From Oscar Boyson comes “A Short History of the World’s Most Important Art Exhibition,” the first of a series of films that will take us inside the Venice Biennale, the prestigious art exhibition that dates back to 1895.
Produced by Artsy and UBS, the short film “pulls back the curtain on the event’s reach, extending beyond art and into politics and history at large,” and helps “us navigate the cultural influence of this somewhat enigmatic, 120-year-old tradition. For a longer look at Italy’s most important art fair, you can watch The Vice Guide to the Venice Biennale.
Maurice Sendak—like some few other exceptional children’s authors—also did work for adults, and in at least one case, did adult work, in his illustrations for a controversial 1995 edition of Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. The drawings are erotic, as well as homoerotic, illustrating the gay subtext in the novel. Sendak may seem like an unlikely illustrator for the Moby Dick author’s work; he was already an unlikely American children’s literary icon—“Jewish, gay, poor,” he nonetheless became “a major cultural influence,” writes blog BLT. As Sendak declared in an interview with Bill Moyers, he learned to “find a separate peace” from his own anxiety not through religious faith but through a “total faith in art.” “My gods,” Sendak told Moyers, “are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart,” among others. The author of Pierre figured highly in that divine hierarchy.
But Melville, at the time of Pierre’s publication, was not loved as a god. Shunned by critics and the reading public after the devastating reception accorded Moby Dick, his self-professed greatest work, Melville felt further humiliated when his publisher demanded he accept 20 cents on the dollar instead of 50 for the next novel, Pierre. Crushed, he signed the new contract. Then, though he had been satisfied with Pierre, considering the novel finished at the end of 1851, he added 150 pages, much of it a scathing, sardonic indictment of the literary establishment, including a non-too-subtle chapter titled “Young Literature in America.”
Whether the expansion was, as Maria Popova suggests at Brain Pickings, an eloquent riposte to his critics, or, as Library Journal suggests, made at the behest of his publishers (unlikely) is unclear. University of Delaware professor Herschel Parker, the Melville scholar who edited the Sendak edition of Pierre,admits, “we had NOT known when the expansion started and had not known just why.” Sendak himself describes Pierre as “a great and ingenious work of art.” Of the notion that Melville’s additions were “a vindictive diatribe against all his critics” Sendak speculates, “he might have been mad and hurt—He must have been mad and hurt. But he wouldn’t have spent that much time on a book being just mad and hurt.”
Sendak, a lifelong amateur Melville scholar, knows what he’s talking about. His familiarity with the author is such that his opinion was cited approvingly in the acknowledgments of a scholarly edition of Moby Dick. Despite Sendak’s comments in defense of Melville’s later additions, his and Parker’s version of Pierre attempts to strip them out and restore the novel to its earlier form, one Melville called his “Kraken book.” Sendak apparently initiated the project in order to publish the drawings. In them, writes John Bryan in a review for College English, “Pierre is a full-blown adolescent: muscular, ecstatic, desperate, devoted, and lonely; he is the man-child invincible.” The novel’s hero spends much of his time a blue Superman outfit, “red cape and all,” so tight “that it is skin itself, concealing nothing.”
Bibliokept compares the illustrations to William Blake. They also contain references to Goya and other artists who explored the grotesque, as well as the morbid, transgressive sexuality of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. “Nowhere else in the history of Melville illustration,” writes John Bryan, “do we find such openings into the latent sexuality of Melville’s prose.” Brain Pickings describes the drawings as “the most sexually expressive of any of his work, featuring 27 discernible nipples and 11 male ‘packages’…. Bold, unapologetic, and incredibly sensual, the illustrations are also subtly subversive in their treatment of gender identity and stereotypes.”
Add to this list of acid acolytes Robert Crumb, the most influential cartoonist of his generation. His strange, frequently obscene, often hilarious stream-of-consciousness cartoons defined a certain subset of hippydom as much as the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey. And his style emerged almost immediately after his first trip.
It all started in 1964, when the drug was still legal. Crumb was stuck in a dead end job drawing greeting cards in Cleveland. “I took this very weird drug. Supposedly it was LSD, but it had a really weird effect where it made my brain all fuzzy,” he said while hunched over a drawing pad in Terry Twigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb. (You can watch the full clip above. ) “And this effect lasted for a couple months.”
