The Complete Works of Hilma af Klint Get Published for the First Time in a Beautiful, Seven-Volume Collection

in Art | February 24th, 2021

If you are a reg­u­lar Open Cul­ture read­er, you’ve prob­a­bly seen our many posts on Hilma af Klint, the Swedish abstract painter who might have been rec­og­nized, before Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, as the first 20th cen­tu­ry abstrac­tion­ist; that is, if she had shown any of her work before her death in obscu­ri­ty in 1944 (the same year that Kandin­sky died, it hap­pens). Instead, af Klint instruct­ed that her paint­ings not be exhib­it­ed until twen­ty years after her death. Then, anoth­er 22 years went by before any­one would see her enig­mat­ic can­vas­es. They first went on dis­play in a 1986 Los Ange­les show called, after Kandin­sky, “The Spir­i­tu­al in Art.”

Com­par­isons seem inevitable, but where the great Russ­ian abstrac­tion­ist the­o­rized about art and spir­it, af Klint encoun­tered it in per­son, she claimed in her Theo­soph­i­cal accounts, in which she writes of meet­ing five “high mas­ters” in a séance and receiv­ing instruc­tions for her new style. She was a chan­nel, a ves­sel, and a medi­um for the spir­its, as she saw it.

“The pic­tures were paint­ed direct­ly through me, with­out any pre­lim­i­nary draw­ings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paint­ings were sup­posed to depict; nev­er­the­less, I worked swift­ly and sure­ly, with­out chang­ing a sin­gle brush stroke.” She showed her paint­ings to occultist Rudolph Stein­er, who told her to hide them away for the next half cen­tu­ry. Dis­cour­aged she stopped paint­ing for four years.

“Af Klint spent her time tend­ing to her blind, dying moth­er,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds. “She then returned to paint­ing but kept her­self and more impor­tant­ly her work removed from the world.” She was not in con­ver­sa­tion with oth­er mod­ern artists. She was in con­ver­sa­tion with an unseen world, her own psy­che, and a small group of women with whom she reg­u­lar­ly con­duct­ed séances. Through­out her life, “the pro­lif­ic Swedish artist cre­at­ed more than 1,600 works,” Grace Ebert writes at Colos­sal, “an impres­sive out­put now col­lect­ed in Hilma AF Klint: The Com­plete Cat­a­logue Raison­né: Vol­umes I‑VII.”

The sev­en-vol­ume series, pub­lished by Bok­för­laget Stolpe, “is orga­nized both chrono­log­i­cal­ly and by theme, begin­ning with the spir­i­tu­al sketch­es af Klint made in con­junc­tion with The Five, a group of women who attend­ed séances in hopes of obtain­ing mes­sages from the dead.” “What makes [af Klint’s] art inter­est­ing,” says Daniel Birn­baum, co-edi­tor of the col­lec­tion, “is that the works are high­ly inter­con­nect­ed.” Such a com­pre­hen­sive account­ing, a “cat­a­logue raison­né,” is nec­es­sary “to see the dif­fer­ent cycles, motifs, and sym­bols that recur in a fas­ci­nat­ing way.”

We see such recur­ring pat­terns in the work of af Klint’s avant-garde con­tem­po­raries, as well, of course, espe­cial­ly in her very famous con­tem­po­rary Kandin­sky. But who knows how her eso­teric sources and extreme­ly retir­ing nature would have been received by the avant-garde move­ments of her time? Giv­en that even the most extro­vert­ed women artists in those movements—from Dada, to Sur­re­al­ism, to the Bauhaus School, to Abstract Expres­sion­ism—have been left out of the sto­ry time and again, it’s like­ly that even had the world known of Hilma af Klint in life, she would not have been appre­ci­at­ed or well-remem­bered.

But whether we cred­it the actions of “high mas­ters” or the arbi­trary asyn­chronies of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, it’s clear af Klint’s moment has final­ly arrived. For “the first time,” Art­net notes, her “daz­zling spir­i­tu­al oeu­vre…. will be pre­sent­ed in its total­i­ty.”

