H.R. Giger’s Dark, Surrealist Album Covers: Debbie Harry, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Celtic Frost, Danzig & More

in Art, Music | July 22nd, 2020

The work of H.R. Giger is immense­ly pow­er­ful. Giger’s amaz­ing cov­er for Emer­son, Lake and Palmer’s album Brain Sal­ad Surgery por­trays a Goth­ic touch that could fit any heavy met­al band at any time.

—Jim­my Page

Swiss artist Hans Rue­di Giger is a genre unto his own, sin­gle-hand­ed­ly invent­ing the bio­me­chan­i­cal hor­ror of the 1980s with his designs for Rid­ley Scott’s 1979 Alien, the film that launched him into inter­na­tion­al promi­nence and turned Deb­bie Har­ry on to his work. Meet­ing him the fol­low­ing year, the Blondie singer asked Giger to design the cov­er and music videos for her solo album, KooKoo.

The album was panned, but the cov­er end­ed up being as pre­scient as the film that pre­ced­ed it. It would “see its influ­ence in films like Hell­rais­er, the rise of what was called the ‘mod­ern prim­i­tive’ move­ment, and help cul­ti­vate the dark masochis­tic char­ac­ter Har­ry would play in David Cronenberg’s Video­drome,” writes Ted Mills in an ear­li­er Open Cul­ture post. “It was a feel­ing that would flour­ish in the deca­dent ‘80s.”

The record was also, in a way, “a throw­back to Giger’s oth­er famous record cov­er, the one for Emer­son, Lake, and Palmer’s Brain Sal­ad Surgery” from 1973 (above). Ten years before Alien, Giger designed his first album cov­er, for a “pro­to-met­al” band called The Shiv­ers.

Their 1969 Walpur­gis, fea­tures what look very much like Alien’s face­hug­gers. Giger had been hav­ing this night­mare for a long time. Years after these begin­nings, due in large part to Alien and its sequels and the Deb­bie Har­ry cov­er, Giger became high­ly sought after by met­al bands, from Celtic Frost to Danzig to Car­cass.

His work appears, how­ev­er, on far more album cov­ers than he would like. There have been “many small bands over the years,” he writes on his site, “pre­sum­ably fans of mine, who had appro­pri­at­ed my art­work for their album and CD cov­ers,” with­out get­ting per­mis­sion. Giger him­self has only cre­at­ed a few pieces specif­i­cal­ly as album cov­er art, the last in 1989 for Steve Stevens’ Atom­ic Play­boys. “Of the approx­i­mate­ly 20 records on which my art­work has been seen over the last 30 years,” he writes, only a small num­ber have been com­mis­sions. These include The Shiv­ers, ELP, Har­ry, and Stevens.

All the oth­er covers—those offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned, in any case—come from work Giger “made for myself, many years before, which the bands, lat­er, licensed for their own use after see­ing them in my books.” Though Giger him­self is more of a jazz fan, his appeal to heavy met­al is obvi­ous. “Giger’s style of adding a sur­re­al­ist twist to mechan­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal scenes,” writes All­mu­sic, “often with twist­ed sex­u­al undertones—was imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fi­able,” and imme­di­ate­ly iden­ti­fied a band as some­thing seduc­tive­ly taboo and pos­si­bly dead­ly.

At least one use of his work got a band pros­e­cut­ed. “Bay Area punks the Dead Kennedys includ­ed a poster of Giger’s Land­scape #XX, also known as Penis Land­scape (the image depict­ed rows of erect phal­lus­es in coitus), in the pack­ag­ing of their 1985 album Frankenchrist,” writes Rolling Stone, “and were sub­se­quent­ly put on tri­al for obscen­i­ty.”

