To find a visual definition of the nineteen-eighties, you need look no further than the windows of the nearest run-down hair or nail salon. There, “faded by time and years of sun damage,” remain on makeshift display the most widely recognized works of — or imitations of the works of — artist and illustrator Patrick Nagel, who specialized in images of women with “sleek black hair, paper-white skin, bold red lipstick and a look of mystery, power, and cool detachment.” So says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his new video essay above on the sudden rise and lasting cultural legacy of the “Nagel women.”
As Puschak tells the story, the figure responsible for launching Nagel and his women into the zeitgeist was publisher Karl Bornstein, who “had been in Europe admiring the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard, Parisian poster artists of the late nineteenth century, and came back to America looking for an artist of his own time when Nagel walked into his life.”
Around this same time, “the manager of the English new-wave band Duran Duran saw Nagel’s work in Playboy, and commissioned a picture for the cover of their 1982 album Rio” — which, apart from all those salon windows, gave most of us our first look at a Nagel woman.
These and other pop-cultural associations “helped to cement the Nagel woman as an emblem of the decade.” For years after Nagel’s death in 1984, his “chic, fashionable, independent” women continued to serve as “aspirational images,” but eventually, amid market saturation and changing sensibilities, their bold look of glamor and professionalism began to seem tacky. Nevertheless, rediscovery always follows desuetude, and sufficient distance from the actual eighties has allowed us to appreciate Nagel’s technique. “Day by day, little by little, Nagel removed details until he arrived at the fewest number of lines that would still capture the spirit of his models,” using rigorous minimalism to evoke — and forever crystallize — a time of brazen excess.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Perhaps we would have felt differently in the early 19th-century, when silhouettes offered a quick and affordable alternative to oil portraits, and photography had yet to be invented.
Self-taught silhouette artist William Bache traveled the eastern seaboard, and later to New Orleans and Cuba, plying his trade with a physiognotrace, a device that helped him outline subjects’ profiles on folded sheets of light paper.
Once a profile had been captured, Bache carefully cut inside the tracing and affixed the “hollow-cut” surrounding sheet to black paper, creating the appearance of a hand-cut black silhouette on a white background.
Customers could purchase four copies of these shadow likenesses for 25¢, which, adjusted for inflation, is about the same amount as a photo strip in one of New York City’s vintage photobooths these days — $5.
Bache was an energetic promoter of his services, advertising that if customers found it inconvenient to visit one of his pop-up studios, he would “at the shortest notice, wait upon them at their own Dwellings without any additional expense.”
Naturally, people were eager to lay hands on silhouettes of their children and sweethearts, too.
One of Bache’s competitors, Raphaelle Peale assumed the perspective of a satisfied male customer to tout his own business:
‘Tis almost herself, Eliza’s shade,
Thus by the faithful facietrace pourtray’d!
Her placid brow and pouting lips, whose swell
My fond impatient ardor would repell.
Let me then take that vacant seat, and there
Inhale her breath, scarce mingled with the air:
And thou blest instrument! which o’er her face
Did’st at her lips one moment pause, retrace
My glowing form and leave, unequall’d bliss!
Borrow’d from her, a sweet etherial Kiss.
Hot stuff, though hopefully besotted young lovers refrained from pressing their lips to the silhouettes they loved best. Conservators in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which houses Bache’s sample book, a ledger filled with likenesses of some 1,800 sitters, discovered it to be suffused with arsenic, presumably meant to repel invading rodents and insects.
Most of the heads in Bache’s album arrived unidentified, but by combing through digitized newspapers, history books, baptismal records, wills, marriage certificates and Ancestry.com, lead curator Robyn Asleson and Getty-funded research assistant Elizabeth Isaacson have managed to identify over 1000.
There are some whose names — and profiles — remain well known more than 200 years later. Can you identify George Washington, Martha Washington, and Thomas Jefferson on the album page below?
Some pages contain entire families. Pedro Bidetrenoulleau coughed up $1.25 for his own likeness, as well as those of his wife, and children Félix, Adele, and Zacharine, numbers 638 through 642, below.
Bache’s travels to New Orleans and Cuba make for a racially diverse collection, though little is known about most of the Black sitters. Dr. Asleson suspects some of these might be the only existing portraits of these individuals, particularly in the case of New Orleanians in mixed-race relationships, whose descendants destroyed strategic evidence in the effort to “pass” as white:
As I was learning more and more about this history, I really began to hope that some of the people who are trying to find their heritage today, who realize it might have been deliberately eradicated to protect their ancestors from oppression, might have the chance to discover an image of a great-great-grandfather or grandmother.
Readers, if you are the caretaker of passed down family silhouettes, perhaps you can help the curators get closer to putting a name to someone who currently exists as little more than a shadow in interesting headgear.
