The late-1800’s European fascination with things Japanese sometimes bordered on the collection of Orientalist kitsch. At the height of French impressionism, so called Japonisme was everywhere, but rarely were Far East designs integrated into Western landscapes with such skill and sensitivity as in the work of Claude Monet. Next to his water lilies and haystacks, one of the most recognizable features in the painter’s work is a Japanese-style footbridge, which, like the lilies, was part of his garden at Giverny (see the aged Monet on the bridge in the 1922 New York Times photo above).
We’re familiar with the bridge as it appears in an 1899 painting Waterlily pond, green harmony, a symmetrical gray structure hovering in a lush, reflective sea of greens, lavenders, and pinks. As Monet’s eyesight further failed him, his paintings became harder to parse, turning to deep, Van Gogh-like swirls of color that are beautiful but sometimes completely abstract. Try and make out the bridge, for instance, in The Japanese Footbridge (above), painted between 1920 and 1922. Monet’s fascination with the bridge is particularly poignant when we consider that, as Australia’s National Gallery of Art says of Waterlily Pond, “not only did Monet create this painting, he made everything depicted in it,” meaning that Monet curated the landscape and supervised the footbridge’s construction.
Monet had it built in 1893, deliberately choosing a Japanese style, but employing local craftsman in the construction. And while the bridge had to be rebuilt in 1970, as you can see from French Impressionist travel guide Thomas Dowson’s 2011 photo of Monet’s real Normandy landscape (above), the painter’s gardens seem little changed from their nineteenth century character as a carefully balanced synthesis of East and West aesthetics.
A special thanks goes to @stevesilberman for sharing this with us.
Just the other day, I had a chat with a well-known poet who laid out for me his theory that Andy Warhol invented our conception of modern America. When we think about this country, the poet explained, we think about this country broadly in the way that Warhol (and thus his disciples) envisioned it. We here at Open Culture have covered several of the forms in which the artist promulgated his distinctive brand of Americana, and today, for the 85th anniversary of his birth, we’ve rounded up a few of his famous “screen tests,” the short films he made between 1963 and 1968 that offer portraits of hundreds of figures, famous and otherwise, who happened to pass through his studio/social club/subcultural hot zone, The Factory. Just above, you can watch Warhol’s screen test with Nico, the German singer who would become an integral part of the Factory-formed band the Velvet Underground.
Little-heard at the time but ultimately highly influential, the Velvet Underground’s sound shaped much American popular music — and given popular music’s centrality back then, much of American culture to come. You may not necessarily buy that argument, but surely you can’t argue against the influence of a certain singer-songwriter by the name of Bob Dylan, Warhol’s screen test with whom appears just above.
Coming from a Polish immigrant family, and seemingly dedicated to the cultivation of his own outsider status his entire life, Warhol understood the importance of foreigners to the vitality of American culture. Naturally, he didn’t miss his chance to shoot a screen test with Salvador Dalí, below, when the Spanish surrealist came to the Factory.
See also our previous post on Warhol’s screen tests with Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, Edie Sedgwick, and others. When you’ve watched them all, consider continuing your celebration of life in Andy Warhol’s 85th birthday with the EarthCam and The Warhol Museum’s collaboration Figment. It offers live camera feeds of not only his grave but the church where he was baptized. Comparisons to the viewing experience of Empire are encouraged.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Late last year, we also announced the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s launch of MetPublications, which will “eventually offer access to nearly all books, Bulletins, and Journals” published by the Met since 1870. The collection now features a whopping 375 free art books and catalogues overall. Taken together, these collections examine in detail art from all eras of human history and all parts of the world. At the top of the post, you will see the cover for the Met’s The Art of Illumination. (Who doesn’t love illuminated Medieval manuscripts?) Below appears Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, available from the Guggenheim. Given the presence of these and the other fascinating catalogues we’ve previously highlighted, word of these two museums’ online libraries certainly shouldn’t stay buried in our archives.
It’s a reality of big city living that one occasionally stumbles upon some famous person behaving like a mere civilian, out walking the dog, buying a latte, or taking the kids to some child-centric event. I’m bad at recognizing these luminaries out of context, which may be why I’m great at mistakenly believing some random citizen standing beside me at an intersection is in fact a noted author or beloved character actor. I have thus far never labored under the delusion that the guy across the aisle on the F train to Brooklyn is a one-eared Dutch post-Impressionist who died over a hundred years ago, but that could change.
Or not. According to Lithuanian architect and photographer Tadao Cern, the friend who served as the model for his digital recreation of Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic self-portrait doesn’t resemble the painter all that much beyond his ginger hair and beard. After taking his picture, Cern devoted a day to adjusting colors and exposure in Lightroom and fine tuning a host of details in Photoshop. Suddenly, the similarities were uncanny.
