Banksy Funds a Boat to Rescue Refugees at Sea–and Soon It Finds Itself in Distress in the Mediterranean

in Art, Current Affairs | August 31st, 2020

“Like most peo­ple who make it in the art world, I bought a yacht to cruise the Med,” Banksy wrote on Insta­gram when intro­duc­ing the Louise Michel, a ves­sel tasked with a some­what dif­fer­ent mis­sion than an arriv­iste par­ty boat: pick­ing up refugees from coun­tries like Libya and Turkey lost at sea. Any­one who’s fol­lowed Banksy’s art career knows he pos­sess­es a well-devel­oped instinct for catch­ing and keep­ing pub­lic atten­tion, and it has hard­ly desert­ed him in this ven­ture. Why spon­sor a refugee res­cue boat, after all, when you can spon­sor a bright pink fem­i­nist refugee res­cue boat, embla­zoned with a piece of orig­i­nal art?

Despite hav­ing been named for the 19th-cen­tu­ry fem­i­nist anar­chist Louise Michel, the motor yacht’s oper­a­tions encom­pass an even wider vari­ety of caus­es: The Guardian’s Loren­zo Ton­do and Mau­rice Stierl quote “Lea Reis­ner, a nurse and head of mis­sion for the first res­cue oper­a­tion,” say­ing that the project is also “meant to bring togeth­er a vari­ety of strug­gles for social jus­tice, includ­ing for women’s and LGBTIQ rights, racial equal­i­ty, migrants’ rights, envi­ron­men­tal­ism and ani­mal rights.” This mul­ti­di­rec­tion­al activism would seem to suit the artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty of Banksy, whose work strikes out in as many crit­i­cal direc­tions as both his admir­ers and detrac­tors can inter­pret.

The Louise Michel, as Ton­do and Stierl report­ed last Thurs­day, “set off in secre­cy on 18 August from the Span­ish sea­port of Bur­ri­ana, near Valen­cia, and is now in the cen­tral Mediter­ranean where on Thurs­day it res­cued 89 peo­ple in dis­tress, includ­ing 14 women and four chil­dren.” After pick­ing up the first group of refugees, reports the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Miri­am Berg­er, “it then encoun­tered a ship trav­el­ing from North Africa to Europe with 130 peo­ple aboard and some bod­ies of peo­ple who had died dur­ing the jour­ney,” and as a result “quick­ly became over­crowd­ed and could not prop­er­ly steer, its Twit­ter posts said.” All this hap­pened “at sea around 55 miles south­east of Lampe­dusa, an Ital­ian island off the North African coast that has become a migra­tion tran­sit point.”

Hours lat­er two oth­er ves­sels, one oper­at­ed by the Ital­ian coast guard and one by a Ger­man non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion, came to take on pas­sen­gers. Though hard­ly smooth sail­ing, the Louise Michel’s first res­cue mis­sion pro­ceed­ed more favor­ably than some: “A ves­sel named the Talia, which res­cued 52 peo­ple almost two months ago, was­n’t allowed into the port for 5 days,” says Dazed. “Now, a boat named the Eti­enne is in the longest record stand-off between author­i­ties and res­cuers ever, hav­ing spent three weeks at sea being denied dis­em­barka­tion in Mal­ta.” Banksy pub­li­cized the Louise Michel, which he spon­sors with­out involve­ment in its oper­a­tions, only after it had set sail. But for any­one with an inter­est in show­ing the world the dire cir­cum­stances of refugees today, the high­ly vis­i­ble boat’s high­ly vis­i­ble dif­fi­cul­ties cer­tain­ly aren’t bad pub­lic­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Banksy Strikes Again in Venice

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

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Banksy Shreds His $1.4 Mil­lion Paint­ing at Auc­tion, Tak­ing a Tra­di­tion of Artists Destroy­ing Art to New Heights

