A Short Biography of Keith Haring Told with Comic Book Illustrations & Music

in Art, History, Museums, Music, Travel | March 8th, 2021

Singer-song­writer-car­toon­ist Jef­frey Lewis is a wor­thy exem­plar of NYC street cred.

Born, raised, and still resid­ing on New York City’s Low­er East Side, he draws comics under the “judg­men­tal” gaze of The Art of Daniel Clowes: Mod­ern Car­toon­ist and writes songs beneath a poster of The Ter­mi­na­tor onto which he graft­ed the face of Lou Reed from a stolen Time Out New York pro­mo.

Billing him­self as “among NYC’s top slingers of folk / garage­rock / antifolk,” Lewis pairs his songs with comics dur­ing live shows, pro­ject­ing orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions or flip­ping the pages of a sketch­book large enough for the audi­ence to see, a prac­tice he refers to as “low bud­get films.”

He’s also an ama­teur his­to­ri­an, as evi­denced by his eight-minute opus The His­to­ry of Punk on the Low­er East Side, 1950–1975 and  a series of extreme­ly “low bud­get films” for the His­to­ry chan­nel, on top­ics such as the French Rev­o­lu­tion, Mar­co Polo, and the fall of the Sovi­et Union.

His lat­est effort is a 3‑minute biog­ra­phy of artist Kei­th Har­ing, above, for the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art Mag­a­zine’s new Illus­trat­ed Lives series.

While Lewis isn’t a con­tem­po­rary of Haring’s, they def­i­nite­ly breathed the same air:

While Har­ing was spend­ing a cou­ple of for­ma­tive years involved with Club 57 and PS 122, there was lit­tle six-year-old me walk­ing down the street, so I can remem­ber and draw that ear­ly ’80s Low­er East Side/East Vil­lage with­out much stretch. My whole brain is made out of fire escapes and fire hydrants and ten­e­ment cor­nices.

Lewis gives then-ris­ing stars Jean-Michel Basquiat and per­for­mance artist Klaus Nomi cameo appear­ances, before escort­ing Har­ing down into the sub­way for a lit­er­al light­bulb moment.

In Haring’s own words:

…It seemed obvi­ous to me when I saw the first emp­ty sub­way pan­el that this was the per­fect sit­u­a­tion. The adver­tise­ments that fill every sub­way plat­form are changed peri­od­i­cal­ly. When there aren’t enough new ads, a black paper pan­el is sub­sti­tut­ed. I remem­ber notic­ing a pan­el in the Times Square sta­tion and imme­di­ate­ly going above­ground and buy­ing chalk. After the first draw­ing, things just fell into place. I began draw­ing in the sub­ways as a hob­by on my way to work. I had to ride the sub­ways often and would do a draw­ing while wait­ing for a train. In a few weeks, I start­ed to get respons­es from peo­ple who saw me doing it.

After a while, my sub­way draw­ings became more of a respon­si­bil­i­ty than a hob­by. So many peo­ple wished me luck and told me to “keep it up” that it became dif­fi­cult to stop. From the begin­ning, one of the main incen­tives was this con­tact with peo­ple. It became a reward­ing expe­ri­ence to draw and to see the draw­ings being appre­ci­at­ed. The num­ber of peo­ple pass­ing one of these draw­ings in a week was phe­nom­e­nal. Even if the draw­ing only remained up for only one day, enough peo­ple saw it to make it eas­i­ly worth my effort.

Towards the end of his jam-packed, 22-page “low bud­get film,” Lewis wan­ders from his tra­di­tion­al approach to car­toon­ing, reveal­ing him­self to be a keen stu­dent of Haring’s bold graph­ic style.

The final image, to the lyric, “Keith’s explo­sive short life­time and gen­er­ous heart speak like an infi­nite foun­tain from some deep well­spring of art,” is breath­tak­ing.

Spend time with some oth­er New York City icons that have cropped up in Jef­frey Lewis’ music, includ­ing the Chelsea Hotel, the sub­way, the bridges, and St. Mark’s Place.

