Paul McCartney’s Conceptual Drawings For the Abbey Road Cover and Magical Mystery Tour Film

in Art, Music | February 14th, 2014

abbey-road-sketch

The web­site of Abbey Road stu­dios has an Earth­Cam trained on the inter­sec­tion of Abbey Road and Grove End Road, right out­side its state­ly Geor­gian Town­house. You can mon­i­tor the site all day and night if you like, and the prospect of doing so seems no cra­zier to me than indulging a fix­a­tion with Paul is dead con­spir­a­cies. It’s a mag­i­cal place, as like­ly to inspire awe as blind obses­sion. Although it has record­ed artists from Paul Robe­son to Lady Gaga, the his­toric stu­dio acquired its shrine sta­tus from one moment only—The Bea­t­les final record­ed album, Abbey Road, and its infa­mous cov­er shot.

abbey-road-empty-690808-580x389

See­ing the sausage of that cov­er made in the alter­nate takes post­ed at the Bea­t­les Bible site (two of which have Paul wear­ing san­dals) doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly dis­pel the mys­tique, but it does dis­abuse one of illu­sions of total spon­tane­ity. Even more so does the draw­ing at the top, which Paul McCart­ney made for pho­tog­ra­ph­er Iain Macmil­lan, who had 10 min­utes to get the hand­ful of shots he cap­tured with his Has­sel­blad. In the top right-hand cor­ner, you can see a small draw­ing added by Macmil­lan which adds depth to McCartney’s rudi­men­ta­ry com­po­si­tions. These sketch­es show McCart­ney and Macmil­lan care­ful­ly visu­al­iz­ing the sym­me­tries, strides, and even shad­ows of the cross­walk pho­to. (See the land­mark above, emp­ty, in a pho­to tak­en that same day.)

SgtPeppersSketch

Sketch­ing out impor­tant shots like these is com­mon prac­tice. For exam­ple, above you can see Peter Blake’s 1967 out­line for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band cov­er art. But the Abbey Road sketch is fur­ther evi­dence of McCartney’s guid­ing hand in The Bea­t­les’ image-mak­ing. Of Sgt. Pepper’s, John Lennon went on record as say­ing of the con­cept that “Sgt Pep­per is Paul.” In this case, McCartney’s idea for the cov­er was instru­men­tal in Blake’s even­tu­al design: “a pre­sen­ta­tion fea­tur­ing a may­or and a cor­po­ra­tion, with a flo­ral clock and a selec­tion of pho­tographs of famous faces on the wall behind The Bea­t­les.” McCart­ney cir­cu­lat­ed a list among the band mem­bers, ask­ing them to list their choice of celebri­ties. Many of the sug­gest­ed fig­ures end­ed up on the cov­er.

McCartneyMMTSketch

Of their sub­se­quent con­cept album, The Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour, Ringo like­wise claimed “it’s Paul’s idea real­ly, he came up with this.” When­ev­er McCart­ney for­mu­lat­ed his ideas—for album struc­tures, cov­er designs, or movies—he says in this video (which we can’t embed, unfor­tu­nate­ly) that he would “draw some­thing out.” Above, see his con­cep­tu­al map for the Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour film (click to enlarge). It may only be a coin­ci­dence that it looks some­thing like a dream­catch­er. Maybe it’s more of a pie chart. In any case, McCart­ney describes it in fair­ly mat­ter-of-fact terms as “vir­tu­al­ly a script” that allowed him to “focus his thoughts.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Tracks for The Bea­t­les’ Cli­mac­tic 16-Minute Med­ley on Abbey Road

John, Paul and George Per­form Duel­ing Gui­tar Solos on The Bea­t­les’ Farewell Song (1969)

The Bea­t­les: Unplugged Col­lects Acoustic Demos of White Album Songs (1968)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

An Online Gallery of 30,000 Items from The British Library, Including Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks And Mozart’s Diary

in Art, History | February 13th, 2014

DAVINCI

(Click image to enlarge)

This past Decem­ber, we wrote about the British Library’s releas­ing “over a mil­lion images onto Flickr Com­mons for any­one to use, remix and repur­pose.” For those who enjoyed this trea­sure trove of his­tor­i­cal con­tent, we bring more good tid­ings: the British Library also has a freely acces­si­ble online gallery, num­ber­ing some 30,000 items.

