Leonardo da Vinci, the archetype of the Renaissance Man, received some formal training in the anatomy of the human body. He regularly dissected human corpses and made very detailed drawings of muscles, tendons, the heart and vascular system, internal organs and the human skeleton. A great number of these drawings can now be seen in the largest exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of the human body, “Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist,” at The Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace, London. In this video, Senior Curator Martin Clayton explores three of these drawings and shows that Leonardo’s medical discoveries could have transformed the study of anatomy in Europe, had they not languished unpublished for centuries. Clayton has also published his findings in “Nature”. And the BBC has looked into the question of just how accurate Leonardo’s anatomical drawings really were.
Bonus links:
The Guardian has a fascinating story about Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, including his ‘to-do’ list.
Here’s a wonderful 360° panoramic view of Santa Maria delle Grazia in Milan with Leonardo’s “Last Supper”.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
By 1969, Salvador Dalí knew how to handle things. He had four decades of celebrity under his belt. He knew what his critics had to say, and he had grown accustomed to dealing with a skeptical media. A decade earlier, Mike Wallace opened his interview with Dalí (watch here) by asking him:
Dali, first of all let me ask you this, you’re a remarkable painter and you’ve dedicated your life to art, in view of this, why do you behave the way that you do? For instance, you have been known to drive in a car filled to the roof with cauliflowers. You lectured, as I mentioned, once with your head enclosed in a diving helmet and you almost suffocated. You issue bizarre statements about your love for rhinoceros horns and so on. You’re a dedicated artist, why do you or why must you do these things?
By 1969, little had changed. In the vintage CBC clip, the interviewer begins the conversation with a similar question, only more bluntly phrased. “People think you are crackpot. Do you know what a crackpot is? A crazy person.” Then Dalí, ever the surrealist, gives his cryptic reply, referring to himself in the third person, and deflects the question rather perfectly:
This is not absolutely exact. Because Dalí is almost crazy. But the only difference between crazy people and Dalí is Dalí is not crazy.
And so the rest of the conversation goes.…
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Maybe you already had a fascination with Saul Bass’ celebrated movie title sequences, or maybe you gained one from yesterday’s post about the current designers he’s inspired. Either way, you can round out your understanding of the man’s artistic sensibility by watching Why Man Creates, the animated film by Bass and his wife/collaborator Elaine which won the 1968 Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. An eight-part meditation on the nature of creativity, the film mixes animation and live action, using Bass’ advanced repertoire of optical techniques, to look at the issues surrounding how and why humans have, throughout the history of civilization, kept on making things. It begins with early hunters felling a beast and making a cave painting out of it. From that cave rises a tower built out of every major phase of human civilization: the wheel near the bottom, the pyramids somewhat higher up, the literal darkness of the Dark Ages as the camera rises higher still, ultimately capped by a heap of planes, trains, and automobiles. One wonders how Bass might, in an update, have stacked his representation of the internet atop of all this, but the sequence’s datedness costs it none of its virtuosity.
Some of Why Man Creates’ subsequent chapters, in their bold late-sixties “trippiness,” may strike you as more dated than virtuosic. But it would take a hardened viewer indeed not to crack a smile at Bass’ Pythonesque turn when a drawn hand flips open the tops of a series of unthinking partygoers’ heads, revealing the emptiness inside. In its 29 short minutes, the film also looks at the creative struggle in terms of the coarseness of evaluative crowds, the tendency of successful radical ideas to become self-perpetuating institutions, and how people just like things better when they have American flags on them. Its journey ends in an unexpected setting, amid the toil of agricultural and medical scientists who may pursue an idea for years only to find that it has no application. This note of frustration leads into a montage of sun, fire, statuary, the Sphinx, canvasses, and rockets. Assembled with Bass’ signature subtle visual complexity, it takes us from antiquity to modernity in a way only he could.
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PBS’ web series Off Book talks to artists working hard, whether they’re doing so in the street, in tattoo parlors, on Etsy, or on film and television title sequences. In the latest installment above, Karin Fong and Peter Frankfurt discuss their now-iconic Mad Men title sequence, as well as their earlier and more troubling opening credits for David Fincher’s Se7en. Ben Conrad explains how his title work integrated into the physical world of Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland, allowing zombies to rampage right through floating letters announcing things like “Columbia Pictures” and “Produced by Gavin Polone,” and spelling out the numbered rules of post-apocalyptic survival even as the protagonists observed, bent, and broke them. Jim Helton tells the story of his back-and-forth with director Derek Cianfrance in designing the titles for Blue Valentine, which take exploding-firework imagery and aesthetically unify it with the scattered memories that make up the movie. All of them face the challenge of simultaneously inviting audiences into a story, reflecting its sensibility, and on top of that, making an original contribution to the production as a whole.
Though the meeting of design, film, and television has never been more enthusiastically examined than in this era of internet video, this line of work has a rich history. After this episode of Off Book’s end credits, the interviewees all give props to title designer Saul Bass — “Saint Saul,” Frankfurt calls him — who, if you believe them, elevated title sequences, corporate logos, and other previously plain and straightforward means of visual communication into art forms unto themselves. Watch Bass’ creations in North By Northwest, The Man With the Golden Arm, and West Side Story, some of the earliest title sequences to showcase the form’s capacity for implication and abstraction, and you’ll understand his importance to these modern-day designers. Perhaps this brief visual introduction to Bass’ designs, previously featured on Open Culture, will inspire you to get into the business yourself.