Watch his low bud­get films for the His­to­ry Chan­nel here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kei­th Haring’s Eclec­tic Jour­nal Entries Go Online

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Dogs, Inspired by Kei­th Har­ing

The Sto­ry of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

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

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The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross & Banksy: Watch Banksy Paint a Mural on the Jail That Once Housed Oscar Wilde

in Art | March 5th, 2021

It would be dif­fi­cult to think of two artists who appear to have less in com­mon than Bob Ross and Banksy. One of them cre­ates art by pulling provoca­tive stunts, often ille­gal, under the cov­er of anonymi­ty; the oth­er did it by paint­ing innocu­ous land­scapes on pub­lic tele­vi­sion, spend­ing a decade as one of its most rec­og­niz­able per­son­al­i­ties. But game rec­og­nize game, as they say, in pop­u­lar art as in oth­er fields of human endeav­or. In the video above, Banksy pays trib­ute to Ross by lay­er­ing nar­ra­tion from an episode of The Joy of Paint­ing over the cre­ation of his lat­est spray paint strike, Cre­ate Escape: an image of Oscar Wilde, type­writer and all, break­ing out jail — on the actu­al exte­ri­or wall of the decom­mis­sioned HM Prison Read­ing.

“The expan­sive and unblem­ished prison wall was a dar­ing and per­fect spot for a Banksy piece,” writes Colos­sal’s Christo­pher Job­son. “It’s best known for its most famous inmate: Oscar Wilde served two years in the prison from 1895–1897 for the charge of ‘gross inde­cen­cy’ for being gay.” This expe­ri­ence result­ed in the poem The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture as read by Wilde him­self.

Where Wilde con­vert­ed his mis­for­tune into ver­bal art, Banksy ref­er­ences it to make a visu­al state­ment of char­ac­ter­is­tic brazen­ness and ambi­gu­i­ty. As with most of his recent pieces, Cre­ate Escape has clear­ly been designed to be seen not just by passers­by in Read­ing, but by the whole world online, which The Joy of Paint­ing with Bob Ross & Banksy should ensure.

“I thought we’d just do a very warm lit­tle scene that makes you feel good,” says Ross in voiceover. But what we see are the hands of a min­er’s-hel­met­ed Banksy, pre­sum­ably, prepar­ing his spray cans and putting up his sten­cil of Wilde in an inmate’s uni­form. “Lit­tle bit of white,” says Ross as a streak of that col­or is applied to the prison wall. “That ought to light­en it just a lit­tle.” In fact, every sam­ple of Ross’ nar­ra­tion reflects the action, as when he urges thought “about shape and form and how you want the limbs to look,” or when he tells us that “a nice light area between the darks, it sep­a­rates, makes every­thing real­ly stand out and look good.” With his sig­na­ture high-con­trast style, Banksy could hard­ly deny it, and he would seem also to share Ross’ feel­ing that in paint­ing, “I can cre­ate the kind of world that I want to see, and that I want to be part of.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

Expe­ri­ence the Bob Ross Expe­ri­ence: A New Muse­um Open in the TV Painter’s For­mer Stu­dio Home

Banksy Strikes Again in Lon­don & Urges Every­one to Wear Masks

Banksy Debuts His COVID-19 Art Project: Good to See That He Has TP at Home

Hear Oscar Wilde Recite a Sec­tion of The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol (1897)

Pat­ti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Let­ter De Pro­fundis: See the Full Three-Hour Per­for­mance

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 Exquisite, Ephemeral Paper Cuttings of Hans Christian Andersen

in Art, Creativity, Literature, Museums | March 1st, 2021

Quick, name a melan­choly Dane.

For most of us, the choice comes down to Ham­let or Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen, author of such bit­ter­sweet tales as “The Lit­tle Match Girl,” “The Stead­fast Tin Sol­dier,” and “The Lit­tle Mer­maid.”

Ander­sen’s per­son­al life remains a mat­ter of both spec­u­la­tion and fas­ci­na­tion.

Was he gay? Asex­u­al? A vir­gin with a propen­si­ty for mas­sive crush­es on unat­tain­able women, who engaged pros­ti­tutes sole­ly for con­ver­sa­tion?

No one can say for sure.

What we know defin­i­tive­ly is that he was a jol­ly and tal­ent­ed paper cut­ter.

He enchant­ed par­ty guests of all ages with impro­vised sto­ries as he snipped away, unfold­ing the sheet at tale’s end, a sou­venir for some lucky young lis­ten­er.

“You can imag­ine how many of them must have got torn or creased,” says art his­to­ri­an Detlef Klein, who co-curat­ed the 2018 exhi­bi­tion Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen, Poet with Pen and Scis­sors. “You could often bend the fig­ures a lit­tle, blow at them and then move them across the table­top.”

Amaz­ing­ly, 400 some sur­vive, pri­mar­i­ly in the Odense City Muse­ums’ large col­lec­tion.