MOZART

The vast dig­i­tal col­lec­tion includes books, ancient maps, and price­less prints. Amid the count­less vir­tu­al tomes, some of the more impres­sive hold­ings include Mozart’s musi­cal diary from the last sev­en years of his life, and Leonar­do da Vinci’s note­book (find both above) where the artist and inven­tor the­o­rized about mechan­ics. Da Vin­ci also record­ed rid­dles in his notes, includ­ing: “The dead will come from under­ground and by their fierce move­ments will send num­ber­less human beings out of the world” (Answer: “Iron, which comes from under the ground, is dead, but the weapons are made of it which kill so many men”).

LONDON

The online col­lec­tion also con­tains a num­ber of expert­ly curat­ed exhibits by British Library staff, many of which are accom­pa­nied by a thor­ough intro­duc­tion to guide read­ers through the mate­r­i­al. I’ve always liked get­ting lost in old, detailed maps and par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed the Crace Col­lec­tion of Maps of Lon­don, which range from a 16th cen­tu­ry “guide for cun­trey men in the famous cittey of Lon­don by the helpe of wich plot they shall be able to know how far it is to any street,” to a 19th cen­tu­ry puz­zle-type map, whose read­ers must find a par­tic­u­lar route from the Strand to St. Paul’s. The col­lec­tion also con­tains a ter­rif­ic selec­tion of pre-print­ing-press-era illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, deemed “illu­mi­nat­ed” because they were metic­u­lous­ly dec­o­rat­ed, often using gold leaf. Among these are the open­ing of St. Luke’s Gospel from the Lind­is­farne Bible (below), one of the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing Eng­lish lan­guage Gospels (cir­ca 715 CE), and scenes from the life of St. Guth­lac, which dates to the ear­ly 13th cen­tu­ry.

STLUKE

For more of the British Library’s Online Col­lec­tion, head here.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

The Get­ty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Pub­lic Domain (and There’s More to Come)

The Nation­al Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Art­work Freely Avail­able Online

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Painters Painting: The Definitive Documentary Portrait of the New York Art World (1940–1970)

in Art, Film | February 12th, 2014

Emile de Anto­nio is one of those peo­ple who sim­ply had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He was a Har­vard class­mate of John F. Kennedy. He knew all of the core mem­bers of the Beat move­ment, even help­ing to dis­trib­ute the sem­i­nal Beat movie Pull My Daisies. And De Anto­nio was a friend with vir­tu­al­ly every­one in the New York art scene from Jasper Johns to Willem de Koon­ing. He once drank him­self into a stu­por for Andy Warhol’s exper­i­men­tal movie Drink. Warhol even famous­ly praised De Anto­nio say­ing, “Every­thing I learned about paint­ing, I learned from De.”

De Anto­nio was also a major voice of dis­sent dur­ing the Cold War. He direct­ed a series of scathing doc­u­men­taries includ­ing Point of Order (1964), about the McCarthy hear­ings; Rush to Judg­ment (1966), a sta­ple among JFK assas­si­na­tion the­o­rists; and the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed anti-Viet­nam war movie In the Year of the Pig. (1968)

For his 1972 movie Painters Paint­ing: The New York Art Scene 1940–1970, De Anto­nio man­aged to get artists like Warhol, Johns, and De Koon­ing along with Robert Rauschen­berg, Frank Stel­la, Bar­nett New­man and Helen Franken­thaler to talk about their craft. It is the defin­i­tive doc­u­men­tary por­trait of the New York art world.

De Anto­nio talked about Painters Paint­ing in a 1988 inter­view:

I was prob­a­bly the only film­mak­er in the world who could [have made Painters Paint­ing] because I knew all those peo­ple, from the time that they were poor, and unsuc­cess­ful and had no mon­ey. I knew Warhol and Rauschen­berg and Jasper Johns and Stel­la before they ever sold a paint­ing, and so it was inter­est­ing to [do the film about them]. They appeared in the film along with De Koon­ing, whom I knew very well, and Bar­nett New­man, who is now dead. They talked to me in a way that they would nev­er have talked to any­body else because they knew I knew the sub­ject.

The film, a tad grainy, appears above. A high­er res ver­sion of the film can “rent­ed” on Ama­zon. Ama­zon Prime mem­ber can watch it for free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:
Watch Por­trait of an Artist: Jack­son Pol­lock, the 1987 Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed by Melvyn Bragg

635 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Rauschen­berg Eras­es De Koon­ing

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Artistic Portrait of Stephen Fry Made From His Own Bacteria

in Art, Biology | February 10th, 2014

Stephen Fry is tak­ing part in a curi­ous sci­ence exper­i­ment. It involves cre­at­ing a por­trait of the writer/comedian/science enthu­si­ast, using noth­ing but his own bac­te­ria and cells. Accord­ing to the web site of The Big Bang UK Young Sci­en­tists & Engi­neers Fair, the “bac­te­ri­ographs” — as the por­traits are called — are “made from the sub­jects’ own cells – and have been grown by Zachary Copfer, an Amer­i­can micro­bi­ol­o­gist and pho­tog­ra­ph­er.” “To make the Pop Art style images, Zachary clev­er­ly expos­es areas of a petri dish to radi­a­tion in order to stim­u­late the bacteria’s growth. This cre­ates a pho­to­graph grown entire­ly from the bac­te­ria itself.” Find more of Copfer­’s work below, and oth­er sci­en­tif­ic work fea­tur­ing Stephen Fry fur­ther down the page.

