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

in Art, Television | February 20th, 2020

There was a time when you could flip on the TV in the evening, tune in to a major net­work’s late-night talk show, and see Sal­vador Dalí walk­ing an anteater. That time was the ear­ly 1970s, the net­work was ABC, and the talk show’s host was Dick Cavett, who dared to con­verse on cam­era, and at length, with every­one from Ing­mar Bergman and Woody Allen to Nor­man Mail­er and Gore Vidal to David Bowie and Janis Joplin, and John Lennon with Yoko Ono. Whether they went smooth­ly or bumpi­ly, Cavet­t’s con­ver­sa­tions played out like no oth­ers on tele­vi­sion, then or now. Dalí’s March 1970 appear­ance above makes for a case in point: not only does he come on with his anteater, he wastes lit­tle time toss­ing it into the lap of anoth­er of the evening’s guests, silent-film star Lil­lian Gish.

Dalí prais­es anteaters to Cavett as the sole “angel­ic” ani­mal, a qual­i­ty that has some­thing to go with their tongues. He goes on to explain his admi­ra­tion for the math­e­mat­i­cal prop­er­ties of rhi­noc­er­os­es, whose pro­por­tions agree with the “gold­en ratio” he tend­ed to incor­po­rate into his art.

Oth­er sub­jects to arise dur­ing Dalí’s twen­ty min­utes on set include the razor blade and the eye­ball in Un Chien Andalou; the vivid, irra­tional, and “liliputit­ian” images that come to life in the mind “ten min­utes or fif­teen min­utes before you fall [asleep]”; and the artist’s main­te­nance of his famous mus­tache (which he’d pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed, six­teen years before, on The Name’s the Same). At one point Gish asks Dalí if his work has “a mes­sage to give to the peo­ple that we, per­haps, don’t under­stand.” His unhesi­tat­ing reply: “No mes­sage.” Cavett, of course, has a smooth fol­low-up: “Could you invent one?”

In his show’s 1970s prime, Cavett demon­strat­ed an unmatched abil­i­ty to make enter­tain­ment out of dif­fi­cult guests — not by mak­ing fun of them, exact­ly, but by crack­ing jokes that revealed a cer­tain self-aware­ness about the form of the talk show itself. “Am I alone in find­ing you some­what to dif­fi­cult to fol­low in terms of what your the­o­ries are?” he asks Dalí amid all the talk of anteaters and eye­balls, dreams and math­e­mat­ics. And the dif­fi­cul­ty was­n’t just con­cep­tu­al: “Is it my imag­i­na­tion,” Cavett asks lat­er on, “or are you speak­ing a mix­ture of lan­guages?” But Dalí’s delib­er­ate­ly idio­syn­crat­ic Eng­lish, ideas, and per­son­al­i­ty all came of a piece, and at the end of the night Cavett admits his own admi­ra­tion for the artist’s work, even going so far as to request an auto­graph on air. The view­ers of Amer­i­ca must have come away from Dalí’s TV appear­ances with more ques­tions than answers. But for us watch­ing today, one is par­tic­u­lar­ly salient: what on Earth must Satchel Paige have thought of all this?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Alfred Hitch­cock Recalls Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­bound: “No, You Can’t Pour Live Ants All Over Ingrid Bergman!”

Alfred Hitch­cock Talks with Dick Cavett About Sab­o­tage, For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent & Lax­a­tives (1972)

Sal­vador Dalí Reveals the Secrets of His Trade­mark Mous­tache (1954)

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophis­ti­ca­tion to Late Night Talk Shows: Watch 270 Clas­sic Inter­views Online

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 or on Face­book.

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Discover the Artist Who Mentored Edward Hopper & Inspired “Nighthawks”

in Art | February 14th, 2020

Every good teacher must be pre­pared for the stu­dents who sur­pass them. Such was the case with Mar­tin Lewis, Edward Hop­per’s one­time teacher, an Aus­tralian-born print­mak­er who left rur­al Vic­to­ria at age 15 and trav­eled the world before set­tling in New York City in 1900 to make his fame and for­tune. By the 1910s, Lewis had become a com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful illus­tra­tor, well-known for his etch­ing skill. It was then that he took on Hop­per as an appren­tice.

