Watch Entr’Acte: René Clair’s Dadaist Masterpiece, Scored by Erik Satie and with Cameos by Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray (1924)

in Art, Film | November 14th, 2014

René Clair’s 1924 avant-garde masterpiece Entr’Acte opens with a cannon firing into the audience and that’s pretty much a statement of purpose for the whole movie. Clair wanted to shake up the audience, throwing it into a disorienting world of visual bravado and narrative absurdity. You can watch it above.

The film was originally designed to be screened between two acts of Francis Picabia’s 1924 opera Relâche. Picabia reportedly wrote the synopsis for the film on a single sheet of paper while dining at the famous Parisian restaurant Maxim’s and sent it to Clair. While that handwritten note was the genesis of what we see on screen, it’s Clair sheer cinematic inventiveness that is why the film is still shown in film schools today.

Clair sought to create a work of “pure cinema,” so he filled the film with just about every camera trick in the book: slow motion, fast motion, split screen and superimpositions among others. The camera is unbound and wildly kinetic. At one point, Clair mounts the camera upside down to the front of a rollercoaster.

In true Dadaist fashion, Clair creates a series of striking images – an upskirt shot of a leaping ballerina; a funeral procession bounding down the street in slow motion; a corpse springing out of a coffin – that seem to cry out for an explanation but remain maddeningly, frequently hilariously obscure.

The movie also serves as a class portrait of the Parisian avant-garde scene of the early ‘20s. Picabia and Erik Satie – who scored the movie – are the ones who fired that cannon. In another scene, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray can be seen playing chess with each other on a Parisian rooftop.

Compared to Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s notorious 1928 short Un Chien Andalou – a movie that is still quite shocking today – Entr’Acte is a much lighter, funnier work, one that looks to thwart bourgeois expectations of narrative logic but doesn’t quite try to shock them into indignant outrage. In fact, to modern eyes, the movie feels at times like a particularly unhinged Monty Python skit. Picabia himself once asserted that Entr’acte “respects nothing except the right to roar with laughter.” So watch, laugh and prepare to be confused.

Entr’Acte will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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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 vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

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Photos of a Very Young Frida Kahlo, Taken by Her Dad

in Art, Photography | November 13th, 2014

Ay que linda!

Long before the tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera and the mortifications of the flesh occasioned by a horrific bus accident, and longer still before the avalanche of Frida-centric kitsch and tchotchkes and the Julie Taymor biopic starring Salma Hayek, there was a cherubic little girl named Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón.

Witness these photos of young Magdalena Carmen Frieda, taken by her Hungarian Jewish father, Guillermo, over a period of twenty years.

The 2‑year-old Frida is merry, chubby, and barely recognizable.

The piercing gaze starts coming into focus around age 5. Kid looks like an artist already!

The famous eyebrows have filled in by 12, when she faces the camera in a sailor suit and giant hair bow.

The 18-year-old pre-med student adopting an unsmiling pose in 1926—the year of the accident—is unapologetic, intense, and unmistakably Frida Kahlo.

Visit Vintage Everyday for more of Guillermo Kahlo’s images of his second-to-last daughter.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Kandinsky, Klee & Other Bauhaus Artists Designed Ingenious Costumes Like You’ve Never Seen Before

in Art | November 3rd, 2014

Artists of the Bauhaus school—including founder Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and others—broke radically with familiar tradition and made minimalist, abstract, and sometimes shocking statements with their work. We know this history, but you probably haven’t seen these cultural figures physically embody their aesthetic principles as they do in the photographs here, from costume parties the Bauhaus school held throughout the twenties.

As Rachel Doyle at Curbed wrote, “if you thought Bauhaus folk were good at designing coffee tables, just have a look at their costumes—as bewitching and sculptural as any other student project, but with an amazing flamboyance not oft ascribed to the movement.”

