AI “Completes” Keith Haring’s Unfinished Painting and Controversy Erupts

in Art, Technology | January 12th, 2024

The celebri­ty graf­fi­ti artist Kei­th Har­ing died in 1990, at the age of 31, no doubt hav­ing com­plet­ed only a frac­tion of the art­work he would have pro­duced in a life a few decades longer. Upon first see­ing his Unfin­ished Paint­ing of 1989, one might assume that his ear­ly death is what stopped him from fin­ish­ing it. In fact, paint­ing only about a quar­ter of the can­vas was his delib­er­ate choice, intend­ed to make a visu­al com­men­tary on the AIDS epi­dem­ic that had claimed so many lives, and, not long there­after, would claim his own. Pre­sum­ably, it nev­er occurred to any­one to “fin­ish” Unfin­ished Paint­ing — not before the age of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, any­way.

“Last sum­mer, artist Brooke Peach­ley … post­ed a pho­to of the work on X” — the social media plat­form for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter — “along­side a prompt ask­ing oth­ers to respond with a visu­al art piece ‘that nev­er fails to destroy [them] every time they see it,’ ” write Elaine Velie and Rhea Nay­yar at Hyper­al­ler­gic. “Over six months lat­er, anoth­er user respond­ed to the orig­i­nal post with a gen­er­a­tive AI image that ‘com­plet­ed’ Haring’s pur­pose­ly half-paint­ed work, writ­ing, ‘now using AI we can com­plete what he couldn’t fin­ish!’ ”

One might, per­haps, sense a jok­ing tone in that post, though the many incensed com­menters it con­tin­ues to draw seem not to take it that way. “The post swift­ly caught the ire of the X com­mu­ni­ty, with users describ­ing the action as ‘dis­re­spect­ful,’ ‘dis­gust­ing,’ and a ‘des­e­cra­tion,’ ” says Art­net News. “Some praised the pow­ers of A.I. for ‘show­ing us a world with­out AIDS,’ while oth­ers deemed the tweet excel­lent ‘bait’ on an Elon Musk-led online plat­form that new­ly rewards out­rage with engage­ment.” As often these days — and very often when it comes to appli­ca­tions of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in pop­u­lar cul­ture — the reac­tions to the thing are more com­pelling than the thing itself.

“The A.I.-generated image doesn’t appear to be faith­ful to Haring’s style, which often includ­ed images of human fig­ures,” writes Julia Bin­swanger at Smithsonian.com. “These kinds of fig­ures are vis­i­ble in Haring’s orig­i­nal piece, but the image gen­er­a­tor wasn’t able to repli­cate them.” The algo­rith­mi­cal­ly filled-in Unfin­ished Paint­ing may be with­out aes­thet­ic or intel­lec­tu­al inter­est in itself, but con­sid­er how many view­ers have only learned of the orig­i­nal work because of it. Nev­er­the­less, stunts like this (or like zoom­ing out the Mona Lisa) ulti­mate­ly amount to dis­trac­tions from what­ev­er artis­tic poten­tial these tech­nolo­gies may actu­al­ly hold. A.I. will come into its own not by gen­er­at­ing images that Har­ing or any oth­er artist could have cre­at­ed, but images that no human being has yet imag­ined.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Demys­ti­fy­ing the Activist Graf­fi­ti Art of Kei­th Har­ing: A Video Essay

A Short Biog­ra­phy of Kei­th Har­ing Told with Com­ic Book Illus­tra­tions & Music

Kei­th Haring’s Eclec­tic Jour­nal Entries Go Online

Behold the World’s First Mod­ern Art Amuse­ment Park, Fea­tur­ing Attrac­tions by Sal­vador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kei­th Har­ing, Roy Licht­en­stein & More (1987)

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

An AI-Gen­er­at­ed Paint­ing Won First Prize at a State Fair & Sparked a Debate About the Essence of Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Why Caspar David Friedrich’s Painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) Is a Romantic Masterpiece, Evoking the Power of the Sublime

in Art, History | January 8th, 2024

When Cas­par David Friedrich com­plet­ed Der Wan­der­er über dem Nebelmeer, or Wan­der­er Above the Sea of Fog, in 1818, it “was not well received.” So says gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in his new Great Art Explained video above, which focus­es on Friedrich’s most famous paint­ing. In the artist’s life­time, the Wan­der­er in fact “marked the grad­ual decline of Friedrich’s for­tunes.” He with­drew from soci­ety, and in 1835, “he suf­fered a stroke that left the left side of his body effec­tive­ly par­a­lyzed, effec­tive­ly end­ing his career.” How, over the cen­turies since, did this once-ill-fat­ed paint­ing become so icon­ic that many of us now see it ref­er­enced every few weeks?

