“David Bowie Is” — The First Major Exhibit Dedicated to Bowie Spans 50 Years & Features 300 Great Objects

in Art, Music | October 1st, 2013

Attention David Bowie fans: If you’re going to be in Toronto between now and November 27th, you’re in for quite a treat. AGO, the Art Gallery of Ontario, just opened the exhibit “David Bowie Is,” a hugely comprehensive multimedia show “Spanning five decades and featuring more than 300 objects from Bowie’s personal archive,” including handwritten lyrics, instruments, photos like that of Bowie and William Burroughs below, and lots and lots of costumes like the bodysuit at the bottom. Originating at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, this is the first international exhibit solely devoted to Bowie.

If you can’t make it to the show, you can see a brief preview here and at AGO’s own site. In the short video at the top, Curator Victoria Broackes describes the title of the exhibit as “both an unfinished sentence and a statement.” The exhibit, she says, illustrates “Bowie’s own belief that we all have within us so many different personalities, and we should work hard to figure out what they are and bring them out.” It’s difficult to imagine anyone but Bowie bringing out so many uniquely fascinating personalities as he has in one lifetime. As Broackes’ fellow curator Geoffrey Marsh comments, Bowie is “an astonishingly hard worker” who “performed on average once every 11 nights” for 32 years, all while recording album after album and becoming an international movie star. Bowie may inspire, but he also blows most performers away with his seemingly endless supplies of creative energy and single-minded focus.

H/T Ken

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Experience of Inventing the Character Ziggy Stardust (1977)

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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 ( None ) |

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

in Art, Letters | September 23rd, 2013

Click for larger image

Important twentieth-century painters, as every student of art history learns, didn’t tend to sail smoothly through existence. Those even a little interested in famed Mexican self-portraitist Frida Kahlo have heard much about the travails both romantic and physical she endured in her short life. But in this lesser-known instance, another artist suffered, and Kahlo offered the solace. Available to view from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, we have here a letter Kahlo sent to Georgia O’Keeffe, painter of blossoms and southwest American landscapes (and more besides), on March 1st, 1933. At that time, O’Keeffe, who the year before had struggled and failed to complete a mural project for Radio City Music Hall on time, lived through the aftermath of a nervous breakdown which had hospitalized her (diagnosis: “psychoneurosis”), sent her to no less remote a locale than Bermuda to recuperate, and prevented her from painting again until 1934.

Kahlo’s letter, sent from Detroit where her muralist husband Diego Rivera had taken a commission for 27 frescoes at the Institute of the Arts, runs as follows:

Georgia,

Was wonderful to hear your voice again. Every day since I called you and many times before months ago I wanted to write you a letter. I wrote you many, but every one seemed more stupid and empty and I torn them up. I can’t write in English all that I would like to tell, especially to you. I am sending this one because I promised it to you. I felt terrible when Sybil Brown told me that you were sick but I still don’t know what is the matter with you. Please Georgia dear if you can’t write, ask Stieglitz to do it for you and let me know how are you feeling will you ? I’ll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn’t know sad things now. After all I shouldn’t complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can’t imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers, but it is so difficult to find the ones I would like for you. I would be so happy if you could write me even two words. I like you very much Georgia.

Frieda

“Clearly Kahlo hoped for a deeper friendship, or perhaps more, with O’Keeffe, when she and Diego went to New York a few weeks later,” writes Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall in Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own. “From there, she wrote to a friend on 11 April (by which time O’Keeffe had gone to Bermuda to convalesce) that because of O’Keeffe’s illness there had been no lovemaking between them that time. A boastful exaggeration of their closeness? Knowing Kahlo’s predilection for sexual hyperbole, this seems likely.”

via A Piece of Monologue, A Writer’s Ruminations

The Real Georgia O’Keeffe: The Artist Reveals Herself in Vintage Documentary Clips

Watch Moving Short Films of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the “Blue House”

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1938

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

10th Graders Draw Pictures Imagining Philosophers at Work

in Architecture, Art | September 21st, 2013

The Tumblr called Philosophers at Work has gathered together a fun series of drawings by 10th graders from Madison WI, who were asked by their teacher to — you guessed it — “draw a philosopher at work.” I will leave it to you to peruse the gallery of drawings. But I’ll just say this: Whatever their virtues, the drawings don’t look anything like real philosophers. (For some pictures of real philosophers, see, of course, the Looks Philosophical tumblr.) Nor do tenth graders, no disrespect to them, depict philosophers nearly as artistically as Renée Jorgensen Bolinger, whose paintings of Wittgenstein, Frege and Russell we showed you a few weeks back. If you missed her paintings, I’d encourage you to see Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists. Enjoy your weekend.

