What Was the Most Revolutionary Painting of the 20th Century?: The Case for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

in Art, History | November 26th, 2025

Practically anyone could take one glance at Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and identify it as a Picasso, even if they’ve never seen it before and couldn’t say anything else about it. That alone goes some way to explaining why the painting would end up ranked as the most important artwork of the twentieth century, at least according to a study by University of Chicago economist David W. Galenson. For that title it beat out the likes of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, and Picasso’s own Guernica.

With Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Galenson writes, “the greatest artist of the century initiated the century’s most important artistic movement. Art scholars debate whether the Demoiselles should be considered a Cubist painting, but there is no question that it differed profoundly from all of the art that preceded it, and that it began the development of Cubism.”

Painted in ambitious response to Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre, its rejection of traditional formality and beauty shocked even Picasso’s forward-thinking colleagues: “Not only did Matisse denounce the painting as an attempt to discredit modern art, but even Georges Braque, who would later join forces with Picasso in developing Cubism, was initially so shocked by the painting that he compared Picasso to the fairground fire-eaters who drank kerosene to spit flames.”

Of course, there was also the matter of the painting’s subject, five nude prostitutes in a Barcelona brothel. But as explained by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker in the Smarthistory video above, the Demoiselles wasn’t always about the demoiselles alone. “In the original sketches, the women were focusing on a male that was included, a sailor,” says Zucker. “There was also a medical student.” At some stages, Harris emphasizes, the latter carried a human skull, a piece of professional equipment but also “a reminder of death, a memento mori. And so there seems to be some tension here between the sensuality that the sailor is indulging in and a moralizing reminder that the pleasures of life are short”: an unusual perspective to be expressed by a 26-year-old, but then, Picasso wasn’t the usual artist.

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

Watch Pablo Picasso’s Creative Process Unfold in Real-Time: Rare Footage Shows Him Creating Drawings of Faces, Bulls & Chickens

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

What Makes Picasso’s Guernica a Great Painting?: Explore the Anti-Fascist Mural That Became a Worldwide Anti-War Symbol

How to Understand a Picasso Painting: A Video Primer

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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

An Introduction to Hilma af Klint: Once a Forgotten Painter, Now a Celebrated Pioneer of Abstract Art

in Art | November 19th, 2025

If pressed to pick the most international art figure of the past dozen years, one could do much worse than the Swedish artist-mystic Hilma af Klint, despite her having been dead for more than 80 years now. As evidenced by the links at the bottom of the post, we’ve been featuring her here on Open Culture since 2017, first in the context of whether she counts as the first abstract painter. Just a few years before that, practically no one in the world had ever heard her name, let alone beheld any of her more than 1,200 paintings and drawings. In fact, it was only in 2013, with the show Hilma af Klint — A Pioneer of Abstraction at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, that she first became publicly known.

From there, her canonization proceeded rapidly. One uses that word advisedly, given af Klint’s religiosity, whose intensity, esotericism, and rigor constitute one of the themes of Alice Gregory’s recent New Yorker piece on the artist’s work, legacy, and relatively newfound popularity, all of it colored by the fact that none of her pieces have ever been for sale.

The uncannily modern, before-its-time aesthetic appeal of af Klint’s work is one thing; the dearth of widespread knowledge about the details of her life and thought, which has allowed many of her suddenly avid twenty-first century fans to imagine her into their preferred artistic, philosophical, and social narratives, is another. Yet key to the fascination of her images is that, having been born in 1862, she wasn’t a twenty-first century woman.

Af Klint barely even belonged to the twentieth century, or indeed to any worldly time period at all. The complex and seemingly contradictory worldview that inspired her artwork is practically inaccessible to us, even if we manage to get through the 26,000 journal pages she left behind. Gregory interviews one such (and perhaps the only) dedicated individual, a nonprofit CEO and af Klint scholar dedicated to exploding the myths that have so readily accreted around her. One is that she worked alone: evidence suggests that some paintings attributed to her may actually have been executed by other members of her spiritualist circle, The Five. But even if she turns out not to have been a movement of one after all, her name will no doubt continue to sell out museum exhibitions for years to come.

The Life & Art of Hilma Af Klint: A Short Art History Lesson on the Pioneering Abstract Artist

New Hilma af Klint Documentary Explores the Life & Art of the Trailblazing Abstract Artist

A Short Video Introduction to Hilma af Klint, the Mystical Female Painter Who Helped Invent Abstract Art

The Complete Works of Hilma af Klint Get Published for the First Time in a Beautiful, Seven-Volume Collection

Who Painted the First Abstract Painting?: Wassily Kandinsky? Hilma af Klint? Or Another Contender?