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Life & Art of Hilma Af Klint: A Short Art His­to­ry Les­son on the Pio­neer­ing Abstract Artist

New Hilma af Klint Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Life & Art of the Trail­blaz­ing Abstract Artist

Dis­cov­er Hilma af Klint: Pio­neer­ing Mys­ti­cal Painter and Per­haps the First Abstract Artist

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

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

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The Oldest Known Globe to Depict the New World Was Engraved on an Ostrich Egg, Maybe by Leonardo da Vinci (1504)

in Art, History, Maps | February 23rd, 2021

Image by Davidguam via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Every time you think you’ve got a han­dle on Leonar­do da Vinci’s genius (which is to say, you think you’ve heard about the most impor­tant things he paint­ed, wrote, and invent­ed), yet more evi­dence comes to light of the many ways he meets the stan­dard for the adjec­tive “genius”.… Recent­ly, Leonar­do re-appeared not only as an inven­tor of futur­is­tic mil­i­tary tech­nol­o­gy or dis­cov­er­er of com­plex human anato­my, but also as the first Euro­pean to depict the “New World” on a globe–proving he knew about Colum­bus’ voy­ages when the globe was made in 1504.

The dis­cov­ery “marks the first time ever that the names of coun­tries such as Brazil, Ger­ma­nia, Ara­bia and Judea have appeared on a globe,” notes Cam­bridge Schol­ars Pub­lish­ing, who released a book by the globe’s dis­cov­er­er and pri­ma­ry researcher, Ste­faan Missinne. The arti­fact attrib­uted to Leonar­do is engraved, “with immac­u­late detail,” writes Meeri Kim at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “on two con­joined halves of ostrich eggs.” And it fea­tures a sin­gle sen­tence, in Latin, above South­east Asia: Hic Sunt Dra­cones–“Here be drag­ons.”

We’ll notice oth­er unique fea­tures of the engraved egg Missinne calls, sim­ply, “the Da Vin­ci Globe,” such as the fact that in place of Cen­tral and North Amer­i­ca are the islands of Colum­bus’ “dis­cov­ery,” sur­round­ed by a vast ocean in which Pacif­ic and Atlantic join. Why ostrich eggs? Humans have used them for dec­o­ra­tive pur­pos­es for mil­len­nia. Also, “in that time peri­od,” says Thomas Sander, edi­tor of the Wash­ing­ton Map Society’s jour­nal, Por­tolan, “the ostrich was quite the ani­mal, and it was a big thing for the noble peo­ple to have ostrich­es in their back gar­dens.”

Missinne, a real estate devel­op­er, col­lec­tor, and globe expert orig­i­nal­ly from Bel­gium, dis­cov­ered the globe in 2012 at the Lon­don Map Fair. It was pur­chased “from a deal­er who said it had been part of an impor­tant Euro­pean col­lec­tion for decades,” and its buy­er and own­er remain anony­mous. After the globe appeared, Missinne “con­sult­ed more than 100 schol­ars and experts in his year-long analy­sis,” putting “about five years of research into one year,” says Sander, call­ing the research “an incred­i­ble detec­tive sto­ry.”

Missinne’s inves­ti­ga­tion seems to sub­stan­ti­ate his claims that the globe was made by Leonar­do or his work­shop. The evi­dence, some of which you can find on the Cam­bridge Schol­ars Pub­lish­ing site, includes a 1503 prepara­to­ry map in da Vinci’s papers; the pres­ence of arsenic, which only Leonar­do was known to use at the time in cop­per to keep it from los­ing its lus­tre; “The use of chiaroscuro, pen­ti­en­ti, tri­an­gu­lar shapes, the math­e­mat­ics of the scale reflect­ing Leonardo’s writ­ten dimen­sion of plan­et earth”; and a 1504 let­ter from Leonar­do him­self stat­ing, “my world globe I want returned back from my friend Gio­van­ni Ben­ci.”

Missinne and Geert Ver­ho­even, of the Lud­wig Boltz­mann Insti­tute for Archae­o­log­i­cal Prospec­tion & Vir­tu­al Arche­ol­o­gy, have pub­lished a paper on the “unfold­ing” of Leonardo’s globe into the two-dimen­sion­al image above (see an inter­ac­tive ver­sion here). “This minia­ture egg globe is not only the old­est extant engraved globe,” the authors write, “but it is also the old­est post-Columbian globe of the world and the first ever to depict New­found­land and many oth­er ter­ri­to­ries.” Pre­vi­ous­ly, the Hunt-Lenox Globe, a small cop­per globe, was thought to be the old­est known such arti­fact. Dat­ed to around 1510, this globe, Missinne dis­cov­ered, is actu­al­ly a copy made from a cast of the old­er, orig­i­nal ostrich-egg globe.