“Hop­per asked that he might study along­side him,” writes DC Pae at Review 31, “and Lewis there­after became his men­tor in the dis­ci­pline.” The future painter of Nighthawks even “cit­ed his appren­tice­ship with the print­mak­er as inspi­ra­tion for his lat­er paint­ing, the con­sol­i­da­tion of his indi­vid­ual style.” Messy Nessy quotes Hopper’s own words: “after I took up my etch­ing, my paint­ing seemed to crys­tal­lize.” Hop­per, she writes, “learned the fin­er points of etch­ing and both artists used the great Amer­i­can metrop­o­lis at night as their muse.”

Though he is not pop­u­lar­ly known for the art, Hop­per him­self became an accom­plished print­mak­er, cre­at­ing a series of around 70 works in the 1920s that drew from both Edgar Degas and his etch­ing teacher, Lewis.

“Hop­per eas­i­ly took to etch­ing and dry­point,” writes the Seat­tle Artist League. “He had a pref­er­ence for a deeply etched plate, and very black ink on very white paper, so the prints were high con­trast, sim­i­lar to Mar­tin Lewis…, Hopper’s pri­ma­ry influ­ence in print­mak­ing.”

A sim­i­lar series by Lewis in the 1920s, which includes the strik­ing prints you see here, shows a far stronger hand in the art, though also, per­haps, some mutu­al influ­ence between the two friends, who exhib­it­ed togeth­er dur­ing the peri­od. But there’s no doubt Lewis’s long shad­ows, for­lorn street-lit cor­ners, and cin­e­mat­ic scenes left their mark on Hopper’s famous lat­er paint­ings.

It was to paint­ing, after the mas­sive pop­u­lar­i­ty of print­mak­ing, that the art world turned when the Depres­sion hit. Lewis found him­self out of date. Hop­per left off etch­ing in 1928 to focus on his pri­ma­ry medi­um. In many ways, Pae points out, Lewis served as a bridge between the doc­u­men­tary Ash­can School and the more psy­cho­log­i­cal real­ism of Hop­per and his con­tem­po­raries. Yet he “died in obscu­ri­ty in 1962, large­ly for­got­ten” notes Messy Nessy (see much more of Lewis’s work there). “His­to­ry chose Edward Hop­per but Mar­tin Lewis was his men­tor,” and a fig­ure well worth cel­e­brat­ing on his own for his tech­ni­cal mas­tery and orig­i­nal­i­ty.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Paint­ings by Edward Hop­per, the Most Cin­e­mat­ic Amer­i­can Painter of All, Turned into Ani­mat­ed GIFs

Sev­en Videos Explain How Edward Hopper’s Paint­ings Expressed Amer­i­can Lone­li­ness and Alien­ation

Edward Hopper’s Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Intro­duc­tion

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

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Old Book Illustrations: An Online Database Lets You Download Thousands of Illustrations from the 19th & 20th Centuries

in Art, Books | February 11th, 2020

The Gold­en Age of Illus­tra­tion is typ­i­cal­ly dat­ed between 1880 and the ear­ly decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry. This was “a peri­od of unprece­dent­ed excel­lence in book and mag­a­zine illus­tra­tion,” writes Art­cy­clo­pe­dia; the time of artists like John Ten­niel, Beat­rix Pot­ter (below), Arthur Rack­ham, and Aubrey Beard­s­ley. Some of the most promi­nent illus­tra­tors, such as Beard­s­ley and Har­ry Clarke (see one of his Poe illus­tra­tions above), also became inter­na­tion­al­ly known artists in the Art Nou­veau, Arts and Crafts, and Pre-Raphaelite move­ments.