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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai: An Introduction to the Iconic Japanese Woodblock Print in 17 Minutes

in Art | November 19th, 2025

When woodcut artist Katsushika Hokusai made his famous print The Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1830 — part of the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — he was 70 years old and had lived his entire life in a Japan closed off from the rest of the world. In the 19th century, however, “the rest of the world was becoming industrialized,” James Payne explains above in his Great Art Explained video, “and the Japanese were concerned about foreign invasions.” The Great Wave shows “an image of Japan fearful that the sea — which has protected its peaceful isolation for so long — would become its downfall.”

It’s also true, however, that The Great Wave would not have existed without a foreign invasion. Prussian blue, the first stable blue pigment, accidentally invented around 1705 in Berlin, arrived in the ports of Nagasaki on Dutch and Chinese ships in the 1820s. Prussian Blue would start a new artistic movement in Japan, aizuri‑e, woodcuts printed in bright, vivid blues.

“Hokusai was one of the first Japanese printmakers to boldly embrace the colour,” Hugh Davies writes at The Conversation, “a decision that would have major implications in the world of art.” When the country’s isolationist policies ended in the 1850s, “a showcase at the inaugural Japanese Pavilion elevated the artistic status of woodblock prints and a craze for their collection quickly followed.”

Chief among the works collected in the European and American fervor for Japanese prints were those from Hokusai, his contemporary Hiroshige, and other aizuri‑e artists. So famous was The Great Wave in the West by 1891 that French graphic artist Pierre Bonnard would satirize its stylish spray in an advertisement for champagne. A print of The Great Wave hung on Claude Debussy’s wall, and the first edition of his La Mer bore an adaptation of a detail from the print. As Michael Cirigliano writes for the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Cultural circles throughout Europe greatly admired Hokusai’s work…. Major artists of the Impressionist movement such as Monet owned copies of Hokusai prints, and leading art critic Philippe Burty, in his 1866 Chefs-d’oeuvre des Arts industriels, even stated that Hokusai’s work maintained the elegance of Watteau, the fantasy of Goya, and the movement of Delacroix. Going one step further in his lauded comparisons, Burty wrote that Hokusai’s dexterity in brush strokes was comparable only to that of Rubens.

These comparisons are not misplaced, John-Paul Stonard explains in The Guardian: “That the Great Wave became the best known print in the west was in large part due to Hokusai’s formative experience of European art.” Not only did he absorb Prussian blue into his repertoire, but “prints from early in his career show him attempting, rather awkwardly, to apply the lesson of mathematical perspective, learnt from European prints brought into Japan by Dutch Traders.” By the time of The Great Wave, he had perfected his own synthesis of Western and Japanese art, over two decades before European painters would attempt the same in the explosion of Japanophilia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Get Free Drawing Lessons from Katsushika Hokusai, Who Famously Painted The Great Wave of Kanagawa: Read His How-To Book, Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawings

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

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

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

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day

in Art, History, Museums | November 18th, 2025

Whether or not we believe that the cards of the tarot have supernatural powers, we all think of them primarily as tools for divination. It might seem as if they’ve played that cultural role since time immemorial, but in fact, that particular use only goes back to the eighteenth century. They were, at first, playing cards, used for a game known as tarocchi in Renaissance Italy. That was the original purpose of the oldest tarot cards in possession of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which you can see unboxed by curator Ruth Hibbard in the video above. Throughout its fifteen minutes, Hibbard and two colleagues also “unbox” five other decks produced across the half-millennium of tarot history.

These include the early eighteenth-century Minchiate Deck, whose name refers to a slightly more complex Florentine card game that evolved alongside tarot. The word itself possibly originates from the term sminchiare, “to play your highest card” (though in Sicilian dialect today, it has a rather different meaning).

Later, circa 1807, comes Le Petit Oracle des Dames, “the petite oracle of women,” the earliest deck in the video expressly produced for cartomancy, or prediction of the future through cards — albeit only as a form of light entertainment for gatherings of ladies. A decade or two later, out came the luxurious Tarocco Soprafino, which bears lavish illustrations made with copper-plate engraving and colored stenciling.

The V&A also has an early twentieth-century tarot deck with rich, lively art created by the occultist Pamela Colman-Smith, whose work has previously been featured here on Open Culture. “What makes these cards so great is that they’re just so rich with mythology and symbology and multilayered meaning,” says curator Beckie Billingham, “allowing you to read the cards in many different ways.” That’s even true of the much more thematically deliberate deck that follows, an example from the early two-thousands that brings into our digital century the mission of tarot art to “reveal clandestine knowledge and the hidden powers at work in the world.” Computers, drones, Aldous Huxley, world wars, the World Wide Web: perhaps these cards let us see our future, but they certainly give us a clear view on our present.