Those who would mis­use his work and vio­late his copy­right may also find them­selves in court. “It will,” he warns, “cost a lot more than if they had first con­tact­ed me, through my agent, to ask for per­mis­sion.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Deb­bie Har­ry Com­bined Artis­tic Forces with H.R. Giger

The Giger Bar: Dis­cov­er the 1980s Tokyo Bar Designed by H. R. Giger, the Same Artist Who Cre­at­ed the Night­mar­ish Mon­ster in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

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

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Artists Give Advice to the Young: Words of Wisdom from Andrei Tarkovsky, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, John Cleese & Many More

in Art, Life | July 22nd, 2020

When Rain­er Maria Rilke began cor­re­spond­ing with a poet­i­cal­ly inclined 19-year-old mil­i­tary-acad­e­my cadet named Franz Xaver Kap­pus, he inad­ver­tent­ly found­ed a genre. After Rilke’s death, Kap­pus pub­lished the mis­sives the two had exchanged in the 1900s as the book Let­ters to a Young Poet, a title to which estab­lished old­er artists giv­ing advice to aspir­ing younger ones have paid homage ever since. Here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, of course, their words of advice don’t usu­al­ly come writ­ten in let­ters. They aren’t even lim­it­ed to one-to-one cor­re­spon­dence: now such words of wis­dom can eas­i­ly be broad­cast to every young per­son in the world with rel­a­tive ease. For the young artist, the chal­lenge thus has shift­ed from seek­ing advice to seek­ing out the right advice.

Hence the roundups we’ve post­ed here on Open Cul­ture of offer­ings like “Advice to the Young,” a Youtube series from Den­mark’s Louisiana Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. In 2016 we high­light­ed its videos of cre­ators who suc­ceed­ed in shap­ing the cul­ture with­out much in the way of com­pro­mise to their idio­syn­crat­ic visions: Lau­rie Ander­son, Daniel Lanois, David, Byrne, Pat­ti Smith, Umber­to Eco, Mari­na Abramović.

In 2018 we fea­tured an update on fur­ther advice to the young offered by writ­ers like Jonathan Franzen and Lydia Davis, film­mak­ers like Wim Wen­ders, and artists like Ed Ruscha. The Louisiana Chan­nel, which has con­tin­ued to add new clips of advice from an ever-widen­ing range of fig­ures, has since uploaded sage coun­sel from the likes of pho­tog­ra­ph­er and film­mak­er Anton Cor­bi­jn, dis­si­dent artist Ai Wei­wei, and Trainspot­ting author Irvine Welsh.

As Welsh puts it, “The most impor­tant thing I would say to any­body who’s doing any­thing” — writ­ing, music, art, what have you — is to “do it with exu­ber­ance, because that will come across.” Long­time Open Cul­ture read­ers may remem­ber Andrei Tarkovsky (an artist who in most respects seems to have occu­pied an entire­ly sep­a­rate world from Welsh’s) hav­ing tak­en that idea fur­ther: young film­mak­ers should­n’t “sep­a­rate their work, their movie, their film, from the life they live,” and indeed should accept that their art requires “sac­ri­fic­ing of your­self. You should belong to it, it should­n’t belong to you.” He also advis­es young peo­ple of any incli­na­tion that they “should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as pos­si­ble by them­selves” — per­haps the only mode in which they can stay true to their own per­cep­tions and moti­va­tions.

“I think many writ­ers are led into a com­pro­mise in their basic rela­tion­ship to truth in their mate­r­i­al,” says Rachel Cusk, author of the recent “Out­line Tril­o­gy” of nov­els and much oth­er fic­tion and non-fic­tion besides, in her Louisiana Chan­nel video. “You get a lot fur­ther by stick­ing to your guns.” But where do you find that mate­r­i­al in the first place?

John Cleese answers that straight­for­ward­ly in the Big Think inter­view clip just above: “I sug­gest at the start that you steal, or bor­row — or as the artists would say, ‘are influ­enced by’ — any­thing that you think is real­ly good and real­ly fun­ny, and which appeals to you. If you study that and try to repro­duce it in some way, then it’ll have your own stamp on it.” Only then can you devel­op your own style. Or, to return to the needs of young poets of the world, you could take the advice of no less cel­e­brat­ed a pre­de­ces­sor in the art than Walt Whit­man: “Don’t write poet­ry.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Lau­rie Ander­son, David Byrne, Umber­to Eco, Pat­ti Smith & More

Great Film­mak­ers Offer Advice to Young Direc­tors: Taran­ti­no, Her­zog, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Ander­son, Felli­ni & More

Ven­er­a­ble Female Artists, Musi­cians & Authors Give Advice to the Young: Pat­ti Smith, Lau­rie Ander­son & More

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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Icons of Art Wearing Masks: Frida Kahlo, Mona Lisa, Girl with the Pearl Earring & More

in Art, Current Affairs | July 20th, 2020

We hear the phrase “unprece­dent­ed times” every day now, but the truth is few calami­ties in human his­to­ry are more prece­dent­ed than plagues and pesti­lences. In West­ern his­to­ry, at least, dis­ease epi­demics seem always to have been fol­lowed by Machi­avel­lian oppor­tunism and cultish con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that only made things worse.