The effect of that first encounter proved to be hugely influential, a “road-to-Damascus experience” as he told the Paris Review:
It knocked you off your horse, taking LSD. I remember going to work that Monday, after taking LSD on Saturday, and it just seemed like a cardboard reality. It didn’t seem real to me anymore. Seemed completely fake, only a paper-moon kind of world. My coworkers, they were like, Crumb, what’s the matter with you, what happened to you? Because I was just staring at everything like I had never seen it before. And then it changed the whole direction of my artwork. […] I got flung back into this cruder forties style, that suddenly became very powerful to me. It was a kind of grotesque interpretation of this forties thing, Popeye kind of stuff. I started drawing like that again. It was bizarre to people who had known my work before. Even [Mad Magazine Editor Harvey] Kurtzman said, What the hell are you doing? You’re regressing!
A couple of years later, Crumb ditched Cleveland (and his first wife) and headed for San Francisco, which was just starting to become the Mecca of the counterculture. Soon issues of his Zap Comix would be blowing minds. All of his most famous characters from those cartoons– from Mr. Natural to Fritz the Cat to the Snoid – were first produced in the months immediately following that first trip.
But remember, drugs are bad. And we don’t recommend them. And if you’re wondering about LSD’s downsides, tune into what Louis CK has to say.
You can see hear Crumb expound more about LSD, San Francisco and the whole Haight-Ashbury scene below.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
There is a David Bowie for every season. A Christmas David Bowie, a Halloween David Bowie, even a David Bowie Easter celebration. But much more than that, there may be a David Bowie for every Bowie fan, especially for artists influenced by his chameleonic career. See for yourself how a whopping 96 Bowie-loving artists—in this case mainly what Bowie himself calls the “World’s Best Comic Artists”—see the changling rock star/actor/space alien.
Collins’ impressive collection includes work from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), whose contribution the editor calls “pretty goddamn wonderful if you ask me.” See it above. And below, Kate Beaton, creator of web comic Hark, A Vagrant, gives us Bowie as a dandy, a character with whom, writes Collins, she has a “rich history.”
Collins offers brief commentary beneath each image in the collection, which also gives us the strange interpretation below by Bowie-inspired underground comics legend Charles Burns; the intense and Archie-esque contributions further down by Brothers Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, creators of the 80s New Wave classic comic Love and Rockets; and the outer space-proportioned Bowie at the bottom of the post, from vocalist Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, a band that has both covered and recorded with Bowie.
A few years ago, we featured J.R.R. Tolkien’s personal cover designs for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a series of novels that justifiably made his name as a world-builder in prose (and occasional verse), but rather overshadowed his output as an illustrator. He didn’t just do covers for his own books, either. You can get a sense of the breadth of Tolkien’s visual art at the Tolkien Gateway’s gallery of over 100 images by Tolkien, which reveal the landscapes, letters, interiors, and animals within the creator of Middle-Earth’s mind.
Many of these images come with descriptions of their provenance, which you can read if you click on their thumbnails in the gallery. At the top of the post, you’ll find Tolkien’s 1927 painting Glaurung Sets Forth to Seek Turin, first published in The Silmarillion Calendar 1978.
“The title is in Old English letters, which J. R. R. Tolkien frequently used when writing in a formal style,” says the Tolkien Gateway, noting that, “at the time of the painting the name of the Father of Dragons was Glórund, not Glaurung,” and that “the entrance to Nargothrond is here seen as a single arch, unlike the triple doors seen in other drawings.” (Leave it to a Tolkien fan site to have just this sort of information at the ready.)
We also have here Tolkien’s crayon drawing of the West Gate of the Moria, a scene described in The Fellowship of the Ring as follows: “Beyond the ominous water were reared vast cliffs, their stern faces pallid in the fading light: final and impassable.” Just above is Tolkien’s rendering of Bag-End, residence of a certain B. Baggins, Esquire, “coloured by H.E. Riddett and first published in the English De Luxe edition and in a new edition of the Dutch translation (both 1976) of The Hobbit.” Just below, you can see his 1911 sketch of the much less fantastical Lamb’s Farm, Gedling.
Beyond perusing the images in the Tolkien Gateway, you’ll also want to have a look at Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull’s book, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. Some Tolkien enthusiasts will, understandably, prefer to keep their personal visualizations of the Lord of the Rings universe unsullied by non-textual imagery such as this, but if all of Peter Jackson’s megabudget film adaptations didn’t sully you, then Tolkien’s mild, almost rustic but still solemnly evocative drawings and paintings can only enrich the Middle-Earth in your own mind.
