We may not know for sure the identity of Banksy, the English street artist famous for his social-commentary graffiti murals inspired and integrated with their surroundings. But given his apparent interests, we might have suspected him to turn up in Ukraine sooner or later. Recently posted by Banksy himself, the video above shows him at work in the region of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, each of which makes a visual comment on this year’s Russian invasion and the fortitude Ukraine’s people have shown against it. “As is typical of Banksy’s work,” writes The Art Newspaper’s Torey Akers, “the artist’s edits combine a satirist’s edge for winking commentary with a sincere investment in political solidarity.”
In another, “a young boy flips an older man onto his back in a judo match. Some speculate that the older man is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is known to be a judo enthusiast.” (Banksy has developed a distinctive sensibility in his decades of public art, but subtlety isn’t its foremost element.) His images put up elsewhere “juxtapose wartime imagery with snapshots of civilian life: in one, children ride a metal tank trap as a seesaw,” and in another “a woman in her dressing gown wears a gas mask.”
The conflict in Ukraine now approaches its tenth month, with no clear signs of an end to the violence. Civilian life can’t go on, yet must go on, and it comes as no surprise that Banksy would find something to draw upon in that harrowing and contradictory state of affairs. Nor could it have been lost on him what contextual power the shambolic urban environments of Borodyanka, Hostomel, and Horenka — towns literally torn apart by war — could grant even murals humorously spray-painted upon its surfaces.
At the end of the video, Akers notes, “a heated local man points to an image the artist painted on a graffitied wall so that a pre-existing tag of a penis became a warhead atop an armored truck and declares, ‘For this, I would kick out all his teeth and break his legs.’ ” Even in a war zone, everybody’s a critic.
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.
André Hörmann and Anna Samo’s short animation, Obon, opens on a serene scene — a quiet forest, anda red torii gate framing moonlight on the water.
But then we notice that the water is choked with bodies, victims of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Akiko Takakura, whose reminiscences inspired the film, arrived for work at the Hiroshima Bank just minutes before the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” over the city, killing some 80,000 instantly.
Takakura-san, who had been cleaning desks and mooning over a cute co-worker with her fellow junior bank employee Satomi Usami when the bomb hit, was one of the 10 people within a radius of 500 meters from ground zero to have survived .
(Usami-san, who fought her way out of the wreckage with her friend’s assistance, later succumbed to her injuries.)
Animator Samo, whose style harkens to traditional woodcuts, based her depiction of the horrors confronting the two young women when they emerge from the bank on the drawings of survivors:
Without craft or artistry to hide behind, the drawings told stories unfiltered, made me hear shaking voices saying: this is what happened to us.
Takakura-san attempted to capture one such image in a 1974 drawing:
I saw one corpse with burning fingers. Her hand was raised and her fingers were on fire, blue flames burning them down to stumps. A light charcoal-colored liquid was oozing onto the ground. When I think of those hands cradling beloved children and turning the pages of books, even now my heart fills with a deep sadness.
Takakura-san was 84 when writer/director Hörmann traveled to Japan to meet with historians, nuclear scientists, peace researchers and elderly survivors of the atomic bomb. Over the course of three 90 minute sessions, he noticed a quality that set her apart from the other survivors he interviewed :
…the stories that she told me there was always a glimmering light of hope in the midst of all of the horror. For me, it was a sigh of relief to have this moment of hope and peace, it was beautiful. It is impossible to just tell a story that is all pain. Ms. Takakura’s story was a way for me to look at this dark piece of history and not be emotionally crushed.
Her perspective informs the film, which travels backward and forward throughout time.
We meet her as a tiny, kimono-clad old woman in modern day Japan, whose face now bears a strong resemblance to her father’s. Her back is crisscrossed with scars of the 102 lacerations she sustained on the morning of August 6, 1945.
We then see her as a little girl, whose father, “a typical man from Meiji times, tough and strict,” is unable to express affection toward his daughter.
This changed when the 19-year-old was reunited with her family after the bombing, and her father asked for forgiveness while tenderly bathing her burned hands.
To Hörmann this “tiny moment of happiness” and connection is at the heart of Obon.
Animator Samo wonders if Takakura-san would have achieved “peace with the world that was so cruel to her” if her father hadn’t tended to her wounded hands so gently:
What does an act of love in a moment of despair mean? Can it allow you to you go on with a normal life, drink tea and cook rice? If you have seen so much death, can you still look people in the eyes, get married and give birth to children?
The film takes its title from the annual Buddhist holiday to commemorate ancestors and pay respect to the dead.
As an old woman, Takakura-san tends to the family altar, then travels with younger celebrants to the river for the release of the paper lanterns that are believed to guide the spirits back to their world at the festival’s end.