Behold the Sola-Busca Tarot Deck, the Earliest Complete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Carl Jung on the Power of Tarot Cards: They Provide Doorways to the Unconscious & Perhaps a Way to Predict the Future

Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Surrealism in a Classic Tarot Card Deck

Alejandro Jodorowsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Creative Inspiration

Divine Decks: A Visual History of Tarot: The First Comprehensive Survey of Tarot Gets Published by Taschen

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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Dozens of M.C. Escher Prints Have Been Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

in Art | November 10th, 2025

In addition to the iconic scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or appearances in animated TV shows and video games, M.C. Escher’s work has adorned the covers of albums like Mott the Hoople’s 1969 debut and the speculative fiction of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. A big hit with hippies and 1960s college students, writes Heavy Music Artwork, his mind-bending prints became associated with “questioning accepted views of normal experience and testing the limits of perception with hallucinogenic drugs.” While he appreciated his cult following, Escher “did not encourage their mystical interpretations of his images.” Replying to one enthusiastic fan of his print Reptiles, who claimed to see in it an image of reincarnation, Escher replied, “Madame, if that’s the way you see it, so be it.”

Rather than illustrate higher states of consciousness or metaphysical entities, Bruno Ernst writes in The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, the artist intended to create practical, “pictorial representation of intellectual understanding.” Illustrations, that is, of philosophical and scientific thought experiments. The son of a civil engineer, Escher began his studies in architecture before moving to drawing and printmaking.

The challenge of creating built environments—even seemingly impossible ones—always seemed to occupy his mind. Along with themes from the natural world, a high percentage of his works center on buildings—inspired by formative early years in Rome and his admiration for Islamic art and Spanish architecture.

In the 50s and 60s Escher’s art piqued the interest of academics and mathematicians, an audience he found more congenial to his vision. He corresponded with scientists and incorporated their ideas into his work, meanwhile claiming to be “absolutely innocent of training or knowledge in the exact sciences.” In the 50s, Escher “dazzled” the likes of mathematicians like Roger Penrose and HSM Coxeter. In turn, notes Maev Kennedy, he “was inspired by Penrose’s perspectival triangle and Coxeter’s work on crystal symmetry.”

For all the excitement he created among mathematicians, it took a bit longer for Escher to get noticed in the art world. When Penrose’s uncle showed Escher’s version of the perspectival triangle to Picasso, “Picasso had heard of the British mathematician but not of the Dutch artist.” Escher’s fame spread outside of the sciences in part through the interests of the counterculture. He may have shrugged off mystical and psychedelic readings of his prints, but he had an innate penchant for the marvelously weird (see his copy of a scene, for example, from Hieronymus Bosch, above, or his surreal print Gravity, below).

See the prints pictured here and a few dozen more digitized in high resolution at Digital Commonwealth, courtesy of Boston Public Library, who scanned their Escher collection and made it available to the public. Zoom into the fine details of prints like Inside Saint Peter’s, further up—a finely rendered but otherwise not-especially-Escher-like work—and the labyrinthine Ascending and Descending at the top. Whether—as Harvard Library curator John Overholt confesses—you’re a “nerd who loves M.C. Escher” for his mathematical mind, an artist with a mystical bent who loves him for his hallucinatory qualities, or some measure of both, you’ll find exactly the Escher you’re looking for in this digital gallery.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

M.C. Escher Cover Art for Great Books by Italo Calvino, George Orwell & Jorge Luis Borges

Watch M.C. Escher Make His Final Artistic Creation in the 1971 Documentary Adventures in Perception

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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When Marcel Duchamp Drew a Mustache & Goatee on the Mona Lisa (1919)

in Art, History | October 30th, 2025

Apart from certain stretches of absence, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa has been on display at the Louvre for 228 years and counting. Though created by an Italian in Italy, the painting has long since been a part of French culture. At some point, the reverence for La Joconde, as the Mona Lisa is locally known, reached such an intensity as to inspire the label Jocondisme. For Marcel Duchamp, it all seems to have been a bit much. In 1919, he bought a postcard bearing the image of that most famous of all paintings, drew a mustache and goatee on it, and dubbed the resulting “artwork” L.H.O.O.Q., whose French pronunciation “Elle a chaud au cul” translates to — as Duchamp modestly put it — “There is fire down below.”

A century ago, this was a highly irreverent, even blasphemous act, but also just what one might expect from the man who, a couple years earlier, signed a urinal and put it on display in a gallery. Like the much-scrutinized Fountain, L.H.O.O.Q. was one of Duchamp’s “readymades,” or artistic provocations executed by modifying and re-contextualizing found objects.