Friedrich had known pop­u­lar and crit­i­cal scorn before. His first major com­mis­sion, paint­ed in 1808, was “an altar­piece which shows a cross in pro­file at the top of a moun­tain, alone and sur­round­ed by pine trees. Hard for us to under­stand now, but it caused a huge scan­dal.” This owed in part to the lack of tra­di­tion­al per­spec­tive in its com­po­si­tion, which pre­saged the feel­ing of bound­less­ness — over­laid with “rolling mists and fogs” — that would char­ac­ter­ize his lat­er work. But more to the point, “land­scape had nev­er been con­sid­ered a suit­able genre for overt­ly reli­gious themes. And of course, nor­mal­ly the cru­ci­fix­ion is shown as a human nar­ra­tive pop­u­lat­ed by human fig­ures, not Christ dying alone.”

It’s fair to say that Friedrich did not do things nor­mal­ly, both philo­soph­i­cal­ly — break­ing away, with his fel­low Roman­ti­cists, from the mech­a­nis­tic Enlight­en­ment con­sen­sus about the world — and aes­thet­i­cal­ly. The Wan­der­er (fur­ther ana­lyzed in the Nerd­writer video just below) presents a Weltan­schau­ung in which “land­scape was a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a divine world order, and man was an indi­vid­ual who watch­es, con­tem­plates, and feels much more than he cal­cu­lates and thinks.” To achieve his desired effect, Friedrich assem­bles an imag­ined vista out of var­i­ous ele­ments seen around Dres­den, pre­sent­ing it in a man­ner that com­bines char­ac­ter­is­tics of both land­scapes and por­traits to “cre­ate a pow­er­ful sense of space” while direct­ing our atten­tion to the lone uniden­ti­fied fig­ure right in the cen­ter.

The “curi­ous com­bi­na­tion of lone­li­ness and empow­er­ment” that results is key to under­stand­ing not just the pri­or­i­ties of the Roman­tics, but the very nature of the aes­thet­ic sub­lime they rev­er­ent­ly expressed. To be sub­lime is not just to be beau­ti­ful or plea­sur­able, but also to exude a kind of intim­i­dat­ing, even fear­some vast­ness; how it feels to enter the pres­ence of the sub­lime can nev­er be ful­ly repli­cat­ed, let alone explained, but as Friedrich demon­strates, it can effec­tive­ly be evoked. Hence, as Payne points out, the ten­den­cy of cur­rent media like movie posters to crib from the Wan­der­er, in ser­vice of the likes of Dunkirk, Obliv­ion, Into Dark­ness, and After Earth. Deter­min­ing whether those pic­tures live up to the ambi­tions evi­dent in Friedrich’s artis­tic lega­cy is an exer­cise left to the read­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Paint­ing of Cas­par David Friedrich, Roman­ti­cism & the Sub­lime

The Oth­er­world­ly Art of William Blake: An Intro­duc­tion to the Vision­ary Poet and Painter

How the Avant-Garde Art of Gus­tav Klimt Got Per­verse­ly Appro­pri­at­ed by the Nazis

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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My Neighbor Totoro Inspires a Line of Traditional Japanese Handicrafts

in Animation, Art, Design, History, Travel | January 4th, 2024

We sup­pose it’s con­ceiv­able that a gift of a wood­en Totoro fig­urine, hand-carved from a sin­gle block using 50 dif­fer­ent kinds of chis­els, might spark a rev­er­ence for tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese craft and nature in the next gen­er­a­tion…

Or, they may be left wish­ing you’d giv­en them a vast­ly more hug­gable machine-made plushie ver­sion, espe­cial­ly if you can’t help suck­ing in your breath every time they start fum­bling with that exquis­ite­ly craft­ed ￥330,000 yen heir­loom-to-be. (That’s $2341.81 in US dol­lars.)