Dur­ing the 14th cen­tu­ry, almost six hun­dred years before Nao­mi Klein defined the shock doc­trine, the Black Death “strength­ened the pow­er of the state and accel­er­at­ed the dom­i­na­tion of key mar­kets by a hand­ful of large com­pa­nies,” write Eleanor Rus­sell and Mar­tin Park­er at The Con­ver­sa­tion (hel­lo, Ama­zon). In their argu­ment, dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism may have pre­ced­ed actu­al cap­i­tal­ism, and it start­ed with the plague.

In his his­to­ry of the Great Plague of 1665, Daniel Defoe described how “every­one behaved bad­ly, though the rich behaved the worst,” as Jill Lep­ore writes at The New York­er, forc­ing their ser­vants to put their lives at risk to pro­vi­sion the great hous­es. “This Neces­si­ty…,” writes Defoe, “was in a great Mea­sure the Ruin of the whole City,” though few in Lon­don then under­stood how to slow trans­mis­sion of the dis­ease.

That was not the case when the Influen­za epi­dem­ic took the lives of hun­dreds of mil­lions around the world between 1918 and 1920. Doc­tors under­stood how the flu spread and rec­om­mend­ed that every­one wear a mask in pub­lic. Cities passed ordi­nances and imme­di­ate­ly resis­tance sprang up, lead­ing to orga­ni­za­tions like San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League, whose rhetoric sounds like that of anti-mask pro­tes­tors of today.

The times may be unique—for the speed at which COVID-19 spread around the world, for instance, along with the disinformation—but humans have lived through many ver­sions of pan­dem­ic, and many dis­as­trous­ly self­ish, oppor­tunis­tic, and short-sight­ed respons­es to it. We may con­tem­plate these his­tor­i­cal rep­e­ti­tions as we admire the Insta­gram cre­ations of artist Genevieve Blais, who has been post­ing images of famous paint­ings, stat­ues, and pho­tographs with their sub­jects wear­ing masks.

More than nov­el­ty memes or high­brow pub­lic ser­vice announce­ments, Blais’ cre­ations are part-whim­si­cal/­part-sober­ing reminders of the per­sis­tence of plagues through­out history—their influ­ence on the rise and fall of dynas­ties and pow­er­ful patrons, and the igno­rance and fol­ly that led to so much pre­ventable death. Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing, humans are bet­ter posi­tioned than ever before to com­bat epi­demics of dis­ease. But it’s worth remem­ber­ing the prece­dents for our cur­rent con­di­tions. Plagues have shaped human his­to­ry. We don’t always have to respond to them the same way. See all of Blais’s masked fine art images at her Plague His­to­ry Insta­gram page. If you DM her, she will make you a print.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Hap­pened When Amer­i­cans Had to Wear Masks Dur­ing the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic

Vin­tage Sci­ence Face Masks: Con­quer the Pan­dem­ic with Sci­ence, Cour­tesy of Maria Popova’s Brain­Pick­ings

Down­load Clas­sic Works of Plague Fic­tion: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shel­ley, to Edgar Allan Poe

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

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Banksy Strikes Again in London & Urges Everyone to Wear Masks

in Art | July 16th, 2020

The per­son who may or may not be Banksy is at it again, this time sten­cil­ing up a Lon­don Under­ground car­riage with his famil­iar rat char­ac­ters. Rats know a thing or two about spread­ing dis­ease but this time they are here to insist that the pub­lic wear a mask. (Ear­li­er in April they appeared in the artist’s own bath­room.)

As post­ed on Banksy’s social media feeds on Tues­day we can see the artist get kit­ted up like one of the Underground’s “deep cleaners”—-a pro­tec­tive face mask, gog­gles, blue gloves, white Tyvek body­suit, and orange safe­ty vest—and enter a car­riage with an exter­mi­na­tor’s spray can­is­ter filled with light blue paint. He also has some of his sten­cils ready to go. “If you don’t mask, you don’t get” reads the video’s cap­tion.

