When Our World Became a de Chirico Painting: How the Avant-Garde Painter Foresaw the Empty City Streets of 2020

This past spring, media out­lets of every kind pub­lished pho­tos and videos of eeri­ly emp­ty pub­lic spaces in cities like Bei­jing, New York, Milan, Paris, and Seoul, cities not known for their lack of street life. At least in the case of Seoul, where I live, the depop­u­lat­ed image was a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion, but tak­en as a whole, these stunned visu­al dis­patch­es from around the world reflect­ed a real and sud­den change in urban life caused by this year’s coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. They also got us think­ing, not just about our cities but about the built envi­ron­ment, and even human civ­i­liza­tion, in gen­er­al. Life, as often, had imi­tat­ed art: specif­i­cal­ly, it had imi­tat­ed the paint­ings of Gior­gio de Chiri­co, the founder of the Meta­phys­i­cal art move­ment.

“In 1909, de Chiri­co was sit­ting on a bench in the Piaz­za San­ta Croce in Flo­rence, recov­er­ing from an intesti­nal ill­ness, when all of a sud­den he had a pro­found expe­ri­ence.” So says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his new video essay “When the World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing.”

As the artist him­self lat­er remem­bered it a few years lat­er, “The whole world, down to the mar­ble of the build­ings and foun­tains, seemed to me to be con­va­les­cent.” There fol­lowed the paint­ing The Enig­ma of an Autumn After­noon, depict­ing a hol­lowed-out Piaz­za San­ta Croce, its stat­ue of Dante now head­less. “This and all the plazas in his Meta­phys­i­cal Town Square series are sim­pli­fied, emp­ty, cut with dra­mat­ic shad­ows.”

Sel­dom does a human being — that is, a human being not made of stone — appear in de Chiri­co’s Meta­phys­i­cal Town Squares. But he does include the occa­sion­al train in the dis­tance, usu­al­ly with a bil­low­ing smoke­stack. This sug­gests that, though life in the fore­ground seems to have stopped indef­i­nite­ly, moder­ni­ty con­tin­ues apace in the back­ground. To many of us, the vague dis­ori­en­ta­tion this caus­es now feels almost nor­mal, as does the sen­sa­tion of see­ing famil­iar places made unfa­mil­iar. In 2020, Puschak says, “cities and towns became immense muse­ums of strange­ness, and it was pos­si­ble to see what we built through alien eyes.” For more than a cen­tu­ry, De Chiri­co’s paint­ings have, on a much small­er scale, pre­sent­ed us the same oppor­tu­ni­ty for reflec­tion. But among oth­er things we’ve learned this year, nobody wants to live in a De Chiri­co for long.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Web Cams of Sur­re­al­ly Emp­ty City Streets in Venice, New York, Lon­don & Beyond

How To Under­stand a Picas­so Paint­ing: A Video Primer

A Quick Six Minute Jour­ney Through Mod­ern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Paint­ing, “The Lun­cheon on the Grass,” to Jack­son Pol­lock 1950s Drip Paint­ings

2,000+ Impres­sion­ist, Post-impres­sion­ist & Ear­ly Mod­ern Paint­ings Now Free Online, Thanks to the Barnes Foun­da­tion

The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Puts Online 75,000 Works of Mod­ern 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

How Jan van Eyck’s Masterpiece, the Ghent Altarpiece, Became the Most Stolen Work of Art in History

It’s a lit­tle mirac­u­lous that so much Euro­pean art and archi­tec­ture sur­vives, giv­en how often the con­ti­nent has erupt­ed into wars that burned down near­ly every­thing else. The Ghent Altar­piece, or Ado­ra­tion of the Lamb, may be the most famous case in point. It is also, by far, the most stolen work of art in his­to­ry, the vic­tim of 13 dif­fer­ent crimes over the past 600 years. Com­plet­ed in 1432 by Flem­ish painter Jan van Eyck, and con­sid­ered one of the world’s great­est trea­sures, the huge, mul­ti-pan­eled paint­ing (a polyp­tych) has weath­ered it all.

