This is something you can do at home. Everyone, please draw pictures —Toshio Suzuki
There’s no shortage of online tutorials for fans who want to draw Totoro, the enigmatic title character of Studio Ghibli’s 1988 animated feature, My Neighbor Totoro:
This is Totoro as Zen practice, offered as a gift to cooped-up Japanese children, whose schools, like so many worldwide, were abruptly shuttered in an effort to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.
What makes great paintings great? Unless you can see them for yourself—and be awed, or not, by their physical presence—the answers will generally come second-hand, through the words of art historians, critics, curators, gallerists, etc. We can study art in reproduction, but seeing, for example, the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn in the flesh presents an entirely different aesthetic experience than seeing them on the page or screen.
Lately, however, the situation is changing, and the boundaries blurring between a virtual and an in-person experience of art. It’s possible with digital technology to have experiences no ordinary museum-goer has had, of course—like walking into a VR Salvador Dalí painting, or through a simulated Vermeer museum in augmented reality.
But these technological interventions are novelties, in a way. Like famous paintings silkscreened on t‑shirts or glazed on coffee mugs, they warp and distort the works they represent.
That is not the case, however, with the latest digital reproduction of Rembrandt’s grandest and most exclusive painting, The Night Watch, a 44.8 gigapixel image of the work that the museum has “released online in a zoomable interface,” notes Kottke. “The level of detail available here is incredible.” Even that description seems like understatement. The image comes to us from the same team responsible for the painting’s multi-phase, live-streamed restoration.
The Rijksmuseum’s imaging team led by datascientist Robert Erdmann made this photograph of The Night Watch from a total of 528 exposures. The 24 rows of 22 pictures were stitched together digitally with the aid of neural networks. The final image is made up of 44.8 gigapixels (44,804,687,500 pixels), and the distance between each pixel is 20 micrometres (0.02 mm). This enables the scientists to study the painting in detail remotely. The image will also be used to accurately track any future ageing processes taking place in the painting.
The hugely famous work is so enormous, nearly 12 feet high and over 14 feet wide, that its figures are almost life-size. Yet even when it was possible to get close to the painting—before COVID-19 shut down the Rijksmuseum and before Rembrandt’s masterwork went behind glass—no one except conservationists could ever get as close to it as we can now with just the click of a mouse or a slide of our fingers across a trackpad.
The experience of seeing Rembrandt’s brushstrokes magnified in crystalline clarity doesn’t just add to our store of knowledge about The Night Watch, as the Rijksmuseum suggests above. This astonishing image also—and perhaps most importantly for the majority of people who will view it online—enables us to really commune with the materiality of the painting, and to be moved by it in a way that may have only been possible in the past by making an exclusive, in-person visit to the Rijksmuseum without a tourist in sight. (For most of us, that is an unrealistic way to view great art.)
See the huge photographic reproduction of The Night Watchhere and zoom in on any detail until you can almost smell the varnish. This image represents the painting in the current state of its restoration, an effort that the museum previously opened to the public by live streaming it. Yet, the work has stopped for the past two months as conservationists have stayed home. Just yesterday, the team’s onsite research began again, and will continue at least into 2021. This huge photo of the painting may be the closest almost anyone will ever get to the canvas, and the only opportunity for some time to approximately feel its monumental scale.
For anyone interested, there’s also a 10 billion pixel scan of Vermeer’s masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring. Explore it here.
Most of us know Mary Wollstonecraft as the author of the 1792 pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and as the mother of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. Fewer of us may know that two years before she published her foundational feminist text, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a pro-French Revolution, anti-monarchy argument that first made her famous as a writer and philosopher. Perhaps far fewer know that Wollstonecraft began her career as a published author in 1787 with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (though she had yet to raise children herself), a conduct manual for proper behavior.
A hugely popular genre during the first Industrial Revolution, conduct manuals bore a miscellaneous character, inculcating a battery of middle-class rules, beliefs, and affectations through a mix of pedagogy, allegory, domestic advice, and devotional writing. Young women were instructed in the proper way to dress, eat, pray, laugh, love, etc., etc.
It may seem from our perspective that a radical firebrand like Wollstonecraft would shun this sort of thing, but her moralizing was typical of middle-class women of her time, even of pioneering writers who supported revolutions and women’s political and social equality.