Neither was singular: just as Duchamp signed multiple urinals, he also drew (or didn’t draw) facial hair on multiple Mona Lisa postcards. In one instance, he even gave the okay to his fellow artist Francis Picabia to make one for publication in his magazine in New York as, nevertheless, “par Marcel Duchamp” — though it lacked a goatee, an omission the artist corrected in his own hand some twenty years later.

In the 1956 interview just above, Duchamp describes L.H.O.O.Q. as a part of his “Dada period” (and, with characteristic modesty, “a great iconoclastic gesture on my part”). He also brings out a fake check — belonging to “no bank at all” — that he created to use at the dentist (who accepted it); and a system designed to “break the bank at Monte Carlo” (which stubbornly remained unbroken). “I believe that art is the only form of activity in which man, as a man, shows himself to be a true individual, and is capable of going beyond the animal state,” he declares. With his collision of Jocondisme and Dada, among the other unlikely juxtapositions he engineered, he showed himself to be the premier prankster of early twentieth-century art — and one whose pranks transcended amusement to inspire a scholarly industry that persists even today.

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think

The Marcel Duchamp Research Portal Opens, Making Available 18,000 Documents and 50,000 Images Related to the Revolutionary Artist

How Marcel Duchamp Signed a Urinal in 1917 & Redefined Art

When Brian Eno & Other Artists Peed in Marcel Duchamp’s Famous Urinal

Salvador Dalí Reveals the Secrets of His Trademark Moustache (1954)

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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Meet the Forgotten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Popular Tarot Deck (1909)

in Art, Religion | October 28th, 2025

As an exercise draw a composition of fear or sadness, or great sorrow, quite simply, do not bother about details now, but in a few lines tell your story. Then show it to any one of your friends, or family, or fellow students, and ask them if they can tell you what it is you meant to portray. You will soon get to know how to make it tell its tale.

- Pamela Colman-Smith, “Should the Art Student Think?” July, 1908

A year after Arts and Crafts movement magazine The Craftsman published illustrator Pamela Colman-Smith’s essay excerpted above, she spent six months creating what would become the world’s most popular tarot deck. Her graphic interpretations of such cards as The Magician, The Tower, and The Hanged Man helped readers to get a handle on the story of every newly dealt spread.

Colman-Smith—known to friends as “Pixie”—was commissioned by occult scholar and author Arthur E. Waite, a fellow member of the British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to illustrate a pack of tarot cards.

In a humorous letter to her eventual champion, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Colman-Smith (1878 – 1951) described her 80 tarot paintings as “a big job for very little cash,” though she betrayed a touch of genuine excitement that they would be “printed in color by lithography… probably very badly.”

Although Waite had some specific visual ideas with regard to the “astrological significance” of various cards, Colman-Smith enjoyed a lot of creative leeway, particularly when it came to the Minor Arcana or pip cards.

These 56 numbered cards are divided into suits—wands, cups, swords and pentacles. Prior to Colman-Smith’s contribution, the only example of a fully illustrated Minor Arcana was to be found in the earliest surviving deck, the Sola Busca, which dates to the early 1490s. A few of her Minor Arcana cards, notably 3 of Swords and 10 of Wands, make overt reference to that deck, which she likely encountered on a research expedition to the British Museum.

Mostly the images were of Colman-Smith’s own invention, informed by her sound-color synesthesia and the classical music she listened to while working. Her early experience in a touring theater company helped her to convey meaning through costume and physical attitude.

Here are Pacific Northwest witch and tarot practitioner Moe Bowstern’s thoughts on Smith’s Three of Pentacles:

Pentacles are the suit of Earth, representative of structure and foundation. Colman-Smith’s theater-influenced designs here identify the occupations of three figures standing in an apse of what appears to be a cathedral: a carpenter with tools in hand; an architect showing plans to the group; a tonsured monk, clearly the steward of the building project.

The overall impression is one of building something together that is much bigger than any individual and which may outlast any individual life. The collaboration is rooted in the hands-on material work of foundation building, requiring many viewpoints.

A special Pixie Smith touch is the physical elevation of the carpenter, who would have been placed on the lowest rung of medieval society hierarchies. Smith has him on a bench, showing the importance of getting hands on with the project.

For years, Colman-Smith’s cards were referred to as the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck. This gave a nod to publisher William Rider & Son, while neglecting to credit the artist responsible for the distinctive gouache illustrations. It continues to be sold under that banner, but lately, tarot enthusiasts have taken to personally amending the name to the Rider Waite Smith (RWS) or Waite Smith (WS) deck out of respect for its previously unheralded co-creator.

