As previously mentioned here on OC, the film distributor Kino Lorber has been quietly making complete art films available to stream on YouTube and its own website. In recent weeks, they’ve uploaded to YouTube the documentaries, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint and M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity. Now comes Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil, which they describe as follows:
In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role. In preparation for the exhibition, a team of Dutch art historians crisscrosses the globe to unravel the secrets of his art. They use special infrared cameras to examine the sketches beneath the paint, in the hope of discovering more about the artist’s intentions. They also attempt to establish which of the paintings can be attributed with certainty to Bosch himself, and which to his pupils or followers. The experts shuttle between Den Bosch, Madrid and Venice, cutting their way through the art world’s tangle of red tape, in a battle against the obstacle of countless egos and conflicting interests. Not every museum is prepared to allow access to their precious art works.
To watch more free-to-stream Kino Lorber films, click here.
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If you spend any time at all on social media, you’ll have glimpsed the work of DALL‑E, OpenAI’s now-famous artificial-intelligence engine that generate images from simple text descriptions. A velociraptor dressed like Travis Bickle, American Gothic starring Homer and Marge Simpson, that astronaut riding a horse on the moon: like any the-future-is-now moment, especially in recent years on the internet, DALL-E’s rise has produced a host of artifacts as impressive as they are ridiculous. Now you can try to top them in both of those dimensions yourself, since not just DALL‑E but the new, improved, higher-resolution DALL‑E 2 has just opened for public use.
“How do you use DALL‑E 2?” You might well ask, and Creative Bloq has a guide for you. “The tool generates art based on text prompts,” it explains. “On the face of it, that couldn’t be more simple. Once you’ve completed the DALL‑E 2 sign up to open an account, you use the program in your browser on the DALL‑E 2 website. You type in a description of what you want, and DALL‑E will create the image.”
Of course, some prompts produce more visually interesting results than others. The guide recommends that you consult the DALL‑E 2 prompt book, which gets into how best to phrase your descriptions in order to inspire the richest combinations of subject, texture, style, and form.
“Even the creators of DALL‑E 2 don’t know what the tool knows and doesn’t know. Instead, users have to work out what it’s capable of doing and how to get it to do what they want.” And indeed, that’s the part of the fun. DALL-E’s own interface recommends that you “start with a detailed description,” and with a little experimentation you’ll discover that specificity is key. The renderings of “an eight-bit Nintendo game designed by Hiroshige” and “a cyberpunk downtown Los Angeles scene painted by Rembrandt” strike me as credible enough for a first effort, but adding just a few more words opens up entirely new realms of surprise and incongruity.
Just above, we have two of DALL-E’s infinitely many possible attempts to visualize “the cover of an old Ernest Hemingway pulp novel about the adventures of David Bowie.” Though the designs look entirely plausible, the titles highlight the technology’s already-notorious inability to come up with intelligible text. Other limitations of the newly public DALL‑E, according to Ars Technica’s Benj Edwards, include the requirement to provide your phone number and other information in order to sign up, the ownership of the generated images by OpenAI, and the necessity to purchase “credits” to generate more images after you’ve run through your initial free 50. Still, there’s nothing quite like typing in a few words and summoning up works of art no one has ever seen before to make you feel like you’re living in the twenty-first century. You can sign up here.
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.
In the nineteen-twenties, as George Orwell remembers it, “Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population.” Along stretches of the Seine, “it was almost impossible to pick one’s way between the sketching-stools.” Legitimate or otherwise, these artists were genuine descendants of Claude Monet, at least in the sense that the latter pioneered painting en plein air, distilling art directly from the world all around him.
“When artists had to grind their own pigments or buy paints contained in fragile pig bladders,” says Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak in the video essay above, “it was much easier to work in a studio. The advent of tubes of paint, like these flexible zinc tubes invented by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a portability that made outdoor painting easy and feasible.” As usual in modernity, a development in technology enabled a development in culture, but to show what kind of possibilities had been opened up took an artist of rare vision as well as rare brazenness: more specifically, an artist like Monet.