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A Beautiful 1897 Illustrated Book Shows How Flowers Become Art Nouveau Designs

in Architecture, Art, Books, Design, Nature | August 28th, 2020

The art of draw­ing is not the art of observ­ing forms and objects alone, it is not mere mim­ic­ry of these objects; it is the art of know­ing how far and where­in, and with what just lim­i­ta­tions, those forms and objects can be repro­duced in a pic­ture, or in a dec­o­ra­tive work. — Eugène Gras­set, 1896

Flow­ers loomed large in Art Nou­veau, from the volup­tuous flo­ral head­pieces that crowned Alphonse Mucha’s female fig­ures to the stained glass ros­es favored by archi­tect Charles Ren­nie Mack­in­tosh.

Graph­ic design­er Eugène Gras­set’s 1897 book, Plants and Their Appli­ca­tion to Orna­ment, vivid­ly demon­strates the ways in which nature was dis­tilled into pop­u­lar dec­o­ra­tive motifs at the end of the 19th-cen­tu­ry.

 

Twen­ty-four flow­er­ing plants were select­ed for con­sid­er­a­tion, from hum­ble spec­i­mens like dan­de­lions and this­tle to such Art Nou­veau heavy hit­ters as pop­pies and iris­es.

Each flower is rep­re­sent­ed by a real­is­tic botan­i­cal study, with two addi­tion­al col­or plates in which its form is flat­tened out and mined for its dec­o­ra­tive, styl­is­tic ele­ments.

 

The plates were ren­dered by Grasset’s stu­dents at the École Guérin, young artists whom he had “for­bid­den to con­de­scend to the art of base and servile imi­ta­tion”:

The art of draw­ing is not the art of observ­ing forms and objects alone, it is not mere mim­ic­ry of these objects; it is the art of know­ing how far and where­in, and with what just lim­i­ta­tions, those forms and objects can be repro­duced in a pic­ture, or in a dec­o­ra­tive work.

He also expect­ed stu­dents to hone their pow­ers of obser­va­tion through intense study of the organ­ic struc­tures that would pro­vide their inspi­ra­tion, becom­ing inti­mate­ly acquaint­ed with the char­ac­ter of petal, leaf, and stem:

Beau­ti­ful lines are the foun­da­tion of all beau­ty. In a work of art, what­ev­er it be, appar­ent or hid­den sym­me­try is the vis­i­ble or secret cause of the plea­sure we feel. Every­thing that is cre­at­ed must have some rep­e­ti­tion in its parts to be under­stood, retained in the mem­o­ry, and per­ceived as a whole

When it came to adorn­ing house­hold imple­ments such as vas­es and plates, Gras­set insist­ed that dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments exist in har­mo­ny with their hosts, snip­ing that any artist who would dis­tort form with ill con­sid­ered flour­ish­es should make a bas-relief instead.

Thus­ly do chrysan­the­mum stems pro­vide log­i­cal-look­ing bal­last for a chan­de­lier, and a dandelion’s curved leaves hug the con­tours of a table leg.

Gras­set’s best known stu­dent, Mau­rice Pil­lard Verneuil, whose career spanned Art Nou­veau to Art Deco, absorbed and artic­u­lat­ed the master’s teach­ings:

 

It is no longer the nature (artists) see that they rep­re­sent, that they tran­scribe, but the nature that they aspire to see; nature more per­fect and more beau­ti­ful and of which they have the inte­ri­or vision.

 

View Eugène Grasset’s Plants and Their Appli­ca­tion to Orna­ment as part of the New York Pub­lic Library’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions here. Or find illus­tra­tions at Raw­Pix­el.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826 )

Beau­ti­ful Hand-Col­ored Japan­ese Flow­ers Cre­at­ed by the Pio­neer­ing Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ogawa Kazu­masa (1896)