Even if you’re not in possession of a silhouette, you may well be one of the tens of thousands living in the United States today connected to the album by blood.
We here at Open Culture heartily endorse the practice of viewing art, whether in a physical museum, in the pages of a book, or online. For some, however, it tends to have one serious shortcoming: all the colors are already filled in. If you’re itching to use your own colored pencils, crayons, watercolors, or other tools of choice on drawings, paintings, and a variety of other works besides in the possession of well-known art institutions, these past few months are a time of year to savor thanks to the initiative Color Our Collections.
“Launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016,” says its about page, it hosts an “annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their collections.”
The de-colored pictures you see here offer just a taste of all you can find in this year’s Color Our Collections crop. Some of the participating institutions provide colorable selections from across their holdings, some stick to a certain theme, and some contribute actual volumes, digitized whole or created for the occasion. Take, for instance, the Ol’ Medical ColouringBook from Queen’s University Library, which promises hours of fun with pages like “anterior view of the skeletal system,” “ventral view of the brain,” and “urinary system shown on the female form.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When Yayoi Kusama first arrived in New York, in the late nineteen-fifties, she must have sensed that she was in a practically ideal time and place to make abstract art. That would explain why she subsequently began creating a series of large paintings we now know as Infinity Nets, all of which consist solely of patterns of polka dots — or at least what look like patterns, and what look like polka dots, when viewed from a distance. Up close, there’s something quite different going on, something altogether more organic, irregular, and ever-shifting. and the best method of understanding it is to pick up a brush and paint an infinity net of your own.
You can learn how to do that by watching the video above, which comes from Coursera and the Museum of Modern Art’s online course “In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting.” In it, painter Corey D’Augustine goes through all the steps of executing a finished canvas in the style of Kusama’s Infinity Nets, which requires little conventional technical skill, but a great deal of patience.
D’Augustine suggests that you “lose yourself in the serial activity” of painting all these tiny shapes “as a way to quiet the mind.” Get deep enough into it, and “you won’t be thinking about your job or your children or whatever it is, whatever kind of stresses you have on your mind normally.
This therapeutic view isn’t a million miles from what Kusama has said of her own motivations for creating art. Even before launching into the Infinity Nets proper, she was painting polka-dot fields out of inspiration given to her by the hallucinations she’d been suffering since the age of ten. Now, at the age of 94, she’s long been a world-renowned artist, one who voluntarily resides at a mental-health facility when not at work in her studio further exploring the very same visual concepts with which she began. You can learn more about Kusama’s life from the material we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, and if you want to go all the way into her world, there’s always her autobiography, Infinity Net.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Public recognition is an all too rare reward for many artists, but it carries with it a risk of being widely misunderstood.
Georgia O’Keeffe gained renown for her large-scale flower paintings in the 1920s, selling six images of calla lilies for $25,000.
Her husband Alfred Stieglitz, an influential photographer and gallery owner 24 years her senior, created a sensation when he exhibited these floral images alongside his sensuous nude portraits of her, fomenting an erotic association that has been near impossible to shake.
O’Keefe maintained that the close-up flower views were abstractions, similar in spirit to the modernist photographs of her husband’s contemporaries Edward Weston and Paul Strand, but as art historian Randall C. Griffin points out, Stieglitz was inclined to see things differently.
Stieglitz and his circle belonged to a tradition that used themes of sexuality in their art as a declaration of being avant-garde. Stieglitz read virtually all of Freud’s books, as well as Havelock Ellis’s six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which argues that art is driven by sexual energy. Thus, for Stieglitz, sex was a liberating source of creativity. O’Keeffe may or may not have thought of Freud when she painted her flowers, but the psychologist’s writings were a cultural touchstone at the time, with his ideas widely known in a simplified fashion.
By the time she began work on it, O’Keeffe had forged a deep, spiritual connection to the New Mexican desert. Its alien landscape offered respite from Stieglitz’s extra-marital affairs and the mental health issues that had plagued her in New York.
The Southwest provided abundant fresh subject matter. She drove her Ford Model A for miles across the desert, stopping to collect the bleached bones of animals who had perished under drought conditions. Unlike Farm Security Agency photographers such as Arthur Rothstein, O’Keeffe was not interested in using these bones to document the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, or even to meditate on mortality:
The bones do not symbolize death to me. They are shapes that I enjoy. It never occurs to me that they have anything to do with death. They’re very lively.…They please me, and I have enjoyed them very much in relation to the sky.