Missinne’s find­ings have their detrac­tors, includ­ing John W. Hessler of the Library of Con­gress, who claims Missinne him­self is the anony­mous own­er of the globe, which rais­es issues of con­flict of inter­est. “Where this thing comes from needs to be clar­i­fied,” says Renais­sance car­tog­ra­phy expert Chet Van Duzer of the John Carter Brown Library in Prov­i­dence, R.I., though he adds, “It is an excit­ing dis­cov­ery, no ques­tion.” Missinne’s claims for the egg’s prove­nance are more mod­est than his mar­ket­ing. He “spec­u­lates,” writes Kim, “ the egg could have loose con­nec­tions to the work­shop of Leonar­do da Vin­ci.” Hessler’s view is less equiv­o­cal: “The Leonar­do con­nec­tion is pure non­sense.”

A layper­son like Missinne, what­ev­er his per­son­al invest­ment, might be inclined to over­in­ter­pret evi­dence or make ten­u­ous con­nec­tions a trained schol­ar would avoid. The many schol­ars he cites in sup­port of his claims for the globe are also vul­ner­a­ble to these charges, how­ev­er, though to a less­er degree. What do we make of French Mona Lisa expert Pas­cal Cotte’s tes­ti­mo­ni­al, “I here­by con­firm the evi­dence of the left-hand­ed­ness of the engrav­ings on the Ostrich Egg Globe. As Leonar­do was the only left-hand­ed artist in his work­shop, I here­by endorse the hypoth­e­sis of Leonar­do da Vinci’s author­ship”? As in all such aca­d­e­m­ic debates, “Here be drag­ons.” Weigh the case in full in Missinne’s 2018 book, The Da Vin­ci Globe.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Stud­ies of the Human Heart Were 500 Years Ahead of Their Time

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

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

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4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

in Archives, Art, Books, History, Libraries, Literature | February 18th, 2021

The phrase “open­ing of Japan” is a euphemism that has out­lived its pur­pose, serv­ing to cloud rather than explain how a coun­try closed to out­siders sud­den­ly, in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, became a major influ­ence in art and design world­wide. Nego­ti­a­tions were car­ried out at gun­point. In 1853, Com­modore Matthew Per­ry pre­sent­ed the Japan­ese with two white flags to raise when they were ready to sur­ren­der. (The Japan­ese called Perry’s fleet the “black ships of evil men.”) In one of innu­mer­able his­tor­i­cal ironies, we have this ugli­ness to thank for the explo­sion of Impres­sion­ist art (van Gogh was obsessed with Japan­ese prints and owned a large col­lec­tion) as well as much of the beau­ty of Art Nou­veau and mod­ernist archi­tec­ture at the turn of the cen­tu­ry.

We may know ver­sions of this already, but we prob­a­bly don’t know it from a Japan­ese point of view. “As our glob­al soci­ety grows ever more con­nect­ed,” writes Katie Bar­rett at the Inter­net Archive blog, “it can be easy to assume that all of human his­to­ry is just one click away. Yet lan­guage bar­ri­ers and phys­i­cal access still present major obsta­cles to deep­er knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of oth­er cul­tures.”

Unless we can read Japan­ese, our under­stand­ing of its his­to­ry will always be informed by spe­cial­ist schol­ars and trans­la­tors. Now, at least, thanks to coop­er­a­tion between the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Gen­er­al Library and the Inter­net Archive, we can access thou­sands more pri­ma­ry sources pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able to “out­siders.”

“Since June 2020,” notes Bar­rett, “our Col­lec­tions team has worked in tan­dem with library staff to ingest thou­sands of dig­i­tal files from the Gen­er­al Library’s servers, map­ping the meta­da­ta for over 4,000 price­less scrolls, texts, and papers.” This mate­r­i­al has been dig­i­tized over decades by Japan­ese schol­ars and “show­cas­es hun­dreds of years of rich Japan­ese his­to­ry expressed through prose, poet­ry, and art­work.” It will be pri­mar­i­ly the art­work that con­cerns non-Japan­ese speak­ers, as it pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned 19th-cen­tu­ry Euro­peans and Amer­i­cans who first encoun­tered the country’s cul­tur­al prod­ucts. Art­work like the humor­ous print above. Bar­rett pro­vides con­text: 

In one satir­i­cal illus­tra­tion, thought to date from short­ly after the 1855 Edo earth­quake, cour­te­sans and oth­ers from the demi­monde, who suf­fered great­ly in the dis­as­ter, are shown beat­ing the giant cat­fish that was believed to cause earth­quakes. The men in the upper left-hand cor­ner rep­re­sent the con­struc­tion trades; they are try­ing to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuild­ing from earth­quakes was a prof­itable busi­ness for them.