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now 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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What Did the Roman Emperors Look Like?: See Photorealistic Portraits Created with Machine Learning

in Art, History, Technology | August 27th, 2020

We can spend a life­time read­ing his­to­ries of ancient Rome with­out know­ing what any of its emper­ors looked like. Or rather, with­out know­ing exact­ly what they looked like: being the lead­ers of the might­i­est polit­i­cal enti­ty in the West­ern world, they had their like­ness­es stamped onto coins and carved into busts as a mat­ter of course. But such artist’s ren­der­ings inevitably come with a cer­tain degree of artis­tic license, a ten­den­cy to mold fea­tures into slight­ly more impe­r­i­al shapes. See­ing the faces of the Roman Emper­ors as we would if we were pass­ing them on the street is an expe­ri­ence made pos­si­ble only by high tech­nol­o­gy, and high tech­nol­o­gy devel­oped six­teen cen­turies after the fall of the Roman Empire at that.

“Using the neur­al-net tool Art­breed­er, Pho­to­shop and his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences, I have cre­at­ed pho­to­re­al por­traits of Roman Emper­ors,” writes design­er Daniel Voshart. “For this project, I have trans­formed, or restored (cracks, noses, ears etc.) 800 images of busts to make the 54 emper­ors of The Prin­ci­pate (27 BC to 285 AD).”

The key tech­nol­o­gy that enables Art­breed­er to con­vinc­ing­ly blend images of faces togeth­er is what’s called a “gen­er­a­tive adver­sar­i­al net­work” (GAN). “Some call it Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence,” writes Voshart, “but it is more accu­rate­ly described as Machine Learn­ing.” The Verge’s James Vin­cent writes that Voshart fed in “images of emper­ors he col­lect­ed from stat­ues, coins, and paint­ings, and then tweaked the por­traits man­u­al­ly based on his­tor­i­cal descrip­tions, feed­ing them back to the GAN.”

Into the mix also went “high-res images of celebri­ties”: Daniel Craig into Augus­tus, André the Giant into Max­imi­nus Thrax (thought to have been giv­en his “a lantern jaw and moun­tain­ous frame” by a pitu­itary gland dis­or­der like that which affect­ed the colos­sal wrestler). This par­tial­ly explains why some of these uncan­ni­ly life­like emper­ors — the biggest celebri­ties of their time and place, after all — look faint­ly famil­iar. Though mod­eled as close­ly as pos­si­ble after men who real­ly lived, these exact faces (much like those in the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed mod­ern pho­tographs pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) have nev­er actu­al­ly exist­ed. Still, one can imag­ine the emper­ors who inspired Voshart’s Prin­ci­pate rec­og­niz­ing them­selves in it. But what would they make of the fact that it’s also sell­ing briskly in poster form on Etsy?

Vis­it the Roman Emper­or Project here. For back­ground on this project, vis­it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Five Hard­core Deaths Suf­fered By Roman Emper­ors

Play Cae­sar: Trav­el Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Inter­ac­tive Map

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

The His­to­ry of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Min­utes: A Primer Nar­rat­ed by Bri­an Cox

The His­to­ry of Rome in 179 Pod­casts

Roman Stat­ues Weren’t White; They Were Once Paint­ed in Vivid, Bright Col­ors

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Take a Virtual Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

in Art, Museums | August 26th, 2020

No first trip to Mex­i­co City is com­plete with­out a vis­it to the Fri­da Kahlo Muse­um. Locat­ed in the vil­lage-turned-bor­ough of Coyoacán south of the city’s cen­ter, it requires a short trip-with­in-a-trip to get there. But even for trav­el­ers who know noth­ing of Kahlo’s art, it’s worth the effort — espe­cial­ly since they’ll come away know­ing quite a bit about not just Kahlo’s art and life but the cul­tur­al­ly rich place and time she inhab­it­ed. For the build­ing occu­pied by the Fri­da Kahlo Muse­um was, in fact, the home in which the artist was born and spent most of her life, mak­ing her one of Coyoacán’s many notable res­i­dents. (Oth­ers include writer Octavio Paz, icon­ic com­ic actor Mario “Can­ti­n­flas” Moreno, and actress-singer Dolores del Río.)

