A couple weeks back, we told you how Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Club used its tech savoir-faire to recover nearly 30 paintings that Andy Warhol made on the Amiga computer back in the 1980s. It involved restoring some Amiga hardware housed at the Andy Warhol Museum and then performing acts of “forensic retrocomputing,” which meant reverse-engineering the “completely unknown file format” in which Warhol saved his images. The Hillman Photography Initiative captured the whole process on film, and created a short movie called Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments. It premiered Saturday, May 10 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library Lecture Hall and it’s also now online. Watch it above. One interesting thing you’ll learn along the way: Steve Jobs originally asked Warhol to make his paintings on an early Mac. But the artist opted for the Commodore Amiga instead. Below, you can actually see Warhol paint Debbie Harry on the Amiga.
If you have an interest in how the internet has widened the very concept of education, you may well know about Google’s Art Project, a digital wealth of free visual art information and viewing opportunities we’ve featured before. And you more than likely know about Khan Academy, the highest-profile producer of educational videos on the internet. Now, from the combined power of their learning resources comes this collection of video introductions to over 100 important paintings. Ranging from between two to nine minutes and covering works of art created in eras from 575 B.C.E to the Second World War, these brief but intellectually dense and visually rich lessons bear the label of Smarthistory, “a multimedia web-book about art and art history” that merged with Khan Academy in 2011.
In the video at the top of the post, Smarthistory introduces us to Botticelli’s 1486 Tbe Birth of Venus, “one of the most iconic images in the history of Western art” — its content, its context, and its inspiration. The Birth of Venus might seem like one of those images that needs no introduction, but as all the information revealed in the video reminds us, most of us, if not art historians ourselves, could at least use a refresher.
Just above, we have Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 The Bedroom, a painting that, in the words of the artist himself, “ought to rest the brain — or rather, the imagination.” Though we all know the name of this particular post-Impressionist, we may not have seen this particular canvas of his before, a fact Smarthistory’s experts Beth Harris and Steven Zucker take into account when they explain to us how they themselves think about it. “What you’re talking about is the root of abstraction itself,” says Zucker. “It’s not that this is representative; it’s that the formal qualities of painting itself can have their own experiential aspect.” And they speak just as insightfully on the paintings we encounter, in one form or another, every so often in our daily lives. Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks, for instance, a replica of which I saw on the side of one coffee mug I used every day for years, gets discussed below as “an expression of wartime alienation” that delivers “an immediate implication that we are alone” that “makes us look for some sign of life, but we don’t see anything.” Smarthistory’s videos manage to reveal a great deal of emotional, technical, and historical knowledge on these and many other paintings in a fraction of the time it takes a student to cross campus for their art history lecture — let alone to sit through its entire slideshow. You can see all 100 videos in the collection here.
Suffering from tuberculosis, André Villers spent eight long years at a sanatorium in the French Riviera town of Vallauris, starting in 1947. There, while recovering, he learned photography, refined his craft, and later shot portraits of Europe’s great artists — Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, to name a few. Villers met Picasso in 1953 and stayed at his side for close to a decade, writes The Age, “quietly observing and shooting the man at work and at play.” In the image above, we find Picasso most certainly at play. Apparently Pablo threw on some random clothes one day, and said “Look at me, I am Popeye!” That scene is recorded for posterity with the great image above. Click to view it in a larger format.
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In early 1988, visual artist, rock producer, and “non-musician” musician Brian Eno came to San Francisco. He’d made the trip to put together “Latest Flames,” a “sound and light installation” using his own music and “television as a radiant light source” to “create a contemplative environment.” He created this contemplative environment at the Exploratorium, a one-of‑a kind museum of “science, art, and human perception” I remember fondly from my own childhood in the Bay Area (though alas, I didn’t start going until just after “Latest Flames” closed). During that visit, he spoke on Berkeley’s KPFA-FM about his great admiration for the very existence of the Exploratorium, which he thinks could never have happened in his native England, “too fussy” a country to accept such an experimental institution. He also emphasizes how much gratitude he thinks Americans should show for their public radio stations like KPFA, which, in contrast to the admittedly “great radio”-producing broadcasters of the U.K., work more loosely, with greater creative freedom not scheduled on “five-year plans.” It surely didn’t dampen Eno’s appreciation for KPFA that he appeared during the station’s “Brian Eno Day,” a twelve-hour marathon of material related to his work: music, music analysis, interviews new and old, and even listener calls.
This happened during KPFA’s regular pledge drive, and as every American public radio listener knows, pledge drives hold out the promise of desirable thank-you gifts to donating callers. In this case, these enticements included items signed right there in the studio, between turns at the microphone answering questions and chatting with composer-host Charles Amirkhanian, by Eno himself. The autographed Oblique Strategies decks run out first, and even after that people still call in with questions about their origin, their best use, and their future availability. They also (and Amirkhanian, and ambient music expert Stephen Hill) have much else to ask besides, filling the hours — those not occupied by pledge pitches, records Eno produced, or the full length of his own Thursday Afternoon album — with talk of the meaning of his inscrutable lyrics, the recording studio as musical instrument, the making of “Latest Flames,” his impatience with computers and synthesizers, his recommended English art schools, and how ambient music differs from new age “muzak.” A fan could ask for no richer a listening experience, even 26 years after it first aired — and few more entertaining listening experiences than, toward the end of this long Brian Eno day, the man of the hour’s (or rather, of the twelve hours’) decision to deliberately answer each and every remaining listener question with a lie. You can stream all of KPFA’s 1988 Brian Eno Day above. It’s also broken into nine thematic segments at the Internet Archive.