And since every Frankenstein needs a bride, Cern has cobbled together a Mona Lisa to keep Van Gogh company.
Ayun Halliday is posting from the wilds of Cape Cod, where she once spotted John Waters riding his bicycle to Safeway in a yellow slicker and matching all-weather pants. Follow her @AyunHalliday
As an arty, unathletic only child in the 70s, I refused to buy into the idea that science could be fun. This despite a wealth of zippy educational programming, and the efforts of at least two cute young teachers whose hands-on approach included throwing eggs off of a railroad trestle, demolishing toothpick bridges and dipping things into liquid nitrogen for the sheer pleasure of seeing them explode when they hit the wall. Nice try. As far as I was concerned, those dullsville black-and-white films from the ’50s embodied the subject’s general vibe far more honestly than any attempt to force it down our throats with a fashionable Honeycomb Kids-style spin.
Having by now met dozens of scientists and science enthusiasts who are left cold by the arts, I’m not ashamed to be plainspoken here. I certainly don’t begrudge them their passion, and appreciate it when they don’t belittle mine. Different strokes, you know?
Stegerfor’s method for capturing big brained innovators in a light frame of mind resembles a well run experiment. His unsuspecting specimens were apprehended at Germany’s annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Thus secured, they were led one at a time into a temporary studio where each was invited to draw whatever it was that had earned him or her the Nobel prize. The results weren’t much as art, but they’re unmistakably playful, bristling with arrows, exclamation points, smiley faces, and word bubbles. The photographer let his subjects pick the pose, at which points things did become art.
I’m going to award 1996 Chemistry laureate Sir Harold Kroto Best in Show for his well warranted action pose. Apparently, his discovery’s molecular structure looks like a soccer ball.
It’s not exactly Breaking Bad, but it does bring Chemistry alive for me as a subject others might find enjoyable in the empirical sense.
View a gallery of Volker Stegerfor’s Sketches of Science. If you’re really into it, the Nobel Museum is heralding a traveling exhibition of Stegerfor’s work with audio recordings of the scientists on the subject of their discoveries.
After the waning of abstract expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg’s exuberant prints, paintings, sculptures, and three-dimensional collages he called “Combines” rejuvenated the New York art world and helped bring pop art to prominence, anticipating Warhol’s experiments. And now students of twentieth-century American art can connect with all of the artist’s work in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection without setting foot in the Bay area, thanks to SFMOMA’s Rauschenberg Research Project, which allows users to download high res images of the museum’s Rauschenbergs. Research materials—including commentary, interviews, essays, and more—accompany each image. Clicking on the main link for each image will send you to a page with a lengthy description. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find individual links for each of the associated files and an omnibus link for all of them at once.
It’s certainly not a substitute for seeing the work up close in all its ontological materiality, but it’s still quite a wonderful resource for researchers, art historians, and even general enthusiasts of Rauschenberg, particularly since many of the works in SFMOMA’s database are not currently on display (and the museum is temporarily closed during an expansion). A painting you can’t see in person is the dense collage Mother of God (at top), one of Rauschenberg’s earliest surviving paintings from a period in the 50s when the artist explored several religious themes. The painting’s brown background is composed of layers of maps of American locales, and the site allows you to zoom in and examine each one in fine detail. In the video above—one of the digital project’s collection of artifacts—see Rauschenberg discuss the painting with curator Walter Hopps and SFMOMA Director David A. Ross in a 1999 interview.
The German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was one of the greatest figures of the Northern Renaissance. As a draughtsman and painter, he rivaled his elder contemporary Leonardo Da Vinci, and his masterful woodcuts and engravings of mythical and allegorical scenes made him famous across Europe.
In the first half of his life, Dürer made a series of exquisite self-portraits. The earliest (above) was made in 1484, when the artist was a precocious boy of 13. It was drawn in silverpoint. Sometime later, he wrote in the upper right-hand corner: “This I have drawn from myself from the looking-glass, in the year 1484, when I was still a child — Albrecht Dürer.” The drawing, now in the collection of the Albertina museum in Vienna, was made at about the time Dürer became an apprentice goldsmith in his father’s jewelry shop in Nuremberg. Much to his father’s disappointment, he would leave the goldsmith shop about a year later to become an apprentice to the prominent Nuremberg artist and printmaker Michael Wolgemut. But the early experience of working with the tools in the goldsmith shop would prove invaluable to Dürer’s later work as an engraver.