Wollstonecraft’s assumptions about class and character come into relief when placed against the views of another famous contemporary, far more radical figure, William Blake, who was then a struggling, mostly obscure poet, printer, and illustrator in London. In 1791, he received a commission to illustrate a second edition of Wollstonecraft’s third book, a follow-up of sorts to her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. The 1788 work—Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness—is a more focused book, using a series of vignettes woven into a frame story.
The two children in the narrative, 14-year-old Mary and 12-year-old Caroline, receive lessons from their relative Mrs. Mason, who instructs them on a different virtue and moral failing in each chapter by using stories and examples from nature. The two pupils “are motherless,” notes the British Library, “and lack the good habits they should have absorbed by example. Mrs. Mason intends to rectify this by being with them constantly and answering all their questions.” She is an all-knowing governess who explains the world away with a philosophy that might have sounded particularly harsh to Blake’s ears.
For example, in the chapter on physical pain, Mary is stung by several wasps. Afterward, her guardian begins to lecture her “with more than usual gravity.”
I am sorry to see a girl of your age weep on account of bodily pain; it is a proof of a weak mind—a proof that you cannot employ yourself about things of consequence. How often must I tell you that the Most High is educating us for eternity?… Children early feel bodily pain, to habituate them to bear the conflicts of the soul, when they become reasonable creatures. This is say, is the first trial, and I like to see that proper pride which strives to conceal its sufferings…. The Almighty, who never afflicts but to produce some good end, first sends diseases to children to teach them patience and fortitude; and when by degrees they have learned to bear them, they have acquired some virtue.
Blake likely found this line of reasoning off-putting, at the least. His own poems “were not children’s literature per se,” writes Stephanie Metz at the University of Tennessee’s Romantic Politics project, “yet their simplistic language and even some of their content responds to the characteristics of didactic fiction and children’s poetry.” Blake wrote expressly to protest the ideology found in conduct manuals like Wollstonecraft’s: “He calls attention to society’s abuse of children in a number of different ways, showing how society corrupts their inherent innocence and imagination while also failing to care for their physical and emotional needs.”
For Blake, children’s big emotions and active imaginations made them superior to adults. “Several of his poems,” Metz writes, “show the ways in which children’s innate nature has already been tainted by their parents and other societal forms of authority, such as the church.” Given his attitudes, we can see why “modern interpreters of the illustrations for Original Stories have detected a pictorial critique” in Blake’s rendering of Wollstonecraft’s text, as the William Blake Archive points out. Blake “appears to have found her morality too calculating, rationalistic, and rigid. He represents Wollstonecraft’s spokesperson, Mrs. Mason, as a domineering presence.”
Nonetheless, as always, Blake’s work is more than competent. The style for which we know him best emerges in some of the prints. We see it, for example, in the chiseled face, bulging eyes, and well-muscled arms of the standing figure above. For the most part, however, he keeps in check his exuberant desire to celebrate the human body. “Only a year earlier,” writes Brain Pickings, “Blake had finished printing and illuminating the first few copies of his now-legendary Songs of Innocence and Experience.” Two of the songs “were inspired by Wollstonecraft’s translation of C.G. Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for which Blake had done several engravings.”
If he had misgivings about illustrating Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, we must infer them from his illustrations. But placing Blake’s most famous book of poetry next to Wollstonecraft’s pious, didactic works of moral instruction produces some jarring contrasts, showing how two towering literary figures from the time (though not both at the time) conceived of childhood, social class, education, and morality in vastly different ways. Learn more about Blake’s illustrations at Brain Pickings, read an edition of Wollstonecraft’s Original Storieshere, and see all of Blake’s illustrations at the William Blake Archive.
Maintaining an aggressively upward-waxed mustache; making a surrealist film with Luis Buñuel that Buñuel described as “nothing more than a desperate impassioned call for murder”; bringing an anteater on The Dick Cavett Show: Salvador Dalí can be described as a master of attention-grabbing gambits, by his admirers and detractors alike. No wonder, then, that he appears to have some serious admirers at Taschen. Known as a publisher of books that draw a great deal of press for their boundary-pushing size, content, and production values, Taschen would seem to be a natural home for Dalí’s legacy, or at least the parts of it that fit between two covers.
