Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel back in time and look over the shoulder of one of the early 20th century’s greatest artists to watch him work? In this brief film from 1926, we get to see the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky as he turns a blank canvas into one of his distinctive abstract compositions.
The film was made at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf in Berlin by Hans Cürlis, a pioneer in the making of art documentaries. At the time, Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus. It was the same year he published his second major treatise, On Point and Line to Plane. The contrasting straight lines and curves that Kandinsky paints in the movie are typical of this period, when his approach was becoming less intuitive and more consciously geometric.
Kandinsky believed that an artist could reach deeper truths by dispensing with the depiction of external objects and by looking within, and despite his analytic turn at the Bauhaus he continued to speak of art in deeply mystical terms. In On Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky writes:
The work of Art mirrors itself upon the surface of our consciousness. However, its image extends beyond, to vanish from the surface without a trace when the sensation has subsided. A certain transparent, but defininite glass-like partition, abolishing direct contact from within, seems to exist here as well. Here, too, exists the possibility of entering art’s message, to participate actively, and to experience its pulsating life with all one’s senses.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.
In a way, it always made sense that one of the most memorable visual distillations of Southern California life would have been painted by an Englishman. The purest appreciation for the wide-open lifestyle choices, freestyle built environment, unrepentant private wealth, and high-wattage sunshine of Los Angeles — especially as it was exaggerated, and indeed mythologized, in mid-twentieth century popular culture — could only be felt by someone from an infinitely more traditional, straitened, and damp part of the world. David Hockney, who died last week, wasn’t just an Englishman but a northern Englishman, who would have grown up surrounded by the kind of attitudes satirized in the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch made famous by Monty Python. Little wonder he fell in love with the newest city of the New World.
Hockney gave that many artistic forms over decades of his long life and career. Practically anyone who knows his name can recognize A Bigger Splash, from 1967, a both idyllic and faintly eerie depiction of someone having just plunged into the swimming pool behind what now looks like a classic “midcentury modern” home accented with palm trees.
But fewer can call to mind the works from which it evolved, A Little Splash and The Splash, both of which Hockney painted the previous year; all together, they constitute a series originally inspired by a photograph on the cover of a swimming-pool maintenance guide from the late fifties. You can see the three paintings put in context in the Sotheby’s video at the top of the post, which reveals how Hockney’s image grew more abstracted, and more Los Angelized, with each iteration.
When it came time to paint the third version, Hockney first built up its arrangement of house, pool, diving board, and sky with blocks of flat (if characteristically bright) color. He then gradually nudged these shapes toward representation by adding detail. Discussing the making of the painting later in life, he liked to mention how much time he spent on the splash alone: a full week, at least, to render an event that lasts no longer than a second or two. There would be more Hockney swimming pools, each evocative in its own way, none more expensive than the nearly photorealistic Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), from 1971, which went for $90.3 million at Christie’s in 2018. But it was only A Bigger Splash that went on to adorn the cover of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, still one of the most perceptive books about that city — and one written, naturally, by another besotted Brit.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
If you’ve taken a good art history course on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, you’ve inevitably encountered Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece “Starry Night,” which now hangs in the MoMA in New York City. The painting, the museum writes on its website, “is a symbolic landscape full of movement, energy, and light. The quietness of the village contrasts with the swirling energy of the sky.… Van Gogh’s impasto technique, or thickly applied colors, creates a rhythmic effect—the picture seems to constantly move in its frame.” Artistically, van Gogh managed to capture movement in a way that no artist had ever quite done it before. Scientifically, it turns out, he was on to something too. Just watch the new TED-ED lesson above, The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
Created by math artist/teacher Natalya St. Clair and animator Avi Ofer, the video explores how “Van Gogh captured [the] deep mystery of movement, fluid and light in his work,” and particularly managed to depict the elusive phenomenon known as turbulence. In Starry Night, the video observes, van Gogh depicted turbulence with a degree of sophistication and accuracy that rivals the way physicists and mathematicians have best explained turbulence in their own scientific papers. And, it all happened, perhaps by coincidence (?), during the turbulent last years of van Gogh’s life.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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The Tarot has long been a tool of charlatans. But it has also long been embraced by brilliant, unconventional thinkers, many of whom themselves have a touch of the charlatan about them (and who would just as likely admit it with a smile). William Butler Yeats was a fan, as is visionary Chilean filmmaker, artist, writer, and psychonaut Alejandro Jodorowsky, who has recorded his own Youtube series explaining his take on this classic mode of divination. With its archetypal symbolism, the Tarot’s appeal to artists should be obvious. Most of them, like Jodorowsky, find far more interesting uses for it than fortune-telling. “You must not talk about the future,” Jodorowsky tells us in his series, “the future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present.”