But exten­sive book illus­tra­tion as the pri­ma­ry visu­al cul­ture of print pre­cedes this peri­od by sev­er­al decades. One of the most revered and pro­lif­ic of fine art book illus­tra­tors, Gus­tave Doré, did some of his best work in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Oth­er French illus­tra­tors, such as Alphonse de Neuville and Emile-Antoine Bayard, made impres­sive con­tri­bu­tions in the 1860s and 70s—for exam­ple, to Jules Verne’s lav­ish­ly illus­trat­ed, 54-vol­ume Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires.

As Col­in Mar­shall wrote in a recent post here, these copi­ous illus­tra­tions (4,000 in all) served more than a just dec­o­ra­tive pur­pose. A less than “ful­ly lit­er­ate pub­lic” ben­e­fit­ed from the pic­ture-book style. So too did read­ers hun­gry for styl­ish visu­al humor, for doc­u­men­tary rep­re­sen­ta­tions of nature, archi­tec­ture, fash­ion, etc., before pho­tog­ra­phy became not only pos­si­ble but also inex­pen­sive to repro­duce. What­ev­er the rea­son, read­ers through­out the nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­turies would gen­er­al­ly expect their read­ing mate­r­i­al to come with pic­tures, and very fine­ly ren­dered ones at that.

The online data­base Old Book Illus­tra­tions has cat­a­logued thou­sands of these illus­tra­tions, lift­ed from their orig­i­nal con­text and search­able by artist name, source, date, book title, tech­niques, for­mats, pub­lish­ers, sub­ject, etc. “There are also a num­ber of col­lec­tions to browse through,” notes Kot­tke, “and each are tagged with mul­ti­ple key­words.” Not all of the work rep­re­sent­ed here is up to the unique­ly high stan­dards of a Gus­tave Doré (below), Aubrey Beard­s­ley, or John Ten­niel, all of whom, along with hun­dreds of oth­er artists, get their own cat­e­gories. But that’s not entire­ly the point of this library.

Old Book Illus­tra­tions presents itself as a schol­ar­ly resource, includ­ing a dig­i­tized Dic­tio­nary of the Art of Print­ing and short arti­cles on some of the most famous artists and sig­nif­i­cant texts from the peri­od. The site’s pub­lish­ers are also trans­par­ent about their selec­tion process. They are guid­ed by their “rea­sons per­tain­ing to taste, con­sis­ten­cy, and prac­ti­cal­i­ty,” they write. The archive might have broad­ened its focus, but “due to obvi­ous legal restric­tions, [they] had to stay with­in the lim­its of the pub­lic domain.”

Like­wise, they note that the dig­i­tized images on the site have been restored to “make them as close as pos­si­ble to the per­fect print the artist prob­a­bly had in mind when at work.” Vis­i­tors who would pre­fer to see the illus­tra­tions as “time hand­ed them to us” can click on “Raw Scan” to the right of the list of res­o­lu­tion options at the top of each image. (See a processed and unprocessed scan above and below of fash­ion illus­tra­tor and humorist Charles Dana Gib­son’s “over­worked Amer­i­can father” on “his day off in August.”)

All of the images on Old Book Illus­tra­tions are avail­able in high res­o­lu­tion, and the site authors intend to add more arti­cles and to make avail­able in Eng­lish arti­cles on French Roman­ti­cism unavail­able any­where else. “We are not the only image col­lec­tion on the web,” they write, “nei­ther will we ever be the largest one. We hope how­ev­er to be a des­ti­na­tion of choice for vis­i­tors more par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in Vic­to­ri­an and French Roman­tic illus­tra­tions.” They give vis­i­tors who fit that descrip­tion plen­ty of incen­tive to keep com­ing back.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Vol­ume Mas­ter­piece, Fea­tur­ing 4,000 Illus­tra­tions: See Them Online

Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Sto­ries (1894)

Har­ry Clarke’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions for Edgar Allan Poe’s Sto­ries (1923)

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Vol­ume Mas­ter­piece, Fea­tur­ing 4,000 Illus­tra­tions: See Them Online

