We tend to imagine old paintings as having a muted, yellow-brown cast, and not without reason. Many of the examples we’ve seen in life really do look that way, though usually not because the artist intended it. As Julian Baumgartner of Chicago’s Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration explains in the video above, these paintings’ colors have changed over the decades, or in any case appeared to change, because of the layer of resin on top of them. When that kind of coating is first applied, it actually makes the hues underneath look richer. As time passes, alas, chemical changes and the accumulation of dirt and grime can result in a dull, even sickly appearance.
“A lot of people say that the varnish should never be removed, “that that’s a patina that is on the surface of the painting and that it adds to the painting’s quality: it makes the painting look better, it makes it look more serious,” says Baumgartner.
“Those are all interesting opinions, but they’re all inaccurate. If the artist wanted to apply a patina to their painting, they could apply a patina and tone down the colors. But most artists, when they apply a varnish, do not envision that that varnish will ever become yellow or brown, or will crack or become cloudy.” The idea is to get the colors back to how the artist would have seen them when the work first attained its finished state.
Therein lies the difference between a painting and, say, a cast-iron skillet. But on some level, the actual labor of cleaning a work of art — as Baumgartner demonstrates, sped-up, in the video — differs less than one might imagine from that of cleaning a kitchen implement. The result, however, can certainly be more striking, especially with a canvas like this one, whose twin-sister subjects provide an ideal means of showing the contrast between colors long covered by varnish and those same colors newly exhumed. Though there now exist formulas that don’t turn yellow in quite the same way, more than a few artists stick to the classic damar varnish, which does have advantages of its own — not least keeping a few more generations of conservators in business.
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.
In his lifetime, Jackson Pollock had only one successful art show. It took place at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in November 1949, and afterward, his fellow abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning declared that “Jackson has finally broken the ice.” Perhaps, according to Louis Menand’s book The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, he meant that “Pollock was the first American abstractionist to break into the mainstream art world, or he might have meant that Pollock had broken through a stylistic logjam that American painters felt blocked by.” Whatever its intent, de Kooning’s remark annoyed art critic and major Pollock advocate Clement Greenberg, who “thought that it reduced Pollock to a transitional figure.”
It wasn’t necessarily a reduction: as Menand sees it, “all figures are transitional. Not every figure, however, is a hinge, someone who represents a moment when one mode of practice swings over to another.” Pollock was such a hinge, as, in his way, was Greenberg: “After Pollock, people painted differently. After Greenberg, people thought about painting differently.”
When they made their mark, “there was no going back.” Gallerist-YouTuber James Payne examines the nature of that mark in the new Great Art Explained video above, the first of a multi-part series on Pollock’s art and the figures that made its cultural impact possible. Even more important than Greenberg, in Payne’s telling, is Pollock’s fellow artist — and, in time, wife — Lee Krasner, whose own work he also gives its due.
We also see the paintings of American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, Pollock’s teacher; Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, in whose workshop Pollock participated; and even Pablo Picasso, who exerted subtle but detectable influences of his own on Pollock’s work. Other, non-artistic sources of inspiration Payne explores include the psychological theory of Carl Gustav Jung, with whose school of therapy Pollock engaged in the late nineteen-thirties and early forties. It was in those sessions that he produced the “psychoanalytic drawings,” one of several categories of Pollock’s work that will surprise those who know him only through his large-canvas, wholly abstract drip paintings. Each represents one stage of a complex evolutionary process: Pollock may have been the ideal artist for the new, post-war American world, but he hardly came fully formed out of Wyoming.
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.
It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paintings of all time. Naturally, those not professionally involved with art history may have some trouble quite hitting that number. Still, however many titles we can write down, each of us will no doubt come up with a mixture of the near-universally known and the relatively obscure, with paintings we’ve been seeing reproduced in popular culture since birth alongside works that made a strong and unexpected impression on us the one time we came across them in a book or gallery. The 100-favorite-paintings list in video form above by Luiza Liz Bond is no exception.