Besides his well-known and much-reprinted paintings, Dalí left behind a body of work also including not just film but sculpture, photography, architecture, and books. His first published volume, 1938’s The Tragic Myth of the Angelus of Millet, offers a “paranoiac-critical” interpretation of the titular pastoral painting by Jean-François Millet. In the 1940s he wrote, among other books, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, a kind of autobiography, and Hidden Faces, a novel set among aristocracy in France, Morocco, and California.
It was in the 1970s that Dalí’s literary efforts took a less predictable turn: 1973 saw the publication of his Les Diners de Gala, a cookbook featuring such recipes as “Veal Cutlets Stuffed with Snails,” “Thousand Year Old Eggs,” and “Toffee with Pine Cones.” In 1978 came The Wines of Gala, a personal guide to “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of Sensuality,” “Wines of Aestheticism,” and others besides. In recent years, Taschen has reprinted Dalí’s food and wine books with characteristic handsomeness. Those two now sit in the Taschen Dalí collection alongside Dalí: The Paintings, the most complete such collection ever published, and Dalí Tarot, a package that includes not just the Dalí-designed tarot deck originally published in 1984 but a companion book by tarot scholar Johannes Fiebig.
Dalí’s wife and savvy business manager Gala — she of all those dinners and wines — would surely approve of the skill and taste that Taschen has put into packaging even the artist’s minor work as a viable 21st-century product. Well-heeled Dalí enthusiasts will surely continue to pay Taschen prices for such packages, and even the less well-heeled ones can’t help but wonder what future reprints are on the table: lavish new editions of Hidden Faces, The Secret Life, or even 1948’s 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship (with its endorsement of power napping)? Dare we hope for the definitive Salvador Dalí Bible?
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.
Young artists can understandably feel hesitant about trying new things. It’s hard enough to compete as a musician, for example. Why try to publish poetry or make visual art, too? Older, more established artists who branch out often have trouble being taken seriously in other fields. Patti Smith—poet, singer, memoirist, photographer, visual artist—has never seemed to suffer in either regard. “Her artwork has been exhibited everywhere from New York to Munich,” notes Dangerous Minds, “and in 2008 a large retrospective of Smith’s artwork (produced between 1967 and 2007) was shown at the Foundation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris.”
Smith “isn’t an artist who is easily categorized,” writes curator John Smith. “She moves fluidly…. Her work and her career defy the traditional boundaries of both the art and music worlds. To understand Smith’s work is to understand the organic quality of what she does.”
Her productions are all of a piece, developing together, in community with other artists. “Many of my drawings,” she says, “are the results of merging calligraphy with geometric planes, poetry and mathematics.”
There’s also the influence of Robert Mapplethorpe, who encouraged Smith in her early twenties when the two famously lived together as starving artists in New York.
Often I’d sit and try to write or draw, but all of the manic activity in the streets, coupled with the Vietnam War, made my efforts seem meaningless. […] Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.
If you have trouble attaining that state of mind, consider heeding the advice Smith got from William S. Burroughs. In a nutshell: do what you want, and don’t worry about what others want.
But self-doubt is real. On one self-portrait from 1971, at the top, she writes, “I got pissed. I gave up art yet here I am again.” Smith’s method for overcoming these common feelings —one that emerges as a theme in her memoirJust Kids—might be summarized as: imagine yourself in the company of the artists you and admire and make art in conversation with them. Or as she puts it:
You look at a Pollock, and it can’t give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work. And that continuous exchange—whether it’s with a rock and roll song where you’re communing with Bo Diddley or Little Richard, or it’s with a painting, where you’re communing with Rembrandt or Pollock—is a great thing.
Her many self-portraits show her in conversation with artists like Aubrey Beardsley, in the brooding 1974 drawing further up; Willem de Kooning in the 1969 work above; and maybe Robert Rauschenberg in “Patti Rides Her Coney Island Pony,” from 1969, below. She tried on many different styles, but Smith could also create finely rendered realist portraits, like those of her and Mapplethorpe at the bottom. Her talent is undeniable, but we’d never know it if she hadn’t first taken herself seriously as an artist.