Though I’ve long want­ed to return to the Blue House, as the Fri­da Kahlo Muse­um is col­lo­qui­al­ly known, I some­how haven’t made it back again on any of my sub­se­quent trips to Mex­i­co City. And giv­en the state of world trav­el at the moment, I doubt I’ll get the chance to make anoth­er vis­it any time soon.

For­tu­nate­ly, the Muse­um has become vir­tu­al­ly explorable online, with 360-degree views of all its rooms as well as its grounds. Even vir­tu­al­ly, writes Vogue’s Manon Gar­rigues, “Frida’s spir­it can be felt every­where. In her ate­lier are care­ful­ly arranged pig­ments fac­ing her easel, while in the kitchen, which once wel­comed the couple’s friends to the house, includ­ing their renowned neigh­bor, Trot­sky, who lived next door with his wife, are play­ful ceram­ics.”

For those with com­pat­i­ble head­sets, all of this is also view­able in Web­VR mode —  even Kahlo’s bed­room, where “an urn in the form of her face lies on her bed, hold­ing her ash­es. Beside is the mir­ror in which Fri­da, bedrid­den, observed her­self to paint her famous self-por­traits, such as The Two Fridas and Fri­da y la cesarea, now on dis­play in the vil­la.”

The home-turned-muse­um’s ten rooms dis­play a great deal of Kahlo’s art, of course, but also works by her hus­band, the painter Diego Rivera, as well as the cou­ple’s cloth­ing and per­son­al effects. You’ll find paint­ings by oth­er artists of Kahlo’s day like Paul Klee and José María Velas­co, and also hand­craft­ed items from oth­er regions of Mex­i­co. The only thing miss­ing in the vir­tu­al Fri­da Kahlo Muse­um expe­ri­ence is the req­ui­site cafe de olla enjoyed after­ward, back out on the streets of Coyoacán. Enter the vir­tu­al tour here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

Watch Mov­ing Short Films of Fri­da Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the “Blue House”

Artists Fri­da Kahlo & Diego Rivera Vis­it Leon Trot­sky in Mex­i­co: Vin­tage Footage from 1938

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly-Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A New Digital Archive Preserves Black Lives Matter & COVID-19 Street Art

in Art, Politics | August 25th, 2020

Image by Aman­da-Lee Har­ris Gibbs, “Floyd & Tay­lor Trib­ute” 

What hap­pens when anti-racist pro­test­ers gath­er in the streets and are not met with tear gas, rub­ber bul­lets, and batons? For one thing, they make art and graf­fi­ti. Lots of it, on walls, streets, side­walks, cour­t­house doors, the ply­wood of board­ed-up win­dows, wher­ev­er. Pub­lic activist art serves not only as a memo­r­i­al for vic­tims of state oppres­sion, but as a way to imag­ine what the future needs and visu­al­ly occu­py the space to make it hap­pen. In the inter­twin­ing “mutu­al rela­tions of the polit­i­cal and the aes­thet­ic,” sym­bols can begin to call real con­di­tions into exis­tence.

The streets of cities around the coun­try have become tem­po­rary gal­leries of art­works that remem­ber vic­tims of sys­tem­i­cal­ly racist police vio­lence and call for jus­tice, even as they imag­ine what a more just world might look like: one where peo­ple are not trapped in cycles of pover­ty by aus­ter­i­ty and state vio­lence. Such dis­plays have pro­lif­er­at­ed espe­cial­ly in Min­neapo­lis, where George Floyd was killed. There, the “memo­r­i­al… is con­stant­ly chang­ing. In the days fol­low­ing Floyd’s mur­der by the police, street art, flow­ers, hand­writ­ten notes, and more” appeared.

Now the site “has become a liv­ing space,” Todd Lawrence, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Thomas, tells Leah Feiger at Hyper­al­ler­gic. “The state of flux char­ac­ter­izes much of Minneapolis’s street art scene in the wake of recent protests,” Feiger writes. “The own­er­ship of the phys­i­cal art is con­tentious,” and tem­po­rary instal­la­tions become sites of long-term debate. The Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Thomas has decid­ed to pre­serve these ephemer­al state­ments in a data­base called Urban Art Map­ping: George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art. The project began with a focus on Min­neapo­lis and has “steadi­ly expand­ed with every new sub­mis­sion.”