You may recognize Bond’s name from her work on the YouTube channel The Cinema Cartography, many of whose videos — on David Lynch, on Quentin Tarantino, on animation, on cinematography, on the greatest films ever made — we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. Recently rebranded as The House of Tabula, that channel now makes its aesthetic and intellectual explorations into not just film but art broadly considered.
And though painting may not be the art form with which we spend most of our time these days, it’s still one of the first art forms that comes to our minds, perhaps thanks to its twenty or so millennia of history. It’s from a relatively narrow but enormously rich slice of that history, spanning the fourteenth century to the twentieth, that Bond makes her 100 selections.
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.
It’s hard to imagine from this historical distance how upsetting Pablo Picasso’s 1907 modernist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignonwas to Parisian society at its debut. On its 100th anniversary, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones described it as “the rift, the break that divides past and future.” The painting caused an uproar, even among the artist’s peers. It was a moment of culture shock, notes PBS. Its five nude figures, broken into proto-cubist planes and angles with faces painted like African masks, met “with almost unanimous shock, distaste, and outrage.”
Henri Matisse, himself often credited with ushering in modernist painting with his flattened fields of color, “is angered by the work, which he considers a hoax, an attempt to paint the fourth dimension.” Much of the outrage was purported to come from middle-class moral qualms about the painting’s subject, “the sexual freedom depicted in a brothel.”
This is a little hard to believe. Nude women in brothels, “odalisques,” had long been a favorite subject of some of the most revered European painters. But where the women in these paintings always appear passive, if not submissive, Picasso’s nudes pose suggestively and meet the viewer’s gaze, actively unashamed.
What likely most disturbed those first viewers was the perceived violence done to tradition. While we cannot recover the tender sensibilities of early 20th-century Parisian critics, we can, I think, experience a similar kind of shock by looking at work Picasso had done ten years earlier, such as the 1896 First Communion, further up, and 1897 study Science and Charity at the top, conservative genre paintings in an academic style, beautifully rendered with exquisite skill by a then 15-year-old artist. See an earlier drawing, Study for a Torso, above, completed in 1892 when Picasso was only 11.
Given his incredible precocity, it may seem hardly any wonder that Picasso innovated scandalously new means of using line, color, and composition. He was a prodigious master of technique at an age when many artists are still years away from formal study. Where else could his restless talent go? He painted a favorite subject in 1900, in the loose, impressionist Bullfight, above, a return of sorts to his first oil painting, Picador, below, made when he was 8. Further down, see a drawing from the following year in his early development, “Bullfight and Pigeons.”
This piece, with its realistic-looking birds carefully drawn upside-down atop a loose sketch of a bullfight, appeared in a 2006 show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC featuring childhood artworks from Picasso and Paul Klee. Contrary, perhaps, to our expectations, curator Jonathan Fineberg remarks of this drawing that “9‑year-old Picasso’s confident, playful scribble” gives us more indication of his talent than the finely-drawn birds.
“It’s not just that Picasso could render well, because you could teach anybody to do that,” Fineberg says. Maybe not anybody, but the point stands—technique can be taught, creative vision cannot. “It’s not about skill. It’s about unique qualities of seeing. That’s what makes Picasso a better artist than Andrew Wyeth. Art is about a novel way of looking at the world.” You may prefer Wyeth, or think the downward comparison unfair, but there’s no denying Picasso had a very “novel way of seeing,” from his earliest sketches to his most revolutionary modernist masterpieces. See several more highly accomplished early works from Picasso here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
By the time he filmed this video archived on Iowa Public Television’s YouTube channel, Jim Henson was just about to strike gold with a new children’s show called Sesame Street. The year was 1969, and he already had 15 years of puppetry experience under his belt, from children’s shows to commercials and experimental films.