It’s odd to think that the gray-faced, gray-suited U.S. Cold Warriors of the 1950s funded Abstract Expressionism and left-wing literary magazines in a cultural offensive against the Soviet Union. And yet they did. This seeming historical irony is compounded by the fact that so many of the artists enlisted (mostly unwittingly) in the cultural Cold War might not have had careers were it not for the New Deal programs of 20 years earlier, denounced by Republicans at the time as communist.
The New Deal faced fierce opposition, and its passage involved some very unfortunate compromises. But for artists, it was a major boon. Programs established under the Works Progress Administration in 1935 helped thousands of artists survive until they could get back to plying trades, working as professionals, or building world-famous careers. Artists and art workers once supported by the WPA include Dorothea Lange, Langston Hughes, Orson Welles, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Gordon Parks, Alan Lomax, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, James Agee, and dozens more famous names.
There were also thousands of unknown painters, photographers, sculptors, poets, dancers, playwrights, etc. who received funding in their local areas to put their skills to work. “Through the WPA,” the National Gallery of Art writes, artists “participated in government employment programs in every state and county in the nation.” As to the question of whether their work deserved to be paid, “Harry Hopkins,” Jerry Adler writes at Smithsonian, “whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt put in charge of work relief, settled the matter, saying, ‘”Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people!”
He turns the question about who “deserves” relief on its head. Dance may not be necessary by some people’s lights but eating most certainly is. Why shouldn’t artists use their talent to beautify the country, collect and archive its cultural history, and provide quality entertainment in uncertain times? And why shouldn’t the country’s artists document the enormous building projects underway, and the major shifts happening in people’s lives, for posterity?
Art in America has always belonged to the people and has never been the property of an academy or a class. The great Treasury projects, through which our public buildings are being decorated, are an excellent example of the continuity of this tradition. The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration is a practical relief project which also emphasizes the best tradition of the democratic spirit. The W.P.A. artist, in rendering his own impression of things, speaks also for the spirit of his fellow countrymen everywhere. I think the W.P.A. artist exemplifies with great force the essential place which the arts have in a democratic society such as ours.
In the future we must seek more widespread popular understanding and appreciation of the arts. Many of our great cities provide the facilities for such appreciation. But we all know that because of their lack of size and riches the smaller communities are in most cases denied this opportunity. That is why I give special emphasis to the need of giving these smaller communities the visual chance to get to know modern art.
As in our democracy we enjoy the right to believe in different religious creeds or in none, so can American artists express themselves with complete freedom from the strictures of dead artistic tradition or political ideology. While American artists have discovered a new obligation to the society in which they live, they have no compulsion to be limited in method or manner of expression.
He began the address with several airy phrases about freedom and liberty; here, he defines what that looks like for the artist—the ability to have dignified work and livelihood, and to operate with full creative freedom. Of course, artists, especially those employed in decorating public buildings, were constrained by certain “American” themes. But they could interpret those themes broadly, and they did, picturing scenes of hardship and leisure, recovering the past and imagining better futures.
It couldn’t last. “The WPA-era art programs reflected a trend toward the democratization of the arts in the United States and a striving to develop a uniquely American and broadly inclusive cultural life,” the National Gallery explains. Art from this period “offers a window through which to explore the social conditions of the Depression, the mainstreaming of art and birth of ‘public art,’ and the opening of government employment to women and African Americans.” Opponents of the programs pushed back with red baiting. Arts funding under the WPA was ended in 1943 by a Congress, says scholar of the period Francis O’Connor, who could “look at two blades of grass and see a hammer and sickle.”
Of the many world class museums treating a stuck-at-home public to virtual tours of their collections, none inspire the resolve for future travel as the Stay At Home Museum, an initiative of the Flanders tourism board.
Before the COVID-19 epidemic response demanded the temporary shuttering of all such attractions, the region was entering the final year of a 3‑year festival celebrating such Flemish masters as Jan Van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, and Peter Paul Rubens.
Our sadness at missing these cannot be chalked up to FOMO. Right now, the whole world is missing out.
So, consider the Stay At Home Museum a preview, something to help us enjoy our trips to the region all the more at some point in the future, by educating ourselves on the painters who made Flanders famous.
The series is also a treat for the Zoom weary. The expert guides aren’t facing their webcams at home, but rather using their high level access to lead us through the empty museums in which the exhibits are still installed.
