Behold Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of the Bible (1866)

in Art, Books, Religion | July 9th, 2024

One occasionally hears it said that, thanks to the internet, all the books truly worth reading are free: Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the Divine Comedy, the Bible. Can it be a coincidence that all of these works inspired illustrations by Gustave Doré? When he was active in mid-nineteenth-century France, he worked in a variety of forms, including painting, sculpture, and even comics and caricatures. But he lives on through nothing so much as his woodblock-print illustrations of what we now consider classics of Western literature — and, in the case of La Grande Bible de Tours, a text we could describe as “super-canonical.”

Doré took on the task of designing 241 engravings for a luxurious new French-language edition of the Vulgate Bible in the mid-eighteen-sixties. The project “offered him an almost endless series of intensely dramatic events,” writes biographer Joanna Richardson: “the looming tower of Babel, the plague of darkness in Egypt, the death of Samson, Isaiah’s vision of the destruction of Babylon.”

All provided practically ideal showcases for the elements of Doré’s intensely Romantic style: “the mountain scenes, the lurid skies, the complicated battles, the almost unremitting brutalism.” But along with the Old Testament “massacres and murders, decapitations and avenging angels” come Victorian angels, Victorian women, and Victorian children, “sentimental or wise beyond their years.”

Those choices may have been motivated by the simultaneous publication of La Grande Bible de Tours in both France and the United Kingdom. In any event, the edition proved successful enough on both sides of the Channel that a major exhibition of Doré’s work opened in London the very next year.

Though visibly rooted in their time and place — as well as in the artist’s personal sensibilities and the aesthetic currents in which he was caught up — Doré’s visions of the Bible still make an impact with their rich and immediately recognizable chiaroscuro portrayals of scenes that have long resonated through the whole of Western culture. You can see the whole series on Wikipedia, or as collected in The Doré Gallery of Bible Illustrations at Project Gutenberg — all, of course, for no charge.

Gustave Doré’s Exquisite Engravings of Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Gustave Doré’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Behold Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satirical Masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel

The Adventures of Famed Illustrator Gustave Doré Presented in a Fantasic(al) Cutout Animation

Salvador Dalí’s Illustrations for the Bible (1963)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Now Appears on Japanese Banknotes

in Art, Current Affairs, Economics | July 4th, 2024

If you’ve lived or traveled in Japan, you know full well how much of daily life in that cash-intensive society involves the use of thousand-yen bills. Once considered the equivalent of the American ten-spot, the yen’s lately having fallen to its lowest value in decades means that it’s now worth closer to six U.S. dollars. This is good news for tourists, and especially so for tourists who appreciate the woodblock-print art of Hokusai, whose famous Great Wave off Kanagawa adorns the brand new ¥1000 banknote. Issued just yesterday by the Bank of Japan, it also bears the image of bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburō, who co-discovered the infectious agent of a bubonic plague outbreak in 1894.

The last revision of the ¥1000, twenty years ago, also featured a bacteriologist: Noguchi Hideyo, who identified syphilis as the cause of progressive paralytic disease. Before Noguchi, it bore the image of Natsume Sōseki, one of the most celebrated writers in the history of Japanese letters.

The Bank of Japan tends to roll out banknote designs for each official era, which begins whenever a new emperor ascends to the throne; the current one began in May of 2019, after Emperor Akihito stepped down and his son Naruhito stepped up. Other historical figures pictured on the currency of this Reiwa era, as it’s called, include Tsuda University founder Tsuda Umeko and “father of Japanese capitalism” Shibusawa Eiichi.”

A not just respected but popular and commercially successful artist, Hokusai knew a thing or two about capitalism himself. Yet he also had an uncommon eye for the beauty of Japan, his distinctive perceptions of which have been highly influential in both Eastern and Western art for nearly two centuries now. Japanese banknotes have previously featured images of Mount Fuji, Ogata Kōrin’s six-panel painting of irises, and a scene from the Tale of Genji. But this is the first time any has drawn from ukiyo‑e, the “pictures of the floating world” of which Hokusai was one of several masters who worked from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. A Great Wave bill is something to celebrate, but given that today happens to be the Fourth of July, let it be said that the pyramid with the eye is also pretty cool.