Gus­tave Doré’s Splen­did Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Illus­tra­tions from the Sovi­et Children’s Book Your Name? Robot, Cre­at­ed by Tarkovsky Art Direc­tor Mikhail Romadin (1979)

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

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illustrations of the Natural World Free to Download

in Archives, Art, Nature | February 11th, 2020

You may have heard of “plant blind­ness,” a con­di­tion defined about 20 years ago that has start­ed to get more press in recent years. As its name sug­gests, it refers to an inabil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy or even notice the many plant species around us in our every­day lives. Some have con­nect­ed it to a poten­tial­ly more wide­spread afflic­tion they call “nature deficit dis­or­der,” which is also just what it sounds like: a set of impair­ments brought on by insuf­fi­cient expo­sure to the nat­ur­al world. One might also draw a line from these con­cepts to our atti­tudes about cli­mate change, or to our ever-less-inter­rupt­ed immer­sion in the dig­i­tal world. But if any part of that dig­i­tal world can open our eyes to nature once again, it’s the Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library (present also on Flickr and Insta­gram.)

Pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its vast archive of two mil­lion illus­tra­tions of the nat­ur­al world, the BHL has received more cov­er­age this year for the more than 150,000 it’s made avail­able for copy­right-free down­load. Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Hakim Bishara quotes Hen­ry David Thore­au — “We need the ton­ic of wild­ness. We can nev­er get enough of nature” — before writ­ing of how thrilled Thore­au would have been by the exis­tence of such a resource for images of nature.

These images include “ani­mal sketch­es, his­tor­i­cal dia­grams, botan­i­cal stud­ies, and sci­en­tif­ic research col­lect­ed from hun­dreds of thou­sands of jour­nals and libraries across the world,” some dat­ing to the 15th cen­tu­ry. He high­lights “Joseph Wolf’s 19th-cen­tu­ry book Zoo­log­i­cal Sketch­es, con­tain­ing about 100 lith­o­graphs depict­ing wild ani­mals in London’s Regent’s Park” and “water­col­ors depict­ing flow­ers indige­nous to the Hawai­ian islands” as well as “an 1833 DIY Taxidermist’s Man­u­al.”

As Smithsonian.com’s There­sa Machemer notes, “The prac­tice of cre­at­ing detailed illus­tra­tions of flo­ra and fau­na, whether to doc­u­ment an expe­di­tion or a med­ical prac­tice, gained pop­u­lar­i­ty well before pho­tog­ra­phy was up to the task.” Hence such ambi­tious projects as the Unit­ed States gov­ern­men­t’s com­mis­sion­ing, in 1866, of water­col­or paint­ings depict­ing every fruit known to man. But even today, “an illus­tra­tion can offer more clar­i­ty than a pho­to­graph,” as you’ll find when you zoom in on any of the BHL’s high-res­o­lu­tion illus­tra­tions. Accord­ing to the BHL, “a world­wide con­sor­tium of nat­ur­al his­to­ry, botan­i­cal, research, and nation­al libraries,” its mis­sion is to pro­vide “access to the world’s col­lec­tive knowl­edge about bio­di­ver­si­ty,” in order to help researchers “doc­u­ment Earth’s species and under­stand the com­plex­i­ties of swift­ly-chang­ing ecosys­tems in the midst of a major extinc­tion cri­sis and wide­spread cli­mate change.” But by reveal­ing how our pre­de­ces­sors saw nature, it can also help all of us see nature again. Access the illus­tra­tions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

In 1886, the US Gov­ern­ment Com­mis­sioned 7,500 Water­col­or Paint­ings of Every Known Fruit in the World: Down­load Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

A Shaz­am for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Iden­ti­fy Plants, Ani­mals & Oth­er Denizens of the Nat­ur­al World

New Study: Immers­ing Your­self in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflam­ma­tion & Increase Life Expectan­cy

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 or on Face­book.