The project includes in its wider scope a data­base of COVID-19 street art, with many an acknowl­edge­ment of how gov­ern­ment fail­ures in response to the pan­dem­ic con­nect to the will­ful dis­re­gard for human life the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment calls out. “Artists and writ­ers pro­duc­ing work in the streets—including tags, graf­fi­ti, murals, stick­ers, and oth­er instal­la­tions on walls, pave­ment, and signs—are in a unique posi­tion to respond quick­ly and effec­tive­ly in a moment of cri­sis,” notes the COVID-19 Street Art site. As we lim­it our move­ment through pub­lic space, that space itself trans­forms, respond­ing in direct ways to a mul­ti­tude of inter­sect­ing crises none of us can afford to ignore.

Make sub­mis­sions to the COVID-19 Street Art archive here and to the George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art archive here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pub­lic Ene­my Releas­es a Fiery Anti-Trump Protest Song (NSFW)

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

How Jazz Helped Fuel the 1960s Civ­il Rights Move­ment

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

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The Face of Bill Murray Adds Some Joy to Classic Paintings

in Art, Comedy, Film, History | August 21st, 2020

Bill Mur­ray isn’t one of those actors who dis­ap­pears into a role.

Nor is he much of a chameleon on can­vas, how­ev­er icon­ic, as artist Eddy Tori­goe demon­strates with a series that grafts Murray’s famous mug onto a num­ber of equal­ly well-known paint­ings.

Tori­goe told Digg that he was inspired by acci­dent, when he was struck by the uncan­ny resem­blance between Gilbert Stuart’s Lans­downe por­trait of George Wash­ing­ton, and a pho­to of Mur­ray post­ed by a Red­dit user.

He down­loaded both images and bus­ied him­self with Pho­to­shop.

The rest is his­to­ry.

The Pres­i­den­tial update is an improve­ment in ways. Mur­ray-faced Wash­ing­ton appears kind­ly, and not averse to a bit of fun. No teeth of enslaved peo­ples com­pro­mis­ing that mouth.

While Mur­ray is capa­ble of main­tain­ing a straight face—wit­ness his work in Lost in Trans­la­tion, The Razor’s Edge, Ham­let 2000, and Torigoe’s homage to Whistler’s Moth­er, above—more often than not a cer­tain puck­ish­ness shines through.

One won­ders what would have befall­en painter Jacques-Louis David had he bestowed The Emper­or Napoleon in His Study at the Tui­leries with Murray’s goofy expres­sion.

And it’s well estab­lished that a key ele­ment of Grant Wood’s oft-par­o­died Amer­i­can Goth­ic is the pok­er faced reserve of its male sub­ject.

Had they been alive today, it’s con­ceiv­able that Lucas Cranach the Elder’s por­trait of Mar­tin Luther might have depict­ed a lighter side of his friend, some­thing more Mur­ray-esque. Though giv­en the Ref­or­ma­tion and his 95 The­ses against Indul­gences, maybe not….

Explore more of Eddy Torigoe’s Bill Mur­ray-enriched mas­ter­pieces of art, includ­ing self-por­traits by Rem­brandt, Fri­da Kahlo, and Picas­so, on his web­site.

via My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Bill Mur­ray Explains How a 19th-Cen­tu­ry Paint­ing Saved His Life

Bill Mur­ray Reads the Poet­ry of Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, Wal­lace Stevens, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er, Lucille Clifton & More

Mas­ter­pieces of West­ern Art with All Gluten Prod­ucts Removed: See Works by Dalí, Cézanne, Van Gogh & Oth­ers