The altar­piece has “almost been destroyed in a fire,” Noah Char­ney writes at The Guardian, “was near­ly burned by riot­ing Calvin­ists, it’s been forged, pil­laged, dis­mem­bered, cen­sored, stolen by Napoleon, hunt­ed in the first world war, sold by a rene­gade cler­ic, then stolen repeat­ed­ly dur­ing the sec­ond world war…. Göring want­ed it for his pri­vate col­lec­tion, Hitler as the cen­tre­piece of his city­wide super-muse­um.”

In the short TED-Ed les­son above, Char­ney, author of the book Steal­ing the Mys­tic Lamb: The True Sto­ry of the World’s Most Cov­et­ed Mas­ter­piece, sketch­es the his­to­ry of the final theft in 1934 by the Nazis of a low­er pan­el that has nev­er been recov­ered. “This may sound very sil­ly,” Char­ney tells NPR, “but in fact, the Nazis and Hitler in par­tic­u­lar were absolute­ly con­vinced that the occult and the super­nat­ur­al was real.” They thought of the Ghent altar­piece as a map to the relics of Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion.

The case of the miss­ing pan­el remains open to this day “and new leads are fol­lowed all the time,” Char­ney writes. It is a sto­ry full of “many bizarre twists,” and just one of many in the altarpiece’s long his­to­ry. But why? What is it about the Ghent Altar­piece, besides occult fas­ci­na­tion, that has drawn so much unwant­ed atten­tion? Eleven feet high by 15 feet wide and made up of 24 pan­els (orig­i­nal­ly), the work “rede­fined art and became instant­ly famous,” notes New Statesman’s Michael Prodger. In his mas­ter­piece, Jan van Eyck, who took over for his old­er broth­er Hubert, “cre­at­ed a series of firsts in art.”

The Ghent altar­piece is “the first real­is­tic inte­ri­or, the first gen­uine land­scape, the first prop­er cityscape, the first tan­gi­ble nudes, the first life­like Renais­sance por­traits. [Van Eyck took oil paint to unprece­dent­ed lev­els of sophistication—with glazes and trans­par­ent lay­ers giv­ing depth and undreamed of effects of light—to match his preter­nat­ur­al pow­ers of obser­va­tion.” In the video series above and below by art his­to­ri­ans Beth Har­ris and Steven Zuck­er, you can learn much more about the qual­i­ties that have made the Ghent Altar­piece irre­sistible.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Lis­ten to Last Seen, a True-Crime Pod­cast That Takes You Inside an Unsolved, $500 Mil­lion Art Heist

Anato­my of a Fake: Forgery Experts Reveal 5 Ways To Spot a Fake Paint­ing by Jack­son Pol­lock (or Any Oth­er Artist)

Meet Noto­ri­ous Art Forg­er Han Van Meegeren, Who Fooled the Nazis with His Coun­ter­feit Ver­meers

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Why Is Napoleon’s Hand Always in His Waistcoat?: The Origins of This Distinctive Pose Explained

If the name of Napoleon Bona­parte should come up in a game of cha­rades, we all know what to do: stand up with one foot in front of the oth­er, stick a hand into our shirt, and con­sid­er the round won. Yet the recog­ni­tion of this pose as dis­tinc­tive­ly Napoleon­ic may not be as wide as we assume, or so Cole­man Lown­des dis­cov­ered in the research for the video above, “Napoleon’s Miss­ing Hand, Explained.” Asked to act out the image of Napoleon, not all of Lown­des col­leagues at Vox tried to evoke his hand in his waist­coat, opt­ing instead for grand pos­tur­ing and an approx­i­ma­tion of the (prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal) mod­est stature for which that pos­tur­ing sup­pos­ed­ly com­pen­sat­ed. Yet enough of us still pic­ture Napoleon hand-in-waist­coat that we might well won­der: how did that image take shape in the first place?

Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the most famous states­man in all French his­to­ry, from paint­ings made in his life time to Bill and Ted’s Excel­lent Adven­ture, include count­less exam­ples of the pose. This has giv­en rise to bod­i­ly-ori­ent­ed spec­u­la­tions — a man­u­al defor­mi­ty, inter­nal organs pained by the can­cer that killed him — but the form came with his­tor­i­cal prece­dent.

“Con­ceal­ing a hand in one’s coat was a por­trai­ture cliche long before Napoleon was paint­ed that way in the ear­ly 1800s,” says Lown­des, in ref­er­ence to Jacques-Louis David’s The Emper­or Napoleon in His Study at the Tui­leries, a por­trait defin­i­tive enough to head up Napoleon’s Wikipedia entry. Nota­bles pre­vi­ous­ly depict­ed with one con­spic­u­ous­ly hid­den hand include George Wash­ing­ton, Mozart, and Fran­cis­co Pizarro.

Even ancient Greek ora­tor Aeschines “claimed that restrict­ing the move­ment of one hand was the prop­er way to speak in pub­lic.” Accord­ing to one 18th-cen­tu­ry British eti­quette guide, “keep­ing a hand in one’s coat was key to pos­tur­ing one­self with man­ly bold­ness, tem­pered with becom­ing mod­esty.” It even­tu­al­ly became com­mon enough to lose its high sta­tus, until David cap­tured Napoleon’s use of it in his mas­ter­ly pro­pa­gan­dis­tic por­trait. But the extent we think of Napoleon keep­ing a hand per­pet­u­al­ly in his waist­coat today sure­ly owes much to the many car­i­ca­tur­ists and par­o­dy artists who took up the trope, includ­ing Char­lie Chap­lin — who, after try­ing a mus­tache and bowler hat for a role, knew what it was to be turned icon­ic by a seem­ing­ly minor styl­is­tic choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Napoleon’s Eng­lish Lessons: How the Mil­i­tary Leader Stud­ied Eng­lish to Escape the Bore­dom of Life in Exile

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

The Face of Bill Mur­ray Adds Some Joy to Clas­sic Paint­ings

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Hokusai’s Iconic Print, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

For those with the time, skill, and dri­ve, LEGO is the per­fect medi­um for wild­ly impres­sive recre­ations of icon­ic struc­tures, like the Taj MahalEif­fel Tow­er, the Titan­ic and now the Roman Colos­se­um.

But water? A wave?

And not just any wave, but Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s cel­e­brat­ed 19th-cen­tu­ry wood­block print, The Great Wave off Kana­gawa.

As Open Culture’s Col­in Mar­shall point­ed out ear­li­er, you might not know the title, but the image is instant­ly rec­og­niz­able.

Artist Jumpei Mit­sui, the world’s youngest LEGO Cer­ti­fied Pro­fes­sion­al, was unde­terred by the thought of tack­ling such a dynam­ic and well known sub­ject.

While oth­er LEGO enthu­si­asts have cre­at­ed excel­lent fac­sim­i­les of famous art­works, doing jus­tice to the curves and implied motion of The Great Wave seems a near­ly impos­si­ble feat.

Hav­ing spent his child­hood in a house by the sea, waves are a famil­iar pres­ence to Mit­sui. To get a bet­ter sense of how they work, he read sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic papers and spent four hours study­ing wave videos on YouTube.

He made only one prepara­to­ry sketch before begin­ning the build, an effort that required 50,000 some LEGO pieces.

His biggest hur­dle was choos­ing which col­or bricks to use in the area indi­cat­ed by the red arrow in the pho­to below. Hoku­sai had tak­en advan­tage of the new­ly afford­able Berlin blue pig­ment in the orig­i­nal.

Mit­sui tweet­ed:

I tried a total of 7 col­ors includ­ing trans­par­ent parts, but in the end, I adopt­ed the same blue col­or as the waves. If you use oth­er col­ors, the lines will be overem­pha­sized and unnat­ur­al, but if you use blue, the shade will be cre­at­ed just by adjust­ing the light, and the nat­ur­al lines will appear nice­ly. It can be said that it was pos­si­ble because it was made three-dimen­sion­al.