Bacteriographs

Relat­ed Con­tent

Stephen Fry Hosts “The Sci­ence of Opera,” a Dis­cus­sion of How Music Moves Us Phys­i­cal­ly to Tears

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Com­put­ing in a Short Ani­mat­ed Video

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

15,000 Colorful Images of Persian Manuscripts Now Online, Courtesy of the British Library

in Art, Books, History | February 7th, 2014

PersianMS1

When a coun­try is in the head­lines almost every day, it can be easy to for­get that today’s news isn’t the whole sto­ry. Iran’s mod­ern sto­ry fea­tures its long, bloody war with Iraq, con­test­ed pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results, and protests that became part of the Arab Spring.

But Iran is also known by its ancient name of Per­sia and is one of the world’s old­est civ­i­liza­tions.

In the 12th cen­tu­ry, all of Mesopotamia blos­somed. The Islam­ic Gold­en Age was a time of thriv­ing sci­ence, schol­ar­ship and art, includ­ing bright and vivid Per­sian miniatures—small paint­ings on paper cre­at­ed to be col­lect­ed into books.

Thou­sands of these minia­tures—known for their bright and pure coloring—are now includ­ed in a new dig­i­tal archive devel­oped by the British Library. The paint­ings, often accom­pa­nied by beau­ti­ful Per­sian texts, are metic­u­lous­ly pre­served, mak­ing avail­able del­i­cate trea­sures on par with, if not more beau­ti­ful than oth­er illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts like the Book of Kells.

PersianMS2

Because the minia­tures were meant to be enjoyed in pri­vate, in books, artists could be freer with their sub­jects than with pub­lic wall paint­ings. Most minia­tures includ­ed human fig­ures, includ­ing depic­tions of the prophet Muhammed that showed his face, and “illu­mi­nat­ed” orna­men­tal bor­ders.

The joy of the archive, which includes works from the British Muse­um and India Office Library, is how close we can get to the work. Zoom in as close as you like to exam­ine the del­i­cate flow­ers and script (click the screen­shots to zoom into each paint­ing). With this tech­nol­o­gy, it’s pos­si­ble to see things that the naked eye would miss.

PersianMS3

A sep­a­rate archive hous­es rare Per­sian texts, includ­ing this pock­et ency­clo­pe­dia. The great­est ben­e­fi­cia­ries are schol­ars, who can pore over beau­ti­ful, frag­ile doc­u­ments and art­work from wher­ev­er they work, with­out dam­ag­ing the old mate­ri­als.

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her on Twit­ter.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

14,000 Free Images from the French Revolution Now Available Online

in Art, History | February 6th, 2014

droits de lhommeIt’s often said that the French Rev­o­lu­tion (1789–1799) cre­at­ed the “blue­print” for all rev­o­lu­tions to come. Unlike any event before it, the Rev­o­lu­tion drew its strength from ide­ol­o­gy — an ide­ol­o­gy that turned on the belief that France had cre­at­ed a rad­i­cal break with its monar­chi­cal past, and would now rad­i­cal­ly re-orga­nize itself along egal­i­tar­i­an and demo­c­ra­t­ic lines. To dri­ve this mes­sage home, the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies pro­duced thou­sands of pam­phlets and polit­i­cal works of art. What’s more, they cre­at­ed a new rev­o­lu­tion­ary cal­en­dar and a series of rev­o­lu­tion­ary fes­ti­vals that helped give cul­tur­al expres­sion to the idea that France had entered a new polit­i­cal age.

More than a cen­tu­ry lat­er, the Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies would use the French blue­print and all cul­tur­al tools at their dis­pos­al to pro­mote its Marx­ist ideals. You’ve seen the posters. You’ve watched the films. Maybe you’ve read their texts. But per­haps you’re not as famil­iar with where rev­o­lu­tion­ary pro­pa­gan­da all began, in which case you’ll want to rum­mage through a new archive of 14,000 images from the French Rev­o­lu­tion, cre­at­ed by Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France (BnF). The new archive con­tains visu­al mate­ri­als that will intrigue schol­ars as much as his­to­ry buffs.