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

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Graphic Novels Tell the Story of David Bowie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Jean-Michel Basquiat & Other Artists and Thinkers

in Art, Books, Comics/Cartoons | August 19th, 2020

If you’re fas­ci­nat­ed by cer­tain artists and thinkers, you can learn about them from books. Any­one who has a sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al or intel­lec­tu­al influ­ence on human­i­ty soon­er or lat­er gets a biog­ra­phy writ­ten about them, and usu­al­ly more than one. But how many get their own graph­ic nov­els? The ver­sa­til­i­ty of the “com­ic book,” long unsus­pect­ed by many West­ern read­ers, has been more and more wide­ly dis­cussed in recent decades. Some of those read­ers, how­ev­er, won’t believe what can be done with the form until they see what can be done with it. So why not show them the graph­ic nov­el on the life of David Bowie pub­lished not long ago — and if they remain uncon­vinced, why not show them the oth­er one?

Few sub­jects demand a visu­al form as much as Bowie, because of the cen­tral­i­ty of his ever-chang­ing appear­ance to his artis­tic project as well as the need to evoke the effer­ves­cent cul­tur­al peri­ods he lived through and did more than his part to define.

Hence the impor­tance of Michael Allred’s BOWIE: Star­dust, Ray­guns, & Moon­age Day­dreams and Nejib’s Had­don Hall as graph­ic-nov­el con­tri­bu­tions to the grow­ing field of Bowieol­o­gy. Com­ic artists and writ­ers have also done well by oth­er fig­ures with places in music his­to­ry: John Coltrane and Bil­lie Hol­l­i­day, for exam­ple, the sub­jects of Pao­lo Parisi’s Coltrane and Blues for Lady Day: The Sto­ry of Bil­lie Hol­i­day.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured both of those books here on Open Cul­ture, as well as Parisi’s Basquiat: A Graph­ic Nov­el. Con­vey­ing the life of a fel­low artist, even one who worked in a dif­fer­ent medi­um, pos­es a unique set of chal­lenges to the graph­ic nov­el­ist. But it’s one thing to depict the work of anoth­er, and some­thing else again to visu­al­ly reimag­ine it, as in BOOM! Stu­dios’ adap­ta­tion of Kurt Von­negut’s Slaugh­ter­house-Five, a nov­el involv­ing not a few bio­graph­i­cal ele­ments in the first place. Oth­er respect­ed works of lit­er­a­ture late­ly to under­go graph­ic nov­el­iza­tion include James Joyce’s Ulysses in Rob Berry’s Ulysses Seen, and the “weird fic­tion” of H.P. Love­craft in the equal­ly weird Love­craft Anthol­o­gy.

You can also read a graph­ic-nov­el adap­ta­tion of a source work nev­er com­plet­ed in the first place — but nev­er com­plet­ed, one must note, by Sal­vador Dalí and the Marx Broth­ers. A col­lab­o­ra­tion between pop-cul­ture schol­ar Josh Frank, artist Manuela Perte­ga, and come­di­an Tim Hei­deck­er, Giraffes on Horse­back Sal­ad real­izes on the page a film that not only was nev­er, but quite pos­si­bly could nev­er have been made. For read­ers clos­er to world­ly real­i­ty, there’s Jim Otta­viani and Leland Myrick­’s Feyn­man: A Biog­ra­phy, which tells and shows the life of world-famous the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist, teacher, and bon vivant Richard Feyn­man. Nev­er before, sure­ly, has a com­ic book had to leg­i­bly and con­vinc­ing­ly depict quan­tum elec­tro­dy­nam­ics, safe-crack­ing, and bon­go-pay­ing — to name just three of Feyn­man’s pur­suits.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Theft! A His­to­ry of Music, a New Free Graph­ic Nov­el Explor­ing 2,000 Years of Musi­cal Bor­row­ing

Bound by Law?: Free Com­ic Book Explains How Copy­right Com­pli­cates Art

iTunes Terms & Con­di­tions Adapt­ed into a Graph­ic Nov­el: Read It Free Online

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graph­ic Nov­el Adap­ta­tion