The whimsical costume parties—to which, wrote Hungarian architect Farkas Molnár, artists devoted “the greatest expenditures of energy”—represented further attempts to transcend “medieval conditions” and integrate “today’s scientific and technological advances… into general culture.” So wrote Molnár in a 1925 essay, “Life at the Bauhaus,” where he describes the playfully serious conditions at the school. These parties, he asserts, were superior to “fancy-dress balls” organized by artists in other cities in that “our costumes are truly original. Everyone prepares his or her own. Never a one that has been seen before. Inhuman, or humanoid, but always new.” Everyone participated, it seems, from the newest student to, as Molnár calls them, “the bigwigs”:

Kandinsky prefers to appear decked out as an antenna, Itten as an amorphous monster, Feininger as two right triangles, Moholy-Nagy as a segment transpierced by a cross, Gropius as Le Corbusier, Muche as an apostle of Mazdaznan, Klee as the song of the blue tree. A rather grotesque menagerie…

Might that be Kandinsky in the photograph at the top? Just who is this luminous figure? Why did Gropius dress up as Le Corbusier, and what, exactly, does “the song of the blue tree” look like? We can identify at least one of these artists—the bald man in black at the center of the photograph below is Oskar Schlemmer, painter, sculptor, designer, and choreographer. Schlemmer gave Bauhaus costume design its most formal context with the Triadic Ballet, a production, writes Dangerous Minds, that “combined his work in both sculpture and theater to create the internationally acclaimed extravaganza which toured from 1922 to 1929.”

The ballet’s “18 costumes,” writes Curbed, “were designed by matching geometric forms with analogous parts of the human body: a cylinder for the neck, a circle for the heads…. These elaborate costumes [see photo of performers below]… totally upped the ante at the Bauhaus school’s regular costume balls.” Schlemmer “made no secret of the fact that he considered the stylized, artificial movements of marionettes to be aesthetically superior to the naturalistic movements of real humans.” His ballet, Dangerous Minds remarks, may be “the least ‘human’ dance performance ever conceived.”

It may come as no surprise then that the Triadic Ballet influenced some of the hyper-stylized alien costuming of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour. Perhaps even more than the photographs of revelers from the costume parties, the Triadic Ballet, which has been periodically revived since its 1922 debut, preserves the fascinating innovations Bauhaus artists envisioned for the human form. Just below, watch a 1970 film production recreating many of the original designs, and see more photographs of Bauhaus costumes at The Charnel-House.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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Celebrate The Day of the Dead with The Classic Skeleton Art of José Guadalupe Posada

in Art, Religion | November 2nd, 2014

In Mexico on November 2, mortality is approached with music and laughter.

“On the Day of the Dead, when the spirits come back to us,” explains the Dr. Vigil character in the 1984 film of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, “the road from heaven must be made easy, and not slippery with tears.”

The souls of the dead are welcomed back with offerings of food and drink. Skulls and frolicking skeletons, often dressed in full costume, are depicted on alters, food and elsewhere — a playful reminder that all of us, despite our vanities, will one day turn to dust.

The origins of the Day of the Dead and its basic motifs can be traced back 3000 years, to the Aztecs, but the satirical skeletons of its present-day iconography bear the strong influence of one man who died 101 years ago: the printmaker and draughtsman José Guadalupe Posada.

Posada was an obscure newspaper illustrator when he settled in Mexico City in 1888 and began working for a company that published graphic flyers designed to bring the news of the day to a largely illiterate public. Posada’s engravings soon caught on.

“Long drawn to the sensational,” writes Jesse Cordes Selbin at the Henry Ransom Center, “Posada’s interest centered on such fantastic and unsavory aspects of life as murders, robberies, bullfights, political scandals, and illicit love affairs. While his political work alternately satirized President Porfirio Díaz and lauded the populist revolutionary leaders Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Madero, for the most part his prints successfully struck the fine line between hard-hitting and light-hearted, resonating widely throughout Mexico.”

Despite their humble purpose, Posada’s engravings were a major influence on the development of 20th century Mexican art. Octavio Paz described his technique as “a minimum of lines and a maximum of expression.” In his introduction to Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, Paz writes, “By birthright Posada belongs to a manner that has left its stamp on the twentieth century: Expressionism. Unlike the majority of Expressionist artists, however, Posada never took himself too seriously.”

Others, however, did. The muralists who flourished in post-revolutionary Mexico revered Posada. Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, in particular, praised him as an inspirational figure. In his autobiography, Orozco writes:

Posada used to work in full view, behind the shop windows, and on my way to school and back, four times a day, I would stop and spend a few enchanted minutes in watching him, and sometimes I even ventured to enter the shop and snatch up a bit of the metal shavings that fell from the minimum-coated metal plate as the master’s graver passed over it. This was the push that first set my imagination in motion and impelled me to cover paper with my earliest little figures; this was my awakening to the existence of the art of painting.