No jostling…
No crowding in front of the most celebrated pieces…
No inane lunch-related chatter from tourists who aren’t into art as deeply as you are…
Above, Van Eyck expert Till-Holger Borchert, Director of Musea Bruges, orients us to the artist and his work, most notably the Ghent altarpiece, aka Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a 12-panel polyptych that Van Eyck worked on with Hugo, the older brother who died 6 years before its completion.
Pay close attention to Adam and Eve’s body hair. Borchert certainly does.
He also sheds a lot of interesting light on the significance of materials, framing choices, and composition.
The restored altarpiece was slated to be reinstalled in its original home of Ghent’s Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, following the scheduled closing of Jan van Eyck: An Optical Revolution—April 30, 2020.
The Royal Museum of Fine Art’s director Michel Draguet takes us on a French-speaking journey inside Bruegel’s painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels.
Ben Van Beneden, the director of the Rubens House, invites us into Ruben’s “art gallery room”—something no self-respecting wealthy polyglot diplomat/aesthete who’s also a Baroque painter would do without, apparently.
The peek at Rubens’ garden is nice too, especially for those of us with no private outdoor space of our own.
Jumping ahead to the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, curator Mieke Mels of Ostennd’s the Mu.ZEE spills the beans on why native son, James Ensor, shielded his 1888 masterpiece Christ’s Entry into Brusselsfrom the public view for 3 decades.
Would-be tourists taking time out of their suddenly very less busy lives to pore over New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art map online may convince themselves it’s possible to see every collection in one day. Say, if they got there first thing in the morning, skipped lunch, and moved fast. Sure, Modern and Egyptian art are on opposite sides of opposite wings and there are two floors and a mezzanine, but if you make a plan….
Any New Yorker who runs across such a person should immediately send them John Kerschbaum’s dense, colorful, information- and people-rich, Where’s Waldo-eye view map above. (View it in a larger format here. Once you access the page, click on the graphic to expand it.) Say, “this is what’s it’s really like on any given day.”
A bewildering experience that renders the most careful plan useless in under thirty minutes. Unless you only plan to spend time in a couple galleries, at most, and know how to get there, it’s best not to get your hopes up for a one-day visit. You’ll be dazzled and wowed, for sure, but also suffer from sensory overload if you try to see it all.
Target your favorite periods and world cultures, ford the crowds to reach your destination, have some grub. It will take a while to get back out. The experience can be daunting, but by all means do not let these warnings stop you once there’s finally an all-clear. The Met is “overwhelming, amazing, and down-right unbelieveable, really,” writes one blogger and frequent traveler based in New York City. “If you haven’t been, think of the Louvre, Vatican Museum, or British Museum. The Met is on the scale of those other impressive international collections.”
Kerschbaum captured the scale of the museum’s awe-inspiring hugeness with flattened cartoon scale and perspective. But the map was drawn from life, in way. Upon receiving the commission in 2004 for what became The Family Map, Kerschbaum, a New Yorker himself, “made countless visits to the encyclopedic museum and drew hundreds of sketches,” Atlas Obscura writes.
He was given 50 museum pieces that are always on display to anchor the authentic feel of his highly compressed rendering. “I’d have a floor plan of the museum and a clipboard,” he says, “and I’d make notes of where each item was, either by name or a quick sketch.” (Note that he did this over “countless visits.”) After that preparatory work, he says, in a charming duet with his daughter above, he returned again and again, and “drew and drew and erased and drew and drew and erased and drew some more and drew and drew. Finally it was done.” (See a larger time-lapse gif further up.)
Those who would like to know the Met as Kerschbaum does, in exquisite detail and with a very keen sense of direction, will need to put in some serious time. The artist himself “dedicated not hours, days, or months, but several years to drawing the art, spaces, and people he saw at the Met,” the museum’s blog notes. The Family Map features “hundreds of galleries and thousands of works of art.”
It’s a map the whole family can appreciate, though Kerschbaum’s daughter sounds maybe a little weary of talking about it. But it’s also one that depicts the museum as a massive, wall-to-wall extended family, one that takes some time and effort to get to know. Kerschbaum even knows where all the bathrooms are. “I tell people about the ones that aren’t crowded,” he says proudly. This is, of course, the most useful knowledge of all in a space of such labyrinthine magnitude in what will someday be again one of the most visited cities in the world.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