There are many such depic­tions of “seis­mic destruc­tion” in ukiyo‑e prints dat­ing from the same peri­od and the lat­er Mino-Owari earth­quake of 1891: “They are a sober­ing reminder of the role that nat­ur­al dis­as­ters have played in Japan­ese life.” 

You can see many more dig­i­tized arti­facts, such as the charm­ing book of Japan­ese ephemera above, at the Inter­net Archive’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo col­lec­tion. Among the 4180 items cur­rent­ly avail­able, you’ll also find many Euro­pean prints and engrav­ings held in the library’s 25 col­lec­tions. All of this mate­r­i­al “can be used freely with­out pri­or per­mis­sion,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Library. “Among the high­lights,” Bar­rett writes, “are man­u­scripts and anno­tat­ed books from the per­son­al col­lec­tion of the nov­el­ist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an ear­ly man­u­script of the Tale of Gen­ji, [below] and a unique col­lec­tion of Chi­nese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.” Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Brought to Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

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

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Archaeologists Find the Earliest Work of “Abstract Art,” Dating Back 73,000 Years

in Art, History, Life | February 16th, 2021

Image by C. Fos­ter

Art, as we under­stand the term, is an activ­i­ty unique to homo sapi­ens and per­haps some of our ear­ly hominid cousins. This much we know. But the mat­ter of when ear­ly humans began mak­ing art is less cer­tain. Until recent­ly, it was thought that the ear­li­est pre­his­toric art dat­ed back some 40,000 years, to cave draw­ings found in Indone­sia and Spain. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, this is also when archae­ol­o­gists believed ear­ly humans mas­tered sym­bol­ic thought. New finds, how­ev­er, have shift­ed this date back con­sid­er­ably. “Recent dis­cov­er­ies around south­ern Africa indi­cate that by 64,000 years ago at the very least,” Ruth Schus­ter writes at Haaretz, “peo­ple had devel­oped a keen sense of abstrac­tion.”

Then came the “hash­tag” in 2018, a draw­ing in ochre on a tiny flake of stone that archae­ol­o­gists believe “may be the world’s old­est exam­ple of the ubiq­ui­tous cross-hatched pat­tern drawn on a sil­crete flake in the Blom­bos Cave in South Africa,” writes Krys­tal D’Costa at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, with the dis­claimer that the drawing’s cre­ators “did not attribute the same mean­ing or sig­nif­i­cance to [hash­tags] that we do.” The tiny arti­fact, thought to be around 73,000 years old, may have in fact been part of a much larg­er pat­tern that bore no resem­blance to any­thing hash­tag-like, which is only a con­ve­nient, if mis­lead­ing, way of nam­ing it.

The arti­fact was recov­ered from Blom­bos Cave in South Africa, a site that “has been under­go­ing exca­va­tion since 1991 with deposits that range from the Mid­dle Stone Age (about 100,000 to 72,000 years ago) to the Lat­er Stone Age (about 42,000 years ago to 2,000 years BCE).” These find­ings have been sig­nif­i­cant, show­ing a cul­ture that used heat to shape stones into tools and, just as artists in caves like Las­caux did, used ochre, a nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring pig­ment, to draw on stone. They made engrav­ings by etch­ing lines direct­ly into pieces of ochre. Archae­ol­o­gists also found in the Mid­dle Stone Age deposits “a toolk­it designed to cre­ate a pig­ment­ed com­pound that could be stored in abalone shells,” D’Costa notes.