The Evolution of Hokusai’s Great Wave: A Study of 113 Known Copies of the Iconic Woodblock Print

Watch Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Get Entirely Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

Hokusai’s Action-Packed Illustrations of Japanese & Chinese Warriors (1836)

Alan Turing Will Be Featured on England’s New £50 Banknote

‘Pride and Prejudice’ Author Jane Austen Will Appear on the £10 Note

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Manuscript, Handwritten & Illustrated By Lewis Carroll (1864)

in Art, Literature | July 2nd, 2024

On a summer day in 1862, a tall, stammering Oxford University mathematician named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took a boat trip up the River Thames, accompanied by a colleague and the three young daughters of university chancellor Henry Liddell. To stave off tedium during the five-mile journey, Dodgson regaled the group with a story of a bored girl named Alice who finds adventure in the most unexpected places. By the day’s end, Liddell’s middle daughter, also named Alice, was so enthralled by this account that she implored the mathematician to write the story down. Some three years later, Dodgson would publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the nom de plume of Lewis Carroll (the pen name is an Anglicized version of “Carolus Ludovicus,” the Latinized form of Charles Ludwidge). The perennial children’s read was immediately popular, counting Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria among its ardent fans, and has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1865.

Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the original version of the book that Carroll presented to Alice Liddell in 1864, is presently housed in the British Library, which has graciously made it freely available online. You can view it here. The handwritten volume includes 37 crisp ink illustrations, all personally drawn by Dodgson. Discerning Alice readers will notice that these illustrations differ from the iconic images (and, to my eyes, very much superior) created by famed Punch magazine political cartoonist John Tenniel.

Title and illustrations aside, the original manuscript is considerably slimmer than the final version, containing roughly 12,000 fewer words.

Those wishing to revisit Alice’s adventures can do so at the Internet Archive.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

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Thousands of Pablo Picasso’s Works Now Available in a New Digital Archive

in Art, Museums, Online Courses | June 27th, 2024

If you want to immerse yourself in the world of Pablo Picasso, you might start at the Museo Picasso Málaga, located in the artist’s Spanish birthplace. But to understand how his work developed throughout his life, you’ll have to get out of Spain — which is just what Picasso did to accelerate that development in the first place. At the turn of the twentieth century, an ambitious young European painter had to go to Paris, the continent’s art capital. Picasso ended up spending much of his life there, making it the most suitable location for the Musée Picasso, home to the single largest collection of his artworks, from paintings and sculptures to drawings and engravings, as well as an even larger archive of photographs, papers, and correspondence.

Now, you don’t actually have to make the trip to Paris to see these collections, or at least an increasingly large portion of their holdings. As Sarah Kuta reports at Smithsonian.com, thousands of Picasso’s artworks are “now accessible from anywhere with an internet connection, thanks to a new online archive created by the Picasso Museum. The museum has digitized thousands of Picasso’s artworks, essays, poems, interviews and other memorabilia, including items that have never been seen by the public before.” The project began last year, with the digitization of “around 19,000 photos”; if all goes according to plan, the museum will eventually make “an additional 200,000 documents” available online.

Browse the Musée Picasso’s online archive and you’ll find many works that, assuming you haven’t yet achieved full Picasso immersion, you won’t have seen before: Femme couchée lisant from 1953, seen at the top of the post, for instance, or the earlier Massacre en Corée just above. (Despite living in Korea myself, I had no idea that Picasso painted a Korean War-themed picture, much less an episode of history that took place in the very neighborhood where I used to live.) Not everything is by Picasso, a good deal having been made by artists with whom he was associated, like Man Ray, who took this 1937 photograph of Picasso and his Hispano-Suiza car. You can find much more of interest in the archive’s themed sections, like “Féminin / Masculin” and “Picasso iconophage,” which are navigable only in French — a language that, in any case, every Picassophile should learn. Enter the digital archive here.

via Smithsonian

14 Self-Portraits by Pablo Picasso Show the Evolution of His Style: See Self-Portraits Moving from Ages 15 to 90

The Mystery of Picasso: Landmark Film of a Legendary Artist at Work, by Henri-Georges Clouzot

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Watch Picasso Create a Masterpiece in Just Five Minutes (1955)

The Louvre’s Entire Collection Goes Online: View and Download 480,00 Works of Art

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the 18th-Century French Media Stoked a Werewolf Panic

in Art, History | June 25th, 2024

If you’ve studied French (or, indeed, been French) in the past couple of decades, you may well have played the card game Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux. Known in English as The Werewolves of Millers Hollow, it casts its players as hunters, thieves, seers, and other types of rural villagers in the distant past. By night, some players also happen to be werewolves, liable to devour the others in their sleep. Though such beings may never actually have existed, they loom fairly large in French popular culture still today — not least, perhaps, because they loomed even larger two and a half centuries ago, such that history now acknowledges a period called the French Werewolf Epidemic.