Jumpei Mitsui’s wave is now on per­ma­nent view at Osaka’s Han­kyu Brick Muse­um.

via Spoon and Tam­a­go and Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Set

With 9,036 Pieces, the Roman Colos­se­um Is the Largest Lego Set Ever

Why Did LEGO Become a Media Empire? Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #37

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Salman Rushdie and Jeff Koons Teach New Courses on Art, Creativity & Storytelling for MasterClass

If Mas­ter­Class comes call­ing, you know you’ve made it. In the five years since its launch, the online learn­ing plat­form has brought on such instruc­tors as Mar­tin Scors­ese, Helen Mir­ren, Steve Mar­tin, Annie Lei­bovitz, and Mal­colm Glad­well, all of whom bring not just knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of a craft, but the glow of high-pro­file suc­cess as well. Though Mas­ter­Class’ line­up has expand­ed to include more writ­ers, film­mak­ers, and per­form­ers (as well as chefs, design­ers, CEOs, and pok­er play­ers) it’s long been light on visu­al artists. But it may sig­nal a change that the site has just released a course taught by Jeff Koons, pro­mot­ed by its trail­er as the most orig­i­nal and con­tro­ver­sial Amer­i­can artist — as well as the most expen­sive one.

Just last year, Koons’ sculp­ture Rab­bit set a new record auc­tion price for a work by a liv­ing artist: $91.1 mil­lion, which breaks the pre­vi­ous record of $58.4 mil­lion that hap­pened to be held by anoth­er Koons, Bal­loon Dog (Orange). This came as the cul­mi­na­tion of a career that began, writes crit­ic Blake Gop­nik, with “tak­ing store-bought vac­u­um clean­ers and pre­sent­ing them as sculp­ture,” then cre­at­ing  “full-size repli­cas of rub­ber dinghies and aqualungs, cast in Old Mas­ter-ish bronze” and lat­er “giant hard-core pho­tos of him­self hav­ing sex with his wife, the famous Ital­ian porn star known as La Cic­ci­oli­na (“Chub­by Chick”)” and “sim­u­lacra of shiny blow-up toys and Christ­mas orna­ments and gems, enlarged to mon­u­men­tal size in gleam­ing stain­less steel.”

With such work, Gop­nik argues, Koons has “rewrit­ten all the rules of art — all the tra­di­tions and con­ven­tions that usu­al­ly give art order and mean­ing”; his ele­va­tion of kitsch allows us to “see our world, and art, as pro­found­ly oth­er than it usu­al­ly is.” Not that the artist him­self puts it in quite those words. In his well-known man­ner — “like a space alien who has spent long years study­ing how to be the per­fect, harm­less Earth­ling, but can’t quite get it right” — Koons uses his Mas­ter­Class to tell the sto­ry of his artis­tic devel­op­ment, which began in the show­room of his father’s Penn­syl­va­nia fur­ni­ture store and con­tin­ued into a rev­er­ence for the avant-garde in gen­er­al and Sal­vador Dalí in par­tic­u­lar. From his life he draws lessons on turn­ing every­day objects into art, using size and scale, and liv­ing life with “the con­fi­dence in your­self to fol­low your inter­ests.”

Also new for this hol­i­day sea­son is a Mas­ter­Class on sto­ry­telling and writ­ing taught by no less renowned a sto­ry­teller and writer than Salman Rushdie. The author of Mid­night’s Chil­dren and The Satan­ic Vers­es thus joins on the site a group of nov­el­ists as var­ied as Neil Gaiman, Joyce Car­ol Oates, Dan Brown, Mar­garet Atwood, and Judy Blume, but he brings with him a much dif­fer­ent body of work and life sto­ry. “I’ve been writ­ing, now, for over 50 years,” he says in the course’s trail­er just above. “There’s all this stuff about three-act struc­ture, exact­ly how you must allow a sto­ry to unfold. My view is it’s all non­sense.” Indeed, by this point in his cel­e­brat­ed career, Rushdie has nar­rowed the rules of his craft down to just one: Be inter­est­ing.