Pier­rots, dancers, and swans were fre­quent sub­jects. Sprad­dle-legged crea­ture’s bel­lies served as prosce­ni­um the­aters. Even the sim­plest fea­ture some tricky, spindly bits—tightropes, umbrel­las, del­i­cate shoes.…

The most intri­cate pieces, like Fan­ta­sy Cut­ting for Dorothea Mel­chior below, were thought­ful home­made presents for close friends. (The Mel­chiors host­ed Andersen’s 70th birth­day par­ty and he died dur­ing an extend­ed vis­it to their coun­try home.)

The cut­tings bring fairy tales to mind, but they are not spe­cif­ic to the pub­lished work of Ander­sen. No Thum­be­li­na. No Ugly Duck­ling. Not a mer­maid in sight.

As Moy McCro­ry, senior lec­tur­er in cre­ative writ­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Der­by, writes:

Ander­sen knew that his writ­ten work would out­last him: he was famous and suc­cess­ful, as were his tales. Yet he con­tin­ued to work in these tran­sient mate­ri­als, their cheap­ness and avail­abil­i­ty mak­ing them of no val­ue apart from their appeal to sentiment…Why work in a form that ought to have left no traces? I sug­gest that this showed how Ander­sen react­ed to his fame, and to his own sense of being for­ev­er on the mar­gins of the lived life. He moved amongst the edu­cat­ed and the famous, was friend­ly with Dick­ens, was patron­ized by nobles, but was out­side those cir­cles. His edu­ca­tion was gained at some pains to him­self, years after the usu­al dates for these activ­i­ties (he would not even pass nowa­days as a “mature stu­dent”, since his com­ple­tion of ele­men­tary school only took place when he was a young adult). He was always placed out­side the nor­mal bounds of the soci­ety he kept.

Read­ers, we chal­lenge you to play Pyg­malion and release a fairy tale based on the images below.

All images, with the excep­tion of The Roy­al Library Copenhagen’s The Botanist, direct­ly above, are used with the per­mis­sion of Odense City Muse­ums, in accor­dance with a Cre­ative Com­mons License.

Explore the Odense City Muse­ums’ col­lec­tion of Hans Chris­t­ian Andersen’s paper­cuts here.

Bonus read­ing for those in need of a laugh: “The Sad­dest End­ings of Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen Sto­ries” by the Toast’s Daniel M. Lav­ery.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Ani­ma­tions of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ries “The Hap­py Prince” and “The Self­ish Giant”

The Japan­ese Fairy Tale Series: The Illus­trat­ed Books That Intro­duced West­ern Read­ers to Japan­ese Tales (1885–1922)

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

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

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René Magritte’s Early Art Deco Posters (1924–1927)

in Art | February 25th, 2021

The Bel­gian painter René Magritte cre­at­ed some of the most enig­mat­ic and icon­ic works in Sur­re­al­ist art. But before he moved to Paris in 1927 and began forg­ing rela­tion­ships with André Bre­ton and the Sur­re­al­ists, Magritte strug­gled in Brus­sels as a free­lance com­mer­cial artist, cre­at­ing adver­tise­ments in the Art Deco style.

In 1924 Magritte began design­ing posters and adver­tise­ments for the cou­turi­er Hon­orine “Norine” Deschri­jver and her hus­band Paul-Gus­tave Van Hecke, own­ers of the Bel­gian fash­ion com­pa­ny Norine. Van Hecke also owned art gal­leries, and was an ear­ly cham­pi­on of sur­re­al­ism. Van Hecke would even­tu­al­ly pay Magritte a stipend in exchange for the right to mar­ket his sur­re­al­ist works. In the 1924 adver­tis­ing poster above, Magritte por­trays a woman in high heels pre­tend­ing to be Lord Lis­ter, the gen­tle­man thief from Ger­man pulp fic­tion, wear­ing “an after­noon coat cre­at­ed by Norine.”

Magritte designed some 40 sheet music cov­ers, most of them in the Art Deco style, accord­ing to Hrag Var­tan­ian at Hyper­al­ler­gic. The one above, “Arli­ta,” is from about 1925. The French and Dutch sub­ti­tles read “The Song of Light.”

The har­le­quin-themed image above is anoth­er adver­tise­ment for Norine, cir­ca 1925. Magritte paint­ed it in water­col­or and gouache. The pen­ciled inscrip­tion at the bot­tom reads “une robe du soir par Norine” — “an evening gown by Norine.”

In 1926 Magritte was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the poster above for the pop­u­lar singer Marie-Louise Van Eme­len, bet­ter known as Primevère. For more of Magrit­te’s Art Deco sheet music cov­ers, vis­it Hyper­al­ler­gic.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dozens of M.C. Esch­er Prints Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Boston Pub­lic Library

Philoso­pher Por­traits: Famous Philoso­phers Paint­ed in the Style of Influ­en­tial Artists

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

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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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