The face that appears in her glowing lantern is both her father’s and a reflection of her own.
8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945,
a very clear morning.
The mother preparing her baby’s milk,
the old man watering his potted plants,
the old woman offering flowers at her Buddhist altar,
the young boy eating breakfast,
the father starting work at his company,
the thousands walking to work on the street,
all died.
Not knowing an atomic bomb would be dropped,
they lived as usual.
Suddenly, a flash.
“Ah ~
Just as they saw it,
people in houses were shoved over and smashed.
People walking on streets were blown away.
People were burned-faces, arms, legs-all over.
People were killed, all over
the city of Hiroshima
by a single bomb.
Those who died.
A hundred? No. A thousand? No. Ten thousand?
No, many, many more than that.
More people than we can count
died, speechless,
knowing nothing.
Others suffered terrible burns,
horrific injuries.
Some were thrown so hard
their stomachs ripped open,
their spines broke.
Whole bodies filled with glass shards.
Clothes disappeared,
burned and tattered.
Fires came right after the explosion.
Hiroshima engulfed in flames.
Everyone fleeing, not knowing where
they were or where to go.
Everyone barefoot,
crying tears of anger and grief,
hair sticking up, looking like Ashura*,
they ran on broken glass, smashed roofs
along a long, wide road of fire.
Blood flowed.
Burned skin peeled and dangled.
Whirlwinds of fire raged here and there.
Hundreds, thousands of fire balls
30-centimeters across
whirled right at us.
It was hard to breathe in the flames,
hard to see in the smoke.
What will become of us?
Those who survived, injured and burned,
shouted, “Help! Help!” at the top of their lungs.
One woman walking on the road
died and then
her fingers burned,
a blue flame shortening them like candles,
a gray liquid trickling down her palms
and dripping to the ground.
Whose fingers were those?
More than 50 years later,
I remember that blue flame,
and my heart nearly bursts
with sorrow.
Historical research reveals psychoactive substances to have been in use longer than most of us would assume. But did Adam and Eve do mushrooms in the Garden of Eden? Unsurprisingly, that question is fraught on more than one level. But if you wish to believe that they did, spend some time with the thirteenth-century artwork above, known as the Plaincourault fresco. In it, writes Atlas Obscura’s Emma Betuel, “Adam and Eve stand in the Garden of Eden, both of them faceless.” Between them “stands a large red tree, crowned with a dotted, umbrella-like cap. The tree’s branches end in smaller caps, each with their own pattern of tiny white spots” — just like you’d see on certain species of fungus. “Tourists, scholars, and influencers come to see the tree that, according to some enthusiasts, depicts the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria.”
This image, more than any other piece of evidence, supports the theory that “early Christians used hallucinogenic mushrooms.” Supports is probably the wrong word, though there have been true believers since at least since 1911, “when a member of the French Mycological Society suggested the thing sprouting between Adam and Eve was a ‘bizarre’ and ‘arborescent’ mushroom.” The video essay just below, “Psychedelics in Christian Art,” presents the cases for and against the Tree of Life being a bunch of magic mushrooms. It comes from Youtuber Hochelaga, whose videos previously featured here on Open Culture have covered subjects like the Voynich Manuscript and the Biblical apocalypse. This particular episode comes as part of a miniseries on “strange Christian art” whose previous installments have focused on hellmouths and the three-headed Jesus.
Nevertheless, Hochelaga can’t come down on the side of the mushrooms-seers. Similar vegetation appears in other pieces of medieval art, but “in reality, these are drawings of trees, rendered with strange forms and bright colors,” as dictated by the relatively loose and exaggerated aesthetic of the era. But that doesn’t mean the Plaincourault fresco has nothing to teach us, and the same holds for other “psychedelic” Christian creations, like the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or the art-inspiring music of Hildegard von Bingen. Judging by the investigations this sort of thing has inspired — Tom Hatsis’ “The Psychedelic Gospels, The Plaincourault fresco, and the Death of Psychedelic History,” Jerry B. Brown and Julie M. Brown’s Journal of Psychedelic Studies article “Entheogens in Christian Art: Wasson, Allegro, and the Psychedelic Gospels” — the relevant history constitutes quite a trip by itself.
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.
“By the time of his death”—almost two years before, in fact—“Van Gogh’s work had begun to attract critical attention,” writes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who point out that Van Gogh’s works shown “at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris between 1888 and 1890 and with Les XX in Brussels in 1890… were regarded by many artists as ‘the most remarkable’” in both exhibits. Critics wrote glowing appreciations, and Van Gogh seemed poised to achieve the recognition everyone knows he deserved in his lifetime. Still, Van Gogh himself was not present at these exhibitions. He was first in Arles, where he settled in near-seclusion (save for Gauguin), after cutting off part of his ear. Then, in 1889, he arrived at the asylum near Saint-Rémy, where he furiously painted 150 canvases, then shot himself in the chest, thinking his life’s work a failure, despite the public recognition and praise his brother Theo poignantly tried to communicate to him in his final letters.