Cur­rent­ly all pas­sen­gers must wear masks on the Lon­don Under­ground, and over the last month Trans­port for Lon­don has report­ed a 90% com­pli­ance rate (take note, Amer­i­ca!). Work­ers have been san­i­tiz­ing sta­tions and trains more, and even installing UV light tech­nol­o­gy to bat­tle the virus.

Banksy’s rats are shown using masks as para­chutes, car­ry­ing bot­tles of hand san­i­tiz­er, and along one wall sneez­ing par­ti­cles across the win­dow, paint­ed using the can­is­ter spray noz­zle. Ban­sky tags the back wall with his name, urges a pas­sen­ger to stay back while he works, and then gets off at a stop. He’s left one final mes­sage: “I get lock­down” (paint­ed on a sta­tion wall) “but I get up again” (on the clos­ing doors). The line is a nod to Chumbawumba’s inescapable 1997 anthem “Tubthump­ing.”

Banksy might be a rebel­lious street artist, but he’s not an idiot: wear­ing masks is imper­a­tive.

The art­work didn’t last long, as Trans­port of Lon­don has strict poli­cies against graf­fi­ti. So few pas­sen­gers even got to expe­ri­ence the art before it was scrubbed by work­ers, long before any­body would have iden­ti­fied it as a Banksy work.

“When we saw the video, we start­ed to look into it and spoke to the clean­ers,” a Lon­don Trans­port source told the New York Post. “It start­ed to emerge that they had noticed some sort of ‘rat thing’ a few days ago and cleaned it off, as they should. It rather changes the aspect for any­one seek­ing to go down the route of accus­ing us of cul­tur­al van­dal­ism.”

The Post even sug­gest­ed that the car­riage could have been removed and then sold as a com­plete art work in itself and raised mon­ey for char­i­ty. (They quote an art bro­ker who val­ues it at $7.5 mil­lion. But where would you hang it? In your pri­vate air­plane hang­er?)

Any­way, like a lot of Banksy work, it appeared, it was doc­u­ment­ed, and it was gone. Trans­port of Lon­don did men­tion that they were open to Banksy cre­at­ing some­thing else at a “suit­able loca­tion,” but then again, that’s not how the artist rolls. Just keep your eyes open, folks, and look out for rats.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behind the Banksy Stunt: An In-Depth Break­down of the Artist’s Self-Shred­ding Paint­ing

Banksy Strikes Again in Venice

Banksy Paints a Grim Hol­i­day Mur­al: Season’s Greet­ings to All

The Genius of Har­ry Beck’s 1933 Lon­don Tube Map–and How It Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Sub­way Map Design Every­where

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Bisa Butler’s Beautiful Quilted Portraits of Frederick Douglass, Nina Simone, Jean-Michel Basquiat & More

in Art, Creativity, Fashion, History | July 10th, 2020

Fiber artist Bisa But­ler’s quilt­ed por­traits of Black Amer­i­cans gain extra pow­er from their medi­um.

Each work is com­prised of many scraps, care­ful­ly cut and posi­tioned after hours of research and pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es.

Vel­vet and silk nes­tle against bits of vin­tage flour sacks, West African wax print fab­ric, den­im and, occa­sion­al­ly, hand-me-downs from the sitter’s own col­lec­tion.

In The Warmth of Oth­er Sons, a 12-foot, life-sized por­trait of an African Amer­i­can fam­i­ly who migrat­ed north in search of eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty, a wary-look­ing young girl clutch­es a purse to her chest. The purse is con­struct­ed from a com­mer­cial wax cot­ton print titled Michelle Obama’s Bag, which com­mem­o­rates one of the for­mer First Lady’s trips to Africa.

As anthro­pol­o­gist Nina Syl­vanus writes in Pat­terns in Cir­cu­la­tion: Cloth, Gen­der, and Mate­ri­al­i­ty in West Africa:

To wear this pattern…is both to hon­or and aspire to be rav­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and pow­er­ful like Michele Oba­ma; It is con­sid­ered a must-have fash­ion piece in the wardrobe of styl­ish women in Abid­jan, Lomé, and Lagos.