Of course, direc­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki’s 1988 ani­mat­ed fea­ture My Neigh­bor Totoro has legions of fans of all ages, and some will con­sid­er them­selves quite lucky if they win the lot­tery that grants them the abil­i­ty to pur­chase such a trea­sure.

They’re not only carved by skilled arti­sans in Ina­mi, the city of wood­carv­ing, but the wood is also that of a cam­phor tree — the nat­ur­al habi­tat of the mys­te­ri­ous, mag­i­cal Totoro! (It’s also con­sid­ered holy by prac­ti­tion­ers of the Shin­to reli­gion.)

Still, if it’s unclear that the recip­i­ent will tru­ly appre­ci­ate such thought­ful­ness, you’re prob­a­bly bet­ter off going with anoth­er offer­ing from Stu­dio Ghibli’s Totoro-themed col­lab­o­ra­tion with Nak­a­gawa Masashichi Shoten, a pur­vey­or of tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese crafts.

Per­haps a￥4180 bud vase fired in Ure­shi­no City’s Edo-peri­od Yozan Kiln, fea­tur­ing Totoro or a clus­ter of susuwatari, the pom pom-like soot sprites infest­ing the Kusak­abe fam­i­ly’s new home, who also play a part in Spir­it­ed Away.

Maybe a tiny Totoro bell amulet, mold­ed by crafts­men in Odawara, cel­e­brat­ed for the qual­i­ty of their met­al­work since the ear­ly 1500s, when they out­fit­ted samu­rai with weapons, armor and hel­mets?

What about a Totoro-embla­zoned trea­sure box from Yat­suo, made of sten­cil-dyed hand­made washi paper? There’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly wrong with stash­ing your acorn col­lec­tion in an old Altoid’s tin, but this ves­sel comes with his­toric pedi­gree:

As one of the lead­ing towns along the trunk road, Yatu­so flour­ished through … pro­duc­tion of wrap­ping paper for the nation-wide famous “Toya­ma Med­i­cine”. At its gold­en age, from the Edo Era to the begin­ning of the Mei­ji Era in the 19th cen­tu­ry, many peo­ple were engaged in paper­mak­ing by hand­work in their homes. Yat­suo Japan­ese paper was expect­ed to be unbreak­able because it was used as pack­age for expen­sive med­i­cine and at the same time it should look bril­liant. It had to be thick and stout so that it could be imper­vi­ous to water and the label print­ed on the sur­face would not be smeared.

The list of Totoro-inspired tra­di­tion­al crafts is impres­sive. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­pling:

Chusen-dyed tenugui hand­ker­chiefs and t‑shirts…

Dish­tow­els made from five lay­ers of Kayaori fab­ric that “was intro­duced to Japan dur­ing the Nara peri­od and is said to allow wind to pass through but keep mos­qui­toes out”…

Tiny Ari­ta ware acorn plates that reward mem­bers of the clean plate club with a view of the Cat­bus… 

View the col­lec­tion and learn more about February’s lot­tery for a chance to pur­chase a Cam­phor wood Totoro here.

Hands-on fans may pre­fer to cul­ti­vate an appre­ci­a­tion for tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese hand­i­crafts by attempt­ing a DIY Totoro.

Via Spoon & Tam­a­go/Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Stream Hun­dreds of Hours of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Movie Music That Will Help You Study, Work, or Sim­ply Relax: My Neigh­bor Totoro, Spir­it­ed Away & More

A Tour of Stu­dio Ghibli’s Brand New Theme Park in Japan, Which Re-Cre­ates the Worlds of Spir­it­ed Away, My Neigh­bor Totoro, and Oth­er Clas­sics

Build Your Own Minia­ture Sets from Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Films: My Neigh­bor Totoro, Kiki’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice & More

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Man Hiding from the Nazis Made 95 Issues of a Highly Creative Zine (1943–1945)

in Art, History, Life, Magazines | December 26th, 2023

Per­haps at some point in the future,

the poems in your tongue I com­posed,

will be brought to your notice,

and if so, to delight will I then be dis­posed.

— Curt Bloch, Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret

Zines typ­i­cal­ly tend toward the ephemer­al, owing to their small cir­cu­la­tions, errat­ic pub­li­ca­tion sched­ules, and the unpre­dictable lives of their cre­ators. 

