Here’s some rare footage of the great Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paying a visit to exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1938.
The Trotskys had arrived the year before, after Rivera petitioned the government of President Lázaro Cárdenas to grant the controversial Marxist leader and theorist sanctuary in Mexico. When the Trotskys arrived on a Norwegian oil tanker at the port city of Tampico in January of 1937, Rivera was not well, but Kahlo boarded the ship to welcome the Trotskys and accompanied them on an armored train to Mexico City. She invited the Trotskys to stay at her family home, La Casa Azul (the Blue House) in Coyoacán, now a section of Mexico City. By the time this footage was taken by a visiting American named Ivan Heisler, Trotsky and Kahlo had either had, or were about to have, a brief affair, and the friendship between the two couples would soon fall apart. In early 1939 Trotsky moved to another house in the same neighborhood, where he was assassinated in August of 1940.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of that effect has to do with encountering familiar icons — Big Ben, double-decker Routemaster buses, Marmite — in cold, damp reality. More of it may be induced by the country’s simultaneously thoroughgoing cultures of normality and eccentricity, an endless source of inspiration for Monty Python’s Flying Circus and much other British comedy since. Yet England came relatively late to Surrealism, or rather, Surrealism came late to England. When the International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries behind London’s Royal Academy in the summer of 1936, the Manchester Evening News decried it as “a travesty of everything that’s decent.” Naturally, the show was a smash hit.
On display was work by artists including Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, who turned up in person to deliver a lecture on “Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms.” In order to “descend to the subconscious” with a properly Surrealist literalism, he rented a diving suit and helmet from a local outfitter for his appearance. (You can see an actual image from 1936 here.) “The diving suit had extremely heavy lead shoes which I could barely lift,” he writes in his autobiography, as translated by Haakon Chevalier. “I therefore had to walk very slowly, leaning on friends who helped to move me, as though I were completely paralyzed, and thus I appeared before the audience holding two luxurious white Russian wolfhounds on a leash.”
Only after he’d been talking for a few minutes did Dalí realize that “it would be impossible for me to deliver my speech through the glass window of my helmet. Moreover, I had been shut up in this thing for ten minutes and became heated from the exertions I had made in walking across the stage to reach my chair, so that I was dripping with perspiration, and felt faint and on the point of suffocating.” With the technician who’d screwed the helmet on in the first place nowhere to be found, his wife Gala and friend Edward James worked desperately to free him, eventually taking a hammer to the bolts. “At each blow I thought I would faint.” When Dalí finally emerged, the audience, having assumed it had all been an act, “was impressed by my really deathly pallor, which constituted the accurate gauge of that Dalinian dramatic element which never fails to attend my most trivial acts and undertakings.”
As uncompromisingly as they made their declarations to change the world through sheer force of nonsense, the Surrealists also understood that the show must go on. Dalí moved on to the visual portion of his lecture, presenting slides out of order and, for the most part, upside down. This was just one of the attractions with which the International Surrealist Exhibition drew 30,000 visitors during its three-week run, and “had it not been for the gathering storm clouds of war in Europe,” writes the Guardian’s Joanna Moorhead, “it might have gone on to achieve far more.” The old English intolerance for Gallic self-seriousness would also have made things difficult for Surrealism as the likes of Dalí, Duchamp, and André Breton conceived it. Or perhaps the domestic variety was simply enough: as critic and poet Herbert Read puts it in the exhibition’s catalog, a nation that has produced both William Blake and Lewis Carroll is to the manner born.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Critical theorists like Theodor Adorno may have overreached in claiming that all mass culture is mediocre, mechanized propaganda made to justify the status quo. But that doesn’t mean they were entirely wrong. Over and over we see even the most subversive art, literature, film, and music has a way of being tamed and Bowdlerized. Global mega-corporate industries don’t need to censor what they don’t like; they only need to buy it, rebrand it, or price it out of reach.
So what? Why do we need challenging, independent art when we have endless entertainment? Is the concept a nostalgic, elitist, Eurocentric idea? Artists have justified the need for art since antiquity, with poetic and logical arguments of every kind. But Dada artists of the early 20th century broke ranks, building their movement on the insight that no defense could possibly mean anything when it came to art’s purpose, especially in the face of the technocratic slaughter of World War I.