The vibrant col­ors of Butler’s mate­ri­als also inform her por­traits, par­tic­u­lar­ly those inspired by his­tor­i­cal fig­ures whose images are most famil­iar in black-and-white.

She is also deeply influ­enced by her under­grad­u­ate years at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, where many of her pro­fes­sors were part of the AfriCO­BRA artists’ col­lec­tive. They encour­aged stu­dents to think of blank can­vas­es as black, rather than white, and to throw out the Beaux Arts palette in favor of West African fabric’s Kool-Aid colors—“bright orange, bright yel­low, crim­son red, intense blue.”

As she describes in the above video:

The ini­tial start is who’s it gonna be? Then after you choose that per­son, choose your col­or scheme. The col­or scheme is based on what you feel about that per­son. Peo­ple have col­or around them, in them, that is not evi­dent­ly vis­i­ble to the naked eye.

The Storm, the Whirl­wind, and The Earth­quake, her recent­ly com­plet­ed full-length por­trait of a 30-year old Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, reimag­ines the abolitionist’s 19th-cen­tu­ry garb as some­thing akin to a mod­ern day Harlem dandy’s bold embrace of col­or, pat­tern, and style, delib­er­ate­ly chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo. The rich col­or scheme extends to his skin and the homey back­ground fab­ric.

But­ler, who was raised in an art-filled New Jer­sey home by a Black Amer­i­can moth­er and a Ghan­ian father, also cred­its her grand­moth­er, the sub­ject of her first quilt­ed por­trait, with help­ing her find her aes­thet­ic.

An ear­ly attempt to paint a por­trait of her beloved rel­a­tive (and child­hood sewing instruc­tor) result­ed in dis­ap­point­ment on both sides. The crest­fall­en artist’s aunt tipped her off that the old­er lady’s men­tal self-pic­ture was that of some­one 30 years younger.

Inspired by the col­laged work of Romare Bear­den, But­ler gave it anoth­er go, this time in quilt­ed form, tak­ing care to rep­re­sent her grand­moth­er as an attrac­tive woman in the prime of life. This time her efforts were met with enthu­si­asm. “I could feel an ener­gy in the room that some­thing new was hap­pen­ing,” But­ler recalls.

Whether her sub­jects are liv­ing or dead, But­ler strives to bring the same sense of “dig­ni­ty and regal opu­lence” to unsung cit­i­zens that she does when cre­at­ing por­traits of such famous Amer­i­cans as Nina Simone, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack­ie Robin­son, Lau­ren Hill, Josephine Bak­er, and Jean-Michel Basquiat:

African Amer­i­cans have been quilt­ing since we were brought to this coun­try and need­ed to keep warm. Enslaved peo­ple were not giv­en large pieces of fab­ric and had to make do with the scraps of cloth that were left after cloth­ing wore out. From these scraps the African Amer­i­can quilt aes­thet­ic came into being. Some enslaved peo­ples were so tal­ent­ed that they were tasked for cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful quilts that adorned their enslavers beds. My own pieces are rem­i­nis­cent of this tra­di­tion, but I use African fab­rics from my father’s home­land of Ghana, batiks from Nige­ria, and prints from South Africa. My sub­jects are adorned with and made up of the cloth of our ances­tors. If these vis­ages are to be recre­at­ed and seen for the first time in a cen­tu­ry, I want them to have their African Ances­try back, I want them to take their place in Amer­i­can His­to­ry. I want the view­er to see the sub­jects as I see them. 

Explore the work of Bisa But­ler on the artist’s Insta­gram, or MyMod­ern­met and Colos­sal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take Free Cours­es on African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry from Yale and Stan­ford: From Eman­ci­pa­tion, to the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, and Beyond

Too Big for Any Muse­um, AIDS Quilt Goes Dig­i­tal Thanks to Microsoft

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

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

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Does Every Picture Tell a Story? A Conversation with Artist Joseph Watson for Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #51

in Art, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | July 9th, 2020

Sto­ry­telling is an essen­tial part of Las Vegas artist Joseph Wat­son’s paint­ing method­ol­o­gy, whether he’s cre­at­ing city scenes or pub­lic sculp­ture or chil­dren’s illus­tra­tions. So how does the nar­ra­tive an author may have in mind affect the view­er, and is this dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent types of art?