“In the 1760s, nearly three hundred people were killed in a remote region of south-central France called the Gévaudan (today part of the département of Lozère),” says the Public Domain Review. “The killer was thought to be a huge animal, which came to be known simply as ‘the Beast’; but while the creature’s name remained simple, its reputation soon grew extremely complex.”

In the press, which speculated on this fearsome creature’s preferred methods of attack (decapitation, blood-drinking, etc.), “illustrators had a field day representing the Beast, whose appearance was reported to be so monstrous it beggared belief.”

By the winter of 1764–65, “the attacks in the Gévaudan had created a national fervor, to the point that King Louis XV intervened, offering a reward equal to what most men would have earned in a year.” In September of 1756, a lieutenant named François Antoine “shot the enormous ‘Wolf of Chazes,’ which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.” This didn’t stop the killings, but “by now the Royal Court had lost interest. The story had played itself out, and public attention had moved on to other matters. Luckily a local nobleman, the Marquis d’Apcher, organized another hunt, and in June 1767 the hunter Jean Chastel laid low the last of what had turned out to be the Beasts of the Gévaudan.”

“The Beast’s stomach was filled with human remains and, by all posthumous accounts, did not look anything like a typical wolf,” says Dangerous Minds. “They were also able to ascertain that the animal was solely responsible for 95% of the attacks on humans from 1764 to 1767.” As to what the animal actually was, theories abound: maybe an unusually large or rabid wolf, maybe a hyena, maybe even a lion. As for the more fantastical theories that captured the public imagination of the time, they may have passed into the realm of myth, but those myths continue to inspire literature, film, television, and games. And as anyone who’s played Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux a few times understands, the werewolf’s luck usually runs out.

via Messy Nessy

The Sights & Sounds of 18th Century Paris Get Recreated with 3D Audio and Animation

A 1665 Advertisement Promises a “Famous and Effectual” Cure for the Great Plague

How the Year 2440 Was Imagined in a 1771 French Sci-Fi Novel

John Steinbeck Wrote a Werewolf Novel, and His Estate Won’t Let the World Read It: The Story of Murder at Full Moon

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Gustave Doré’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

in Art, Books, Poetry | June 24th, 2024

One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th century, Gustave Doré made his name illustrating works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he created one of the most memorable and popular illustrated editions of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, while at the same time completing a set of engravings for an 1866 English Bible. He probably could have stopped there and assured his place in posterity, but he would go on to illustrate a 1872 guide to London, a new edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and several more hugely popular works.

In 1884, he produced 26 steel engravings for an illustrated edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s gloomy classic “The Raven.” Like all of his illustrations, the images are rich with detail, yet in contrast to his earlier work, particularly the fine lines of his Quixote, these engravings are softer, characterized by a deep chiaroscuro appropriate to the mood of the poem.

Above see the plate depicting the first lines of the poem, the haunted speaker, “weak and weary,” slumped over one of his many “quaint and curious volume[s] of forgotten lore.” Below, see the raven tapping, “louder than before,” at the window lattice.

By the time Doré’s edition saw publication, Poe’s most famous work had already achieved recognition as one of the greatest of American poems. Its author, however, had died over thirty years previous in near-poverty. A catalog description from a Penn State Library holding of one of Doré’s “Raven” editions compares the two artists:

The careers of these two men are fraught with both popular success and unmitigated disappointment. Doré enjoyed phenomenal monetary success as an illustrator in his life-time, however his true desire, to be acknowledged as a fine artist, was never realized. The critics of his day derided his abilities as an artist even as his popularity soared.

One might say that Poe suffered the opposite fate—recognized as a great artist in his lifetime, he never achieved financial stability. We learn from the Penn State Rare Collections library that Doré received the rough equivalent of $140,000 for his illustrated edition of “The Raven.” Poe, on the other hand, was paid approximately nine dollars for his most famous poem.

The Library of Congress has digital editions of the complete Doré edition of “The Raven.”

Behold Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satirical Masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel

The Adventures of Famed Illustrator Gustave Doré Presented in a Fantasic(al) Cutout Animation

Gustave Doré’s Exquisite Engravings of Cervantes’ Don Quixote

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

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The Evolution of Hokusai’s Great Wave: A Study of 113 Known Copies of the Iconic Woodblock Print

in Art, History | June 18th, 2024

The most widely known work by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese artist Hokusai, 神奈川沖浪裏, is usually translated into English as The Great Wave off Kanagawa. That version of the title reflects the iconic scene depicted in the image well enough, though I can’t help but feel that we should be talking about waves, plural. Granted, the Japanese language hardly makes a fuss about plurality and singularity in the first place, but even by the standards of ukiyo‑e woodblock prints, this is a work of art that takes many forms. It’s not just that there are a lot of parodies floating around, but that no single “original” even exists.