The most influential of Posada’s works were his Calaveras, meaning “skulls,” or, by extension, “skeletons.” Perhaps the most famous work from the series is Calavera Catrina (above), a zinc etching completed in about 1910. It depicts a woman of the social class known as the Catrins (from a Spanish word meaning “over-elegant”), a group who denied their Maya heritage and thought of themselves only as European.

In 1947 Diego Rivera paid homage to Posada by placing him at the center of his panoramic Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central with a full-length version of the Calavera Catrina on his arm, while Rivera himself, depicted as a young boy, stands on the other side holding her bony hand. For more of Posada’s Calaveras, scroll down.

The Folk Dance Beyond the Grave:

Another zinc etching from around 1910, El Jarabe en ultratumba (“The Folk Dance Beyond the Grave”) depicts a merry group of skeletons eating, drinking, making music and dancing the traditional jarabe. The reproduction is from the posthumous 1930 monograph Las Obras de José Guadalupe Posada, Grabador Mexicano.

Calavera from Oaxaca:

Calavera Oaxaqueña (“Calavera from Oaxaca”) was first published on a broadside in 1910. It shows a proud-looking skeleton dressed as a charro, running past a crowd of skeletons with a blood-stained knife in his hand.

Calavera of Don Quixote:

In this etching made sometime between 1910 and Posada’s death in 1913, Don Quixote rides into battle wearing an upside-down barber’s basin he imagines to be the legendary helmet of Mambrino, a solid-gold relic said to make its wearer invulnerable. He vanquishes every foe. “This is the calavera of Don Quixote,” says the caption on the original broadside publication, “the first-class one, the matchless one, the gigantic one.”

Click on the images above to view them in a larger format. You can view more prints by Posada at MoMA and The Public Domain Review.

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by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Modern Art Was Used As a Torture Technique in Prison Cells During the Spanish Civil War

in Art, History | October 29th, 2014

We’ve all got those friends or family members who consider “modern art” a form of torture. Next time they complain about an exhibition you bring them to, just tell them how relieved they should feel that they didn’t fight in the Spanish Civil War — not just for the obvious reasons; they could have found themselves subject not just to actual torture, but torture directly inspired by modernist aesthetic principles. “A Spanish art historian has found evidence that suggests some Civil War jail cells were built like 3‑D modern art paintings in order to torture prisoners,” reports BBC News. “The cells were built in 1938 for the republican forces fighting General Franco’s Fascist Nationalist army, who eventually won power.” The finding comes from historian Jose Milicua, who discovered references to these modern-art cells among court papers from “the 1939 trial of French anarchist Alphonse Laurencic, a republican, by a Franco-ist military court.”

“During the trial,” the BBC article continues, “Laurencic revealed he was inspired by modern artists, such as surrealist Salvador Dali and Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky” to create the six-foot-by-four-foot cells placed secretly in Barcelona (see a re-creation above), which featured “sloping beds at a 20-degree angle that were almost impossible to sleep on,” “irregularly shaped bricks on the floor that prevented prisoners from walking backwards or forwards,” walls “covered in surrealist patterns designed to make prisoners distressed and confused,” and lighting effects “to make the artwork even more dizzying.” Evidence also indicates that, elsewhere in Spain, Nationalist prisoners “were forced to watch Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s film Un Chien Andalou,” especially an endless loop of its “graphic sequence of an eyeball being cut open” (at the top of the post).

Ironically, those imprisoned in such cells would have wound up there in the name of their fascist cause, which like the Franco-backing Nazi regime in Germany, considered modernism “degenerative.” Presumably, they didn’t leave their imprisonment with any more sympathetic idea of modern art than the one they’d gone in with. “A subcurrent of shock and provocation has always lurked within avant-garde art, which deliberately sets out to challenge bourgeois convention and to elicit a strong response” writes the New York Times’ John Rockwell. “My own experience has been that opponents of new art are much too quick to presume provocation, let alone provocation intended literally to torture. Still, there can be no doubt that outrage was and is a goal of some artists, even if they rarely pushed it to the logical extreme that Laurencic took it.” You can learn more about this unusually artistic form of warfare in this All Things Considered interview with art historian Victoria Combalia. (Listen below.) And do try to suppress those fantasies of throwing your more Philistine acquaintances in there for an hour or two.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

On the Importance of the Creative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Others Explain its Essential Role

in Architecture, Art, Business, Creativity, Design | October 27th, 2014

Every project starts with a brief.

