, the museum placed over 100 art catalogues online, including a collection called “The Syllabus,” featuring books by the museum’s first curator. Looking for a way of understanding that weird phenomenon known as modern art? Look no further, the Guggenheim’s got you covered.
How does “non-musician” musician, former Roxy Music member, Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay producer, and visual artist Brian Eno define art itself? “Everything that you don’t have to do.” He has expanded eloquently on that simple but highly clarifying notion in speech and writing many times over the past couple of decades, and this past Sunday he made it the intellectual centerpiece of the fifth annual John Peel Lecture, a series named for the influential BBC DJ and whose past speakers have included Pete Townshend, Billy Bragg, Charlotte Church, and Iggy Pop.
You can hear Eno’s introduction to his talk at the top of the post, stream the talk itself within the next 25 days at the BBC’s site, and read a transcript here. All of the John Peel Lecturers so far have discussed the relationship between music and wider human culture, and Eno has plenty of stories to tell about his own career in both music and the wider cultural realm: the importance of his time in art school, how he fell into performing with Roxy Music, how a relaxation of the band’s “strict non-drug” policy resulted in one “hilariously chaotic” performance, and how John Peel himself premiered his first album with Robert Fripp on the radio — by accidentally playing it backward.
All this will inspire even the most Eno-familiar fan to revisit the man’s catalog of recorded works, which you can easily do with the Spotify playlist “Touched by the Hand of Eno,” featuring “150 tracks handpicked from 150 albums/EPs/singles that credit Eno as composer, instrumentalist, vocalist, mixing engineer, or producer, sorted in chronological order.” (If you need to download Spotify’s free software, you’ll find it here.) The playlist includes cuts from Eno’s own albums, of course, but also those of Roxy Music, Genesis, Ultravox, David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, Depeche Mode, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay, and many more. And after you’ve virtually flipped through these selections from Eno’s body of work, you can watch Eno flip through physical selections from Peel’s library of records just above. Sure, you don’t have to do any of this — if anyone can explain to you why you should, Eno can.
Earlier this month, we featured Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play Salome as illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in 1894. Though Beardsley’s short life and career would end a scant four years later at the age of 25, the illustrator still had more than enough time to develop a clear and bold, yet elaborate and even decadent style, still immediately recognizable and deeply influential today.
He also managed to visualize an impressively wide range of material, one that includes — in the very same year — the transgressively witty writing of Oscar Wilde as well as the groundbreakingly macabre writings of Edgar Allan Poe.
“Aubrey Beardsley’s four Poe illustrations were commissioned by Herbert S. Stone and Company, Chicago, in 1894 as embellishment for a multi-volume collection of the author’s works,” writes artist and designer John Coulthart. “The Black Cat (above) is justifiably the most reproduced of these.” The Literary Archive blog argues that “what Beardsley’s illustrations do tell us of is that Poe’s stories are not static, but living works that each new generation gets to experience in [its] own way,” and that they “give us a glimpse into a slight decadence and gothic-ness still preferred in horror at the time (a giant orangutan envelopes the girl in his arms—King Kong anyone?)”
They also remind us that “our taste for creepiness, for hearing tales about the darker side of human life, hasn’t changed appreciably in over 150 years.” If the American author and the English illustrator would seem to make for odd literary and artistic bedfellows, well, therein lies the appeal: when one strong creative sensibility comes up against another, things can well go off in the kind of richly bizarre directions you see hinted at in the images here.
If you’d like to own a piece of this odd chapter in the history of illustrated texts, keep your eye on Sotheby’s — you’ll only have to come up with between 4,000 and 6,000 pounds.
Ask the man on the street what he knows about the work of Marcel Duchamp, and he’ll almost certainly respond with some description of a urinal. He would be referring to 1917’s Fountain, a piece whose unusual content and context you can get a solid introduction to in the three-minute Smarthistory video above. In it, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker discuss how and why Duchamp went down to the plumbing store, purchased a plain, simple urinal, turned it on its side, signed it, titled it, and submitted it to a gallery show.
“He made it as a work of art, through the alchemy of the artist transformed it,” says Zucker on this piece of what Duchamp described as “readymade” art. “One of the ways we can think about what art is,” says Harris, “is as a kind of transformation of ordinary materials into something wonderful. It transports us, and that makes us see things in a new way. Even though he didn’t make anything, he is asking us to see the urinal in a new way: not, necessarily, as an aesthetic object, but to make us ask these philosophical questions about what art is and what the artist does.”