Curt Bloch’s zine, Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret (The Under­wa­ter Cabaret) defies these odds.

Bloch not only pro­duced an impres­sive 95 issues between August 1943 and April 1945, he did so as a Ger­man Jew hid­ing from the Nazis in the rafters of a pri­vate home in the Dutch city of Enschede, not far from the Ger­man bor­der.

His cut-and-paste illus­tra­tions are part of a long-stand­ing zine con­tin­u­um, made pos­si­ble in part by helpers who fur­nished him with pens, glue, news­pa­pers and oth­er col­lage-wor­thy mate­ri­als, in addi­tion to food and oth­er neces­si­ties. 

His print run was sub-minis­cule. Dupli­cat­ing his work was not an option, so Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret cir­cu­lat­ed in its orig­i­nal form, passed from hand to hand at great risk.

The zine’s title is a play on onder­duiken (to dive under), which Dutch peo­ple under­stood as a ref­er­ence to the 10,000 Jews hid­ing from the Nazis in their coun­try.

Ger­ard Groen­eveld, author of The Under­wa­ter Cabaret: The Satir­i­cal Resis­tance of Curt Bloch, cred­its the “huge orga­ni­za­tion” who helped Bloch and oth­ers sequestered Jews with cir­cu­lat­ing the zine:

(It) includ­ed couri­ers, who brought food, but who could also bring the mag­a­zine out, to share with oth­er peo­ple in the group who could be trust­ed. The mag­a­zines are very small, you can eas­i­ly put one in your pock­et or hide it in a book. He got them all back. They must have also returned them in some way.

It’s noth­ing short of a mir­a­cle that all 95 install­ments sur­vive. Many zinesters fall short of pre­serv­ing their work, but Bloch could not ignore this pro­jec­t’s per­son­al and his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.

Aubrey Pomer­ance, co-cura­tor of the Jüdis­ches Muse­um Berlin’s upcom­ing exhib­it, “My Vers­es Are Like Dyna­mite, Curt Bloch’s Het Onder­wa­ter Cabaret”, notes that “the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of writ­ings that were cre­at­ed in hid­ing were destroyed.” 

For half a cen­tu­ry, these zines were known to a select few — fam­i­ly mem­bers, their orig­i­nal read­ers, and a hand­ful of guests whom Bloch enter­tained by read­ing pas­sages aloud after din­ner par­ties in the family’s New York home. 

Pomer­ance sus­pects that Bloch always intend­ed for his work to have a per­for­mance aspect, and that the cou­ple who shared his crawl­space quar­ters may well have been his first audi­ence for dit­ties like the one below.

Hye­nas and jack­als

Look on with jeal­ousy

For they now seem as choir­boys

Com­pared to human­i­ty.

Bloch’s daugh­ter, Simone, who describes her dad as a smar­tass, is work­ing on a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to his work. Read more about Bloch’s zine at The New York Times.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Two Tiny Rembrandt Paintings Have Been Rediscovered & Put On Display in Amsterdam

in Art | December 18th, 2023

Many first-time vis­i­tors to the Lou­vre expe­ri­ence a let­down to dis­cov­er how small the Mona Lisa is -just 21” x 30”.

Mean­while, over in Ams­ter­dam, vis­i­tors have been flock­ing to the Rijksmu­se­um, eager to lay eyes on the two small­est for­mal works in the museum’s col­lec­tion.

Mea­sur­ing slight­ly less than 8” tall, they are about as tall as the aver­age retail banana as per US Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture esti­mates.

It’s not just the match­ing oval por­traits’ size that’s pack­ing ’em in.

The recent­ly redis­cov­ered paint­ings have been iden­ti­fied as the work of Rem­brandt Har­men­szoon van Rijn, the lead­ing artist of the Dutch Gold­en Age.

Paint­ed in 1635, the por­traits fea­ture Jan Willem­sz van der Pluym, a wealthy 17th-cen­tu­ry plumber and his wife, Jaap­gen Caerls­dr, dressed in black with stiff white ruffs. The cou­ple owned the gar­den next to the painter’s moth­er, and he was dis­tant­ly relat­ed to them through a mar­riage on her side.

Their triple-great-grand­chil­dren put the por­traits up for auc­tion in 1760, after which they passed through sev­er­al pri­vate col­lec­tions, before drop­ping entire­ly from pub­lic view fol­low­ing an auc­tion in the sum­mer of 1824.