Above you can see one image cel­e­brat­ing a found­ing doc­u­ment of the Rev­o­lu­tion — 1789’s Les droits de l’homme et du citoyen (The Rights of Man and Cit­i­zen).  Imme­di­ate­ly below, you can see a depic­tion of Lib­er­ty (a mod­ern ver­sion of a Greek god­dess) tri­umph­ing over past polit­i­cal abus­es. And, at the bot­tom, we have a vivid dis­play of the Rev­o­lu­tion’s choice instru­ment of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — the guil­lo­tine. Plus an image of an “aris­to­crat­ic hydre” in com­bat with the peo­ple.

liberty abuse

The images in the archive can be sort­ed by theme. If you find one you like, you can choose to down­load the image in a high-res­o­lu­tion for­mat, rang­ing from small to extra large. Schol­ars of the French Rev­o­lu­tion won’t want to miss anoth­er part of the new­ly-cre­at­ed archive. It con­tains the Archives par­lemen­taires, a series of his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments that record the polit­i­cal events of the Rev­o­lu­tion. In the mid 1990s, I  spent long stretch­es of time read­ing those doc­u­ments in the great read­ing room of the old BN.

To explore more image archives, please see our recent post: Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums & Libraries.

frenchrevolutionarchive12

Note: Some lec­tures on the French Rev­o­lu­tion can be found in Yale’s course Euro­pean Civ­i­liza­tion, 1648–1945, which appears in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

frenchrevolutionarchive4

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

Impressions of Upper Mongolia : Salvador Dalí’s Last Film About a Search for a Giant Hallucinogenic Mushroom

in Art, Film, Literature | February 6th, 2014

Sal­vador Dalí and his fel­low sur­re­al­ists owed a great debt to the wealthy, dandy­ish French writer Ray­mond Rous­sel, as much as mod­ernist poets owed the Sym­bol­ist Jules Laforgue. But like Laforgue, Rous­sel is much more often ref­er­enced than read, and he isn’t ref­er­enced often. A her­met­ic, insu­lar writer who seems to belong to a pri­vate world almost entire­ly his own, Rous­sel despaired of his lack of suc­cess and com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1933. His aes­thet­ic prog­e­ny, on the oth­er hand— Dalí, Mar­cel Duchamp, André Bre­ton—were show­men, self-pro­mot­ers and media genius­es. So it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly poignant, in the quirki­est of ways, that Dalí chose for his final film project a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Jose Montes Baquer in 1976 called Impres­sions of Upper Mon­go­lia (“Impres­sions de la haute Mongolie”—above with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles), an homage to Roussel’s self-pub­lished 1910 nov­el Impres­sions of Africa.

Rous­sel, who trav­eled wide­ly, nev­er trav­eled to Africa, and his “impres­sions” are whol­ly cre­ations of the kind of word­play that Dalí made visu­al in his paint­ing (includ­ing a can­vas with Rous­sel’s title). Like Roussel’s nov­el, Impres­sions of Upper Mon­go­lia is a sur­re­al­ist fan­ta­sy with only the most ten­u­ous con­nec­tion to its osten­si­ble geo­graph­i­cal sub­ject.

The entire 50-minute adven­ture takes place, MUBI tells us, “in [Dalí’s] stu­dio-muse­um in Cadacès (Spain).” The film opens with an epi­taph for Rous­sel in Ger­man, French, and Eng­lish that lion­izes the pro­to-sur­re­al­ist as “the mon­strous mas­ter of mys­ti­cal lan­guage.” “Mys­ti­cal” is indeed the mot juste for this film. Dalí nar­rates a sto­ry about an expe­di­tion he sup­pos­ed­ly sent to the tit­u­lar region in search of a giant hal­lu­cino­genic mush­room. Fla­vor­wire describes the “qua­si-fake doc­u­men­tary” suc­cinct­ly: “…it’s every bit as trip­py as you would expect it to be. Along the way, there’s a lot of mus­tache-wag­gling, yelling at Hitler, dis­cus­sions about Out­er Mon­go­lia and Ray­mond Rous­sel, intense close-ups of insects, and oth­er eccen­tric addi­tions — like Dalí’s over­act­ing.”