What might another visionary artist, Salvador Dalí, think of Jodorowsky’s Tarot interpretations? We’ll never know, but I suspect he would find them enchanting. Not only do the two seem like kindred spirits, but Dalí devoted some part of his life to the Tarot, designing his own deck in the 70s.
Initially, the project arrived as a commission from producer Albert Broccoli for the James Bond film Live and Let Die. “Likely inspired by his wife Gala, who nurtured his interest in mysticism,” writes Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, “Dalí eagerly got to work, and continued the project of his own accord when the contractual deal fell through.”
It was just around this time that the Tarot saw a massive resurgence in popularity. The occult interests of the 60s counterculture were mainstreamed in the 70s thanks to books like Stuart Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling. But while Dalí had channeled the vivid psychedelia of the age in an earlier illustration project, 1969’s Alice and Wonderland, his Tarot deck, writes Lisa Rainwater at Galo magazine, “actually shows reserve. Yes, reserve—as if his reverence for the tarot nearly humbles him.” His knack for “fanatical self-promotion” does get the better of him eventually: he chooses his own face to represent the Magician (above).
Overall, the deck combines the eclectic origins of occult practices with Dalí’s own unmistakable sensibility. Dalí’s Tarot is “a pastiche of old-world art, surrealism, kitsch, Christian iconography and Greek and Roman sculpture. Many of his recurring motifs such as the rose, the fly and the bull’s head are found throughout the deck.” First published in a limited edition in 1984—and reissued since in editions by TASCHEN and in book form by other publishers—the deck included an introductory booklet that reads, in Spanish, English, and French:
The Wizard (Arcanum I), Salvador Dalí, has transformed with his exceptional art and his marvelous talent the 78 golden plates of ‘The fabulous book of Thot’ into as many artistic marvels, each one of them duly signed by the hand of this unmatchable, internally famous painter … such an extraordinary artistic creation does not detract, in any way, from the Tarot’s close symbolism. On the contrary, it enhances with its captivating beauty, the Tarot’s esoteric and plastic meaning.
A difficult childhood and adolescence, saturated with the feeling of being an outsider, may or may not contribute to becoming a great artist. Experiencing the social and cultural ferment of Berlin and Paris in the nineteen-twenties probably wouldn’t hurt one’s chances. Nor, surely, would formative exposure in such cities to films like Metropolis, Battleship Potemkin, and Abel Gance’s Napoleon, as well as to the paintings of Pablo Picasso. Going to art school may seem like the natural choice for any aspiring artist, but there’s also something to be gained from avoiding that academic system entirely.
If you’ve seen that painting even once, you haven’t forgotten it, and indeed, you’ve probably seen it again in your nightmares since. To trace the source of its troubling power, Payne plunges into the history of Bacon’s harrowing life as well as that of the Irish, English, and European historical contexts in which he lived — often to its dangerous, chaotic fullest.
Not that any art historian can ignore the inspiration cited right there in the painting’s title. It is to that seventeenth-century Spaniard’s acclaimed portrait of that head of the Catholic Church (who pronounced the finished work “troppo vero”) that Bacon pays twisted, deconstructive homage. Yet despite having been to Rome, he never actually saw the original; that, as Payne explains, “would have meant facing its power directly.” Instead, he worked from a small, washed-out “copy of a copy,” all the better to allow for not just reinvention, but also the incorporation of other scraps of the rapidly expanding mass media of the twentieth century: the period, despite the out-of-time quality of so much of his art, to which Bacon so thoroughly belonged.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Though you may not hear it every day, chimera remains an evocative word, perhaps even more so for its rarity. It descends from the Greek Khimaira, literally “year-old she-goat,” the name of a mythical fire-breathing creature with a caprine body, sure enough, but also the head of a lion and the tail of a dragon. Today the word broadly refers to any compound, usually bizarre, of parts drawn from disparate sources, a usage that dates back to the Middle Ages. Look at the illuminated manuscripts from that time, and you’ll find chimeras aplenty, a host of beastly mash-ups that look evocatively funny enough to be converted straight into twenty-first-century internet memes — most of which appear to have originally been intended as depictions of real, individual animals.
The video above from Curious Archive presents a gallery of medieval chimeras both intended and not. These include spiked sea turtles, small tigers without stripes, hippopotamuses with dorsal fins, elephants with entire stone castles on their backs, hyenas that resemble carnivorous cows, ostriches eating iron horseshoes, and scorpions with mammalian faces.
Mistakes of this kind were perhaps inevitable, given the difficulty of coming by such exotic animals in medieval Europe, even for artists with access to a royal court. Most would have had to rely on word of mouth or depictions in the Bestiary, a text that functions as both “a natural history and a series of moral and religious lessons,” according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and also incorporated “tales about the existence of bizarre and loathsome creatures.”