The documentary form, like every other kind of onscreen storytelling, is a very recent development in human history. Yet we tend to take for granted the way in which it constructs our sense of reality—from not only much-maligned reality TV, but also endless loops of cable news and Netflix channels. But the man widely credited with the invention of documentary film, Dziga Vertov, made decidedly anti-story movies, particularly his Man With a Movie Camera(watch it online here)—a film that jars contemporary sensibilities. With no narrative to speak of, the movie contains roughly 1,775 separate shots from three cities, shot over four years time, and edited together by his wife. Its viewing is indeed a dizzying experience, and its director Vertov—born David Kaufman—truly illustrates the aesthetic of his pseudonym, which means “spinning top.”
Vertov’s radical experimentation did not begin and end with Man With a Movie Camera or his other avant-garde documentaries and animations. (Find eight of Vertov’s films here.) Once a psychology student in Petrograd, the future filmmaker started his artistic career as a writer of futurist poetry and science fiction. Entranced by emerging recording technology and committed to disrupting traditional forms, in 1916 Vertov began, writes Monoskop, “experimenting with the perception and arrangement of sound.”
He created “sound poems,” and produced “verbal montage structures.” Of his audio art, Vertov remarked, “I had an idea about the need to enlarge our ability for organized hearing. Not limiting this ability to the boundaries of usual music. I decided to include the entire audible world into the concept of ‘Hearing.’”
After the Russian Revolution, Vertov embraced Bolshevist agit-prop; his “Kino-Pravda,” or “truth films,” celebrated industrialization and the Russian worker. His first sound film, Enthusiasm! The Donbass Symphony (1930)—a “paean to coal and steel workers”—integrates his experiments with sound recording in an entirely novel way. Ubuweb describes the film and its accompanying soundtrack as “Vertov’s most revolutionary achievement: a symphony of abstract industrial noise for which a specially designed giant mobile recoding system was constructed (it weighed over a ton) in order to capture the din of mines, furnaces and factories. For Vertov, the introduction of sound film didn’t mean talkies, but the opportunity to collage, montage and splice together constructions of pure environmental noise.”
You can hear three excerpts of this industrial sound collage above and the remaining seven at Ubuweb. Listen to them first as examples of “sound poems,” then watch Enthusiasm: The Donbass Symphony at the top for a better understanding of why Vertov remains such an influential, indeed essential, film—and audio—artist widely credited with freeing new media from the aesthetic confines of the stage and the page. Just below, listen to one of Vertov’s early experiments with documentary sound art, from 1916. Just as he sought to create an international worker’s visual language through film, “Through radio, he attempted to establish auditory communication across the whole of the world’s proletariat by way of recording the sounds of workplaces and of life itself.”
He only talks for five minutes–and before you know it, he’s produced a sketch of The Bard. We wish it was more, but his observations make for some good inspirational quotes, whether you dabble in art or not. He critiques art schools for dropping drawing from their curriculums because drawing doesn’t jibe with their computer-based, career focus. “While people have what they need, perhaps, for their professional life, what they don’t have is a fundamental instrument for understanding the reality of that life,” he opines.
Drawing is how Glaser understands the world, and how it keeps him present in reality. It’s the basis for all art that is to come, no matter if the student goes on to abstraction. It’s also essential, he says, for child development, and any child not given the tools to make art is being done a disservice.
For those wondering about that book Glaser mentions writing, Drawing Is Thinking, you can get it here.
And if you’re curious about Frank R. Wilson’s The Hand, which Glaser compliments, it’s here.
And finally, if you need a quick primer on the man, here’s a quick overview of Milton Glaser by the New York Times. “Drawing is my greatest pleasure,” he says, and it shows.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
In a new picture book called Medieval Monsters, published by the British Library, historian Damien Kempf and art historian Maria L. Gilbert have gathered together illustrations that highlight the great monsters of the medieval world. Monsters were everywhere, including “on the edges of manuscript pages” and on “the fringes of maps.” The successor to Medieval Cats and Medieval Dogs, Medieval Monsterscontains no shortage of fascinating illustrations, including the one above. It looks remarkably like Yoda, doesn’t it?
A British Library curator told NPR, “The Yoda image comes from a 14th-century manuscript known as the Smithfield Decretals.” “I’d love to say that it really was Yoda, or was drawn by a medieval time traveler.” But “it’s actually an illustration to the biblical story of Samson — the artist clearly had a vivid imagination!”
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
.jpg){kind=link}