When the hyperrationalism of modernity led to mass death and destruction, the only humane response was to declare war on rationalization—to “destroy the hoaxes of reason,” as French artist Jean Arp put it. “For the disillusioned artists of the Dada movement,” the Museum of Modern Art explains, “the war merely confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture and thought.”
Dada took a combative stance against, for one thing, the insistence that art justify its existence to win establishment approval. “All activity is vain,” declared poet Tristan Tzara in his 1918 “Dada Manifesto,” including the “monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring…. The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust” with the ossified culture of the “nice, nice bourgeois,” who would preserve at any cost “the possibility of wallowing in cushions and good things to eat.”
“And so Dada,” wrote Tzara, “was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity.” Such declarations aside, the movement was decidedly unified in its aims. “For us, art is not an end in itself,” poet Hugo Ball wrote. “It is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.” This critique required new experimental techniques that deformed and repurposed the technologies of mass culture.
The undertaking would not have been possible without a Dada publishing wing that turned out scores of journals, magazines, books, leaflets, essays, manifestos, etc., written, designed, edited, illustrated, photographed, and controlled by the artists themselves. They might find no small amount of irony in the fact that their productions have received the ultimate institutional sanction: housed in “nice, nice bourgeois” museums, libraries, and universities around the world.
The University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive has amassed a considerable number of Dada publications and offers a wealth of high-quality scanned images of the originals on their site. “The first section” of their Digital Library “includes some of the major periodicals of the Dada movement from Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere.”
The second section of the site “includes books by some of the participants in the Dada movement, as well as some of the more ephemeral Dada-era publications, such as exhibition catalogs and broadsides.” You’ll find writings by all of the artists mentioned above, as well as other well-known names like Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, George Grosz, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and more.
All of these publications are, of course, in their original European languages, though you can find translations of many documents online. The most influential Dada magazine in English, Alfred Stieglitz’s 291, will give monolingual readers a flavor of the larger scene. Published in New York between 1915 and 1916, the short-lived journal included many of the major European names. Its first issue covered experiments like “simultanism,” “sincerism,” and “idiotism,” and introduced visual poetry to American readers. Issue 5–6 featured on its cover one of the weird, nonsensical machines of Francis Picabia.
Dada splintered into other movements before its artists were forced out of Europe or hounded into obscurity by the Nazis. Their unified attempt to fragment and disrupt the dominance of mass culture was itself fragmented and disrupted by a horrific new war machine. But while their ideas may have been co-opted, their spirit may yet live on. Inspired by their work, perhaps a new generation will take up the Sisyphean task of making radical, critical, experimental art to subvert the homogenizing juggernaut of the culture industry.
“The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most remarkable survivals of the Middle Ages — a 70 metre embroidered account of the events leading to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, culminating in the Battle of Hastings. This video tells the Tapestry’s story in full, using Charles Stothard’s early colour reproduction, presented here as a seamless scroll for the first time. We follow Harold Godwinson’s fateful journey from Edward the Confessor’s court to Normandy, his later seizure of the Crown, and William the Conqueror’s invasion. Beyond its political messaging, the Tapestry is also bursting with medieval history, including jokes, fascinating technical details, and a warning for those who break their promises…”
It’s an ungainly word for English speakers, which is maybe why we do not hear it often: Gleichschaltung. Yet the concept remains central for a clear view of what happened to Germany in the 1930s. In 1933, the nation completely transformed, seemingly overnight, through “a concerted policy of ‘coordination’ (Gleichschaltung),” the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum writes. “Culture, the economy, education, and law all came under Nazi control.” Those artists and organizations that were not purged had their essential character changed to reflect an entirely different set of artistic and political values. One publication, especially, serves as an example of the Nazification of culture.