“I’ll tell you what went on in my so-called mind when I did my paintings of animal skulls” she told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins in a 1974 interview:
There was a lot of talk in New York then—during the late twenties and early thirties—about the Great American Painting. It was like the Great American Novel. People wanted to ‘do’ the American scene. I had gone back and forth across the country several times by then, and some of the current ideas about the American scene struck me as pretty ridiculous. To them, the American scene was a dilapidated house with a broken-down buckboard out front and a horse that looked like a skeleton. I knew America was very rich, very lush. Well, I started painting my skulls about this time. First, I put a horse’s skull against a blue-cloth background, and then I used a cow’s skull. I had lived in the cattle country—Amarillo was the crossroads of cattle shipping, and you could see the cattle coming in across the range for days at a time. For goodness’ sake, I thought, the people who talk about the American scene don’t know anything about it. So, in a way, that cow’s skull was my joke on the American scene, and it gave me pleasure to make it in red, white, and blue.
Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills presents a more nuanced vision than Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, and represents a turning point in O’Keeffe’s art.
As Payne observes, the dark clouds gathered above the red hills visible from her desert ranch promise a much longed-for rain.
The hollyhock she plucked from her garden is a symbol of rebirth and fertility.
Their floating placement has drawn comparisons to Surrealism, but O’Keefe asserted that the composition “just sort of grew together”, telling art historian Katherine Kuh, “I was in the surrealist show when I’d never heard of surrealism. I’m not a joiner.”
Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills met with acclaim when it was shown at Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in 1936. The New Yorker hailed it as one of O’Keeffe’s most brilliant paintings in form and execution, and Stieglitz’s friend, painter Marsden Hartley, might well have intuited something about the direction O’Keeffe was heading in when he described the image as “a transfiguration:”
…as if the bone, divested of its physical usages—had suddenly learned of its own esoteric significance, had discovered the meaning of its own integration through the processes of disintegration, ascending to the sphere of its own reality, in the presence of skies that are not troubled, being accustomed to superior spectacles—and of hills that are ready to receive.
We don’t hear the phrase “very rich hours” as much as we used to, back when it was occasionally employed in the headlines of magazine articles or the titles of novels. Today, it’s much to be doubted whether even one in a hundred thousand of us could begin to identify its referent — or at least it was much to be doubted until an elaborate New York Times online feature appeared just last week. Written by art critic Jason Farago, “Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar” takes a close look at the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a late-medieval illuminated manuscript created (between 1412 and 1416) for the bibliophilic John, Duke of Berry by a trio of Flemish artists known as the Limbourg brothers.
The word “hours” in the title refers not to units of time, exactly, but to the prayers that believers must speak at certain hours: this is a book of hours, a hugely popular form of manuscript in the Middle Ages. But compared to most surviving books of hours, Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is, well, very rich indeed.
Farago calls it “the finest surviving manuscript of the fifteenth century, a monument of International Gothic book arts. Really, the thing is just stupefying. Its pictures combine astounding detail with exuberant, sometimes irrational spatial organization.” But “like every book of hours, it opens with a calendar. And here, on its first 12 spreads — with one full-page illustration per month — the Limbourgs did their most painstaking work.”
Here we have just five of the images from the calendar at the head of the Très Riches Heures. You can see the rest at the site of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which offers its “intimate Northern vision of nature with Italianate modes of figural articulation” in downloadable digital form. These detailed images constitute a window into not just medieval life (or at least an idealized version thereof), but also the medieval relationship to time. “Time appears to be a cycle,” writes Farago. “It repeats year after year.” And “months rather than years were the meat of these cycles. Seasons. Harvests. Feasts. Constellations.” All this “could be perceived with the senses. In snowfall, in star signs. In the bright colors you wore in May, in the furs you wore in December.”
On top of this palpably cyclical experience of time, monotheistic religions introduced the notion that “time progressed onward,” and indeed “offered a one-way ticket to the end of days.” Coexisting in the medieval mind, these two contrasting modes of perception gave rise to the sort of calendars created and used in that era. No finer example exists than the Très Riches Heures, created as it was not long — at least in historical time — before the approach of modernity, with its ever more finely divided and rigorously calibrated chronometric regimes. Our hours are much more clearly demarcated than the Duke of Berry’s; whether they’re richer is another question entirely.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you attended a seder this month, you no doubt read aloud from the Haggadah, a Passover tradition in which everyone at the table takes turns recounting the story of Exodus.
There’s no definitive edition of the Haggadah. Every Passover host is free to choose the version of the familiar story they like best, to cut and paste from various retellings, or even take a crack at writing their own.
As David Zvi Kalman, publisher of the annual, illustrated Asufa Haggadah told the New York Times, “The Haggadah in America is like Kit Kats in Japan. It’s a product that accepts a wide variety of flavors. It’s probably the most accessible Jewish book on the market.”