Eas­i­er said than done, of course, which is why Rushdie’s Mas­ter­Class comes struc­tured in nine­teen prac­ti­cal­ly themed lessons. In these he deals with such lessons as build­ing a sto­ry’s struc­ture, open­ing with pow­er­ful lines, draw­ing from old sto­ry­telling tra­di­tions, and rewrit­ing — which, he argues, all writ­ing is. To make these fic­tion-writ­ing con­cepts con­crete, Rushdie offers exer­cis­es for you, the stu­dent, to work through, and he also takes a crit­i­cal look back at the failed work he pro­duced in his ear­ly twen­ties. But though his tech­niques and process have great­ly improved since then, his resolve to cre­ate, and to do so using his own dis­tinc­tive sets of inter­ests and expe­ri­ences, has wavered no less than Koons’. At the moment you can learn from both of them (and Mas­ter­Class’ 100+ oth­er instruc­tors) if you take advan­tage of Mas­ter­Class’ hol­i­day 2‑for‑1 deal. For $180, you can buy an annu­al sub­scrip­tion for your­self, and give one to a friend/family mem­ber for free. Sign up here.

Note: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Artist Jeff Koons, Nar­rat­ed by Scar­lett Johans­son

Christo­pher Hitchens Remem­bers Aya­tol­lah Khomeini’s Fat­wa Against His Friend Salman Rushdie, 2010

Hear Salman Rushdie Read Don­ald Barthelme’s “Con­cern­ing the Body­guard”

Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap

Neil Gaiman Teach­es the Art of Sto­ry­telling in His New Online Course

Mar­garet Atwood Offers a New Online Class on Cre­ative Writ­ing

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Get Inside the Head of a New York City Christmas Tree: A Gonzo Short Film from Artist Nina Katchadourian

For every year this Christ­mas tree

Brings to us such joy and glee

O Christ­mas tree, O Christ­mas tree

Such plea­sure do you bring me…

All over New York City, tree stands are spring­ing up like mush­rooms.

Unlike the fan­ci­ful win­dows lin­ing 5th avenue, the Union Square hol­i­day mar­ket, or Rock­e­feller Center’s tree and skat­ing rink, this sea­son­al plea­sure requires no spe­cial trip, no threat of crowds.

You could bat­tle traf­fic, and lose half a day, drag­ging the kids to a cut-your-own farm on Long Island or in New Jer­sey, but why, when the side­walk stands are so fes­tive, so con­ve­nient, so quin­tes­sen­tial­ly New York?

The ven­dors hail from as far away as Ver­mont and Cana­da, shiv­er­ing in lawn chairs and mobile homes 24–7.

What befalls the unsold trees on Christ­mas Eve?

No one knows. They van­ish along with the ven­dors by Christ­mas morn­ing.

The spon­ta­neous coop­er­a­tion of two such ven­dors was crit­i­cal to artist Nina Katchadourian’s “Tree Shove,” above.

Katchadouri­an, who may look famil­iar to you from Lava­to­ry Self-Por­traits in the Flem­ish Style, recalls:

My friend Andrew had been hear­ing me say for years that I want­ed to be shoved through one of those things and he found two friend­ly Cana­di­ans sell­ing Christ­mas trees in a Brook­lyn super­mar­ket park­ing lot and worked it out with them.

The result is high­ly acces­si­ble, gonzo per­for­mance art from an artist who always lets the pub­lic in on the joke.