On the cusp of success, Henson, along with fellow puppeteer Don Sahlin (the creator and voice of Rowlf), ventures to teach kids how to make a puppet out of pretty much anything you’ll find around the house. Such a vision appears easy, but it really shows the genius of Henson, as he and Sahlin make characters from a tennis ball, a mop, a wooden spoon, a cup, socks, an envelope, even potatoes and pears. (There is a lot to be said for the inherent comedy of googly eyes, and the importance of fake fur.)
An unknown assistant takes some of these puppets and brings them to life while Henson and his partner create more–funny voices, personalities, even a bit of anarchy are in play. Surprisingly, Kermit does not make an appearance, although his sock ancestor does.
The man who saw potential puppets in everything is in his element and relaxed. Check it out, smile, and then raid your kitchen for supplies for your own puppet show. And although Henson promises a further episode, it has yet to be found on YouTube, or elsewhere.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Images or Orwell and Dali via Wikimedia Commons
Should we hold artists to the same standards of human decency that we expect of everyone else? Should talented people be exempt from ordinary morality? Should artists of questionable character have their work consigned to the trash along with their personal reputations? These questions, for all their timeliness in the present, seemed no less thorny and compelling 81 years ago when George Orwell confronted the strange case of Salvador Dali, an undeniably extraordinary talent, and—Orwell writes in his 1944 essay “Benefit of Clergy”—a “disgusting human being.”
The judgment may seem overly harsh except that any honest person would say the same given the episodes Dali describes in his autobiography, which Orwell finds utterly revolting. “If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages,” he writes, “this one would.” The episodes he refers to include, at six years old, Dali kicking his three-year-old sister in the head, “as though it had been a ball,” the artist writes, then running away “with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act.” They include throwing a boy from a suspension bridge, and, at 29 years old, trampling a young girl “until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach.” And many more such violent and disturbing descriptions.
Dali’s litany of cruelty to humans and animals constitutes what we expect in the early life of serial killers rather than famous artists. Surely he is putting his readers on, wildly exaggerating for the sake of shock value, like the Marquis de Sade’s autobiographical fantasies. Orwell allows as much. Yet which of the stories are true, he writes, “and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.” Moreover, Orwell is as repulsed by Dali’s work as he is by the artist’s character, informed as it is by misogyny, a confessed necrophilia and an obsession with excrement and rotting corpses.
But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.
Orwell is unwilling to dismiss the value of Dali’s art, and distances himself from those who would do so on moralistic grounds. “Such people,” he writes, are “unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right,” a “dangerous” position adopted not only by conservatives and religious zealots but by fascists and authoritarians who burn books and lead campaigns against “degenerate” art. “Their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well.” (“Witness,” he notes, the outcry in America “against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence.”) “In an age like our own,” writes Orwell, in a particularly jarring sentence, “when the artist is an exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is.”
At the very same time, Orwell argues, to ignore or excuse Dali’s amorality is itself grossly irresponsible and totally inexcusable. Orwell’s is an “understandable” response, writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, given that he had fought fascism in Spain and had seen the horror of war, and that Dali, in 1944, “was already flirting with pro-Franco views.” But to fully illustrate his point, Orwell imagines a scenario with a much less controversial figure than Dali: “If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.”
Draw your own parallels to more contemporary figures whose criminal, predatory, or violently abusive acts have been ignored for decades for the sake of their art, or whose work has been tossed out with the toxic bathwater of their behavior. Orwell seeks what he calls a “middle position” between moral condemnation and aesthetic license—a “fascinating and laudable” critical threading of the needle, Jones writes, that avoids the extremes of “conservative philistines who condemn the avant garde, and its promoters who indulge everything that someone like Dali does and refuse to see it in a moral or political context.”