Near­ly two hun­dred years lat­er, Jan and Jaapgen’s por­traits weren’t mak­ing much of an impres­sion on that win­ning bidder’s descen­dants.

As Hen­ry Pet­tifer, an Old Mas­ter Paint­ings spe­cial­ist at Christies, which con­duct­ed both the 1824 auc­tion and the one last sum­mer, where the por­traits fetched 14.3 mil­lion dol­lars, told the Wash­ing­ton Post, “the fam­i­ly liked the pic­tures but were nev­er cer­tain that they were by Rem­brandt and nev­er real­ly looked into that:”

The pic­tures were com­plete­ly absent from the Rem­brandt lit­er­a­ture in the 19th and 20th cen­turies, which was extra­or­di­nary. They have inti­ma­cy about them, a dig­ni­ty. They’re extra­or­di­nary… They’re unlike some of his grand, for­mal com­mis­sioned por­traits, and they are some­thing much more spon­ta­neous and inti­mate. I think the rea­son for that is that the sit­ters were very close­ly con­nect­ed to Rem­brandt. They were very much from Rembrandt’s own inner cir­cle. We should regard them as per­son­al doc­u­ments rather than for­mal com­mis­sions.

The most recent win­ning bid­der is com­mit­ted to keep­ing the paint­ings in the pub­lic eye with a long term-loan to the Rijksmu­se­um, where exten­sive research using X‑radiography, infrared pho­tog­ra­phy, infrared reflec­tog­ra­phy, macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence, stere­omi­croscopy and paint sam­ple analy­sis con­firmed their prove­nance.

Experts have also not­ed sim­i­lar­i­ties in com­po­si­tion, col­or, and paint­ing tech­nique between these works and larg­er por­traits Rem­brandt exe­cut­ed dur­ing the same peri­od.

Jonathan Bikker, the Rijksmuseum’s cura­tor of 17th-cen­tu­ry Dutch paint­ing, describes the ver­i­fi­ca­tion of prove­nance as “mind­blow­ing:”

Total­ly unknown works hard­ly ever hap­pen. We real­ly want­ed to be able to show them.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Explore the New 717-Gigapix­el Scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the Most Detailed Pho­to Ever Tak­en of a Work of Art

300+ Etch­ings by Rem­brandt Now Free Online, Thanks to the Mor­gan Library & Muse­um

The Rem­brandt Book Bracelet: Behold a Func­tion­al Bracelet Fea­tur­ing 1400 Rem­brandt Draw­ings

Sci­en­tists Cre­ate a New Rem­brandt Paint­ing, Using a 3D Print­er & Data Analy­sis of Rembrandt’s Body of Work

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Origin Story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: How a 1939 Marketing Gimmick Launched a Beloved Christmas Character

in Art, Books, K-12, Music, Television | December 13th, 2023

It’s time to for­get near­ly every­thing you know about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer…at least as estab­lished by the 1964 Rankin/Bass stop motion ani­mat­ed tele­vi­sion spe­cial.

You can hang onto the source of Rudolph’s shame and even­tu­al tri­umph — the glow­ing red nose that got him bounced from his play­mates’ rein­deer games before sav­ing Christ­mas.

Lose all those oth­er now-icon­ic ele­ments —  the Island of Mis­fit Toys, long-lashed love inter­est Clarice, the Abom­inable Snow Mon­ster of the North, Yukon Cor­nelius, Sam the Snow­man, and Her­mey the aspi­rant den­tist elf.

As orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived, Rudolph (run­ner up names: Rol­lo, Rod­ney, Roland, Rod­er­ick and Regi­nald) wasn’t even a res­i­dent of the North Pole.

He lived with a bunch of oth­er rein­deer in an unre­mark­able house some­where along San­ta’s deliv­ery route.

San­ta treat­ed Rudolph’s house­hold as if it were a human address, com­ing down the chim­ney with presents while the occu­pants were asleep in their beds.

To get to Rudolph’s ori­gin sto­ry we must trav­el back in time to Jan­u­ary 1939, when a Mont­gomery Ward depart­ment head was already look­ing for a nation­wide hol­i­day pro­mo­tion to draw cus­tomers to its stores dur­ing the Decem­ber hol­i­days.