Note: if you click on the images above and below, you can see each in an expanded format.

via Leiter Reports

Photography of Ludwig Wittgenstein Released by Archives at Cambridge

Philosophy: Free Courses

The History of Philosophy … Without Any Gaps

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

William S. Burroughs Explains What Artists & Creative Thinkers Do for Humanity: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

in Art | September 20th, 2013

The interview clip above, from the 1991 documentary Commissioner of Sewers, puts a two-part question to Naked Lunch author, “cut-up writing” master, and counterculture eminence William S. Burroughs: “What is the original feel of the writer? What mechanisms should he consider, work on?” That may sound like a slightly odd line of inquiry — the interviewer, bear in mind, doesn’t speak English natively — but Burroughs responds with an important point, clearly made. “The word should should never arise,” he first insists, though perhaps self-contradictorily. “There is no such concept as should in regard to art — or anything — unless you specify. If you’re trying to build a bridge, then you can say we should do this and we should do that, with respect to getting a bridge built, but it doesn’t float in a vacuum.” All well and good for engineering. But what can art do, if not build a bridge?

“One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and what they don’t know that they know,” Burroughs says. “This applies to all creative thinking. For example, people on the sea coast in the middle ages knew the Earth was round. They believed the Earth was flat because the church said so. Galileo tells them the Earth was round, and nearly was burned at the stake for saying so.”

Burroughs summons as examples Cézanne, whose studies of what “objects look like seen from a certain angle and in a certain light” at first made viewers think “he’d thrown paint on canvas,” and Joyce, who “made people aware of their stream of consciousness, at least on a verbal level,” but “was first accused of being unintelligible.” Yet Burroughs found he lived in a world where, this art already having expanded humanity’s consciousness, “no child would have any difficulty in seeing a Cézanne” and few “would have any difficulty with Ulysses. The artist, then, expands awareness. Once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.” Such insight makes Burroughs, as one Youtube commenter puts it, “so down-to-earth that he’s far-out.”

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Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing

William S. Burroughs’ Short Course on Creative Reading

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings

in Art, Literature, Science | September 19th, 2013

We don’t often talk about the hobbies (other than drinking, anyway) of respected twentieth-century writers. But do you know a single Nabokov reader, or even an aspiring Nabokov reader, ignorant of the lepidopterist leanings of the author of Lolita, The Gift, and Pale Fire? The man liked butterflies, as any of the widely seen photographs of him wielding his comically oversized net can attest. But when his eyes turned toward these striking, delicate insects, he didn’t necessarily put down his pen. Nabokov’s wife Vera, according to a Booktryst post on the sale of his book and manuscript collections, “treasured nature, art, and life’s other intangibles more highly than material possessions, and Vladimir knew that for Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries” — in Montreux in 1971, Ithaca in 1957, Los Angeles in 1960, or anywhere at any time in their life together — “Vera appreciated his thoughtful and delicate butterfly drawings much more than some trinket. She delighted in these drawings in a way she never did for the landscapes he used to paint for her in earlier days.” For the woman closest to his heart, Nabokov drew the creatures closest to his heart.

“From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender.” This he declares in his autobiography Speak, Memory. “I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts.” Despite the passion with which Nabokov pursued lepidoptery, it seemed, in his lifetime, his accomplishments in the field would remain mostly non-professional; he began one book called Butterflies of Europe and another called Butterflies in Art, but finished neither.

But in 2000, out came the 782-page Nabokov’s Butterflies, which collects, as its co-editor Brian Boyd writes in the Atlantic, “his astonishingly diverse writing about butterflies, whether scientific or artistic, published or unpublished, carefully finished or roughly sketched, in poems, stories, novels, memoirs, scientific papers, lectures, notes, diaries, letters, interviews, dreams.” And in 2011, a hypothesis he had about butterfly evolution had its vindication under the Royal Society of London. But to understand how much butterflies meant to him, we need look no further than the title pages of the volumes he gave his wife.

via Book Tryst

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Art of Handwriting as Practiced by Famous Artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning & More

in Art, History | September 17th, 2013

Click each image for a larger version

Didn’t we used to hear all sorts of grumbling about the disappearance of the handwritten letter? What a relief those complaints seem now to have subsided, leaving us in peace to efficiently type to one another about how we find pieces of longhand correspondence fascinating purely as artifacts of our favorite historical figures. If you share that fascination, have a look at The Art of Handwriting, an exhibit from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art now on display through October 27 at Washington D.C.‘s Lawrence A. Fleischman gallery, which showcases not only the artistic aspects of handwriting, but the handwriting of actual artists. “An artist might put pen to paper just as he or she would apply a line to a drawing,” says the exhibition’s site. “For each artist, a leading authority interprets how the pressure of line and sense of rhythm speak to that artist’s signature style. And questions of biography arise: does the handwriting confirm assumptions about the artist, or does it suggest a new understanding?” Plus, we have here the ideal test of those handwriting analysis booths at county fairs — could they detect these artistic personalities?