Now imagine that Van Gogh had actually been able to experience the acclaim bestowed on him near the end—or the acclaim bestowed on him hundreds of times over in the more than 100 years since his death. Such is the premise of the clip above from Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 10, in which Van Gogh—who struggled to sell any of his work through most of his lifetime—finds himself at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2010, courtesy of the TARDIS. Granted, the scene milks the inherent pathos with some maudlin musical cues, but watching actor Tony Curran react as Van Gogh, seeing the gallery’s collections of his work and the wall-to-wall admirers, is “unexpectedly touching,” as Kottke writes. To drive the emotional point even further home, the Doctor calls over a docent played by Bill Nighy, who explains why “Van Gogh is the finest painter of them all.” Laying it on thick? Fair enough. But try not getting a little choked up at the end, I dare you.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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William Shakespeare’s plays have endured not just because of their inherent dramatic and linguistic qualities, but also because each era has found its own way of envisioning and re-envisioning them. The technology involved in stage productions has changed over the past four centuries, of course, but so has the technology involved in art itself. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture an archive of 3,000 illustrations of Shakespeare’s complete works going back to the mid-nineteenth century. That site was the PhD project of Cardiff University’s Michael Goodman, who has recently completed another digital Shakespeare project, this time using artificial intelligence: Paint the Picture to the Word.
“Every image collected here has been generated by Stable Diffusion, a powerful text-to-image AI,” writes Goodman on this new project’s About page. “To create an image using this technology a user simply types a description of what they want to see into a text box and the AI will then produce several images corresponding to that initial textual prompt,” much as with the also-new AI-based art generator DALL‑E.
Each of the many images Goodman created is inspired by a Shakespeare play. “Some of the illustrations are expressionistic (King John, Julius Caesar), while some are more literal (Merry Wives of Windsor).” All “offer a visual idea or a gloss on the plays: Henry VIII, with the central characters represented in fuzzy felt, is grimly ironic, while in Pericles both Mariana and her father are seen through a watery prism, echoing that play’s concern with sea imagery.”
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.
Few countries love cats as much as Japan does, and none expresses that love so clearly in its various forms of art. Though not eternal, the Japanese inclination toward all things feline does extend deeper into history than some of us might assume. “In the sixth century, Buddhist monks travelled from China to Japan,” writes Philip Kennedy at Illustration Chronicles. On these journeys, they brought scriptures, drawings, and relics – items that they hoped would help them introduce the teachings of Buddhism to the large island nation.” They also brought cats, in part as carriers of good luck and in part for their ability to “guard the sacred texts from the hungry mice that had stowed on board their ships.”
Buddhism made a lasting mark on Japanese culture, but those cats practically overtook it. “Today, cats can be found nearly everywhere in Japan,” Kennedy writes. “From special cafés and shrines to entire cat islands. Indeed the owners of one Japanese train station were so enamored with their cat that they appointed her stationmaster.”
By the mid-nineteenth century, the ukiyo‑e woodblock print master Utagawa Kuniyoshi could keep a studio overrun with cats and not seem too terribly eccentric for it. “His fondness for felines crept into his work, and they appear in many of his finest prints. Sometimes they crop up as characters from well-known stories; other times, they are beautifully expressive studies.”
Kuniyoshi made his name illustrating tales of historical warriors, but his artistic capacity also encompassed “everything from landscapes and animals to ghostly apparitions and scenes from popular kabuki theatre.” When the Tokugawa Shogunate sensed its power declining in the 1840s, it banned such “luxuries” as the depictions of kabuki actors (as well as geisha).
To accommodate that demand, Kuniyoshi created humanoid cats endowed with features resembling well-known personages of the era. This in addition to his series Neko no ateji, or “cat homophones,” with cats arranged to spell the names of fish, and Cats Suggested As The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a feline parody of Hiroshige’s earlier Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Rat-eating aside, cats aren’t known as especially useful animals, but many a Japanese artist can attest to their inspirational value even today.
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.
Piet Mondrian’s New York City I was recently discovered to have been hanging upside-down on display for the past 75 years, which made for a cultural story practically designed to go viral. Unsurprisingly, some of those keeping it in circulation have read it as proof positive of the fraudulence of “modern art.” How good could Mondrian be, after all, if nobody else over the past three-quarters of a century could tell that his painting wasn’t right-side-up? That isn’t a cogent criticism, of course: New York City I dates from 1941, by which time Mondrian’s work had long since become austere even by the standards of abstract art, employing only lines and blocks of color.