He set­tled on a book to be pro­duced in house and giv­en away free of charge to any child accom­pa­ny­ing their par­ent to the store.

Copy­writer Robert L. May was charged with com­ing up with a hol­i­day nar­ra­tive star­ring an ani­mal sim­i­lar to Fer­di­nand the Bull.

After giv­ing the mat­ter some thought, May tapped Den­ver Gillen, a pal in Mont­gomery Ward’s art depart­ment, to draw his under­dog hero, an appeal­ing-look­ing young deer with a red nose big enough to guide a sleigh through thick fog.

(That schnozz is not with­out con­tro­ver­sy. Pri­or to Caitlin Flana­gan’s 2020 essay in the Atlantic chaf­ing at the tele­vi­sion spe­cial’s explic­it­ly cru­el depic­tions of oth­er­ing the odd­ball, Mont­gomery Ward fret­ted that cus­tomers would inter­pret a red nose as drunk­en­ness. In May’s telling, San­ta is so uncom­fort­able bring­ing up the true nature of the deer’s abnor­mal­i­ty, he pre­tends that Rudolph’s “won­der­ful fore­head” is the nec­es­sary head­lamp for his sleigh…)

On the strength of Gillen’s sketch­es, May was giv­en the go-ahead to write the text.

His rhyming cou­plets weren’t exact­ly the stuff of great children’s lit­er­a­ture. A sam­pling:

Twas the day before Christ­mas, and all through the hills, 

The rein­deer were play­ing, enjoy­ing the spills.

Of skat­ing and coast­ing, and climb­ing the wil­lows,

And hop­scotch and leapfrog, pro­tect­ed by pil­lows.

___

And San­ta was right (as he usu­al­ly is)
The fog was as thick as a soda’s white fizz

—-

The room he came down in was black­er than ink

He went for a chair and then found it a sink!

No mat­ter.

May’s employ­er wasn’t much con­cerned with the art­ful­ness of the tale. It was far more inter­est­ed in its poten­tial as a mar­ket­ing tool.

“We believe that an exclu­sive sto­ry like this aggres­sive­ly adver­tised in our news­pa­per ads and circulars…can bring every store an incal­cu­la­ble amount of pub­lic­i­ty, and, far more impor­tant, a tremen­dous amount of Christ­mas traf­fic,” read the announce­ment that the Retail Sales Depart­ment sent to all Mont­gomery Ward retail store man­agers on Sep­tem­ber 1, 1939.

Over 800 stores opt­ed in, order­ing 2,365,016 copies at 1½¢ per unit.

Pro­mo­tion­al posters tout­ed the 32-page free­bie as “the rol­lickingest, rip-roaringest, riot-pro­vokingest,  Christ­mas give-away your town has ever seen!”

The adver­tis­ing man­ag­er of Iowa’s Clin­ton Her­ald for­mal­ly apol­o­gized for the paper’s fail­ure to cov­er the Rudolph phe­nom­e­non  — its local Mont­gomery Ward branch had opt­ed out of the pro­mo­tion and there was a sense that any sto­ry it ran might indeed cre­ate a riot on the sales floor.

His let­ter is just but one piece of Rudolph-relat­ed ephemera pre­served in a 54-page scrap­book that is now part of the Robert Lewis May Col­lec­tion at Dart­mouth, May’s alma mater.

Anoth­er page boasts a let­ter from a boy named Robert Rosen­baum, who wrote to thank Mont­gomery Ward for his copy:

I enjoyed the book very much. My sis­ter could not read it so I read it to her. The man that wrote it done bet­ter than I could in all my born days, and that’s nine years.

The mag­ic ingre­di­ent that trans­formed a mar­ket­ing scheme into an ever­green if not uni­ver­sal­ly beloved Christ­mas tra­di­tion is a song …with an unex­pect­ed side order of cor­po­rate gen­eros­i­ty.

May’s wife died of can­cer when he was work­ing on Rudolph, leav­ing him a sin­gle par­ent with a pile of med­ical bills. After Mont­gomery Ward repeat­ed the Rudolph pro­mo­tion in 1946, dis­trib­ut­ing an addi­tion­al 3,600,000 copies, its Board of Direc­tors vot­ed to ease his bur­den by grant­i­ng him the copy­right to his cre­ation.

Once he held the reins to the “most famous rein­deer of all”, May enlist­ed his song­writer broth­er-in-law, John­ny Marks, to adapt Rudolph’s sto­ry.

The sim­ple lyrics, made famous by singing cow­boy Gene Autry’s 1949 hit record­ing, pro­vid­ed May with a rev­enue stream and Rankin/Bass with a skele­tal out­line for its 1964 stop-ani­ma­tion spe­cial.

Screen­writer Romeo Muller, the dri­ving force behind the Island of Mis­fit Toys, Sam the Snow­man, Clarice, et al revealed that he would have based his tele­play on May’s orig­i­nal book, had he been able to find a copy.

Read a close-to-final draft of Robert L. May’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer, illus­trat­ed by Den­ver Gillen here.

Bonus con­tent: Max Fleischer’s ani­mat­ed Rudolph The Red-Nosed Rein­deer from 1948, which pre­serves some of May’s orig­i­nal text.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Hear Neil Gaiman Read A Christ­mas Car­ol Just Like Charles Dick­ens Read It

Hear the Christ­mas Car­ols Made by Alan Turing’s Com­put­er: Cut­ting-Edge Ver­sions of “Jin­gle Bells” and “Good King Wences­las” (1951)

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

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The Ten Earliest Depictions of Jesus: How Art Visualized Jesus in the First Centuries After His Death

in Art, History, Religion | December 13th, 2023

Jesus Christ: as soon as you hear those words, assum­ing they’re not being used exclam­a­to­ri­ly, you see a face. In almost all cas­es, that face is beard­ed and framed by long brown hair. Usu­al­ly it has strong, some­what sharp fea­tures and an expres­sion of benev­o­lence, patience, faint expectan­cy, or (depend­ing on the rel­e­vant Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion) com­plete agony. What­ev­er the details of his appear­ance, even the least reli­gious among us has a per­son­al Jesus in our imag­i­na­tion, a com­pos­ite of the many depic­tions we’ve seen through­out our lives. But where, exact­ly, did those depic­tions come from?

The Use­fulCharts video above assem­bles the ten ear­li­est known images of Jesus in art, orga­niz­ing them in a count­down that works its way back from the sixth cen­tu­ry. Remark­ably, these exam­ples remain imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able even a mil­len­ni­um and a half back, though beyond that point the son of God becomes rather more clean-cut.

“Orig­i­nal­ly, Jesus was always depict­ed with­out a beard,” explains Use­ful­Carts cre­ator Matt Bak­er, “and as we’re about to see, he usu­al­ly just looks like a typ­i­cal Roman from the time of the Roman Empire.” Ancient-Rome enthu­si­asts will rec­og­nize his man­ner of dress, although they might be sur­prised to see him using a mag­ic wand, in one late-third-cen­tu­ry image, to raise Lazarus from the dead.

The hol­i­day sea­son is an espe­cial­ly appro­pri­ate time to con­sid­er where our cul­tur­al con­cep­tion of Jesus comes from, giv­en that he is — at least as some Chris­tians put it — the very “rea­son for the sea­son.” And indeed, among these ten ear­li­est art­works fea­tur­ing Jesus is a sar­coph­a­gus lid inscribed with a clas­sic Christ­mas tableau, which depicts him as a “baby being held by his moth­er, Mary. Stand­ing behind them is, pre­sum­ably, Joseph, and in front of them are the three wise men and the star of Beth­le­hem.” That’s cer­tain­ly a depic­tion of Jesus for all time. As for what depic­tion of Jesus reflects our own time, we can hard­ly stop a cer­tain “restored” nine­teen-thir­ties Span­ish fres­co turned inter­net phe­nom­e­non from com­ing to mind.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Caravaggio’s The Tak­ing of Christ a Time­less, Great Paint­ing?

Behold! The Very First Christ­mas Card (1843)

Did Psy­che­del­ic Mush­rooms Appear in Medieval Chris­t­ian Art?: A Video Essay

Sal­vador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christ­mas Cards

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Take a Virtual Tour of the Lascaux Cave Paintings

in Art, History, Travel | December 5th, 2023

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The Las­caux Caves enjoyed a qui­et exis­tence for some 17,000 years.

Then came the sum­mer of 1940, when four teens inves­ti­gat­ed what seemed to be a fox’s den on a hill near Mon­ti­gnac, hop­ing it might lead to an under­ground pas­sage­way of local leg­end.

Once inside, they dis­cov­ered the paint­ings that have intrigued us ever since, expand­ing our under­stand­ing of pre­his­toric art and human ori­gins, and caus­ing us to spec­u­late on things we’ll nev­er have an answer to.

The boys’ teacher reached out to sev­er­al pre­his­to­ri­ans, who authen­ti­cat­ed the fig­ures, arranged for them to be pho­tographed and sketched, and col­lect­ed a num­ber of bone and flint arti­facts from the caves’ floors.

By 1948, exca­va­tions and arti­fi­cial lights ren­dered the caves acces­si­ble to vis­i­tors, who arrived in droves — as many as 1,800 in a sin­gle day.

Less than 20 years lat­er, The Collector’s Rosie Lesso writes, the caves were in cri­sis, and per­ma­nent­ly closed to tourism:


…the heat, humid­i­ty and car­bon diox­ide of all those peo­ple crammed into the dark and air­less cave was caus­ing an imbal­ance in the cave’s nat­ur­al ecosys­tem, lead­ing to the over­growth of molds and fun­gus­es that threat­ened to oblit­er­ate the pre­his­toric paint­ings.

The lights that had helped vis­i­tors get an eye­ful of the paint­ings caused fad­ing and dis­col­oration that threat­ened their very exis­tence.

Declar­ing this major attrac­tion off lim­its was the right move, and those who make the jour­ney to the area won’t leave entire­ly dis­ap­point­ed. Las­caux IV, a painstak­ing repli­ca that opened to the pub­lic in 2016, offers even more verisimil­i­tude than the pre­vi­ous mod­el, 1983’s Las­caux II.

A hand­ful of researchers and main­te­nance work­ers are still per­mit­ted inside the actu­al caves, now a UNESCO World Her­itage site, but human pres­ence is lim­it­ed to an annu­al total of 800 hours, and every­one must be prop­er­ly out­fit­ted with ster­ile white over­alls, plas­tic head cov­er­ings, latex gloves, dou­ble shoe cov­ers, and LED fore­head lamps with which to view the paint­ings.

The rest of us rab­ble can get a healthy vir­tu­al taste of these vis­i­tors’ expe­ri­ence thanks to the dig­i­tal Las­caux col­lec­tion that the Nation­al Arche­ol­o­gy Muse­um cre­at­ed for the Min­istry of Cul­ture.

An inter­ac­tive tour offers close-up views of the famous paint­ings, with titles to ori­ent the view­er as to the par­tic­u­lars of what and where  — for exam­ple “red cow fol­lowed by her calf” in the Hall of the Bulls.

Click the but­ton in the low­er left for a more in-depth expert descrip­tion of the ele­ment being depict­ed:

The flat red col­or used for the sil­hou­ette is of a uni­for­mi­ty that is sel­dom attained, which implies a repeat­ed ges­ture start­ing from the same point, with com­ple­men­tary angles of pro­jec­tion of pig­ments. The out­lines have been cre­at­ed with a sten­cil, and only the hindquar­ters, horns and the line of the back have been laid down with a brush…The fact that the artist used the same pig­ment for both fig­ures with­out any pic­to­r­i­al tran­si­tion between them indi­cates that the fusion of the two sil­hou­ettes was inten­tion­al, indica­tive of the con­nec­tion between the calf and its moth­er. This duo was born of the same ges­ture, and the image of the off­spring is mere­ly the graph­ic exten­sion of that of its moth­er.

The inter­ac­tive vir­tu­al tour is fur­ther com­pli­ment­ed by a trove of his­toric pho­tographs and inter­views, geo­log­i­cal con­text, con­ser­va­tion updates and anthro­po­log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions sug­gest­ing the paint­ings had a func­tion well beyond visu­al art.

Begin your vir­tu­al inter­ac­tive vis­it to the Las­caux Cave here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Archae­ol­o­gists May Have Dis­cov­ered a Secret Lan­guage in Las­caux & Chau­vet Cave Paint­ings, Per­haps Reveal­ing a 20,000-Year-Old “Pro­to-Writ­ing” Sys­tem

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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