And what does another artist do when confronted with all this? Brian Eno, musician, producer, and visual artist in his own right, decided to treat Fountain not philosophically, but rather literally. At Dangerous Minds, Martin Schneider writes up the story as heard from a 1993 interview on European television. Seeing Duchamp’s by-then-sacred urinal on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
I thought, how ridiculous that this particular … pisspot gets carried around the world at—it costs about thirty or forty thousand dollars to insure it every time it travels. I thought, How absolutely stupid, the whole message of this work is, “You can take any object and put it in a gallery.” It doesn’t have to be that one, that’s losing the point completely. And this seemed to me an example of the art world once again covering itself by drawing a fence around that thing, saying, “This isn’t just any ordinary piss pot, this is THE one, the special one, the one that is worth all this money.”
So I thought, somebody should piss in that thing, to sort of bring it back to where it belonged. So I decided it had to be me.
Schneider also quotes from Eno’s description of the incident in his diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices, in which he describes exactly how he pulled this operation off. It involved obtaining “a couple of feet of clear plastic tubing, along with a similar length of galvanized wire,” filling the wired tube with urine, then inserting “the whole apparatus down my trouser-leg,” returning to the museum, and — with a guard standing right there — sticking the tube through a slot in the display case, “peeing” into “the famous john,” and using the experience of Fountain’s “re-commode-ification” as the basis of a talk he gave that very night.
But Eno isn’t the only one to have used Duchamp’s urinal for its original purpose. According to Art Damaged, “French artist Pierre Pinoncelli urinated into the piece while it was on display in Nimes, France in 1993,” and at a 2006 exhibition in Paris “attacked the work with a hammer” (later, and under arrest, describing the attack as “a work of performance art that Duchamp himself would have appreciated”). In 2000, “Chinese performance art duo Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi urinated on the work while it was on display in London,” though they could make a direct hit only on its Perspex case. “The urinal is there – it’s an invitation,” Chai explained. “As Duchamp said himself, it’s the artist’s choice. He chooses what is art. We just added to it.”
The list goes on: in 1993, South African artist and readymade enthusiast Kendell Geers peed on another one of the Fountain replicas in circulation, then on display in Venice; in 1999, Swedish student Björn Kjelltoft similarly befouled another in Stockholm. “I wanted to have a dialogue with Duchamp,” said Kjelltoft. “He raised an everyday object to a work of art and I’m turning it back again into an everyday object.” That quote appears in “Pissing in Duchamp’s Fountain” by 3:AM Magazine’s Paul Ingram, a piece offering details on all these incidents, and even photos of two of them. “These acts of vandalism, almost constituting a tradition, might be imagined as an accompaniment to the unending stream of critical commentary on this work of art, to which [this] case study makes its own contribution.” The pee-ers, perhaps, have by now made their point — but the philosophy continues.
As a writer, a thinker, and a human being, James Baldwin knew few boundaries. The black, gay, expatriate author of such still-read books as Go Tell it on the Mountainand The Fire Next Timeset an example for all who have since sought to break free of the strictures imposed upon them by their society, their history, or even their craft. Baldwin wrote not just novels but essays, plays, poetry, and even a children’s book, which you see a bit of here today.
Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhoodcame out in 1976, a productive year for Baldwin which also saw the publication of The Devil Finds Work, a book of writing on film (yet another form on which he exerted his own kind of socially critical mastery). In Little Man, he writes not about a highly visual medium, but in a highly visual medium: young children delight in lively illustrations, and they must have especially delighted in the ones here (more of which you can see in this gallery), drawn by French artist Yoran Cazac with a kind of mature childishness.
Those same adjectives might apply to Baldwin’s writing here as well, since he aims his story toward children, talking not down at them but straight at them, in their very own language: “TJ bounce his ball as hard as he can, sending it as high in the sky as he can, and rising to catch it.” So goes the introduction to the main character, a four-year-old boy living in Harlem whom Baldwin based on his nephew. “Sometimes he misses and has to roll into the street. A couple of times a car almost run him over. That ain’t nothing.”