If you saw our post on Andy Warhol digitally painting Debbie Harry at the 1985 launch of the Commodore Amiga 1000, you know how effusively — effusively by the impassive Warholian standard, anyway — the artist praised the computer’s artistic power. Now, thanks to a recent discovery by members of Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Club, we know for sure that the mastermind behind the Factory didn’t simply shill for Commodore; he actually spent time creating work with their then-graphically advanced machine, a few pieces of which, unseen for nearly thirty years, just came back to light on monitors everywhere. Above we have the 1985 self-portrait Andy2. The 27 other finds include a mouse-drawn rendition of his signature Campbell’s soup can and a three-eyed Venus, surely one of the eerier early uses of cut-and-paste functionality, all products, explains the press release from The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon,” of a commission by Commodore International to demonstrate the graphic arts capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer.”
1980s electronics-loving artist Cory Arcangel, upon watching the video of Warhol at the launch, contacted the Andy Warhol Museum “regarding the possibility of restoring the Amiga hardware in the museum’s possession.” The effort necessitated acts of “forensic retrocomputing” — a delicate process, since “even reading the data from the diskettes entailed significant risk to the contents.” The CMU Computer Club team even had to reverse-engineer the “completely unknown file format” in which Warhol had saved his images. “By looking at these images, we can see how quickly Warhol seemed to intuit the essence of what it meant to express oneself, in what then was a brand-new medium: the digital,” Arcangel says in the press release. “FYI, it was the most fun project I ever worked on,” he says on his blog — a meaningful statement indeed, since so much of his other work involves old Nintendo games. The Hillman Photography Initiative captured it all in a film called Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments, which premieres Saturday, May 10, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library Lecture Hall, thereafter becoming viewable at nowseethis.org.
Last summer we told you that the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content Program by taking 4600 high-resolution images from the Getty collections, putting them into the public domain, and making them freely available in digital format. We also made it clear — there would be more to come.
Yesterday, the Getty made good on that promise, adding another 77,000 images to the Open Content archive. Of those images, 72,000 come from the Foto Arte Minore collection, a rich gallery of photographs of Italian art and architecture, taken by the photographer and scholar Max Hutzel (1911–1988).
All images in the Getty Open Content program — now 87,000 in total — can be downloaded and used without charge or permission, regardless of whether you’re a scholar, artist, art lover or entrepreneur. The Getty only asks that you give them attribution.
You can start exploring the complete collection by visiting the Getty Search Gateway. Images can also be accessed via the Museum’s Collection webpages. Be sure to look for the “download” link near the images.
For more information on the Open Content program, please visit this page. For more open content from museums, see the links below.
We’ve established something of a tradition here of featuring drawings by famous authors. It seems, unsurprisingly, that skill with the pen often goes hand-in-glove with a keen visual sense, though admittedly some writers are more talented draftsmen than others. William Faulkner, for example, created some very fine pen-and-ink illustrations for his college newspaper during his brief time at Ole Miss. Franz Kafka’s expressionistic sketches are quite striking, despite his anguished protestations to the contrary. And Jorge Luis Borges’ doodles are as quirky and playful as the author himself. Today we bring you the sketches of that great French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre—a collection of six rough, childlike caricatures that are, shall we say, rather less than accomplished. It’s certainly for the best—as the cliché goes—that Sartre never quit his day job for an art career.
But there is a certain wicked charm in Sartre’s visual satires of human moral failings, which he calls a “series de ‘douze vices sans allusion’”—roughly, “a series of twelve vices without reference.” Either Sartre only completed half the series, or—more likely—half have been lost, since the author assures the recipient of his handiwork, a Mademoiselle Suzanne Guille, that he presents to her a “série complete.” Who was Suzanne Guille? Your guess is as good as mine. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses these sketches, gives us no indication. Perhaps she was a relative, perhaps the spouse, of Pierre Guille, Simon de Beauvoir’s last lover? Given the many complicated liaisons pursued by both Sartre and his partner, the possibilities are indeed intriguing. As for the drawings? Their subjects hold more interest than their execution, providing us with keys to Sartre’s moral universe.
The first caricature, at the top, is titled “Le Contentment de soi”—“Self-Satisfaction”—and the character’s pompous expression says as much. Below it, the curious little fellow with the curlicue nose is called “L’Esprit Critique”—“The Spirit of Criticism.” And above we have “Le respect de la consigne et de la jurée”—“Keeping a Sworn Oath.” You can see the remaining three drawings, and read Sartre’s letter (in French, of course) to Mademoiselle Guille in pdf form here.
What do we have here? Painter Paul Gauguin playing a harmonium at the Paris studio of Alphonse Mucha, a Czech Art Nouveau painter, in or around 1895. How this came about — how Gauguin decided to strip off his pants and shoes and start playing that pump organ — we’ll probably never know. But we’re certainly glad that this light moment was saved for posterity.
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