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Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece, Featuring 4,000 Illustrations: See Them Online

in Art, Books, Sci Fi | February 10th, 2020

Not many read­ers of the 21st cen­tu­ry seek out the work of pop­u­lar writ­ers of the 19th cen­tu­ry, but when they do, they often seek out the work of Jules Verne. Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth, Twen­ty Thou­sand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days: fair to say that we all know the titles of these fan­tas­ti­cal French tales from the 1860s and 70s, and more than a few of us have actu­al­ly read them. But how many of us know that they all belong to a sin­gle series, the 54-vol­ume Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires, that Verne pub­lished from 1863 until the end of his life? Verne described the pro­jec­t’s goal to an inter­view­er thus: “to con­clude in sto­ry form my whole sur­vey of the world’s sur­face and the heav­ens.”

Verne intend­ed to edu­cate, but at the same time to enter­tain and even artis­ti­cal­ly impress: “My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the uni­verse,” he said. “And I have tried at the same time to real­ize a very high ide­al of beau­ty of style.” This he accom­plished with great suc­cess in a time and place with­out even what we would now con­sid­er a ful­ly lit­er­ate pub­lic.

As philoso­pher Marc Sori­ano writes of the 1860s when Verne began pub­lish­ing, “The dri­ve for lit­er­a­cy in France has been under­way since the Guizot Law of 1833, but there is still much to do. Any well-advised edi­tor must aid his read­ers who have not yet achieved a good read­ing pro­fi­cien­cy.”

Hence the need for illus­tra­tions: beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly and nar­ra­tive­ly faith­ful illus­tra­tions, and above all a great many illus­tra­tions: over 4,000 of them, by the count of Arthur B. Evans in his essay on the series’ artists, “an aver­age of 60+ illus­tra­tions per nov­el, one for every 6–8 pages of text.” Still today, “most mod­ern French reprints of the Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires con­tin­ue to fea­ture their orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions — recap­tur­ing the ‘feel’ of Verne’s socio-his­tor­i­cal milieu and evok­ing that sense of far­away exoti­cism and futur­is­tic awe which the orig­i­nal read­ers once expe­ri­enced from these texts. And yet, to date, the bulk of Vern­ian crit­i­cism has vir­tu­al­ly ignored the cru­cial role played by these illus­tra­tions in Verne’s oeu­vre.”

Evans iden­ti­fies four dif­fer­ent types of illus­tra­tions in the series: “ren­der­ings of the pro­tag­o­nists of the sto­ry — e.g., por­traits like the one of Impey Bar­bi­cane in De la terre à la lune”; “panoram­ic and post­card-like” views of the “exot­ic locales, unusu­al sights, and flo­ra and fau­na which the heroes encounter dur­ing their jour­ney, like the one from Vingt mille lieues sous les mers depict­ing divers walk­ing on the ocean floor”; “doc­u­men­ta­tion­al” illus­tra­tions like “the map of the Polar regions (hand-drawn by Verne him­self) for his 1864 nov­el Les Voy­ages et aven­tures du cap­i­taine Hat­teras”; and por­tay­als of “a spe­cif­ic moment of action in the narrative—e.g., the one from Voy­age au cen­tre de la terre where Prof. Liden­brock, Axel, and Hans are sud­den­ly caught in a light­ning storm on a sub­ter­ranean ocean.”

Verne and his edi­tor Pierre-Jules Het­zel com­mis­sioned these illus­tra­tions from no few­er than eight artists, a group includ­ing Edouard Riou, Alphonse de Neuville, Emile-Antoine Bayard (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), and Léon Benett — all well-known artists in late 19th-cen­tu­ry France, and made even more so by their work in the Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires. You can browse a com­plete gallery of the series’ orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions here, and if you like, enrich the expe­ri­ence with this exten­sive essay by Ter­ry Har­pold on “read­ing” these images in con­text.