From the layman’s perspective, the project above starts with a bit of self-mythologizing.

Bassett & Partners, the “award-winning, disruptive brand and design strategy firm” and maker of the video above, seems not to subscribe to TED-Ed’s practice of educating viewers from the get-go.

A couple of minutes in, I hit pause in order to do a little research on the word “brief.”

I’m familiar with male underpants (though technically those are plural, even if the garment is singular).

I have the average moviegoers handle on the meaning of legal briefs.

And now I know what the noted architects, illustrator, designer, and ad execs are talking about above! If only they’d referred to it as an elevator pitch, I’d have been on board from the start. Of course, why would they? Only those of us who want to sound all Hollywood call it that.

Whatever you call it, it’s a concise statement that gets right to the heart of what you—or your project—are about. No history. No campaign plans or citations. Just a whole lot of passion and truth tightly packed into a small vessel.

Architect David Rockwell defines a brief as a short-form communication tool from a client.

Art Director John Jay says its purpose is to inspire the creatives…

…without (as per ad exec John Boiler) dictating creative terms. Of all the interviewees, the trucker hatted Boiler exudes the schmooziest, most off-putting Hollywood vibe. I’d rather do lunch with Frank Gehry. Does this make me guilty of comparing apples to oranges, when director (and “disruptive brand and design” strategist) Tom Bassett leveled the playing field by giving them equal time?

Perhaps if Boiler had humbled himself by sharing an experience as heartbreaking as Gehry’s ill-fated Eisenhower Memorial. (Skip ahead to the 16:16 mark if you want to hear how outside opinion can pound context, research, poetry, and many months of thoughtful work to a heap of rubble.)

I love Maira Kalman, but remain unclear as to whether she’s fielding or submitting briefs. If the latter, how do those differ from book proposals?

What if the emotion, creativity, and enthusiastic research that went into Nike’s 1996 Olympics ads resulted in an equally fierce campaign to end hunger in a country with no Olympic teams?

What if the client’s problem was cancer? Could the brief demand a cure? That sounds simple.

Let us acknowledge that most grand scale visions require a fleet of underlings to come to fruition. I wonder what plumbers and electricians would make of seeing their contributions described in such poetic terms. Never underestimate the power of a soundtrack.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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

The Groundbreaking Art of Alex Steinweiss, Father of Record Cover Design

in Art, Music | October 22nd, 2014

Given the visual perfection and ubiquity of album covers by designers like Storm Thorgerson and Peter Saville—given the popularity of blogs featuring monumentally bad album covers—it’s hard to feature a time when records came wrapped in plain brown paper like cheap booze or covered in nondescript bindings like business ledgers. But this was the case, before another widely admired designer, Alex Steinweiss, more or less invented the album cover in 1939 at the age of 22.

There had been cover art before, during the age of the 78 rpm record, but only for the rare special release. Most music came stamped with its contents and little else. Initially contracted by Columbia Records to produce better jackets for the unwieldy 78, Steinweiss soon became the label’s art director and convinced them to try out several full color designs inspired by French and German modernist poster art. When Columbia released the first vinyl LP in 1948, Steinweiss not only designed the cover, but he invented the paperboard jacket that still surrounds records today.

You can see a few of Steinweiss’ covers for classical and jazz albums here. At the top of the post, see that first LP cover, for a recording of Grieg’s Violin Concerto in E Minor. The design may seem pretty restrained, but Steinweiss quickly broadened his palette. Just below the Grieg cover is a classic design for the jazz compilation Boogie Woogie, and just above, we have a colorful block design for a Gershwin album. Steinweiss also drew inspiration from abstract expressionist painters like Wassily Kandinsky, as you can see in the Bartok cover below.