“Obsessed, most of all, with light and color, and the ways they register in the human mind,” Monet “rejected the popular conventions of his time, which prioritized line, color, and blended brushstrokes that concealed the artist’s hand in favor of several short, thick applications of solid color placed side by side, largely unblended.” His paintings, which we now credit with launching the Impressionist movement, show us not so much colors as “color relationships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the canvas.” But then, so does real life, whose constantly changing light ensures that “every few minutes, we experience a subtly different color palette.”
For Puschak, nowhere is Monet’s artistic enterprise more clearly demonstrated than in the so-called “Haystacks.” The series consists of 25 paintings depicting just what that name suggests (and which, belonging to Monet’s neighbor in Giverny, were well placed to catch his eye), each painted at a different time of day. Each image represents Monet’s attempt to capture the light colors just as he perceived them at a particular moment, straight from nature. Taken together, they constitute “maybe the definitive expression of the Impressionist movement” — as well as a reminder that, haystack or water lily, we never truly set eyes on the same thing twice.
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.
As a child, Jeff De Boer, the son of a sheet metal fabricator, was fascinated by the European plate armor collection in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum:
There was something magical or mystical about that empty form, that contained something. So what would it contain? A hero? Do we all contain that in ourselves?
After graduating from high school wearing a partial suit of armor he constructed for the occasion, De Boer completed seven full suits, while majoring in jewelry design at the Alberta College of Art and Design.
A sculpture class assignment provided him with an excuse to make a suit of armor for a cat. The artist had found his niche.
Using steel, silver, brass, bronze, nickel, copper, leather, fiber, wood, and his delicate jewelry making tools, DeBoer became the cats’ armorer, spending anywhere from 50 to 200 hours producing each increasingly intricate suit of feline armor. A noble pursuit, but one that inadvertently created an “imbalance in the universe”:
The only way to fix it was to do the same for the mouse.
“The suit of armor is a transformation vehicle. It’s something that only the hero would wear,” De Boer notes.
Fans of David Petersen’s Mouse Guard series will need no convincing, though no real mouse has had the misfortune to find its way inside one of his astonishing, custom-made creations.
It’s not an altogether bad idea. The only reason I don’t do it is that hollow suit of armor like you might see in a museum, your imagination will make it do a million things more than if you stick a mouse in it will ever do. I have put armor on cats. I can tell you, it’s nothing like what you think it’s going to be. It’s not a very good experience for the cat. It does not fulfill any fantasies about a cat wearing a suit of armor.
Though cats were his entry point, De Boer’s sympathies seem aligned with the underdog — er, mice. Equipping humble, hypothetical creatures with exquisitely wrought, historical protective gear is a way of pushing back against being perceived differently than one wishes to be.
Accepting an Honorary MFA from his alma mater earlier this year, he described an armored mouse as a metaphor for his “ongoing cat and mouse relationship with the world of fine art…a mischievous, rebellious being who dares to compete on his own terms in a world ruled by the cool cats.”
Each tiny piece is preceded by painstaking research and many reference drawings, and may incorporate special materials like the Japanese silk haori-himo cord lacing the shoulder plates to the body armor of a Samurai mouse family.
Additional creations have referenced Mongolian, gladiator, crusader, and Saracen styles — this last perfect for a Persian cat.
“I mean, “Why not?” he asks in his TED‑x Talk,Village Idiots & Innovation, below.
His latest work combines elements of Maratha and Hussar armor in a veritable puzzle of minuscule pieces.
See more of Jeff De Boer’s cat and mouse armor on his Instagram.
Though most of us see Francisco Goya’s Saturno devorando a su hijo, or Saturn Devouring His Son, at least every few months, we were never meant to see it all. The same is true of all fourteen of the so-called “Black Paintings,” which Goya executed late in his life on the walls of his villa outside Madrid. They now hang at the Prado where, as one tour guide put it to the Guardian’s Stephen Phelan, “some people can hardly even look at them.” When visitors enter the room that contains these often grim and bizarre visions, “they are always surprised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a visitor whose expression hasn’t changed.”