The arts journal Jugend (Youth), writes Messy Nessy Chic, “had been turned largely into propaganda” between 1933 and 1940, its final year. But prior to the regime’s takeover, Jugend showcased the most avant-garde, “degenerate” artists of the era, and might have been “the ‘brainiest’ periodical of the day,” as one critic wrote in a 1904 issue of The Yale Literary Magazine. “There is no magazine published in England or in this country which is at all like it.”
As in England, France, Austria, and the U.S., the Art Nouveau movement in Germany emerged from a whirlwind of post-Impressionist painting, Orientalist motifs, folk art, modernist art and advertising, book illustration, and graphic and industrial design. Appropriately, given its perch on the threshold of a new century, Art Nouveau looked both backward—to the medieval, gothic, and Romantic—and forward toward a more modernist, urbane, and urbanized sensibility.
So influential was Jugend that Art Nouveau in Germany became known as Jugendstil. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines writes, “Among Jugend’s most important qualities—indeed, an essential aspect of Art Nouveau and its German equivalent Jugendstil—was its brilliant escapism.” Founded in 1896 by writer Georg Hirth, the magazine was “from the start a venue to promote the new cultural Renaissance without recourse to the established ‘vintage’ art.” (See its very first cover right above.)
Jugendstil was primarily based in Munich, where most of its artists, designers, and writers lived and worked, until the turn of the century, when, notes the Art Encyclopedia, “the Munich group dispersed, heading for Berlin, Weimar and Darmstadt.” Art Nouveau in Germany developed in two phases, “a pre-1900 phase dominated by floral motifs, themselves rooted in English Art Nouveau and Japanese art,” and a “post-1900 phase, marked by a tendency towards abstract art.”
While we know the names of many Art Nouveau artists from elsewhere in Europe—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in France, Aubrey Beardsley in England, Gustav Klimt in Austria, for example—Jugendstil in Germany produced few international stars. Many of the artists published in its pages were relatively unknown at first. But its shockingly brilliant covers and radical editorial tone put it at the forefront of German arts for decades. “Jugend’s political and social platform,” wrote The Yale Literary Magazine critic, “is one of opposition—opposition to everything.”
In 1933, however, the magazine was forced to comply with the kind of dour conservatism it had arisen explicitly to protest. Its wild covers and proudly original contents turned somber and neoclassical, as in the bust of Nietzsche on the cover above from 1934. Many of its artists disappeared or went into exile. But as we observe this transformation happening abruptly in the University of Heidelberg archive, we still see a magazine whose editorial staff held fast to notions of artistic quality, as they were forced to turn away from everything that had made Jugend exciting, cutting-edge, and worthy of its title.
Frank Lloyd Wright was often strapped for cash. In that respect, he had something in common with Vincent van Gogh, who passed most of his much shorter life in more dire circumstances. Unlike Wright, who enjoyed decades of fame at the pinnacle of the American architectural profession, van Gogh remained practically unknown until after his death. But if they’ve encountered one another in the afterlife, they’ve certainly discussed one subject above all others: their shared appreciation for Japanese woodblock prints. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the collection of 500 such works of art that van Gogh left behind. At the end of Wright’s life in 1959, he owned about 6,000, many of which his estate had to sell to pay both Japanese art dealers and American tax collectors.
We could say that Wright died as he lived, advanced age having not evidently diminished either his financial recklessness or his obsession with ukiyo‑e. The masters of that classical “art of the floating world” like Hokusai and Hiroshige were among his favorite artists of any kind. When still a teenager, Wright went to work for the architect Joseph Silsbee, who’d built a chapel for his uncle.
“Silsbee’s cousin, Ernest Fenollosa, happened to be the world’s leading Western expert on Japanese art at the time,” writes Kevin Nute at The Conversation. It isn’t certain how well the young Wright knew Fenollosa — or indeed when he began collecting ukiyo‑e, writes Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan author Julia Meech-Pekarik, though he may have seen both Hokusai and Hiroshige’s works at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, “about the time he opened his practice in Oak Park.”