Add it to your annu­al hol­i­day spe­cial playlist.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Artist Nina Katchadouri­an Cre­ates Flem­ish Style Self-Por­traits in Air­plane Lava­to­ry

Watch The Insects’ Christ­mas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Star­ring a Cast of Dead Bugs

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed Christ­mas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hall­mark (1960)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

David Byrne Turns His Acclaimed Musical American Utopia into a Picture Book for Grown-Ups, with Vivid Illustrations by Maira Kalman

What­ev­er your feel­ings about the sen­ti­men­tal, light­heart­ed 1960 Dis­ney film Pollyan­na, or the 1913 nov­el on which it’s based, it’s fair to say that his­to­ry has pro­nounced its own judg­ment, turn­ing the name Pollyan­na into a slur against exces­sive opti­mism, an epi­thet reserved for adults who dis­play the guile­less, out-of-touch naïveté of chil­dren. Pit­ted against Pollyanna’s effer­ves­cence is Aunt Pol­ly, too caught up in her grown-up con­cerns to rec­og­nize, until it’s almost too late, that maybe it’s okay to be hap­py.

Maybe we all have to be a lit­tle like prac­ti­cal Aunt Pol­ly, but do we also have a place for Pollyan­nas? Can that not also be the role of the mod­ern artist? David Byrne hasn’t been wait­ing for per­mis­sion to spread joy in his late career. Con­tra the com­mon wis­dom of most adults, a cou­ple years back Byrne began to gath­er pos­i­tive news sto­ries under the head­ing Rea­sons to Be Cheer­fulnow an online mag­a­zine.

Then, Byrne had the audac­i­ty to call a 2018 album, tour, and Broad­way show Amer­i­can Utopia, and the gall to have Spike Lee direct a con­cert film with the same title, and release it smack in the mid­dle of 2020, a year all of us will be glad to see in hind­sight. Byrne’s two-year endeav­or can be seen as his answer to “Amer­i­can Car­nage,” the grim phrase that began the Trump era.

As if all that weren’t enough, Amer­i­can Utopia is now an “impres­sion­is­tic, sweet­ly illus­trat­ed adult pic­ture book,” as Lily Mey­er writes at NPR, “a sooth­ing and uplift­ing, if some­what neb­u­lous, expe­ri­ence of art.” Work­ing with artist Maira Kalman, Byrne has turned his con­cep­tu­al musi­cal into some­thing like a “book-length poem… filled with charm­ing illus­tra­tions of trees, dancers, and par­ty-hat­ted dogs.”

Byrne’s project is not naive, Maria Popo­va argues at Brain Pick­ings, it’s Whit­manesque, a sal­vo of irre­press­ible opti­mism against “a kind of pes­simistic ahis­tor­i­cal amne­sia” in which we “judge the defi­cien­cies of the present with­out the long vic­to­ry ledger of past and fall into despair.” Amer­i­can Utopia doesn’t artic­u­late this so much as per­form it, either with bare feet and gray suits onstage or the vivid col­ors of Kalman’s draw­ings, “light­ly at odds,” Mey­er notes, “with Byrne’s words, trans­form­ing their plain opti­mism into a more nuanced appeal.”

Amer­i­can Utopia the book, like the musi­cal before it, was writ­ten and drawn before the pan­dem­ic. Do Byrne and Kalman still have rea­sons to be cheer­ful post-COVID? Just last week, they sat down with Isaac Fitzger­ald for Live Talks LA to dis­cuss it. You can see the whole, hour-long con­ver­sa­tion just above. Kalman con­fess­es she’s still in “qui­et shock,” but finds hope in his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive and “incred­i­ble peo­ple out there doing fan­tas­tic things.”

Byrne takes us on one of his fas­ci­nat­ing inves­ti­ga­tions into the his­to­ry of thought, ref­er­enc­ing a the­o­rist named Aby War­burg who saw in the sum total of art a kind “ani­mat­ed life” that con­nects us, past, present, and future, and who remind­ed him, “Yes, there are oth­er ways of think­ing about things!” Per­haps the vision­ary and the Pollyan­naish need not be so far apart. See sev­er­al more of Kalman and Byrne’s beau­ti­ful­ly opti­mistic pages from Amer­i­can Utopia, the book, at Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