Pablo Picasso’s art emerges in front of our eyes in this remarkable 1956 film by the French master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot.
The Mystery of Picasso (in French Le Mystère Picasso) is a unique collaboration between filmmaker and painter. Pauline Kael called it “One of the most exciting and joyful movies ever made.” The film is not so much a documentary as a carefully contrived cinematic depiction of Picasso’s creative process. While painting is generally experienced as a fixed art form, in The Mystery of Picasso we watch as it evolves over time.
In the first half of the 75-minute film, Picasso uses color pens to make playful doodles on translucent screens. These sequences bear some resemblance to a 1950 film by Belgian filmmaker Paul Haesaerts called Visite à Picasso (A visit with Picasso), which features Picasso painting on glass. As Clouzot’s film progresses, the artworks become more refined. Picasso switches from ink pens to oil brushes and paper collage. A work that took five hours to create unfolds in a ten-minute time-lapse. At the 54-minute mark Picasso says “Give me a large canvas,” and the film switches to CinemaScope.
Indeed, in The Mystery of Picasso, the film itself is the artist’s canvas. Clouzot draws attention to this fact through a series of contrivances. At one point he highlights the temporal constraints of the medium by creating an element of suspense. He asks cinematographer Claude Renoir (grandson of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir) how much film is left, and then we watch as the film counter ticks away the time while the 76-year-old painter races to finish a painting. When the The Mystery of Picasso ends, the artist “signs” the film by painting his signature on a canvas large enough to fill the screen. As Clouzot later wrote, “It is someone else’s film, that of my friend Pablo Picasso.”
The Mystery of Picasso (now added to our collection of Free Online Movies) performed poorly at the box office but won the Special Jury Prize at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. In 1984 the French government declared it a national treasure. Picasso’s paintings from the production were reportedly destroyed afterward. They exist only in the film.
Give this one a minute to get going, to get beyond the schtick. And then you’ll enter the world of Chip Kidd, associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers for many famous books. As he will tell you, his job comes down to asking: What do stories look like, and how can he give them a face, if not write a short visual haiku for them? In the remaining minutes of his TED Talk, Kidd takes you through his work, revealing the aesthetic choices that went into designing covers for books by Michael Crichton, John Updike, David Sedaris, Haruki Murakami, and others.
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With the aid of YouTube, you can watch an episode of Robert Hughes’ documentary seriesThe Shock of the New each week, just as it first aired on the BBC and PBS in 1980. But I defy you to watch “The Mechanical Paradise,” the first of its eight installments, and not plow through the rest in a day. Hughes, a prolific art critic who has written books on everything from Francisco Goya to America’s culture of complaint to the city of Barcelona to the history of his native Australia, has also hosted television programs about everything from Caravaggio to Utopian architecture to the Mona Lisa. The Shock of the New, a project which found expression as a book as well as these broadcasts, takes on the ambitious task of tracing the progress of modernism through visual art. But the roots of the movement run deeper into history, and so this first episode begins at the base of the Eiffel Tower, a monument to the accelerating scientific and technological progress of the late nineteenth century that would so disrupt the aesthetics of the twentieth.
As a reader of art criticism, I’ve long trusted Hughes’ writing on these subjects more than I do anyone else’s. Clear, bold, concrete, and always, in a bluntly stealthy way, more nuanced than it seems, Hughes’ textual persona stands against what, in his autobiography, he calls the “airy-fairy, metaphor-ridden kind of pseudo-poetry” that he sees as having flooded the field. As a guide through the history of artistic modernism, he proves as no-nonsense yet dryly entertaining on film as he is on the page. Whether turning our attention toward special details of Braque and Picasso’s canvasses or zipping around in a 1900s roadster, Hughes presents with the assurance of authority but not its intellectual overreach, pulling you along to Fernand Léger, the Futurists, and Marcel Duchamp. And as a viewer of television documentaries, I’ve long trusted the late seventies and early eighties as the form’s golden age. In this episode and beyond, The Shock of the New showcases what the productions of that era did best: a moody electronic score, archival clips creatively used, and extended sequences that give us time to really look. (Voiceover work by Judi Dench and Martin Jarvis doesn’t lose this chapter any points, either.)
The Shock of the New consists of the following episodes: “The Mechanical Paradise,” “The Powers That Be,” “The Landscape of Pleasure,” “Trouble in Utopia,” “The Threshold of Liberty,” “The View From the Edge,” “Culture as Nature,” “The Future That Was”
From April 4 through September 9, the Tate Modern will stage the first serious UK exhibition of major works by Damien Hirst, one of Britain’s most influential, controversial and wealthy artists. Many of his famous sculptures — including, of course, the famous/infamous shark suspended in formaldehyde — will be on display. It’s our job to get you better acquainted with the exhibit. So let’s have Damien Hirst, the artist himself, take you on a tour of the big affair. The program above, Damien Hirst — The First Look, originally aired on Channel 4 in the UK. You can also watch Hirst wander through the exhibition with curator Ann Gallagher right here. Finally, you might want to spend a few minutes with a review by Oliver Wallington, an artist who wonders whether the emperor of art “has no clothes.” Or scan the review at The Guardian, which quietly raises eyebrows of its own.
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