As in so many domains of the pre-Enlightenment world, the real and the fantastical went together in a way we can have trouble understanding today. We aren’t always aware, for example, that the lore of the time tended to link the lion — an animal locally extinct since before the Middle Ages began — with Jesus Christ. Thus “the symbolic aspects of lions were therefore as important for the artists as their actual physical features,” writes Mental Floss’ Jane Alexander, and in any case, “medieval artists typically weren’t concerned with realism.” At Hyperallergic, Elaine Velie quotes the Met’s associate curator in the Department of Medieval Art Shirin Fozi as observing that, “very often, people think that they’re laughing at the Middle Ages, and they’re actually laughing with the Middle Ages.” It may surprise us to consider that our ancestors, too, had senses of humor — and that the cultural concept of the “funny animal” has been around much longer than we might have imagined.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
No art enthusiast’s visit to the United Kingdom would be complete without days at the British Museum, the Tate, the V&A and the National Gallery. The fact that all those respected institutions are in London constitutes a plausible excuse never to stray outside the capital. But that capital is surrounded, lest we forget, by not just a whole country, but a whole United Kingdom’s worth of countries. Each region of England has its own museums and galleries worth visiting, and so do Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But why just visit museums and galleries? Universities, libraries, town halls, hospitals, homes: these places and more also put art on display for anyone who cares to visit them, which you can now do not just physically, but also online at Art UK.
As even that short list reflects, what’s on digital display at Art UK is by no means limited to British works, nor are there any restrictions on medium or sensibility. Paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, digital art: if it’s held at a UK institution, it’s available for your viewing pleasure — or your education, your research, whatever your purpose may be.
A decade into Art UK’s evolution, one of the most fascinating sections of its digital holdings may hardly contain any work by artists whose names you’ve heard. That’s because it’s a collection of the UK’s murals and street art, whose digitization began in early 2024. “The project followed the successful, award-winning sculpture digitization and engagement project, which firmly established Art UK as the home for showcasing the UK’s public realm artworks,” writes photographer Tracy Jenkins. “We have now recorded over 6,600 murals, bringing the total number of public artworks on the website to 21,400.” Dating from 1000 AD to the present, these “include wall paintings in historic churches, post-war ceramic and concrete works, and contemporary painted murals and mosaics.” Collectively, they remind us that, in our haste to tour the most august temples of art, we ignore at our peril the museums without walls — or rather, the museums that are walls. Enter Art UK here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying.” Perhaps this is why American artists and bohemians have so often taken to the political iconography of far-flung regimes, in ways both romantic and ironic. One nation’s tedious socialist realism is another’s radical exotica.
But do U.S. cultural exports have the same effect? One need only look at the success of our most banal branding overseas to answer in the affirmative. Yet no one would think to add Abstract Expressionist painting to a list that includes fast food and Walt Disney products.
Nevertheless, the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning wound up as part of a secret CIA program during the height of the Cold War, aimed at promoting American ideals abroad.
The artists themselves were completely unaware that their work was being used as propaganda. On what agents called a “long leash,” they participated in several exhibitions secretly organized by the CIA, such as “The New American Painting” (see catalog cover at top), which visited major European cities in 1958–59 and included such modern primitive works as surrealist William Baziotes’ 1947 Dwarf (below) and 1951’s Tournament by Adolph Gottlieb above.
Of course what seems most bizarre about this turn of events is that avant-garde art in America has never been much appreciated by the average citizen, to put it mildly. American Main Streets harbor undercurrents of distrust or outright hatred for out-there, art-world experimentation, a trend that filters upward and periodically erupts in controversies over Congressional funding for the arts. A 1995 Independent article on the CIA’s role in promoting Abstract Expressionism describes these attitudes during the Cold War period:
In the 1950s and 1960s… the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art—President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why, then, did they receive such backing? One short answer:
This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy’s hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy.
The one-way relationship between modernist painters and the CIA—only recently confirmed by former case officer Donald Jameson—supposedly enabled the agency to make the work of Soviet Socialist Realists appear, in Jameson’s words, “even more stylized and more rigid and confined than it was.” (See Evdokiya Usikova’s 1959 Lenin with Villagers below, for example). For a longer explanation, read the full article at The Independent. It’s the kind of story Don DeLillo would cook up.
William Empson goes on to say that “a Tory audience subjected to Tory propaganda of the same intensity” as Russian imports, “would be extremely bored.” If he is correct, it’s likely that the average true believer socialist in Europe was already bored silly by Soviet-approved art. What surprises in these revelations is that the avant-garde works that so radically altered the American art world and enraged the average congressman and taxpayer were co-opted and collected by suave U.S. intelligence officers like so many Shepard Fairey posters.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
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