Steinweiss’ designs were extremely popular and sent record sales soaring. In one instance, Newsweek reported that sales of a recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony “increased 895% with its new Steinweiss cover.” A savvy, fearless artist, Steinweiss left the field with the same ease and grace with which he’d entered it. After designing album covers, movie posters, and graphics for “countless other products” for 33 years, writes Jeff Newelt for the Art Directors Club, Steinweiss retired to become a painter, “noting the rise of Swiss Modernism and minimalism, and the increasing preference for photography in the field” of graphic design. While Steinweiss wasn’t afraid to incorporate photos into his designs on occasion—as you can see in a 1940 Bessie Smith cover below—it was the rare occasion. Mostly what interested him were bold colors and geometrical shapes.

Though it’s certain that someone would have come along and created record covers eventually, it’s hard to underestimate the tremendous influence Steinweiss had on the form—the way his work has guided our experience of staring in awe at a mysterious album cover, even in the MP3 age, and trying to imagine the kind of music it describes. For much, much more on Steinweiss, you could purchase this enormous, and enormously expensive, Taschen book. Or save a few bucks and browse through some extensive online collections of his work, like this Steinweiss tribute site, this six part biography, and the Birka Jazz Archive from Columbia, which also features iconic covers by such artists as Jim Flora, Neil Fujita, and Saul Bass. Steven Heller, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, presents a talk on Steinweiss’ art here.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Lynda Barry, Cartoonist Turned Professor, Gives Her Old Fashioned Take on the Future of Education

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Creativity, Education | October 21st, 2014

With college tuitions ballooning to the point of implosion, and free educational content proliferating online, the future of education is a scorching hot topic.

So where are we heading?

Coursera and Khan Academy? Video game-based curricula? Experience-driven microlearning?

Or school buildings that moonlight as candy?

So suggested one of the younger participants in a workshop led by the University of Wisconsin’s Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity, cartoonist and author Lynda Barry (aka Professor Long-Title).

Barry’s messianic embrace of the arts has proved popular with students of all ages. When the university’s Counterfactual Drawing Board Project invited faculty, staff, and others to consider what the “appearance, purpose, atmosphere and community of the campus” would be like in 100 years time, Barry deliberately widened the pool to include children.

Yes, their innovations tended toward volcano schools that erupt at dismissal, but presumably some of those same children will be in the vanguard when it’s time for initiatives that seem unimaginable now to be implemented. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and all that.

Or as one gimlet-eyed youth put it, in a hundred years “the teachers will all be dead.”

No wonder few adult participants can see past a button-driven, hermetically sealed, digital future wherein every student has a chip implanted in his or her head.

Barry, no stranger to depression, manages to laugh such gloomy forecasts off, despite what they portend for the tactile, handmade ephemera she reveres. A sense of humor—and humanity—is at the core of every educational reform she practices.

Rather than rip each other’s writing to shreds during in-class critiques, her students call each other by outlandish pseudonyms and draw meditative spirals as each others’ work is read aloud. Every reader is assured of a hearty “good!” from the teacher. She wants them to keep going, you see.

Surely there are institutions where this approach might not fly, but why poo-poo it? Isn’t fueling the creative spirit a practical investment in the future?

“It’s there in everybody,” Barry believes. “You have to give people an experience of it, a repeated experience of it that they generate themselves.”

Maybe someday, some kid who hasn’t had the love of learning squelched out of him or her will apply all that creativity toward curing cancer. That’d be great, huh? At worst, that carefully tended spark can give solace in the dark days ahead. As fans of Barry’s work well know, art exists to carry us through times of “sorrow and grief and trouble.”

Join Cartoonist Lynda Barry for a University-Level Course on Doodling and Neuroscience

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Entr’Acte: René Clair’s Dadaist Masterpiece, Scored by Erik Satie and with Cameos by Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray (1924)

Photos of a Very Young Frida Kahlo, Taken by Her Dad

Kandinsky, Klee & Other Bauhaus Artists Designed Ingenious Costumes Like You’ve Never Seen Before

Celebrate The Day of the Dead with The Classic Skeleton Art of José Guadalupe Posada

Modern Art Was Used As a Torture Technique in Prison Cells During the Spanish Civil War

On the Importance of the Creative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Others Explain its Essential Role

The Groundbreaking Art of Alex Steinweiss, Father of Record Cover Design

Lynda Barry, Cartoonist Turned Professor, Gives Her Old Fashioned Take on the Future of Education

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