For all his ease with film, and his out­sized rep­u­ta­tion in film his­to­ry, Dali only ever col­lab­o­rat­ed with oth­er film­mak­ers, first Luis Buñuel, then Walt Dis­ney, and final­ly Baquer (who called him, approv­ing­ly, “an intel­lec­tu­al vam­pire”). In an inter­view, Baquer reveals that Dali chose the title and the Rous­sel ref­er­ences. He also “com­mis­sioned” the film, in a way, by hand­ing Baquer a pen that he had been uri­nat­ing on for sev­er­al weeks after “observ­ing how the uri­nals in the lux­u­ry restrooms of [the St. Reg­is Hotel] have acquired an entire range of rust colours through the inter­ac­tion of the uric acid on the pre­cious met­als.”

Baquer recounts that Dali cer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly told him to “take this mag­i­cal object, work with it, and when you have an inter­est­ing result, come see me. If the result is good, we will make a film togeth­er.” The result is most cer­tain­ly inter­est­ing. A fit­ting trib­ute to Rous­sel, it recalls Trevor Winkfield’s com­ments on the world of the writer, one that “belongs entire­ly to the imag­i­na­tion. Noth­ing real intrudes; it all derives from his head. Like a fairy tale, but a believ­able one.”

Watch Part 1 up top, and the remain­ing parts on YouTube here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Vin­tage Films by Sal­vador Dalí and Luis Buñuel: Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or

Des­ti­no: The Sal­vador Dalí – Dis­ney Col­lab­o­ra­tion 57 Years in the Mak­ing

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Great Orson Welles

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Drawings of Franz Kafka (1907–1917)

in Art, Books | February 4th, 2014

Run­ner 1907–1908

Runner 1907-1908

UK-born, Chica­go-based artist Philip Har­ti­gan has post­ed a brief video piece about Franz Kaf­ka’s draw­ings. Kaf­ka, of course, wrote a body of work, most­ly nev­er pub­lished dur­ing his life­time, that cap­tured the absur­di­ty and the lone­li­ness of the new­ly emerg­ing mod­ern world: In The Meta­mor­pho­sis, Gre­gor trans­forms overnight into a giant cock­roach; in The Tri­al, Josef K. is charged with an unde­fined crime by a mad­den­ing­ly inac­ces­si­ble court. In sto­ry after sto­ry, Kaf­ka showed his pro­tag­o­nists get­ting crushed between the pin­cers of a face­less bureau­crat­ic author­i­ty on the one hand and a deep sense of shame and guilt on the oth­er.

On his deathbed, the famous­ly tor­tured writer implored his friend Max Brod to burn his unpub­lished work. Brod ignored his friend’s plea and instead pub­lished them – nov­els, short sto­ries and even his diaries. In those diaries, Kaf­ka doo­dled inces­sant­ly – stark, graph­ic draw­ings infused with the same angst as his writ­ing. In fact, many of these draw­ings have end­ed up grac­ing the cov­ers of Kafka’s books.

“Quick, min­i­mal move­ments that con­vey the typ­i­cal despair­ing mood of his fic­tion” says Har­ti­gan of Kafka’s art. “I am struck by how these sim­ple ges­tures, these zigza­gs of the wrist, con­tain an econ­o­my of mark mak­ing that even the most expe­ri­enced artist can learn some­thing from.”

In his book Con­ver­sa­tions with Kaf­ka, Gus­tav Janouch describes what hap­pened when he came upon Kaf­ka in mid-doo­dle: the writer imme­di­ate­ly ripped the draw­ing into lit­tle pieces rather than have it be seen by any­one. After this hap­pened a cou­ple times, Kaf­ka relent­ed and let him see his work. Janouch was aston­ished. “You real­ly didn’t need to hide them from me,” he com­plained. “They’re per­fect­ly harm­less sketch­es.”

“Kaf­ka slow­ly wagged his head to and fro – ‘Oh no! They are not as harm­less as they look. These draw­ing are the remains of an old, deep-root­ed pas­sion. That’s why I tried to hide them from you…. It’s not on the paper. The pas­sion is in me. I always want­ed to be able to draw. I want­ed to see, and to hold fast to what was seen. That was my pas­sion.”

Check out some of Kafka’s draw­ings below:

Horse and Rid­er 1909–1910

Horse and Rider 1909-1910

Three Run­ners 1912–1913

Three Runners 1912-1913

The Thinker 1913

The Thinker 1913

Fenc­ing 1917

Fencing 1917

via Arts­Cen­tre

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Find Works by Kaf­ka in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion

Watch Franz Kaf­ka, the Won­der­ful Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

Vladimir Nabokov Makes Edi­to­r­i­al Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novel­la

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delight­ful But­ter­fly Draw­ings

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast