If your knowledge of America’s most celebrated female artist is confined to the gift shop’s greatest hits, you might enjoy a leisurely prowl through the 1100+ works in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s digital collection.
A main objective of this collection is to provide a more complete understanding of the life and work of the iconic artist, who died in 1986 at the age of 98.
Her evolution is evident when you search by materials or date.
You can also view works by other artists in the collection, including two very significant men in her life, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and ceramicist Juan Hamilton.
Each item’s listing is enhanced with information on inscriptions and exhibitions, as well as links to other works produced in the same year.
In 2003, a Salvador Dalí drawing was stolen from Rikers Island, one of the most formidable prisons in the United States. That the incident has never been used as the basis for a major motion picture seems inexplicable, at least until you learn the details. A screenwriter would have to adapt it as not a standard heist movie but a comedy of errors, beginning with the very conception of the crime. It seems that a few Rikers guards conspired surreptitiously to replace the artwork, which hung on a lobby wall, with a fake. Unfortunately for them, they made a less-than-convincing replacement, and even if it had been detail-perfect, how did they expect to sell a unique work whose criminal provenance would be so obvious?
Yet the job was, in some sense, a success, in that the drawing was never actually found. Dalí created it in 1965, when he was invited by Department of Correction Commissioner Anna Moscowitz Kross to meet with Rikers Island’s inmates. “Kross, the first female commissioner of the jail system, believed in rehabilitating prisoners with art, including painting sessions and theater productions,” writes James Fanelli, telling the story in Esquire. As for the artist, “as long as the city’s newspapers would be there to capture his magnanimous act, he was game” — but in the event, a 101-degree fever kept him from getting on the ferry to the prison that day. Instead, he dashed off an image of Christ on the cross (not an unfamiliarsubject for him) and sent it in his stead.
“For nearly two decades, it hung in the prisoners’ mess hall,” writes Fanelli. “In 1981, after an inmate lobbed a coffee cup at the painting, breaking its glass casing and leaving a stain, the Dalí was taken down.” It then went from appraiser to gallery to storage to the trash bin, from which it was saved by a guard. By 2003, it had ended up in the lobby of one of the ten jails that constitute the Rikers Island complex, hung by the Pepsi machine. That no one paid the work much mind, and more so that it has been appraised at one million dollars, was clearly not lost on the employee who masterminded the heist. Yet though they managed to catch his accomplices, the investigators were never able legally to determine who that mastermind was.
Readers of Fanelli’s story, or viewers of the Inside Edition video at the top of the post, may well find themselves suspecting a particular corrections offer, who successfully maintained his innocence despite being named by all his colleagues who did get convictions. Any dramatization of the Rikers Island Dalí heist would have to make its own determination about whether he or someone else was really the ringleader, and it might even have to make a guess as to the ultimate fate of the stolen drawing itself. One isn’t entirely displeased to imagine it hanging today in a hidden room in the outer-borough home of some retired prison guard: made in haste and with scant inspiration, damaged by coffee and poor storage conditions, and possibly ripped apart and put back together again, but a Dalí nonetheless.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
On Sunday morning, some audacious thieves stole priceless jewels from the Louvre Museum. The heist took only eight minutes from start to finish.
At 9:30 a.m., the robbers parked a truck with a portable ladder in front of the Parisian museum. They ascended the ladder, cut through a second-floor window, entered the museum, smashed through display cases, and snatched priceless jewels, including a royal emerald necklace. By 9:38 a.m., they descended the ladder and escaped on motorcycles. And, with that, they made off like bandits.
Above, the Wall Street Journal video helps you visualize how the theft unfolded, as does this article in the New York Times.
In the Relateds below, you can learn about the greatest theft in Louvre history—that is, the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa, which helped turn da Vinci’s artwork into the most famous painting in the world.
Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges brings this tendency to whimsical employ in his nonfiction Book of Imaginary Beings, a heterogeneous compendium of creatures from ancient folktale, myth, and demonology around the world.
Borges himself sometimes remarks on how these ancient stories can float too far away from ratiocination. The “absurd hypotheses” regarding the mythical Greek Chimera, for example, “are proof” that the ridiculous beast “was beginning to bore people…. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.” Of what he calls “Jewish Demons,” a category too numerous to parse, he writes, “a census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind.
Throughout the centuries, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia all enriched this teeming middle world.” Although a lesser field than angelology, the influence of this fascinatingly diverse canon only broadened over time.
“The natives recorded in the Talmud” soon became “thoroughly integrated” with the many demons of Christian Europe and the Islamic world, forming a sprawling hell whose denizens hail from at least three continents, and who have mixed freely in alchemical, astrological, and other occult works since at least the 13th century and into the present. One example from the early 20th century, a 1902 treatise on divination from Isfahan, a city in central Iran, draws on this ancient thread with a series of watercolors added in 1921 that could easily be mistaken for illustrations from the early Middle Ages.
The wonderful images draw on Near Eastern demonological traditions that stretch back millennia — to the days when the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud asserted it was a blessing demons were invisible, since, “if the eye would be granted permission to see, no creature would be able to stand in the face of the demons that surround it.”
The author of the treatise, a rammal, or soothsayer, himself “attributes his knowledge to the Biblical Solomon, who was known for his power over demons and spirits,” writes Ali Karjoo-Ravary, now an assistant professor of Islamic history at Columbia University. Predating Islam, “the depiction of demons in the Near East… was frequently used for magical and talismanic purposes,” just as it was by occultists like Aleister Crowley at the time these illustrations were made.
“Not all of the 56 painted illustrations in the manuscript depict demonic beings,” the Public Domain Review points out. “Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the animals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scorpion — associated with the zodiac.” But in the main, it’s demon city. What would Borges have made of these fantastic images? No doubt, had he seen them, and he had seen plenty of their like before he lost his sight, he would have been delighted.
A blue man with claws, four horns, and a projecting red tongue is no less frightening for the fact that he’s wearing a candy-striped loincloth. In another image we see a moustachioed goat man with tuber-nose and polka dot skin maniacally concocting a less-than-appetising dish. One recurring (and worrying) theme is demons visiting sleepers in their beds, scenes involving such pleasant activities as tooth-pulling, eye-gouging, and — in one of the most engrossing illustrations — a bout of foot-licking (performed by a reptilian feline with a shark-toothed tail).
There’s a playful Boschian quality to all of this, but while we tend to see Bosch’s work from our perspective as absurd, he apparently took his bizarre inventions absolutely seriously. So too, we might assume, did the illustrator here. We might wonder, as Woolf did, about this work as the product of “suffering human beings… attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” What kinds of ordinary, material concerns might have afflicted this artist, as he (we presume) imagined demons gouging the eyes and licking the feet of people tucked safely in their beds?
The work of the comic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius (or, more stylishly, Mœbius), has often appeared on Open Culture over the years, but even if you’ve never seen it here, you know it. Granted, you may never have read a page of it, to say nothing of an entire graphic novel’s worth, but even so, you’ve absorbed it indirectly through generations of international popular culture. If you enjoy Blade Runner, Akira, the manga and anime of Hayao Miyazaki, and even the Star Wars movies, you must, on some level, enjoy Moebius, so deeply did his comic art shape the look and feel of those major works, to say nothing of all it has inspired at further remove.
The new video above by Youtuber matttt goes in depth on the biographical, cultural, and psychological force that shaped the artist’s vision on the page, whose sheer imaginative force and persistently strange sublimity looked like nothing else in comics when he hit his stride in the nineteen-seventies. It helped that he was French, and thus an inheritor of the grand Francophone tradition of the bande dessinée, an art form taken much more seriously than comic strips and books in America. Belgian comics like Spirou and Tintin caught his attention early on, and time spent as a teenager amid the vast desert landscapes of Mexico instilled him with a taste for spiritual grandeur.
An apprenticeship under the Belgian comic artist Joseph “Jijé” Gillain, whom he idolized, helped Giraud — who had not yet become Moebius — to refine his style. His creation of the Jean Paul Belmondo-looking cowboy Blueberry in the early nineteen-sixties produced what turned out to be his most lucrative franchise. But it wasn’t until his encounter with taboo-breaking American “underground” comics that flourished later in that decade, and especially the work of Robert Crumb, that he found it within himself to let loose, exploring technological, mythological, and psychosexual realms hitherto unknown in his medium.
It was with the launch of the comics-anthology magazine Métal Hurlant in 1974, later repackaged in the United States as Heavy Metal, that Moebius’ work found its way to a much wider public. Notable readers included William Gibson, Ridley Scott, Luc Besson, George Lucas, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the Wachowskis: some imitated Moebius, and others hired him. Through the Japanese edition of Starlog magazine in the late seventies, his art re-shaped the aesthetics of mangaka like Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. Moebius himself later took on Otomo as one of his own influences, and in tribute to Miyazaki, named his daughter Nausicaa. For Jean Giraud, inspiration wasn’t a one-way street; it was more like a Möbius strip.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
If you follow the ongoing beef many popular scientists have with philosophy, you’d be forgiven for thinking the two disciplines have nothing to say to each other. That’s a sadly false impression, though they have become almost entirely separate professional institutions. But during the first, say, 200 years of modern science, scientists were “natural philosophers”—often as well versed in logic, metaphysics, or theology as they were in mathematics and taxonomies. And most of them were artists too of one kind or another. Scientists had to learn to draw in order to illustrate their findings before mass-produced photography and computer imaging could do it for them. Many scientists have been fine artists indeed, rivaling the greats, and they’ve made very fine musicians as well.
And then there’s Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a German biologist and naturalist, philosopher and physician, and proponent of Darwinism who described and named thousands of species, mapped them on a genealogical tree, and “coined several scientific terms commonly known today,” This is Colossal writes, “such as ecology, phylum, and stem cell.” That’s an impressive resume, isn’t it? Oh, and check out his art—his brilliantly colored, elegantly rendered, highly stylized depictions of “far flung flora and fauna,” of microbes and natural patterns, in designs that inspired the Art Nouveau movement. “Each organism Haeckel drew has an almost abstract form,” notes Katherine Schwab at Fast Co. Design, “as if it’s a whimsical fantasy he dreamed up rather than a real creature he examined under a microscope. His drawings of sponges reveal their intensely geometric structure—they look architectural, like feats of engineering.”
Haeckel published 100 fabulous prints beginning in 1889 in a series of ten books called Kunstformen der Natur (“Art Forms in Nature”), collected in two volumes in 1904. The astonishing work was “not just a book of illustrations but also the summation of his view of the world,” one which embraced the new science of Darwinian evolution wholeheartedly, writes scholar Olaf Breidbach in his 2006 Visions of Nature.
Haeckel’s method was a holistic one, in which art, science, and philosophy were complementary approaches to the same subject. He “sought to secure the attention of those with an interest in the beauties of nature,” writes professor of zoology Rainer Willmann in a book from Taschen called The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel, “and to emphasize, through this rare instance of the interplay of science and aesthetics, the proximity of these two realms.”
The gorgeous Taschen book includes 450 of Haeckel’s drawings, watercolors, and sketches, spread across 704 pages, and it’s expensive. But you can see all 100 of Haeckel’s originally published prints in zoomable high-resolution scans here. Or purchase a one-volume reprint of the original Art Forms in Nature, with its 100 glorious prints, through this Dover publication, which describes Haeckel’s art as “having caused the acceptance of Darwinism in Europe…. Today, although no one is greatly interested in Haeckel the biologist-philosopher, his work is increasingly prized for something he himself would probably have considered secondary.” It’s a shame his scientific legacy lies neglected, if that’s so, but it surely lives on through his art, which may be just as needed now to illustrate the wonders of evolutionary biology and the natural world as it was in Haeckel’s time.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
There is a well-known scene in Woody Allen’s Take The Money And Run (1969) when Virgil Starkwell (Allen) takes a psychological test to join the Navy, but is thwarted by his lascivious unconscious. The psychological measure that proves to be Starkwell’s undoing—rejected, he turns to a life of crime—is the Rorschach inkblot test, devised a century ago by Carl Jung’s compatriot and fellow psychologist, Hermann Rorschach. Although Rorschach would die young, at 37, his namesake remains embedded in our perception of psychology, alongside Freud’s couch and Pavlov’s dog.
Hermann Rorschach’s father was an art teacher, and encouraged his son to express himself. Whether the young Rorschach had innate artistic leanings, or had begun to listen to his father more closely after the death of his mother at age 12, is uncertain. What is known, however, is that Hermann became so fascinated with making pictures out of inkblots—a Swiss game known under the delightful designation of Klecksography—that his schoolmates gave him the nickname of Klecks.
Although he struggled to choose between art and science as a career, Rorschach, on the counsel of eminent German biologist and ardent Darwin supporter Ernst Haeckel, chose medicine, specializing in psychology. Still, he never abandoned art.
Even before the young Rorschach began to study psychology, the medical profession had flirted with imagery association. In 1857, a German doctor named Justinus Kerner published a book of poetry, with each poem inspired by an accompanying inkblot. Alfred Binet, the father of intelligence testing, also tinkered with inkblots at the outset of the 20th century, seeing them as a potential measure of creativity. While the claim that Rorschach was familiar with these particular inkblots rests on conjecture, we know that he was familiar with the work of Szymon Hens, an early psychologist who explored his patients’ fantasies using inkblots, as well as Carl Jung’s practice of having his patients engage in word-association.
After noticing that schizophrenic patients associated vastly different things with inkblots than other patients, Rorschach, following some experimentation, created the first version of the inkblot test as a measure of schizophrenia in 1921. The test, however, only came to be used as a form of personality assessment when Samuel Beck and Bruno Klopfer expanded its original scope in the late 1930s. Since then, psychologists have frequently used the various aspects of people’s responses (e.g., inkblot focus area) to make judgment calls about broad personality traits. Ironically, Rorschach himself had been skeptical about the inkblots’ value in assessing personality.
In honor of Rorschach’s birthday (he was born on this day in 1884), we’ve highlighted his original images below, as well as some of the most popular responses. If you see something else in these images, feel free to let us know in the comments section below. The images, we should note, are in the public domain, and otherwise readily viewable on Wikipedia. And, according to Wikimedia Commons, the images are in the public domain.
Image 1: Bat, butterfly, moth
Image 2: Two humans
Image 3: Two humans
Image 4: Animal hide, skin, rug
Image 5: Bat, butterfly, moth
Image 6: Animal hide, skin, rug
Image 7: Human heads or faces
Image 8: Animal; not cat or dog
Image 9: Human
Image 10: Crab, lobster, spider,
Happen to see an elephant and a men’s glee club engaged in unmentionable acts? Don’t fret—you’ve likely projected nothing intelligible. The test has long been out of date, and is deemed neither reliable nor valid in the vast majority of cases (although an updated version exists, it suffers from similar methodological flaws). Virgil Starkwell, it seems, would have made a fine Navy officer.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture writer. Follow him at@iliablinderman
The Carnegie Museum of Art’s chief conservator Ellen Baxter talks to the paintings she’s restoring.
“You have to … tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she says, above, spreading varnish over a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de’ Medici prior to starting the laborious process of restoring years of wear and tear by inpainting with tiny brushes, aided with pipettes of varnish and solvent.
Isabella had been waiting a long time for such tender attention, concealed beneath a 19th-century overpainting depicting a daintier featured woman reputed to be Eleanor of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the second Duke of Florence.
Louise Lippincott, the CMA’s former curator of fine arts, ran across the work in the museum’s basement storage. Records named the artist as Bronzino, court painter to Cosimo I, but Lippincott, who thought the painting “awful”, brought it to Ellen Baxter for a second opinion.
As Cristina Rouvalis writes in Carnegie Magazine, Baxter is a “rare mix of left- and right-brained talent”, a painter with a bachelor’s degree in art history, minors in chemistry and physics, and a master’s degree in art conservation:
(She) looks at paintings differently than other people, too—not as flat, static objects, but as three-dimensional compositions layered like lasagna.
The minute she saw the oil painting purported to be of Eleanor of Toledo… Baxter knew something wasn’t quite right. The face was too blandly pretty, “like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,” she says. Upon examining the back of the painting, she identified—thanks to a trusty Google search—the stamp of Francis Leedham, who worked at the National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s as a “reliner,” transferring paintings from a wood panel to canvas mount. The painstaking process involves scraping and sanding away the panel from back to front and then gluing the painted surface layer to a new canvas.
An x‑ray confirmed her hunch, revealing extra layers of paint in this “lasagna”.
Careful stripping of dirty varnish and Victorian paint in the areas of the portrait’s face and hands began to reveal the much stronger features of the woman who posed for the artist. (The Carnegie is banking on Bronzino’s student, Alessandro Allori, or someone in his circle.)
Lippincott was also busily sleuthing, finding a Medici-commissioned copy of the painting in Vienna that matched the dress and hair exactly. Thusly did she learn that the subject was Eleanor of Toledo’s daughter, Isabella de’ Medici, the apple of her father’s eye and a notorious, ultimately ill-fated party girl.
The History Blog paints an irresistible portrait of this maverick princess:
Cosimo gave her an exceptional amount of freedom for a noblewoman of her time. She ran her own household, and after Eleanor’s death in 1562, Isabella ran her father’s too. She threw famously raucous parties and spent lavishly. Her father always covered her debts and protected her from scrutiny even as rumors of her lovers and excesses that would have doomed other society women spread far and wide. Her favorite lover was said to be Troilo Orsini, her husband Paolo’s cousin.
Things went downhill fast for Isabella after her father’s death in 1574. Her brother Francesco was now the Grand Duke, and he had no interest in indulging his sister’s peccadilloes. We don’t know what happened exactly, but in 1576 Isabella died at the Medici Villa of Cerreto Guidi near Empoli. The official story released by Francesco was that his 34-year-old sister dropped dead suddenly while washing her hair. The unofficial story is that she was strangled by her husband out of revenge for her adultery and/or to clear the way for him to marry his own mistress Vittoria Accoramboni.
Baxter noted that the urn Isabella holds was not part of the painting to begin with, though neither was it one of Leedham’s revisions. Its resemblance to the urn that Mary Magdalene is often depicted using as she anoints Jesus’ feet led her and Lippincott to speculate that it was added at Isabella’s request, in an attempt to redeem her image.
“This is literally the bad girl seeing the light,” Lippincott told Rouvalis.
Despite her fondness for the subject of the liberated painting, and her considerable skill as an artist, Baxter resisted the temptation to embellish beyond what she found:
I’m not the artist. I’m the conservator. It’s my job to repair damages and losses, to not put myself in the painting.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2023.
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