Nicholas St. Fleur describes the tiny “hash­tag” in more detail at The New York Times as “a small flake, mea­sur­ing only about the size of two thumb­nails, that appeared to have been drawn on. The mark­ings con­sist­ed of six straight, almost par­al­lel lines that were crossed diag­o­nal­ly by three slight­ly curved lines.” Its dis­cov­er­er, Dr. Luca Pol­laro­lo of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Wit­wa­ter­srand in Johan­nes­burg, express­es his aston­ish­ment at find­ing it. “I think I saw more than ten thou­sand arti­facts in my life up to now,” he says, “and I nev­er saw red lines on a flake. I could not believe what I had in my hands.”

The evi­dence points to a very ear­ly form of abstract sym­bol­ism, researchers believe, and sim­i­lar pat­terns have been found else­where in the cave in lat­er arti­facts. Pro­fes­sor Francesco d’Errico of the French Nation­al Cen­ter for Sci­en­tif­ic Research tells Schus­ter, “this is what one would expect in tra­di­tion­al soci­ety where sym­bols are repro­duced…. This repro­duc­tion in dif­fer­ent con­texts sug­gests sym­bol­ism, some­thing in their minds, not just doo­dling.”

As for whether the draw­ing is “art”… well, we might as well try and resolve the ques­tion of what qual­i­fies as art in our own time. “Look at some of Picasso’s abstracts,” says Christo­pher Hen­shilwood, an archae­ol­o­gist from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen and the lead author of a study on the tiny arti­fact pub­lished in Nature in 2018. “Is that art? Who’s going to tell you it’s art or not?”

Researchers at least agree the mark­ings were delib­er­ate­ly made with some kind of imple­ment to form a pat­tern. But “we don’t know that it’s art at all,” says Hen­shilwood. “We know that it’s a sym­bol,” made for some pur­pose, and that it pre­dates the pre­vi­ous ear­li­est known cave art by some 30,000 years. That in itself shows “behav­ioral­ly mod­ern” human activ­i­ties, such as express­ing abstract thought in mate­r­i­al form, emerg­ing even clos­er to the evo­lu­tion­ary appear­ance of mod­ern humans on the scene.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear a Pre­his­toric Conch Shell Musi­cal Instru­ment Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years

A Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered 44,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing Tells the Old­est Known Sto­ry

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

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

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

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How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons

in Art, History, Photography | February 9th, 2021


More than 40 years after Nor­man Rock­well’s death, the ques­tion of whether his paint­ings are real­is­tic or unre­al­is­tic remains open for debate. On one hand, crit­i­cal opin­ion has long dis­missed his Sat­ur­day Evening Post-adorn­ing visions of Amer­i­can life as sheer­est fan­ta­sy. “A lit­tle girl with a black eye, an elder­ly woman say­ing grace with her grand­son, a boy going to war: Rock­wellian scenes rep­re­sent a cer­tain sen­ti­men­tal Amer­i­ca — an ide­al Amer­i­ca, or at least Rock­well’s ide­al,” says a 2009 NPR sto­ry on his work.

On the oth­er hand, if Rock­well’s admir­ers give him a pass on this sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, his detrac­tors often turn a blind eye to his obvi­ous tech­ni­cal mas­tery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a cam­era.  Indeed, his process began with an actu­al cam­era. Accord­ing to that NPR piece, he “used pho­tos, tak­en by a rotat­ing cast of pho­tog­ra­phers, to make his illus­tra­tions — and all of his mod­els were neigh­bors and friends,” res­i­dents of his small town of Stock­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts.

The cam­era­men includ­ed a Ger­man immi­grant named Clemens Kalis­ch­er: “An artist-pho­tog­ra­ph­er him­self, Kalis­ch­er was at odds with the trac­ing tech­niques and sac­cha­rine sub­ject mat­ter in Rock­well’s work. After all, Rock­well nev­er paint­ed free­hand, and almost all of his paint­ings were com­mis­sioned by mag­a­zines and adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shut­ter, Rock­well direct­ed every facet of every com­po­si­tion,” as you can see by exam­in­ing his paint­ings and ref­er­ence pho­tos togeth­er, fea­tured as they’ve been on sites like Petapix­el.