While Colman-Smith is best remembered for her tarot imagery, she was also a celebrated storyteller, illustrator of children’s books and a collection of Jamaican folk tales, creator of elaborate toy theater pieces, and maker of images on behalf of women’s suffrage and the war effort during WWII.

Outside of some early adventures in a traveling theater, and friendships with Stieglitz, author Bram Stoker, actress Ellen Terry, and poet William Butler Yeats, certain details of her personal life—namely her race and sexual orientation—are difficult to divine. It’s not for lack of interest. She is the focus of several biographies and an increasing number of blog posts.

It’s sad, but not a total shocker, to learn that this interesting, multi-talented woman died in poverty in 1951. Her paintings and drawings were auctioned off, with the proceeds going toward her debts. Her death certificate listed her occupation not as artist but as “Spinster of Independent Means.” Lacking funds for a headstone, she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Read some of her letters to Alfred Stieglitz at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library collection.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Carl Jung on the Power of Tarot Cards: They Provide Doorways to the Unconscious & Perhaps a Way to Predict the Future

Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Surrealism in a Classic Tarot Card Deck

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist in NYC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

How Saul Bass Designed the Strange Original Poster for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

in Art, Design, Film | October 28th, 2025

With Halloween just days away, many of us are even now readying a scary movie or two to watch on the night itself. If you’re still undecided about your own Halloween viewing material, allow us to suggest The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s “masterpiece of modern horror.” Those words come straight from the original poster hung up at theaters when the film was released in 1980, and presumptuous though they may have sounded at the time — especially considering the mixed first wave of critical reception — the decades have proven them right. Even if you’ve watched it for ten, twenty, forty Halloweens in a row, The Shining remains frightening on both the jump-scare and existential-dread levels, while its each and every frame appears more clearly than ever to be the work of an auteur.

One could hardly find a more suitable figure to represent the notion of the auteur — the director as primary “author” of a film — than Kubrick, whose aesthetic and intellectual sensibility comes through in all of his major pictures, each of which belongs to a different genre. Kubrick had tried his hand at film noir, World War I, swords-and-sandals epic, psychological drama, Cold War black comedy, science fiction, dystopian crime, and costume drama; a much-reworked adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining represents, of course, Kubrick’s foray into horror.

Despite the famously quick-and-dirty tendencies of that defiantly unrespectable cinematic tradition, Kubrick exercised, if anything, an even greater degree of meticulousness than that for which he was already notorious, demanding perfection not just on set, but also in the creation of the marketing materials.

According to the new Paper & Light video above, famed designer Saul Bass (who’d previously created the title sequence of Kubrick’s Spartacus) did more than 300 drawings for The Shining’s movie poster. The only concept that met with the director’s approval placed a terrified, vaguely inhuman visage inside the lettering of the title. We don’t know whose face it’s supposed to be, but Paper & Light hazards a guess that it may be that of Danny, the young son of the Overlook Hotel’s doomed caretaker Jack Torrance, or even Danny’s invisible friend Tony. (Note the containment of all of its features within the T.) Though Kubrick credited Bass’ final design with solving “the eternal problem of trying to combine artwork with the title of the film,” The Shining’s bright yellow poster now sits somehow uneasily with the movie’s legacy, more as a curiosity than an icon. Nevertheless, it does evoke — and maybe too well — what we’ll all hope to feel when we press play this, or any, Halloween night.

Who Created the Famous Shower Scene in Psycho? Alfred Hitchcock or the Legendary Designer Saul Bass?

Watch Saul Bass’s Trippy, Kitschy Short Film The Quest (1983), Based on a Ray Bradbury Short Story

The Invisible Horror of The Shining: How Music Makes Stanley Kubrick’s Iconic Film Even More Terrifying

40 Years of Saul Bass’ Groundbreaking Title Sequences in One Compilation

Saul Bass’ Advice for Designers: Make Something Beautiful and Don’t Worry About the Money

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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

What Was the Most Revolutionary Painting of the 20th Century?: The Case for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

An Introduction to Hilma af Klint: Once a Forgotten Painter, Now a Celebrated Pioneer of Abstract Art

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai: An Introduction to the Iconic Japanese Woodblock Print in 17 Minutes

The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day

Dozens of M.C. Escher Prints Have Been Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

When Marcel Duchamp Drew a Mustache & Goatee on the Mona Lisa (1919)

Meet the Forgotten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Popular Tarot Deck (1909)

How Saul Bass Designed the Strange Original Poster for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

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