Joseph is per­haps best known as the illus­tra­tor of the Go, Go, GRETA! book series and does online stream­ing of draw­ing ses­sions through Insta­gram and Face­book. On this episode of Pret­ty Much Pop, he joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to explore the pic­ture-nar­ra­tive con­nec­tion and more gen­er­al­ly how know­ing about the cre­ation of an image affects our recep­tion of it, touch­ing on Guer­ni­ca, Where the Wild Things Are, Dr. Seuss, The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, and more.

You can browse Joseph’s work at josephwatsonart.com, and you’re real­ly going to want in par­tic­u­lar to look at a cou­ple of the works that we con­sid­er explic­it­ly:

Oth­er sources we looked at in prepa­ra­tion for this dis­cus­sion include:

Fol­low Joseph on Insta­gram @josephwatsonart; also Twit­ter and Face­book.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This week, it includes a par­tic­u­lar­ly philo­soph­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion of the notion of escapism and how dif­fer­ent that is from so-called seri­ous pur­suits. Is this just a ver­sion of the high-low cul­ture dis­tinc­tion that we large­ly reject­ed in episode one? This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Explore the Beautiful Pages of the 1902 Japanese Design Magazine Shin-Bijutsukai: European Modernism Meets Traditional Japanese Design

in Art | July 8th, 2020

We read much about the role of Japanism in the art of late 19th Europe and North Amer­i­ca. “The craze for all things Japan­ese,” writes the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, “was launched in 1854 when Amer­i­can Com­modore Matthew Per­ry forced Japan to recom­mence inter­na­tion­al trade after two cen­turies of vir­tu­al iso­la­tion.” Britain, the Con­ti­nent, and the U.S. were awash in Japan­ese art and arti­facts and ideas about the pre-indus­tri­al puri­ty of Japan­ese forms pro­lif­er­at­ed. “West­ern­ers were… drawn to tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese artis­tic expres­sion because of its ties to the nat­ur­al world. Japan­ese artists in all media treat­ed the sub­jects of birds, flow­ers, land­scapes, and the sea­sons.”

West­ern­ers like Louis Com­fort Tiffany emu­lat­ed these pat­terns in their designs, and they appeared in the work of van Gogh and Gau­guin. We may be famil­iar with how much the admi­ra­tion for Japan­ese wood­cuts, fur­ni­ture, archi­tec­ture, and poet­ry influ­enced Impres­sion­ism, the Arts and Crafts Move­ment, and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry Mod­ernism.

We may not know that the influ­ence was mutu­al, with Japan­ese artists devel­op­ing their own forms of Art Deco, Euro­pean-influ­enced Mod­ernism and a nation­al­ist Japan­ese Arts and Crafts Move­ment called “Mingei” that was heav­i­ly inspired by ear­li­er British artists who had them­selves been inspired by the Japan­ese.

An ear­li­er exam­ple of the cross-cul­tur­al exchange in the arts between Europe and Japan can be seen here in these prints from Shin-Bijut­sukai (新美術海)… a Japan­ese design mag­a­zine that was edit­ed by illus­tra­tor and design­er Korin Furuya (1875–1910),” notes Spoon and Tam­a­go. These images come from a col­lec­tion of issues from 1901 to 1902, bound togeth­er in a huge 353-page design book (view it online at the Inter­net Archive or the Pub­lic Domain Review). We can see in the tra­di­tion­al images of flow­ers and birds the influ­ence of indus­tri­al design as well as “hints of art nou­veau and oth­er influ­ences of the time” from Euro­pean graph­ic arts.

There was a reluc­tance among many Japan­ese artists to acknowl­edge their debts to West­ern artists, a symp­tom, writes Wendy Jones Nakan­ishi, pro­fes­sor at Shikoku Gakuin Uni­ver­si­ty, of “the ambiva­lence felt by many Japan­ese towards the rapid west­ern­iza­tion of their coun­try at the cost of the loss of indige­nous cul­tur­al prac­tices.” Despite the enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty of Japan­ese art in Europe, “the ambiva­lence was mutu­al.” Many appeared to feel that “the sub­tle beau­ty of the Japan­ese art threat­ened Euro­pean claims to cul­tur­al suprema­cy” when it appeared in Vic­to­ri­an exhi­bi­tions in Lon­don and else­where.