This ethical critique, writes Charlie Finch at Artnet, attacks the assumption in the art world that an appreciation of artists with Dali’s peculiar tastes “is automatically enlightened, progressive.” Such an attitude extends from the artists themselves to the society that nurtures them, and that “allows us to welcome diamond-mine owners who fund biennales, Gazprom billionaires who purchase diamond skulls, and real-estate moguls who dominate temples of modernism.” Again, you may draw your own comparisons.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
Pablo Picasso was born not long before the invention of the motion picture. With a different set of inclinations, he might have become one of the most daring pioneers of that medium. Instead, as we know, he mastered and then practically reinvented the much older art form of painting. That said, cinema did seem to have been fascinated by both Picasso’s work and the man himself. He made a cameo appearance in Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus in 1960, a few years after playing the title role in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s documentary Le Mystère Picasso. The short clip from the latter above shows how Picasso could create an expressive face with just a few strokes of a pen.
By the time he made Le Mystère Picasso, Clouzot was already well established as a director of elevated genre films, having just made Le salaire de la peur or (The Wages of Fear) and Les diaboliques (or Diabolique), which would turn out to be one of his defining works.
To filmgoers following his career, it may have come as a surprise to see him follow those up with a documentary about a painter: a genius, yes, but one whose work had already seemed familiar. But Clouzot took as his task not telling the story of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or Three Musicians or Guernica, but capturing Picasso (whom he’d known since his teenage years) in the act of creating new works of art — works never to be seen except on film.
That was the idea, in any case; though most of the 20 paintings and drawings created just for Le MystèrePicasso were destroyed, some weren’t. One such survivor, a chicken-turned-devilish-visage that emerges in one of the film’s more tense sequences (an intersection of Clouzot and Picasso’s artistic instincts), was actually restored a few years ago for inclusion in the Royal Academy of Arts’ exhibition Picasso and Paper. He could also work on glass, as evidenced by the clip just above from Visit to Picasso, a 1949 documentary short by the Belgian filmmaker Paul Haesaerts. In it he paints — in less than 30 seconds, with the camera running just on the other side of the pane — an evocative image of a bull, demonstrating that, no matter how fully he was embraced by the Francophone world, a Spaniard he remained.
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.
Today, 133 cardinals from around the world enter the conclave to determine the next pope, during which they’ll cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel. Despite being one of the most famous tourist attractions in Europe, the Sistine Chapel still serves as a venue for such important official functions, just as it has since its completion in 1481. When its namesake Pope Sixtus IV commissioned it, he also ordered its walls covered in frescoes by some of the finest artists of that period of the Renaissance, including Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Cosimo Rosselli. He also made the unusual choice of having the cross-vault ceiling covered by a blue-and-gold painting of the night sky, ably executed by Piermatteo Lauro de’ Manfredi da Amelia.
No longer do the cardinals vote for their next leader under the stars, nor have they for about half a millennium. Even if you’ve never set foot in the Sistine Chapel, you surely know it as the building whose ceiling was painted by Michelangelo, lying flat on a scaffold all the while (a pleasing but highly doubtful image in the collective cultural memory).
In fact, that master of Renaissance masters didn’t touch his brush to the place until 1508. He’d been brought in by a later pope, Julius II, after having first resisted the commission, insisting that he was a sculptor first, not a painter. Fortunately for Renaissance art enthusiasts, not only did Julius II prevail upon Michelangelo, so, nearly thirty years later, did Paul III, who had him paint over the altar the work that turned out to be the Last Judgment.
In the video at the top of the post, history-and-architecture YouTuber Manuel Bravo (previously featured here on Open Culture for his explanations of historic places like Venice, Pompeii, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and St. Peter’s Basilica, which was also touched by the hand of Michelangelo) narrates a 3D virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. That format makes it possible to see not only its numerous works of Biblical art, by Michelangelo and a host of other painters besides, from every possible angle, but also the building itself just as it would have looked in eras past, even before Michelangelo made his contribution. The more you understand each individual element, the better you can appreciate this “veritable Divina Commedia of the Renaissance,” as Bravo calls it, when next you can see it in person. That, of course, will only be after the conclave finishes up: in a few hours, or days, or weeks, or maybe — a phenomenon not unexampled in the history of the church — a few years.
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.
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