At Google Arts & Cul­ture, you can scroll through a short exhi­bi­tion of Rock­well’s late work on race rela­tions in Amer­i­ca that reveals how he had not just one but many pho­tographs tak­en as source mate­r­i­al for each paint­ing, which he would then com­bine into a sin­gle image. This qua­si-cin­e­mat­ic “edit­ing” process brings to mind the “sto­ry­board­ing” of Edward Hop­per, who stands along­side Rock­well as one of the most Amer­i­can painters of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

But while Hop­per gave artis­tic form to the coun­try’s alien­ation, Rock­well — whom his­to­ry has­n’t remem­bered as a par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py man — cre­at­ed an “Amer­i­can sanc­tu­ary oth­ers wished to share.” And though nei­ther Hop­per nor Rock­well’s Amer­i­ca may ever have exist­ed, they were craft­ed from the pieces of Amer­i­can life the artists found every­where around them.

via Petapix­el/Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nor­man Rock­well Illus­trates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (1936–1940)

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Lei­bovitz, Nor­man Rock­well & 350 Oth­er Artists to Visu­al­ly Doc­u­ment America’s Space Pro­gram

Nor­man Rockwell’s Type­writ­ten Recipe for His Favorite Oat­meal Cook­ies

Edward Hopper’s Cre­ative Process: The Draw­ing & Care­ful Prepa­ra­tion Behind Nighthawks & Oth­er Icon­ic Paint­ings

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

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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Watch a Korean Master Craftsman Make a Kimchi Pot by Hand, All According to Ancient Tradition

in Art, Food & Drink, History | February 8th, 2021

The South Kore­an cap­i­tal of Seoul, where I live, has in the 21st cen­tu­ry aston­ished vis­it­ing West­ern­ers with its tech­nol­o­gy, its infra­struc­ture, and its sheer urban vital­i­ty. It strikes many of those West­ern­ers (and I include myself among them) as con­sid­er­ably more devel­oped than any­where in the coun­tries they came from. But how­ev­er much Seoul may feel like the future, nowhere in Korea has the past whol­ly van­ished. Take the bul­bous earth­en­ware jars still vis­i­ble on more than a few of the coun­try’s ter­races and rooftops, meant to hold condi­ments like soy­bean and red pep­per paste as well as that world-famous sym­bol of not just Kore­an cui­sine but Kore­an cul­ture itself, the fer­ment­ed cab­bage known as kim­chi.

Com­mon­ly called hangari, or more tra­di­tion­al­ly ong­gi, these jars essen­tial to the fer­men­ta­tion of kim­chi and oth­er Kore­an foods are today pro­duced in large num­bers with indus­tri­al meth­ods. But there are also Kore­an pot­ters who’ve stuck to the old ways — and in a select few cas­es, the very old ways indeed. Take Jin-Gyu, the sub­ject of the video above, a short doc­u­men­tary from Eater’s “Hand­made” series.

“I’m the youngest of the intan­gi­ble cul­tur­al assets in Korea,” he says, refer­ring to the offi­cial list of Impor­tant Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Prop­er­ties intro­duced to pro­tect long-stand­ing tra­di­tions in music, dance, and craft just as the coun­try began its unprece­dent­ed surge into moder­ni­ty. The mak­ing of ong­gi itself, a process Jin-Gyu demon­strates from start to fin­ish in the video, is Impor­tant Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Prop­er­ty No. 96.

After pound­ing his clay into shape while describ­ing how its soil first flows down from the moun­tains, Jin-gyu places it onto his wheel and gives it the dis­tinc­tive shape rec­og­niz­able from all those ter­races and rooftops. This requires con­stant use of his hands, occa­sion­al use of his feet, and even the appli­ca­tion of tra­di­tion­al tools that he also made him­self. The con­trast with tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese pot­tery, its empha­sis on small-scale ele­gance and near-exis­ten­tial­ist atti­tude toward the final prod­uct, is instruc­tive: the Kore­an vari­ety, as Jin-gyu prac­tices it, has a dif­fer­ent ener­gy, more of an emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal rus­tic­i­ty. “This makes me so hap­py,” he says after remov­ing fin­ished jar from the kiln orig­i­nal­ly built by his ong­gi-pot­ter father. “After 300 years, it’ll return to the soil.” But there are plen­ty of hearty meals to be had in the mean­time, none of them with­out kim­chi.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Kore­an Pot­ter Found a “Beau­ti­ful Life” Through His Art: A Short, Life-Affirm­ing Doc­u­men­tary