What could have moved Goya to create such paintings? In the new Great Art Explained video essay above, gallerist and Youtuber James Payne lays out the relevant factors in Goya’s life and the turbulent society in which he lived. His Enlightenment views and penchant for brazen satire drew suspicion, as did his willingness to paint for French and pro-French clients during that country’s occupation of Spain.
At the age of 72 he ended up putting himself into a kind of countryside exile, taking up residence in an estate called the Quinta del Sordo (the “Villa of the Deaf,” and suitably enough, since Goya himself happened to have lost his hearing by that point).
It was in the Quinta del Sordo, and indeed on it, that Goya (or, according to certain theories, Goya’s son) set his artistic worldview free to realize its most grotesque and jaundiced forms. Even apart from Saturn’s act of cannibalistic filicide, Phelan writes, “a humanoid billy goat in a monkish cassock bleats a satanic sermon to a gasping congregation of witches. A desperately expressive little dog appears to plead for rescue, submerged up to its neck in a mud-colored mire beneath a gloomy, void-like firmament of negative space.” Known as El Perro, or The Dog, that last artwork is one of the most beloved in Spain — and, in its ascetic way, the most haunting Black Painting of all.
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.
Cover your eyes when the knife comes out in the horror movie?
If so, and also if not, fall to your knees and give thanks that you’re not the Wound Man, above.
A staple of medieval medical history, he’s a grisly compendium of the injuries and external afflictions that might befall a mortal of the period- insect and animal bites, spilled entrails, abscesses, boils, infections, plague-swollen glands, piercings and cuts, both accidental and deliberately inflicted.
Any one of these troubles should be enough to fell him, yet he remains upright, displaying every last one of them simultaneously, his expression stoic.
The Wound Man was not a figure designed to inspire fear or to menace. On the contrary, he represented something more hopeful: an imaginative and arresting herald of the powerful knowledge that could be channelled and dispensed through the practice of medieval medicine.
A valuable educational resource for surgeons for some three centuries, he began cropping up in southern Germany in the early 1400s. In an essay for the Public Domain Review, Hartnell notes how these early specimens served “as a human table of contents”, directing interested parties to the specific passages in the various medical texts where information on existing treatments could be found.
The protocol for injuries to the intestines or stomach called for stitching the wound up with a fine thread and sprinkling it with an antihemorrhagic powder made from wine, hematite, nutmeg, white frankincense, gum arabic, bright red sap from the Dracaena cinnabari tree and a restorative quantity of mummy.
The Wound Man evolved along with medical knowledge, weapons of warfare and art world trends.
The woodcut Wound Man in Hans von Gersdorff’s 1517 landmark Fieldbook of Surgery introduces cannonballs to the ghastly mix.
And the engraver Robert White’s Wound Man in British surgeon John Browne’s 1678 Compleat Discourse of Woundsloses the loincloth and grows his hair, morphing into a neoclassical beauty in the Saint Sebastian mold.
Surgical knowledge eventually outpaced the Wound Man’s usefulness, but popular culture is far from ready for him to lay down and die, as evidenced by recent cameos in episodes of Hannibal and the British comedy quiz show, QI.
Delve into the history of the Wound Man in Jack Hartnell’s British Art Studies article “Wording the Wound Man.”
Anyone who’s ever walked the red carpet or posed for a high fashion shoot would count themselves lucky to create the sort of impression made by John Singer Sargent’s iconic portrait of Madame X.
Though not if we’re talking about the sort of impression the painting made in 1884, when the model’s haughty demeanor, plunging bodice, and unapologetic use of skin-lightening, possibly arsenic-based cosmetics got the Paris Salon all riled up.
Most scandalously, one of her gown’s jeweled straps had slipped from her shoulder, a costume malfunction this cool beauty apparently couldn’t be bothered to fix, or even turn her head to acknowledge.
Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the New Orleans-born Paris socialite (social climber, some would have sniffed) so strikingly depicted by Sargent, was horrified by her likeness’ reception at the Salon. Although Sargent had coyly replaced her name with an ellipses in the painting’s title, there was no doubt in viewers’ minds as to her identity.
John Sargent, Evan Charteris’ 1927 biography, shows Madame Gautreau very little mercy when recounting her attempts at damage control:
A demand was made that the picture should be withdrawn. It is not among the least of the curiosities of human nature, that while an individual will confess and even draw attention to his own failings, he will deeply resent the same office being undertaken by someone else. So it was with the dress of Madame Gautreau. Here a distinguished artist was proclaiming to the public in paint a fact about herself she had hitherto never made any attempt to conceal, one which had, indeed, formed one of her many social assets. Her resentment was profound.
Sargent, distraught that his portrait of the celebrated scenemaker had yielded the opposite of the hoped-for positive splash, refused to indulge her request to remove the painting from exhibition.
His friend, painter Ralph Wormeley Curtis, wrote to his parents of the scene he witnessed in Sargent’s studio when Madame Gautreau’s mother rolled up, “bathed in tears”, primed to defend her daughter:
(She) made a fearful scene saying “Ma fille est perdu — tout Paris se moque d’elle. Mon genre sera forcé de se battre. Elle mourira de chagrin” etc.
(My daughter is lost — all of Paris mocks her. My kind will be forced to fight. She will die of sorrow.)
John replied it was against all laws to retire a picture. He painted her exactly as she was dressed, that nothing could be said of the canvas than had been said of her appearance dans le monde etc. etc.
Defending his cause made him feel much better. Still we talked it all over till 1 o’clock here last night and I fear he has never had such a blow. He says he wants to get out of Paris for a time. He goes to Eng. in 3 weeks. I fear là bas he will fall into Pre‑R. Influence wh. has got a strange hold of him, he says since Siena.
As Charlotte, creator of the Art Deco YouTube channel, points out in a frenetic overview of the scandal, below, Sargent came out of this fiasco a bit better than Madame Gautreau, whose damaged reputation cost her friends as well as her queen bee status.
(In her essay, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau: Living Statue, art historian Elizabeth L. Block corrects Charlotte’s assertion that the painting “destroyed Madame Gautreau’ life”. Contrary to popular opinion, within three years, she was making her theatrical debut, hosting parties, and was hailed by the New York Times as a “piece of plastic perfection.”)
Sargent did indeed decamp for England, where he found both creative and critical success. By century’s end, he was widely recognized as the most successful portrait painter of his day.
The portrait of Madame Gautreau remained enough of a sore spot that he kept it out of the public eye for more than twenty years, though shortly after its disastrous debut at the Salon, he did take another swipe at it, repositioning the suggestive shoulder strap to a more conventionally acceptable location, as the below photo, taken in his studio in 1885 confirms.
In 1905, he finally allowed it to see the light of day in a London exhibition, with subsequent engagements in Berlin, Rome and San Francisco.
In 1916, when the portrait was still on display in San Francisco, he wrote his friend Edward “Ned” Robinson, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, offering to sell it for £1,000, saying, “I suppose it is the best thing I have done.”
“By the way,” he added, “I should prefer, on account of the row I had with the lady years ago, that the picture should not be called by her name.”
Even though Madame Gautreau had died the previous year, Robinson obliged, retitling the painting Portrait of Madame X, the name by which it and its glamorous model are famously known today.
Read about the discoveries Metropolitan Museum of Art conservationists made during X‑radiography and infrared reflectography of the portrait here.
A quick heads up: The University of Chicago Press will soon publish the first biography of the Swedish avant-garde painter Hilma af Klint–an artist we have explored here many times before. Written by Julia Voss, the 440-page biography features nearly 100 images of Klint’s life and art. Until October 27th, you can get 40% of the new book if you use the code VOSS40at this site.
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