Though it bears the coats of arms of two prominent families, its provenance is not definitively known.
Leora Bromberg of the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library notes that it is “especially striking for its colorful illuminations of biblical and Passover ritual scenes and its beautifully hand-scribed Sephardic letterforms:”
As precious as this Haggadah was, and still is, Haggadot are books that are meant to be used in festive and messy settings—sharing the table with food, wine, family and guests. The Sarajevo Haggadah was no exception to this; its pages show evidence that it was well used, with doodles, food and red wine stains marking its pages.
Some brave soul took care to smuggle this essential volume out with them when 1492’s Alhambra Decree expelled all Jews from Spain.
The manuscript’s travels thereafter are shrouded in mystery.
It survived the Roman Inquisition by virtue of its contents. As per a 1609 note jotted on one of its pages, nothing therein seemed to be aimed against the Church.
More handwritten notes place the book in the north of Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries, though its new owner is not mentioned by name.
Eventually, it found its way to the hands of a man named Joseph Kohen who sold it to the National Museum of Sarajevo in 1894.
It was briefly sent to Vienna, where a government official replaced its original medieval binding with cardboard covers, chopping its 142 bleached calfskin vellum down to 6.5” x 9” in order to fit them.
It had a narrow escape in 1942, when a high-ranking Nazi official, Johann Fortner, visited the museum, intent on confiscating the priceless manuscript.
The chief librarian, Dervis Korkut, a Muslim, secreted the Haggadah inside his clothing, reputedly tellingFortner that museum staff had turned it over to another German officer.
After that folklore takes over. Korkut either stowed it under the floorboards of his home, buried it under a tree, gave it to an imam in a remote village for safekeeping, or hid it on a shelf in the museum’s library.
Whatever the case, it reappeared in the museum, safe and sound, in 1945.
The museum was ransacked during 1992’s Siege of Sarajevo, but the thieves, ignorant of the Haggadah’s worth, left it on the floor. It was removed to an underground bank vault, where it survived untouched, even as the museum sustained heavy artillery damage.
The president of Bosnia presented it to Jewish community leaders during a Seder three years later.
Shortly thereafter, the head of Sarajevo’s Jewish Community sought the United Nations’ support to restore the Haggadah, and house it in a suitably secure, climate-controlled setting.
A number of facsimiles have been created, and the original codex once again resides in the museum where it is stored under the prescribed conditions, and displayed on rare special occasions, as “physical proof of the openness of a society in which fear of the Other has never been an incurable disease.”
UNESCO added it to its Memory of the World Register in 2017, “praising the courage of the people who, even in the darkest of times during World War II, appreciated its importance to Jewish Heritage, as well as its embodiment of diversity and intercultural harmony depicted in its illustration:”
Regardless of their own religious beliefs, they risked their lives and did all in their power to safeguard the Haggadah for future generations. Its destruction would be a loss for humanity. Protecting it is a symbol of the values which we hold dear.
For those interested, the Sarajevo Haggadah figures centrally in the bestselling 2008 novel People of the Book, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. You can read an New Times review here.
H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a national panic). After the occurrence, reports Phil Klass, the actor remarked, “I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.”
Surely Welles knew that is precisely why the broadcast had the effect it did, especially in such an anxious pre-war climate. The 1898 novel also startled its first readers with its verisimilitude, playing on a late Victorian sense of apocalyptic doom as the turn-of-the-century approached.
But what contemporary circumstances eight years later, we might wonder, fueled the imagination of Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose 1906 illustrations of the novel you can see here? Wells himself approved of these incredible drawings, praising them before their publication and saying, “Alvim Corrêa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.”
Indeed they capture the novel’s uncanny dread. Martian tripods loom, ghastly and cartoonish, above blasted realist landscapes and scenes of panic. In one illustration, a grotesque, tentacled Martian ravishes a nude woman. In a surrealist drawing of an abandoned London above, eyes protrude from the buildings, and a skeletal head appears above them. The alien technology often appears clumsy and unsophisticated, which contributes to the generally terrifying absurdity that emanates from these finely rendered plates.
Alvim Corrêa was a Brazilian artist living in Brussels and struggling for recognition in the European art world. His break seemed to come when the War of the Worlds illustrations were printed in a large-format, limited French edition of the book, with each of the 500 copies signed by the artist himself.
Unfortunately, Corrêa’s tuberculosis killed him four years later. His War of the Worlds drawings did not bring him fame in his lifetime or after, but his work has been cherished since by a devoted cult following. The original prints you see here remained with the artist’s family until a sale of 31 of them in 1990. (They went up for sale again recently, it seems.) You can see many more, as well as scans from the book and a poster announcing the publication, at Monster Brains and the British Library site.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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