TJ and WT, his older pal from the neighborhood, take their scrapes throughout the course of this short book, but they also have a rich experience — and thus provide, for their readers young and old, a rich experience — of the unique time and place in which they find themselves growing up. Their working-class Harlem childhood obviously has its pains, but it has its joys too. “TJ’s Daddy try to act mean, but he ain’t mean,” Baldwin writes. “Sometime take TJ to the movies and he take him to the beach and he took him to the Apollo Theatre, so he could see blind Stevie Wonder. ‘I want you to be proud of your people,’ TJ’s Daddy always say.”
At We Too Were Children, Ariel S. Winter highlights the book’s dedication “to the eminent African-American artist Beauford Delaney. Baldwin met Delaney when he was fourteen, the first self-supporting artist he had ever met, and like Baldwin, Delaney was black and homosexual. Delaney became a mentor to Baldwin, who often spoke of him as a ‘spiritual father,’ ” and “it was Delaney who introduced Baldwin to Yoran Cazac in Paris.” Baldwin became godfather to Cazac’s third child, and Cazac, of course, became the man who gave artistic life to Baldwin’s vision of childhood itself.
Some of the U.S.‘s greatest secular sages also happen to be some of its greatest cranks, contrarians, and critics. I refer to a category that includes Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, and Hunter S. Thompson. The many differences between these characters don’t eclipse a fundamental similarity: not a one embraced any of the usual pieties about the inherent, infallible greatness of Western Civilization, though each one in his own way made a significant contribution to the Western canon. We would be greatly remiss if we did not include among them perhaps the greatest American satirist of all, Mark Twain.
Twain skewered all comers, usually with such wit and invention that we smile and nod even when we feel the sting ourselves. Such was his talent, to deflate puffery in Western literature, politics, religion, and… as we will see, in art. “Throughout his career”—writes UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library—“Twain expressed his strong reactions to Western painting and sculpture, particularly the Old Masters, both in his published works and in private.” He offered up some hilariously irreverent takes on some of the most revered works of art in history: “his opinions are often passionate, sometimes eccentric, and always lively.” Take for example Twain’s tepid assessment of that most recognizable of Renaissance masterpieces, the Mona Lisa. In an unpublished draft called “The Innocents Adrift,” an account of an 1891 boat trip down the Rhone River, Twain “admitted to being puzzled by the adulation accorded” the painting.
To Twain, the Mona Lisa seemed “merely a good representation of a serene & subdued face… The complexion was bad; in fact it was not even human; there are no people of that color.” The painting’s greenish hue prompted one of Twain’s companions, possibly an invention of the author’s, to exclaim in response, “that smoked haddock!” “After some discussion,” write the UC Berkeley librarians, “the travelers concede that it requires a ‘trained eye’ to appreciate certain aspects of art.” Such training in art appreciation seemed to Twain as much genuine education as instruction in studied, insincere poses.
The author took his first “grand tour” in 1867—travelling through Europe and the Levant on the cruise ship Quaker City in the company of many “prosperous—and very proper—passengers.” Unlike these bourgeois travelling companions’ “conventional appreciation for all that they saw,” Twain—writing as a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California—confessed himself underwhelmed. In particular, he described another Da Vinci, The Last Supper—“the most celebrated painting in the world”—as a “mournful wreck.” (The work was then unrestored; see it above as it looked 100 years later in the 1970s.) Twain later revised his observations for his first full-length book, 1869’s Innocents Abroad, a caricature of ugly American tourists filled with what William Dean Howells called “delicious impudence.” While the others marveled at Da Vinci’s crumbling fresco, Twain, in the current parlance, expressed a great big “meh.”
The world seems to have become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not possible for human genius to outdo this creation of Da Vinci’s.… The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes.… I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a very miracle of art once. But it was three hundred years ago.