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

How Soy Sauce Has Been Made in Japan for Over 220 Years: An Inside View

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

“Prim­i­tive Pot­ter” Trav­els into the Back­coun­try for 10 Days with Only a Knife & Buck­skin and Makes Anasazi Pot­tery

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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The Bauhaus Chess Set Where the Form of the Pieces Artfully Show Their Function (1922)

in Art, Games, History | February 3rd, 2021

Learn­ing to play chess first neces­si­tates learn­ing how each piece moves. This is hard­ly the labor of Her­cules, to be sure, though it does come down to pure mem­o­riza­tion, unaid­ed by any ver­bal or visu­al cues. Does the name “pawn,” after all, sound par­tic­u­lar­ly like some­thing that can only step for­ward? And what about the shape of the knight sug­gests the shape of the knight’s move? The form of a chess piece, in oth­er words, does­n’t fol­low its func­tion — and under cer­tain sets of aes­thet­ic prin­ci­ples, there could be few greater crimes. Leave it to a mem­ber of the Bauhaus, the art school and move­ment that aimed to uni­fy not just form and func­tion but art, craft, and design — to bring them all into line.

Brought into the Bauhaus in 1921 by its founder Wal­ter Gropius, the sculp­tor Josef Hartwig began work on his redesigned chess set the fol­low­ing year. In all its iter­a­tions, the pieces takes on forms made of sim­ple shapes: “The sphere, dou­ble cube, and three sizes of block, singly or com­bined, yield pieces that, despite their high­ly geo­met­ric styl­iza­tion, are strong­ly sug­ges­tive of their rank or pow­er,” says the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, own­er of one of one of Hartwig’s orig­i­nal sets.

“The bish­ops are clear­ly implied by the cross out­line, and the rooks by the sim­ple sta­bil­i­ty of a cube. Most inge­nious of all are the knights, formed of three dou­ble cubes joined in such a fash­ion that each face of the result­ing form shows two cubes one above the oth­er and a third on the side, an embod­i­ment of the knight’s move.”

Like many Bauhaus works, Hartwig’s chess set found a dual exis­tence as both a piece of art and a con­sumer good. The artist him­self also “made a poster to talk about his prod­uct” and “a box to pack­age it,” says cua­tor Anne Monier in the video above, “so we real­ly are in a total cre­ation around a game of chess.” In addi­tion to mak­ing the game’s move­ments eas­i­er to learn, it also con­sti­tutes a visu­al demon­stra­tion of what it means for form to fol­low func­tion. The idea, says Monier, is “to spread the ideas of the Bauhaus in peo­ple’s every­day life, to be able in fact to change the liv­ing envi­ron­ment, to take part in cre­at­ing a new soci­ety.” The video comes from Bauhaus Move­ment, an online shop where you can invite the spread into your home by order­ing a repli­ca Hartwig chess set. It’ll set you back €495, but ideals, now as in the hey­day of the Bauhaus, don’t come cheap.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Puts Online a Huge Col­lec­tion of Bauhaus Art Objects

Man Ray Cre­ates a “Sur­re­al­ist Chess­board,” Fea­tur­ing Por­traits of Sur­re­al­ist Icons: Dalí, Bre­ton, Picas­so, Magritte, Miró & Oth­ers (1934)

The Pol­i­tics & Phi­los­o­phy of the Bauhaus Design Move­ment: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Mar­cel Duchamp, Chess Enthu­si­ast, Cre­at­ed an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Avail­able via 3D Print­er

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

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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YInMn Blue, the First Shade of Blue Discovered in 200 Years, Is Now Available for Artists

in Art, Chemistry, Science | January 29th, 2021

Pho­to via Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty

“Col­or is part of a spec­trum, so you can’t dis­cov­er a col­or,” says Pro­fes­sor Mas Sub­ra­man­ian, a sol­id-state chemist at Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty. “You can only dis­cov­er a mate­r­i­al that is a par­tic­u­lar color”—or, more pre­cise­ly, a mate­r­i­al that reflects light in such a way that we per­ceive it as a col­or. Sci­en­tif­ic mod­esty aside, Sub­ra­man­ian actu­al­ly has been cred­it­ed with dis­cov­er­ing a color—the first inor­gan­ic shade of blue in 200 years.