“There’s not just one impression of the Great Wave, as many people think. There were originally thousands of them,” says scientist Capucine Korenberg in the British Museum video above. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, “Japanese prints were very cheap, and you could buy them for the same amount of money you could buy a double helping of soup and noodles.” Demand for the Great Wave in particular was such that experts reckon that at least 8,000 prints were sold, having been made “until the woodblocks just started to be so worn out that they couldn’t be used anymore.” Again, note the plural: if the blocks used to make the image were replaced, we’d expect to see differences in the actual image over time.

We’ve discussed before how the Great Wave went through several iterations over four decades before Hokusai found the form recognized around the world still today. But if you look at a print of the final version closely enough — and know enough about Hokusai’s art — you can tell whether it came from an earlier edition or a later one. It was no less an expert than longtime Tokyo-based printmaker and Hokusai enthusiast David Bull (previously featured here on Open Culture) who noticed that “he could see small differences between the strokes” of the three Great Wave prints owned by the British Museum. Hearing this sent Korenberg on a quest to determine their exact chronological order.

Many factors complicated this task, including the amount of ink and pressure applied to the woodblock during its creation, as well as the chances of modification or partial replacement of particular blocks along the way. In the end, she found it “more certain than ever” that the British Museum’s three Great Waves came from the same key block, which would have been modeled after Hokusai’s drawing. But along the way, she did make a discovery: it was previously thought that 111 identified prints existed, but she confirmed two more, bringing the total up to 113. Determining the fate of the other 7,887 is a task best left to the even more obsessive ukiyo-e-hunters out there.

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

Watch the Making of Japanese Woodblock Prints, from Start to Finish, by a Longtime Tokyo Printmaker

Watch a Master Japanese Printmaker at Work: Two Unintentionally Relaxing ASMR Videos

A Collection of Hokusai’s Drawings Are Being Carved Onto Woodblocks & Printed for the First Time Ever

Watch Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Get Entirely Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Patti Smith Reads Her Final Letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, Calling Him “the Most Beautiful Work of All”

in Art, Music, Photography | June 5th, 2024

If you go to hear Patti Smith in concert, you expect her to sing “Beneath the Southern Cross,” “Because the Night,” and almost certainly “People Have the Power,” the hit single from Dream of Life. Like her 1975 debut Horses, that album had a cover photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, whom Smith describes as “the artist of my life” in Just Kids, her memoir of their long and complex relationship. A highly personal work, that book also includes the text of the brief but powerful goodbye letter she wrote to Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989. If you go to hear Smith read a letter aloud, there’s a decent chance it’ll be that one.

“Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake,” Smith wrote to Mapplethorpe, then in his final hospitalization and already unable to receive any further communication. “Are you in pain, or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together. Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand. Grip it hard, Robert, and don’t let it go.”

Smith speaks these words in the Letters Live video at the top of the post, shot just a few weeks ago in The Town Hall in Manhattan. “Of all your work, you are still your most beautiful,” she reads, “the most beautiful work of all,” and it’s clear that, 35 years after Mapplethorpe’s death, she still believes it. That may come across even more clearly than in Smith’s earlier reading of the letter featured here on Open Culture back in 2012. As the years pass, Robert Mapplethorpe remains frozen in time as a culturally transgressive young artist, but Patti Smith lives on, still playing the rock songs that made her name in the seventies while in her seventies. And unlike many cultural figures at her level of fame, she’s remained wholly herself all the while — no doubt thanks to inspiration from her old friend.

Vintage Footage Shows a Young, Unknown Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe Living at the Famed Chelsea Hotel (1970)

Patti Smith’s Award-Winning Memoir Just Kids Now Available in a New Illustrated Edition

Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Letter De Profundis: See the Full Three-Hour Performance

Patti Smith Documentary Dream of Life Beautifully Captures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

The Life and Controversial Work of Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe Profiled in 1988 Documentary

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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

Behold Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of the Bible (1866)

Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Now Appears on Japanese Banknotes

The Original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Manuscript, Handwritten & Illustrated By Lewis Carroll (1864)

Thousands of Pablo Picasso’s Works Now Available in a New Digital Archive

How the 18th-Century French Media Stoked a Werewolf Panic

Gustave Doré’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

The Evolution of Hokusai’s Great Wave: A Study of 113 Known Copies of the Iconic Woodblock Print

Patti Smith Reads Her Final Letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, Calling Him “the Most Beautiful Work of All”

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