Togeth­er with the sto­ries them­selves, on the back of which Verne remains the most trans­lat­ed sci­ence-fic­tion author of all time, they allow Har­pold to make the cred­i­ble claim that “the tex­tu­al-graph­ic domain con­sti­tut­ed by these objects is unmatched in its breadth and vari­ety; no oth­er cor­pus asso­ci­at­ed with a sin­gle author is com­pa­ra­ble.” Human knowl­edge of the uni­verse has widened and deep­ened since Verne’s day, but for sheer intel­lec­tu­al and adven­tur­ous won­der about what that uni­verse might con­tain, has any writer, from any era or land, out­done him since?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Émile-Antoine Bayard’s Vivid Illus­tra­tions of Jules Verne’s Around the Moon: The First Seri­ous Works of Space Art (1870)

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Hear Rick Wakeman’s Musi­cal Adap­ta­tion of Jules Verne’s Jour­ney to the Cen­tre of the Earth, “One of Prog Rock’s Crown­ing Achieve­ments”

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

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 or on Face­book.

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Free Coloring Books from World-Class Libraries & Museums: Download & Color Hundreds of Free Images

in Art, Coloring Books, Libraries, Museums | February 7th, 2020

There are many roads to well­ness. Med­i­ta­tion, yoga, exer­cise, and healthy diet are all effec­tive ther­a­pies for bring­ing down stress lev­els. But we shouldn’t dis­count an activ­i­ty we once used to while hours away as chil­dren, and that adults by the mil­lions have tak­en to in recent years. Col­or­ing takes us out of our­selves, say experts like Doc­tor of Psy­chi­a­try Scott M. Bea, “it’s very much like a med­i­ta­tive exer­cise.” It relax­es our brain by focus­ing our atten­tion and push­ing dis­tract­ing and dis­turb­ing thoughts to the mar­gins. The low stakes make the activ­i­ty easy and plea­sur­able, qual­i­ties grown-ups don’t get to ascribe to most of what they spend their time doing.

Reduc­ing anx­i­ety is all well and good, but some art and his­to­ry lovers can’t accept just any old mass-mar­ket col­or­ing book. Luck­i­ly, a con­sor­tium of over a hun­dred muse­ums and libraries has giv­en these spe­cial cus­tomers a rea­son to stick with it. Since 2016, the annu­al #Col­or­Our­Col­lec­tions cam­paign, led by the New York Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine (NYAM), has made avail­able, for free, adult col­or­ing books. The range of images offers some­thing for every­one, from ear­ly mod­ern illus­tra­tions like the cat at the top, from Edward Topsell’s His­to­rie of Foure-Foot­ed Beast­es (1607)—courtesy of Trin­i­ty Hall Cam­bridge; to the poignant cov­er of The Suf­frag­ist, below, from July 1919, a month after U.S. women won the right to the vote (from the Hunt­ing­ton Library, Art Muse­um, and Botan­i­cal Gar­dens).

There are, unsur­pris­ing­ly, copi­ous illus­tra­tions of med­ical pro­ce­dures and anato­my, like that below from the Library at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Barcelona. There are vin­tage adver­tise­ments, “canoe-heavy con­tent” from a Cana­di­an muse­um, as Kather­ine Wu reports at Smith­son­ian, and war posters like that fur­ther down of Admi­ral Chester Nimitz ask­ing for “the stuff” to hit “the spot,” i.e. Tokyo –from the Pritzk­er Mil­i­tary Muse­um. “The only com­mon­al­i­ty shared by the thou­sands of prints and draw­ings avail­able on the NYAM web­site is their black-and-white appear­ance: The pages oth­er­wise span just about every taste and illus­tra­tive predilec­tion a col­or­ing con­nois­seur could con­jure.”