Eight years later, “Wright made his first voyage to Japan in pursuit of prints, and he did indeed return with enough expertise to stage an exhibition of his own Hiroshige collection at the Art Institute of Chicago in March of 1906.” He returned for two months in 1913, making it clear that he was only interested in using that time to acquire more prints. Later, while working on the Imperial Hotel between 1917 and 1922, he spent a total of more than three years there, later writing that “the pursuit of the Japanese print became my constant recreation while in Tokio,” a quest whose “adventures and excursions would take place at night or sometimes call for a journey by day to distant places.” This positioned him well to take on a sideline as a dealer (or as he liked to call himself, a merchant) of Japanese art in a United States only just becoming aware of its beauty — an especially advantageous condition in architecturally lean years.
Wright valued ukiyo‑e, about which he published a book in 1912, for its sense of order, structure, nature, and simplicity. “Five lines where three are enough is stupidity,” he wrote. “Nine pounds where three are sufficient is stupidity. But to eliminate expressive words that intensify or vivify meaning in speaking or writing is not simplicity.” In his own form, he understood full well that “expressive changes of surface, emphasis of line, and especially textures of material, may go to make facts eloquent — forms more significant.” But it was Hokusai, Hiroshige, and countless other commercial artists of that earlier time and distant land that changed his approach to building in the first place. “When I saw the print and I saw the elimination of the insignificant and simplicity of vision, together with the sense of rhythm and the importance of design, I began to see nature in a totally different way.” And thus, thanks to Japanese art, did that most American of all architects begin taking shape.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In some rare cases, adaptations and interpretations of a literary work can surpass the source. Despite hundreds of valiant efforts on the part of fans, filmmakers, game/toy designers, and radio producers, this has never been true of the fully-realized fantasy world in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (not that it’s ever been anyone’s intent). As we noted in a previous post, Tolkien’s fictional world is so intricate, its sources so vast and varied, that Corey Olsen, “The Tolkien Professor,” has made it his entire life’s work to open that world up to students and curious readers, such as with his eight-part lecture series on The Hobbit.
One might also add illustrators to the list of Tolkien interpreters above who have—in the almost ninety years since The Hobbit’s publication and more than seventy years since the first appearance of The Lord of the Rings trilogy—done their best to visualize Tolkien’s world. But perhaps no one did so better than the master himself. Long known as a visual artist as well as a literary one, Tolkien left behind over 100 illustrations for The Hobbit, one of which adorns 2011’s HarperCollins 75th anniversary edition of the book. He also created these original cover designs for each book in TheLord of the Rings trilogy.
It doesn’t quite ring true to call David Bowie a rock star. Ziggy Stardust, the neon synthetic-clad alien alter ego he both created and retired in the early seventies, was, of course, rock stardom outlandishly personified. But then, that was the concept of what turned out to be just one of many personae he deliberately crafted throughout the course of his career. That career was in music, primarily, but looking back on it today, more than a decade after Bowie’s death, it looks more like his medium was culture itself. That’s underscored by his interviews, clips from a variety of which appear in the new video above from YouTube channel T&H Inspiration.
Most of T&H’s most popular videos add visuals to speeches by the popularizer of Eastern philosophy Alan Watts, who’s been featuredhere on Open Culture before. He and Bowie had more in common than it may seem at first, beginning with an Englishness that remained thoroughgoing no matter how far out they ventured into the world.
Though Watts’ interest in Buddhism hardly needs stating, it’s worth remembering that he chose to be ordained as an Episcopalian priest rather than as a Buddhist monk. The young Bowie, for his part, very nearly took the latter path, studying under the late Lama Chime Rinpoche, who eventually told him he’d be better off going into the music business.
Bowie did so, of course, but with a new “sense of transience and change, which actually became fundamental to my life and my approach to it,” as he put it decades later. That sense manifests even in his early work, but embracing and even pursuing impermanence — the impermanence of sounds, of fashions, of hit records, of life itself — also kept him from getting mired in the irrelevance or auto-kitsch that threatens every superstar. Given the belief that nothing lasts forever, “looking for the source of one’s own being becomes much more important,” as does attempting artistic or intellectual challenges at the very edge of one’s abilities. Alan Watts would probably have agreed. The bigger question is, did he ever hear “Changes”?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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