Named “YIn­Mn blue” —and affec­tion­ate­ly called “Mas­Blue” at Ore­gon State—the pig­men­t’s unwieldy name derives from its chem­i­cal make­up of yttri­um, indi­um, and man­ganese oxides, which togeth­er “absorbed red and green wave­lengths and reflect­ed blue wave­lengths in such a way that it came off look­ing a very bright blue,” Gabriel Rosen­berg notes at NPR. It is a blue, in fact, nev­er before seen, since it is not a nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring pig­ment, but one lit­er­al­ly cooked in a lab­o­ra­to­ry, and by acci­dent at that.

The dis­cov­ery, if we can use the word, should just­ly be cred­it­ed to Subramanian’s grad stu­dent Andrew E. Smith who, dur­ing a 2009 attempt to “man­u­fac­ture new mate­ri­als that could be used in elec­tron­ics,” heat­ed the par­tic­u­lar mix of chem­i­cals to over 2000 degrees Fahren­heit. Smith noticed “it had turned a sur­pris­ing, bright blue col­or [and] Sub­ra­man­ian knew imme­di­ate­ly it was a big deal.” Why? Because the col­or blue is a big deal.

In an impor­tant sense, col­or is some­thing humans dis­cov­ered over long peri­ods of time in which we learned to see the world in shades and hues our ances­tors could not per­ceive. “Some sci­en­tists believe that the ear­li­est humans were actu­al­ly col­or­blind,” Emma Tag­gart writes at My Mod­ern Met, “and could only rec­og­nize black, white, red, and only lat­er yel­low and green.” Blue, that is to say, didn’t exist for ear­ly humans. “With no con­cept of the col­or blue,” Tag­gart writes, “they sim­ply had no words to describe it. This is even reflect­ed in ancient lit­er­a­ture, such as Homer’s Odyssey,” with its “wine-dark sea.”

Pho­to via Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty

Sea and sky only begin to assume their cur­rent col­ors some 6,000 years ago when ancient Egyp­tians began to pro­duce blue pig­ment. The first known col­or to be syn­thet­i­cal­ly pro­duced is thus called Egypt­ian blue, cre­at­ed using “ground lime­stone mixed with sand and a cop­per-con­tain­ing min­er­al, such as azu­rite or mala­chite.” Blue holds a spe­cial place in our col­or lex­i­cog­ra­phy. It is the last col­or word that devel­ops across cul­tures and one of the most dif­fi­cult col­ors to man­u­fac­ture. “Peo­ple have been look­ing for a good, durable blue col­or for a cou­ple of cen­turies,” Sub­ra­man­ian told NPR.

And so, YIn­Mn blue has become a sen­sa­tion among indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ers and artists. Patent­ed in 2012 by OSU, it received approval for indus­tri­al use in 2017. That same year, Aus­tralian paint sup­pli­er Derivan released it as an acrylic paint called “Ore­gon Blue.” It has tak­en a few more years for the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency to come around, but they’ve final­ly approved Yln­Mn blue for com­mer­cial use, “mak­ing it avail­able to all,” Isis Davis-Marks writes at Smith­son­ian. “Now the authen­ti­cat­ed pig­ment is avail­able for sale in paint retail­ers like Gold­en in the US.”

Pho­to via Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty

The new blue solves a num­ber of prob­lems with oth­er blue pig­ments. It is non­tox­ic and not prone to fad­ing, since it “reflects heat and absorbs UV radi­a­tion.” YIn­Mn blue is “extreme­ly sta­ble, a prop­er­ty long sought in a blue pig­ment,” says Sub­ra­man­ian. It also fills “a gap in the range of col­ors,” says art sup­ply man­u­fac­tur­er Georg Kre­mer, adding, “The pure­ness of YIn­Blue is real­ly per­fect.”

Since their first, acci­den­tal col­or dis­cov­ery, “Sub­ra­man­ian and his team have expand­ed their research and have made a range of new pig­ments to include almost every col­or, from bright oranges to shades of pur­ple, turquoise and green,” notes the Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty Depart­ment of Chem­istry. None have yet had the impact of the new blue. Learn much more about the unique chem­i­cal prop­er­ties of YIn­Mn blue here and see Pro­fes­sor Sub­ra­man­ian dis­cuss its dis­cov­ery in his TED talk fur­ther up.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Behold One of the Ear­li­est Known Col­or Charts: The Table of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Col­ors (1686)

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete Dig­i­tal Scan

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

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

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