Age 22:
After Dürer finished his apprenticeship with Wolegmut at the age of 19, he followed the tradition of young artists and embarked on a guild tour of southern Germany to study the work of various artists and printmakers. He was probably in Strasbourg when he painted his “Portrait of the Artist holding a Thistle” (above) in 1493. He was 22 years old. The portrait was painted in oil on vellum, and was pasted on canvas several centuries later. Johann Wofgang von Goethe saw the painting in 1805 at a museum in Leipzig and was deeply impressed. In 1922 it was purchased by the Louvre.
“The face still has some of the childish features seen in his early drawing of a Self-Portrait,” says the Louvre Web site, “but the manly neck, the strong nose, and the vigorous hands are already those of an adult. Dürer, who was also an excellent engraver, composed his works in a very graphic fashion. The almost metallic fineness of detail, seen in the prickles of the thistle, also recalls his early training as a goldsmith.”
There are two competing theories about the meaning of the painting. Some scholars believe it was an engagement present for Agnes Frey, whom Dürer would marry the following year. “In fact,” says the Louvre, “the thistle held by the artist is called ‘Mannstreu’ in German, which also means ‘husband’s fidelity.’ This pledge of love would also explain the elegance of the costume. The main loophole in this hypothesis is that Dürer may still have been unaware of the marriage, which had been arranged by his father.” A rival theory is that the thistle represents the crown of thorns from Christ’s Passion. In any case, the artist’s inscription reads, “Things happen to me as it is written on high.”
Age 26:
The second of Dürer’s three painted self-portraits was made in 1498, when he was 26 years old and entering his mature period as a master artist. Dürer had made his first of two visits to northern Italy a few years earlier to study Italian art and mathematics. While there, he was impressed and gratified by the elevated social status granted to great artists. In Germany he had been looked down upon as a lowly craftsman. “How I shall freeze after this sun!” Dürer wrote home to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer from Italy. “Here I am a gentleman, at home only a parasite.” Upon his return to Nuremberg, Dürer asserted his new sense of social position. In the portrait above he depicts himself as something of a dandy, with flamboyant dress and a haughty bearing. The painting was made in oil on a wood panel, and now resides in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
Age 28:
The Christ-like self-portrait above was painted in 1500, shortly before Dürer’s 29th birthday. The painting was made in oil on a wooden panel, and is now in the collection of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Unlike his earlier self-portraits, which were composed in the customary three-quarters view, Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500 depicts the artist faced squarely toward the viewer — a pose usually reserved at that time for images of Christ. His hand, touching the fur collar of his coat, brings to mind the gestures of blessing in religious icons. The highly symmetric composition draws attention to the eyes, which gaze directly at the viewer. The artist’s monogram, “AD,” and the Latin inscription — “I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, portrayed myself in everlasting colors aged twenty-eight years” — are placed at eye-level to strengthen the effect. The year “1500” is written directly above the monogram, giving the “AD” a second meaning as Anno Domini, which further reinforces the connection between Dürer and Christ. The art historian Joseph Koerner has suggested that the entire composition, from the triangular outline of the frontal likeness to the curve of Dürer’s fingers, echoes the overarching “A” and nestled “D” of the artist’s monogram. “Nothing we see in a Dürer is not Dürer’s,” writes Koerner, “monogram or not.”
David Lynch has embraced visual art and the possibilities of the new music industry. With Pina, Wim Wenders made one of the most acclaimed works in the latest, superhero-filled wave of 3D movies. Jean-Luc Godard… well, I couldn’t quite tell you what he has got up to with his latest picture, but it sounds conceptually and technologically forward-looking indeed. Clearly, some of the creators best suited for the new cinematic reality in which we find ourselves also happen to have already logged decades and decades in the craft. Werner Herzog, director of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, another one of the few recent 3D movies you still hear people talking about, has executed his latest project not in the theater, but in a museum, and not as a traditional film, but as a five-channel video installation.
Hearsay of the Soul will run at the Getty Center, a particularly well-known museum overlooking Los Angeles — Herzog’s city of residence and my own — from July 23 to January 19. In it, Herzog combines landscape etchings by Dutch Golden Age master printmaker and Rembrandt-influencer Hercules Segers with music from two of Segers’ modern countrymen, cellist Ernst Reijseger and organist Harmen Fraanje. (Herzog aficionados will, in fact, recognize Reijseger’s work from the score of Cave of Forgotten Dreams.) “They are like flashlights held in our uncertain hands,” Herzzog says of Segers’ images, “a frightened light that opens breaches into the recesses of a place that seems somewhat known to us: our selves. We morph with these images. Hercules Segers’s images and my films do not speak to each other, but for a brief moment, I hope, they might dance with each other.” You can glimpse a few of the installation’s images and hear a few of its sounds just above.
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.