Twain and the professional critics did not always disagree. Take J.M.W. Turner’s famously riotous canvas Slave Ship (or Slavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On), above. John Ruskin may have praised the work as the “noblest sea… ever painted by man” and it has come down to us as a violent representation of the horrors of the slave trade, occasioned in part, writes Stephen J. May, by Turner’s sense of “shared guilt about his own role and England’s role in condoning and perpetuating slavery’s malevolent legacy.” The anti-slavery, anti-imperialist Twain would surely have appreciated the sentiment; the painting, however, not so much. Other critics felt similarly, one calling Slave Ship a “gross outrage on nature.” Twain’s summation in an 1878 notebook is much more colorful, a piece of vintage Samuel Clemens undercutting: “Slave Ship—Cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”
For all his snide portraits of conventional middle-class attitudes toward art, Twain could also be a bit of a prig, as we see in his response to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In this, he was not so far removed from our own cultural attitudes (or Facebook and Google’s attitudes) about nudity. The censored version of the painting above (see the original here) comes to us via Buzzfeed, who write “Remember kids, blood and gore are fine but boobs will make you blind.” Twain seemed to have unironically agreed, railing in his 1880 travel book A Tramp Abroad against the “indecent license” afforded artists and calling Titian’s suggestive reclining nude “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.” (Ah, if only he had lived to see the internet’s foulest depths.)
Twain’s own meager contributions to the visual arts—consisting of a dozen sketches, like that above, made for A Tramp Abroad—fall somewhat short of the standards he set for other artists. Nevertheless, he recalled in The Innocents Abroad his dismay at the “acres of very bad drawing, very bad perspective, and very incorrect proportions” in the museums and churches across Europe. What, we might wonder, could possibly move such a harsh, unsparing critic? In art, it seems, Twain valued “strict realism, grandeur of theme and scale, and propriety”—all on display in abundance in American artist Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes, below.
After viewing this idealized South American landscape in St. Louis, Twain called the enormous (over five feet high by ten feet wide) canvas a “most wonderfully beautiful painting.” “We took the opera glasses,” he wrote to his brother, “and examined its beauties minutely…. There is no slurring of perspective about it.” He recommended multiple viewings: “Your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in… and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands.”
Twain, won over by this sublime spectacle, seems to have temporarily surrendered his critical faculties. In reading his response, I found myself wanting to egg him on: C’mon, what about this soft, gauzy lighting, those lumpy mountains, and the kitschy, overly-sentimental look of the whole thing? But there was room enough in Twain’s critical arsenal for genuine awe as for amused contempt at what he saw as phony expressions of the same. And that breadth of character is what made Mark Twain, well, Mark Twain.
History’s most respected painters all gave their lives to their art. We can almost call that a requirement of the artist who wishes their work to attain immortality, but as for the mortal artists themselves — well, they’ve all got to get out of the house sometime or another. That rule held even for Edgar Degas, 19th- and early 20th-century painter, sculptor, and reluctant impressionist whose body of work commands many dedicated exhibitions even in the 21st century. In the clip above, you can see one of his excursions onto the streets of Paris, captured in 1915 with the then-new invention known as the motion picture camera.
Degas, who would die in 1917, had by the time of this walk reached his eighties, having put his artistic work behind him at least three years before. With his longtime residence on rue Victor-Massé just about to go under the wrecking ball, he moved over to Boulevard de Clichy, where he lived out his days walking the streets in the very manner we see in this snippet of film.
But even as Degas roamed Paris so restlessly and aimlessly, other French painters and sculptors did the work that would put their own names into the art-history pantheon. In the video just above, you can see a 74-year-old Claude Monet — also at quite an advanced age for the time — doing a bit of outdoor painting in his garden at Giverny in 1915, the very year we saw Degas strolling past us with his hat and umbrella.
Here, you can see several shots of the sculptor Auguste Rodin in action, also in 1915, two years before his death, as Mike Springer previously wrote here. The clip’s first sequence “shows the artist at the columned entrance to an unidentified structure, followed by a brief shot of him posing in a garden somewhere. The rest of the film, beginning at the 53-second mark, was clearly shot at the palatial, but dilapidated, Hôtel Biron, which Rodin was using as a studio and second home.”
Mike also covered the fourth French-artist film from 1915 we have here, three minutes of footage of Auguste Renoir in which “we see the 74-year-old master seated at his easel, applying paint to a canvas while his youngest son Claude, 14, stands by to arrange the palette and place the brush in his father’s permanently clenched hand.” Though in several ways debilitated by age, Renoir continued to create, and you can read more about his struggle, as well as the project of the young filmmaker who shot several of these now-invaluable pieces of film, at the original post. And if you want to see more of these artists you may know only as names from art-history textbooks brought to life, if only for a few moments, have a look at our roundup of iconic artists at work.
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