Read the Entire Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem, “Annabel Lee”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portraits: Explore & Download a Collection of 17 Paintings Free Online

in Art, History | August 18th, 2020

“They say — and I glad­ly believe it — that it is dif­fi­cult to know your­self,” Vin­cent Van Gogh once wrote to his broth­er Theo, “but it isn’t easy to paint one­self either.” This from one of the most pro­lif­ic self-por­traitists of all time. Between the years 1885 and 1889, Van Gogh paint­ed him­self more than 35 times, most of them dur­ing the two years in the mid­dle when he lived in Paris. Always short of funds, but espe­cial­ly strait­ened there, he saved the cost of hir­ing mod­els by invest­ing in a mir­ror instead.

That mir­ror, Van Gogh wrote in anoth­er let­ter, was “good enough to enable me to work from my image in default of a mod­el, because if I can man­age to paint the col­or­ing of my own head, which is not to be done with­out some dif­fi­cul­ty, I shall like­wise be able to paint the heads of oth­er good souls, men and women.” At the Van Gogh Muse­um’s online col­lec­tion you can browse up close and in detail — as well as down­load — sev­en­teen exam­ples of the painter’s essays in his own head col­or, and much else about him­self besides.

We’ve all seen Van Gogh’s two or three most well-known self-por­traits. The most famous of those, 1889’s Self-Por­trait With a Ban­daged Ear (one of two paint­ed that year), hints at the act of self-muti­la­tion that fol­lowed one of his many quar­rels with his friend and col­league Paul Gau­guin. Held at the Cour­tauld Gallery, that paint­ing does­n’t appear on the Van Gogh Muse­um’s site, but those that do reveal aspects of the painter (lit­er­al­ly, in some cas­es) artis­ti­cal­ly unex­plored by his more wide­ly seen works.

Take Self-Por­trait as a Painter at the top of the post, an unusu­al depic­tion in that Van Gogh makes ref­er­ence in it to his pro­fes­sion. Cre­at­ed between Decem­ber 1887 and Feb­ru­ary 1888, this final Parisian work includes a palette, paint­brush­es, and an easel, but the way in which Van Gogh paint­ed it tells us some­thing more: “He showed that he was a mod­ern artist by using a new paint­ing style, with bright, almost unblend­ed col­ors,” says the Van Gogh Muse­um’s web site, “the blue of his smock, for instance, and the orange-red of his beard” cho­sen to inten­si­fy one anoth­er.

Dif­fer­ent self-por­traits empha­size dif­fer­ent dis­tinc­tive ele­ments of Van Gogh’s appear­ance and self-pre­sen­ta­tion. In 1887’s Self-Por­trait with Straw Hat he wears the tit­u­lar piece of head­wear that allows him to use his beloved col­or yel­low, even as he “exam­ines us with one blue and one green eye.” In some self-por­traits he goes not just with­out a hat but with­out any of the accou­trements of his work at all, includ­ing his artist’s smock. In oth­ers, as in the Adolphe Mon­ti­cel­li-inspired exam­ple here, he smokes a pipe; in the clear­ly Impres­sion­ist-influ­enced self-por­trait just above, he opts for both pipe and hat. Yet we can always rec­og­nize Van Gogh by the inten­si­ty of his expres­sion — or as Dou­glas Cou­p­land less rev­er­ent­ly put it, his “self­ie face.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore 1400 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh–and Much More–at the Van Gogh Museum’s Online Col­lec­tion

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

Expe­ri­ence the Van Gogh Muse­um in 4K Res­o­lu­tion: A Video Tour in Sev­en Parts

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Por­trait Morphs Into a Pho­to­graph

Van Gogh’s “Star­ry Night” and “Self Por­trait” Paint­ed on Dark Water, Using a Tra­di­tion­al Turk­ish Art Form

Dis­cov­ered: The Only Known Pic­ture of Vin­cent Van Gogh as an Adult Artist? (Maybe, Maybe Not)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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