“The way the picture is currently hung shows the multicolored lines thickening at the bottom, suggesting an extremely simplified version of a skyline,” writes the Guardian’s Philip Oltermann.
But “the similarly named and same-sized oil painting, New York City, which is on display in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, has the thickening of lines at the top,” and “a photograph of Mondrian’s studio, taken a few days after the artist’s death and published in American lifestyle magazine Town and Country in June 1944, also shows the same picture sitting on an easel the other way up.” It was just such clues that Susanne Meyer-Büser, curator of the art collection of North Rhine-Westphalia, put together to diagnose its current mis-orientation.
Regardless, New York City I will remain as it is. The eight-decade-old strips of painted tape with which Mondrian assembled its black, yellow, red, and blue grid “are already extremely loose and hanging by a thread,” said Meyer-Büser. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction.” The artist’s signature would normally be a distraction in an inverted work, but since he didn’t consider this particular work finished, he never actually signed it — and if he had, of course, it would have been hung correctly in the first place. In any case, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine having a rich aesthetic experience with an upside-down Mondrian; could we say the same about, for instance, an upside-down Last Supper?
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.
Oh to go behind the scenes at a world class museum, to discover treasures that the public never sees.
Among the most compelling — and unexpected — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are a pair of crumbing scrapbooks, their pages thick with yellowing obituaries and death notices for a wide array of late 19th and early 20th-century painters, sculptors, and photographers.
Others, like Francis Davis Millet, who served as a Union Army drummer boy during the Civil War and perished on the Titanic, were much admired in their day, but have largely faded from memory.
The vast majority are requiems of a sort for those who toiled in obscurity. They may not have received much attention in life, but the circumstances of their deaths by suicide, murder, or bizarre accident had the whiff of the penny dreadful, a quality that could move a lot of newspapers. The deceased’s addresses were published, along with their names. Any tragic detail was sure to be heightened for effect, the tawdrier the better.
As the Met’s Managing Archivist, Jim Moske, who unearthed the scrapbooks four years ago while prowling for historic material for the museum’s 150th anniversary celebration, writes in Lit Hub:
Typical of the era’s crass tabloid journalism, they were crafted to wring maximum drama out of misfortune, and to excite and fix the attention of readers susceptible to raw emotional appeal and voyeurism. Their authors drew upon and reinforced stereotypes of artists as indigent, debauched, obsessed with greatness, eccentric, or suffering from mental illness.
It took Moske a fair amount of digging to identify the creator of these scrapbooks, one Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly.
D’Hervilly spent a decade working in various administrative capacities before being promoted to Assistant Curator of Paintings. A dedicated employee and talented artist himself, D’Hervilly put his calligraphic skills to work crafting illuminated manuscript-style keepsakes for the families of recently deceased trustees and locker room signs.
In a recent lecture hosted by the Victorian Society of New York, Moske noted that D’Hervilly understood that the museum could use newspapers for self-documentation as well promotion.
To that end, the Met maintained accounts with a number of clippings bureaus, media monitoring services whose young female workers pored over hundreds of daily newspapers in search of target phrases and names.
Think of them as an analog, paid precursor to Google Alerts.
Many of the clippings in the scrapbook bear the initials “D’H” or D’Hervilly’s surname, scrawled in the same blue crayon the National Press Intelligence Company and other clippings bureaus used to underline the target phrase.
Moske theorizes that D’Hervilly may have been using the Met’s account to pursue a personal interest in collecting these types of notices:
Newly promoted to curate masterpiece paintings, had he given up for good his own artistic ambition? Was the composition of these morbid tomes a veiled acknowledgement of the passing away of his creative aspiration? Did he identify with the hundreds of uncelebrated artists whose fates the news clippings recorded in grim detail? Perhaps, instead, his intent was more mundane, and compiling them was an expedient for collecting useful biographical data as he catalogued pictures in the Met collection that were made by recently deceased artists.
Many of the hundreds of clippings he preserved appear to be the only traces remaining of these artists’ creative existence on this earth.
After D’Hervilly suffered a fatal heart attack while getting ready to leave for work on the morning April 7, 1919, his colleagues took over his pet project, adding to the scrapbooks for another next ten years.
In researching the scrapbooks’ author’s life, Moske was able to truffle up scant evidence of D’Hervilly’s extracurricular creative output — just one painting in a catalogue of an 1887 National Academy of Design exhibition — but a 1919 clipping, dutifully pasted (posthumously, of course) into one of the scrapbooks, identified the longtime Met employee as a “SLAVE OF DUTY AT ART MUSEUM”, who never took time off for holidays or even luncheon, preferring to eat at his desk.
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