Just above, we have a page of abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning’s missive in light-blue ink of March 28, 1966 to friend and fellow abstract expressionist Michael Loew. (They’ve even included the envelope.) At the top of the post, you’ll find a page another painter, the famously blossom-focused Georgia O’Keeffe, wrote to New Mexico modernist Cady Wells in 1939. The subject of the letter? “O’Keeffe worries that Wells doesn’t like a painting she has bought and suggests replacements; and describes an argument she had with a friend.” That description comes from the Smithsonian’s catalog, as does this one: “[Jackson] Pollock writes with descriptions of his new home in Springs, on Long Island, and discusses his work and that of other artists.” You can also view both pages of that evidently unscandalous piece of communication on the site. They’ve even got letters composed by hand in other languages, such as Marcel Duchamp writing to his sister Suzanne (below) on January 15, 1916. Don’t worry if you can’t read French, or if you think you can’t contextualize the personal content of any of the letters at all; focus on, as the Archives of American Art suggests, how “every message brims with the personality of the writer at the moment of interplay between hand, eye, mind, pen, and paper.” That, and the that hope schoolchildren won’t have to endure cursive lessons many generations longer.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

René Magritte’s Early Art Deco Advertising Posters, 1924–1927

in Art | September 12th, 2013

The Belgian painter René Magritte created some of the most enigmatic and iconic works in Surrealist art. But before he moved to Paris in 1927 and began forging relationships with André Breton and the Surrealists, Magritte struggled in Brussels as a freelance commercial artist, creating advertisements in the Art Deco style.

In 1924 Magritte began designing posters and advertisements for the couturier Honorine “Norine” Deschrijver and her husband Paul-Gustave Van Hecke, owners of the Belgian fashion company Norine. Van Hecke also owned art galleries, and was an early champion of surrealism. Van Hecke would eventually pay Magritte a stipend in exchange for the right to market his surrealist works. In the 1924 advertising poster above, Magritte portrays a woman in high heels pretending to be Lord Lister, the gentleman thief from German pulp fiction, wearing “an afternoon coat created by Norine.”

Magritte designed some 40 sheet music covers, most of them in the Art Deco style, according to Hrag Vartanian at Hyperallergic. The one above, “Arlita,” is from about 1925. The French and Dutch subtitles read “The Song of Light.”

The harlequin-themed image above is another advertisement for Norine, circa 1925. Magritte painted it in watercolor and gouache. The penciled inscription at the bottom reads “une robe du soir par Norine” — “an evening gown by Norine.”

In 1926 Magritte was commissioned to create the poster above for the popular singer Marie-Louise Van Emelen, better known as Primevère. An original print is currently up for sale at Christie’s and is expected to bring somewhere between $18,000 and $25,000.

For more of Magritte’s Art Deco sheet music covers, visit Hyperallergic.

The Art of William Faulkner: Drawings from 1916–1925

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by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Salvador “Dalí is the Biggest ‘Prick’ of the 20th Century,” Says the Quotable Henry Miller

in Art, Literature | September 5th, 2013

There’s no two ways about it. Henry Miller had a way with words. He could be blunt, lewd, cutting, all in one short sentence. You want a little case study? Ok, how about the notes Miller scrawled back in 1973, when he called Salvador Dalí “the biggest ‘prick” of the 20th century” (or, in another instance a “prick of the first water”). What was his beef with the Spanish surrealist? It all started in 1940, when Miller and his lover, the incomparable Anaïs Nin, spent some time cooped up in the same house with Dalí, who turned out to be an insufferable prima donna. Their time together ended in a wild shouting match, with Miller and Nin storming out of the home and holding a grudge for decades to come. The story is nicely recounted by Book Tryst, a site that has recently become a new favorite of ours.

Related Content:

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Tom Schiller’s 1975 Journey Through Henry Miller’s Bathroom (NSFW)

Henry Miller Talks Writing and the Expat Life with Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and Others (1969)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

“David Bowie Is” — The First Major Exhibit Dedicated to Bowie Spans 50 Years & Features 300 Great Objects

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

10th Graders Draw Pictures Imagining Philosophers at Work

William S. Burroughs Explains What Artists & Creative Thinkers Do for Humanity: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings

The Art of Handwriting as Practiced by Famous Artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning & More

René Magritte’s Early Art Deco Advertising Posters, 1924–1927

Salvador “Dalí is the Biggest ‘Prick’ of the 20th Century,” Says the Quotable Henry Miller

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Illustrated by Salvador Dalí in 1969, Finally Gets Reissued

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