These fears aside, the meet­ing of many cul­tures in the exchanges between Europe and Japan helped to revi­tal­ize the arts and shake off stag­nant clas­si­cal tra­di­tions while respond­ing in dynam­ic ways to rapid indus­tri­al­iza­tion. The empha­sis on folk and dec­o­ra­tive art, brought into the realm of fine art, was cul­tur­al­ly trans­for­ma­tive in Europe. In Japan, the styl­iza­tions of mod­ernist paint­ing dis­rupt­ed tra­di­tion­al scenes and tech­niques, as in the wood­block prints here and in the sev­er­al hun­dred more in var­i­ous issues of the month­ly mag­a­zine. See them all at Pub­lic Domain Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Full Issues of MAVO, the Japan­ese Avant-Garde Mag­a­zine That Announced a New Mod­ernist Move­ment (1923–1925)

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

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

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

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Salvador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Contributed “Nothing” to Art (1986)

in Art, Television | July 8th, 2020

Not so very long ago, Sal­vador Dalí was the most famous liv­ing painter in the world. When the BBC’s Are­na came to shoot an episode about him in 1986, they asked him what that exalt­ed state felt like. “I don’t know if I am the most famous painter in the world,” Dalí responds, “because lots of the peo­ple who ask for my auto­graph in the street don’t know if I’m a singer, a film star, a mad­man, a writer — they don’t know what I am.” He was, in one sense or anoth­er, most of those things and oth­ers besides. But we can safe­ly say, more than thir­ty years after his death, that Dalí will be remem­bered first for his visu­al art, with its vast seas and skies, its impos­si­ble beasts, its melt­ing clocks. And what did Dalí him­self believe he had con­tributed to art?

“Noth­ing,” he says. “Absolute­ly noth­ing, because, as I’ve always said, I’m a very bad painter. Because I’m too intel­li­gent to be a good painter. To be a good painter you’ve got to be a bit stu­pid, with the excep­tion of Velázquez, who is a genius, whose tal­ent sur­pass­es the art of paint­ing.” In oth­er words, when Dalí’s ever-present detrac­tors said he was no Velázquez, Dalí’s whole­heart­ed­ly agreed.

Over the past few decades, appre­ci­a­tion of the dis­tinc­tive com­bi­na­tion of vision and tech­nique on dis­play in Dalí’s paint­ings has won him more offi­cial respect (as well as a lav­ish new col­lec­tion pub­lished in book form by Taschen), but the debate about to what extent he was a true artist and to what extent a cal­cu­lat­ed­ly eccen­tric self-pro­mot­er will nev­er ful­ly sim­mer down.

Dalí also claimed to owe his life to paint­ing bad­ly. “The day Dalí paints a pic­ture as good as Velázquez, Ver­meer, or Raphael, or music like Mozart,” he says, “the next week he’ll die. So I pre­fer to paint bad pic­tures and live longer.” That he had already entered his ninth decade by the time Are­na came call­ing sug­gests that this strat­e­gy might have been effec­tive, though he was­n’t with­out his health trou­bles. In his first pub­lic appear­ance after hav­ing had a pace­mak­er implant­ed that same year, he declared that “When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are nec­es­sary for the progress of human­i­ty.” Dalí’s kept his askew arro­gance to the end, even through the con­tro­ver­sial final years that saw him sign off on the large-scale pro­duc­tion of shod­dy lith­o­graphs of his paint­ings. About the peo­ple who made them and the peo­ple who bought them, Dalí had only this to say: “They deserve each oth­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Q: Sal­vador Dalí, Are You a Crack­pot? A: No, I’m Just Almost Crazy (1969)

Sal­vador Dalí Strolls onto The Dick Cavett Show with an Anteater, Then Talks About Dreams & Sur­re­al­ism, the Gold­en Ratio & More (1970)

When Sal­vador Dali Met Sig­mund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Sur­re­al­ism (1938)

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Great Orson Welles

The Most Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Sal­vador Dalí’s Paint­ings Pub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful New Book by Taschen: Includes Nev­er-Seen-Before Works

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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