One Twit­ter fan point­ed out that the ini­tia­tive pro­vides “a great way to get to know some of the col­lec­tions held in libraries around the world.” Their enthu­si­asm is catch­ing. But note that few of the insti­tu­tions (see full col­lec­tion here) have uploaded a large quan­ti­ty of col­orable images. Most of the “col­or­ing books” con­sist of only a hand­ful of pages, some only one or two. Tak­en alto­geth­er, how­ev­er, the com­bined strength of one hun­dred insti­tu­tions, over four years (see pre­vi­ous years at the links below), adds up to many hun­dreds of pages of col­or­ing fun and relax­ation. If that’s your thing, start here. If you don’t know if it’s your thing, #Col­or­Our­Col­lec­tions is a free (minus the cost of print­er ink and paper), edu­ca­tion­al way to find out. Grab those crayons, oil pas­tels, col­ored pen­cils, etc. and calm down again the way you did when you were six years old.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Free Col­or­ing Books from World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: The New York Pub­lic Library, Bodleian, Smith­son­ian & More

Free Col­or­ing Books from World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: The Met, New York Pub­lic Library, Smith­son­ian & More

Down­load 150 Free Col­or­ing Books from Great Libraries, Muse­ums & Cul­tur­al Insti­tu­tions: The British Library, Smith­son­ian, Carnegie Hall & More

Down­load Free Col­or­ing Books from 113 Muse­ums

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

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

in Art, Books | February 5th, 2020

Sal­vador Dali was that rare avant-garde artist whose work earned the respect of near­ly every­one, even those who hat­ed him per­son­al­ly. George Orwell called Dali a “dis­gust­ing human being,” but added “Dali is a draughts­man of very excep­tion­al gifts…. He has fifty times more tal­ent than most of the peo­ple who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paint­ings.”

Walt Dis­ney was very keen to work with Dali. And Dali’s own per­son­al hero and intel­lec­tu­al father fig­ure, Sig­mund Freud—no lover of mod­ern art—found the artist’s “unde­ni­able tech­ni­cal mas­tery” so com­pelling that he rethought his long­stand­ing neg­a­tive opin­ion of Sur­re­al­ism.

It’s hard to imag­ine that Orwell, Dis­ney, and Freud would agree on much else, but when it came to Dali, all three saw what is uni­ver­sal­ly appar­ent: as an artist, he was “not a fraud,” as Orwell grudg­ing­ly admit­ted.

It is also clear that Dali was a “very hard work­er.” For all the time he spent in absolute­ly shame­less self-promotion—a full career’s worth of activ­i­ty for many a cur­rent celebrity—Dali still found the time to leave behind hun­dreds of high­ly accom­plished can­vas­es, draw­ings, pho­tographs, films, mul­ti­me­dia projects, and more. A trip to the Dali Muse­um in Tam­pa, Flori­da can be a dis­ori­ent­ing expe­ri­ence.

Despite the already siz­able body of work we might have seen on view or repro­duced, how­ev­er, the edi­tors of Taschen’s newest, updat­ed edi­tion of Dali: The Paint­ings have “locat­ed paint­ed works by the mas­ter that had been inac­ces­si­ble for years,” as the influ­en­tial arts pub­lish­er notes, “so many, in fact, that almost half the fea­tured illus­tra­tions appear in pub­lic for the first time.” In addi­tion to the “opu­lent” pre­sen­ta­tion of the art­work, the book (which expands on a first edi­tion pub­lished last year) also “con­tex­tu­al­izes Dali’s oeu­vre and its mean­ings by exam­in­ing con­tem­po­rary doc­u­ments, from writ­ings and draw­ings to mate­r­i­al from oth­er facets of his work, includ­ing bal­let, cin­e­ma, fash­ion, adver­tis­ing, and objets d’art.”

The first sec­tion of the book reveals how Dali found his own style by mas­ter­ing every­one else’s. He “deployed all the isms… with play­ful mas­tery” and “would bor­row from pre­vail­ing trends before ridi­cul­ing and aban­don­ing them.” Dali want­ed us to know that he could have paint­ed any­thing he want­ed, throw­ing into even high­er relief the con­found­ing dream log­ic of his cho­sen sub­jects. Per­haps Dali him­self made it impossible—as Orwell had want­ed to do—to sep­a­rate Dali the per­son from the tech­ni­cal achieve­ments of his art.