David Byrne’s Amer­i­can Utopia: A Sneak Pre­view of Spike Lee’s New Con­cert Film

David Byrne Launch­es Rea­sons to Be Cheer­ful, an Online Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Arti­cles by Byrne, Bri­an Eno & More

David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs Writ­ten Over the Past 60 Years: Stream Them Online

Watch Life-Affirm­ing Per­for­mances from David Byrne’s New Broad­way Musi­cal Amer­i­can Utopia

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Art of Movie Posters: View Online 40,000+ Movie Posters & Learn How They’re Made

If you can’t judge a movie by its poster, it’s not for the poster design­er’s lack of try­ing. Near­ly as ven­er­a­ble as cin­e­ma itself, the art of the movie poster has evolved to attract the atten­tion and inter­est of gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of film­go­ers — and, safe to say, devel­oped a few best prac­tices along the way. Some exam­ples go beyond effec­tive adver­tise­ment to become icons in and of them­selves: take for exam­ple, the poster for Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Pulp Fic­tion, designed by James Verdes­o­to. In the Van­i­ty Fair video above, Verdes­o­to draws on a vari­ety of “one-sheets” in order to explain a few of the tricks of the trade.


Like any cul­tur­al arti­fact, movie posters are sub­ject to trend and fash­ion. It just hap­pens that trends and fash­ions in movie poster design can last for decades, with each revival bring­ing an under­ly­ing aes­thet­ic con­cept back into the zeit­geist in a new way. Sure­ly you’ll recall a few years, not long ago, when every major com­e­dy seemed to stamp bold red text on a pure white back­ground: Amer­i­can Pie, the remakes of Cheap­er by the Dozen, and The Heart­break Kid, even the likes of Nor­bit.

This has been going on at least since the 1980s, as Verdes­o­to shows by pulling out the poster for John Hugh­es’ beloved Planes, Trains, and Auto­mo­biles, then com­par­ing it to the con­cep­tu­al­ly sim­i­lar one for Meet the Par­ents to note dif­fer­ences in the use of fonts, pho­tographs, and neg­a­tive space.

Since The Firm, thrillers have often been sig­naled with hunt­ed-look­ing men run­ning down blue-toned cor­ri­dors or streets, often in sil­hou­ette; a great many explo­sive action movies since Die Hard have gone in for black-and-white posters that empha­size slash­es of red or orange. Even the non-genre of “inde­pen­dent films,” often mod­est of mar­ket­ing bud­get, have their own col­or: canary yel­low “a cheap way to catch the eye.” Case in point: Vin­cent Gal­lo’s The Brown Bun­ny, a noto­ri­ous film that also hap­pened to come with one of the most mem­o­rable posters of the 2000s, due not just to its yel­low back­ground but because its con­scious ref­er­ence to Euro­pean designs of the 1950s and 60s, such as the one for Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nion­i’s Blow-Up.

You can behold (and in some cas­es even down­load) count­less many works of movie-poster art, from a vari­ety of decades and a vari­ety of nations, at the sites of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter and the New York movie poster gallery Pos­ter­i­tati. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve also fea­tured Taschen’s book of dynam­ic movie posters of the Russ­ian avant-garde, online archives of the famous­ly artis­tic movie posters of Poland and Czecho­slo­va­kia, not to men­tion com­pelling­ly odd hand-paint­ed movie posters from Ghana. Spend enough time with all of them, and you may find your­self pos­sessed of enough of an intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in this thor­ough­ly mod­ern art form to start invest­ing in a gen­uine col­lec­tion of your own. But no mat­ter your enthu­si­asm for movie posters, it’ll be a while before you catch up with Mar­tin Scors­ese.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

50 Film Posters From Poland: From The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark

An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czecho­slo­va­kia (1930–1989)

Graph­ic Design­er Redesigns a Movie Poster Every Day, for One Year: Scar­face, Mul­hol­land Dr., The Grad­u­ate, Ver­ti­go, The Life Aquat­ic and 360 More

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed Exclu­sive­ly to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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