As the artist him­self saw things, his life and work were all wrapped up togeth­er in a sin­gu­lar per­for­mance. At the age of sev­en, he wrote, he had decid­ed he want­ed to be Napoleon. “Since then,” Dali mock-humbly con­fessed, “my ambi­tion has steadi­ly grown, and my mega­lo­ma­nia with it. Now I want only to be Sal­vador Dali, I have no greater wish.” A great part of Dali’s mag­net­ism, of course, is due to what he calls his “mega­lo­ma­nia,” or rather to his uncom­pro­mis­ing life’s work of becom­ing ful­ly, com­plete­ly, him­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

Sal­vador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Short Ani­mat­ed Film, Des­ti­no, Set to the Music of Pink Floyd

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

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The Met Puts 650+ Japanese Illustrated Books Online: Marvel at Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji and More

in Archives, Art, Books | February 5th, 2020

There are cer­tain Japan­ese wood­block prints many of us can pic­ture in our minds: Hoku­sai Kat­sushika’s The Great Wave off Kana­gawa, Uta­gawa Hiroshige’s Sud­den Show­er over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake, Kita­gawa Uta­maro’s Three Beau­ties of the Present Day. Even when we find vast archives of such works, known as ukiyo‑e or “pic­tures of the float­ing world,” we tend to appre­ci­ate the works them­selves one piece at a time; we imag­ine them on walls, not in books. But it was in books that much of the work of ukiyo‑e mas­ters first appeared in the first place. Hoku­sai, Hiroshige, and Uta­maro, as the three are usu­al­ly called, “are best known today for their wood­block prints, but also excelled at illus­tra­tions for deluxe poet­ry antholo­gies and pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture.”

So writes John Car­pen­ter, Cura­tor of the Depart­ment of Asian Art at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, describ­ing the “fell swoop” in which the Met acquired “a superb col­lec­tion of Japan­ese books to com­ple­ment its excel­lent hold­ings in paint­ings and prints of the Edo peri­od (1615–1868).” Once the per­son­al col­lec­tion of Arthur and Char­lotte Ver­sh­bow, these books came into the muse­um’s pos­ses­sion in 2013, and have now come avail­able to browse on and even down­load from its web site.

Car­pen­ter describes the col­lec­tion as “par­tic­u­lar­ly strong in works by ukiyo‑e artists, but includes rep­re­sen­ta­tive exam­ples of all the var­i­ous schools of Japan­ese art. Includ­ed in the col­lec­tion of some 250 titles — more than 400 vol­umes — are numer­ous mas­ter­pieces of wood­block print­ing, many of which are near­ly impos­si­ble to find in such fine con­di­tion today.”

You’ll find in the Met’s online col­lec­tion not just the vol­umes from the Ver­sh­bow col­lec­tion, but “over 650 eigh­teenth- and nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Japan­ese illus­trat­ed books” in total. Selec­tions include edi­tions of Uta­maro’s Gifts of the Ebb Tide (The Shell Book), Hiroshige’s Pic­ture Book of the Sou­venirs of Edo (the name of Tokyo in his day), and Hoku­sai’s One Hun­dred Views of Mount Fuji. You can also find books full of the work of ukiyo‑e mas­ters of whom you may not have heard, such as Kat­sukawa Shun­shō’s Mir­ror of Yoshi­wara Beau­ties, Kitao Masanobu’s A New Record Com­par­ing the Hand­writ­ing of the Cour­te­sans of the Yoshi­wara, and Uta­gawa Kunisada’s That Pur­ple Image in Mag­ic Lantern Shows. Though few of us today know Kunisada’s name, in the ear­ly to mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry his pop­u­lar rep­u­ta­tion far exceed­ed those of Hoku­sai, Hiroshige, and Uta­maro — not least because of how many could enjoy his work in books like these. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

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

Get Free Draw­ing Lessons from Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, Who Famous­ly Paint­ed The Great Wave of Kana­gawa: Read His How-To Book, Quick Lessons in Sim­pli­fied Draw­ings

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 or on Face­book.

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