How to Paint Like Willem De Kooning: Watch Visual Primers from the Museum of Modern Art

in Art | October 17th, 2019

Before you learn how to paint like Dutch American Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, you might ask, why should you paint like Willem De Kooning? Shouldn’t every artist have his or her own inimitable personal style? We might ask, why learn to play piano like Nina Simone or write prose like William Faulkner? If you stop at mere imitation, there may be no good reason to mimic the masters.

But if you take their techniques and make them yours—steal, if you will, their best parts for your work—then, with enough talent and persistence, you might be on your way toward an inimitable personal style of your own. Or, you could simply watch these videos on how to paint like De Kooning to get a vivid, live-action demonstration of how the artist himself did it.

You need never have held a paintbrush to appreciate the Museum of Modern Art’s “How to Paint Like” series, featuring videos of MoMA educator and conservator Cory D’Augustine, who shows us how to imitate the methods of not only of De Kooning, but also Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Agnes Martin. All of these tutorials come from D’Augustine’s Coursera class “In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting.”

And as his other videos, here D’Augustine offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s tools and techniques: low-viscosity oil paint held in large quantities in bowls, rather than small blobs of paint on a palette; the big powerful full-body gestures to achieve “action painting.” If you are trying this at home, be advised, D’Augustine moves fast, assuming a lot of prior experience and a serious artist’s collection of supplies. Think more Bob Vila than Bob Ross—you will need a good set of tools. But if you’re aspiring to paint like De Kooning, odds are you’ve got it covered.

D’Augustine has also been responsive to critics in the comments, releasing the follow up Part 2 video, above, to address the absurdity of actually “doing a De Kooning-esque painting in a day.” Additionally, as he notes above, De Kooning “reinvented himself again and again and again,” meaning “there certainly isn’t one way, there certainly aren’t a hundred ways, to make a De Kooning since he was relentlessly inventive.”

That is to say, we’re seeing a curated selection of De Kooning’s materials and application techniques, which still may be quite enough to influence a budding painter on the way to a unique technique of her own—or to inform De Kooning fans who do not paint, but who have stood before his fearfully, brutally energetic canvases and wondered how they came to be.

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

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The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

in Art, Design, History, Politics | October 17th, 2019

This year marks the centennial of the Bauhaus, the German art-and-design school and movement whose influence now makes itself felt all over the world. The clean lines and clarity of function exhibited by Bauhaus buildings, imagery, and objects — the very definition of what we still describe as “modern” — appeal in a way that transcends not just time and space but culture and tradition, and that’s just as the school’s founder Walter Gropius intended. A forward-looking utopian internationalist, Gropius seized the moment in the Germany left ruined by the First World War to make his ideals clear in the Bauhaus Manifesto: “Together let us call for, devise, and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form,” he writes: “architecture, sculpture and painting.”

In about a dozen years, however, a group with very little time for the Bauhaus project would suddenly rise to prominence in Germany: the Nazi party. “Their right-wing ideology called for a return to traditional German values,” says reporter Michael Tapp in the Quartz video above, “and their messaging carried a typeface: Fraktur.” Put forth by the nazis as the “true” German font, Fraktur was “based on Gothic script that had been synonymous with the German national identity for 800 years.” On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the Bauhaus created “a radical new kind of typography,” which Museum of Modern Art curator Barry Bergdoll describes as “politically charged”: “The Germans are probably the only users of the Roman alphabet who had given typescript a nationalist sense. To refuse it and redesign the alphabet completely in the opposite direction is to free it of these national associations.”

The culture of the Bauhaus also provoked public discomfort: “Locals railed against the strange, androgynous students, their foreign masters, their surreal parties, and the house band that played jazz and Slavic folk music,” writes Darran Anderson at Citylab. “Newspapers and right-wing political parties cynically tapped into the opposition and fueled it, intensifying its anti-Semitism and emphasizing that the school was a cosmopolitan threat to supposed national purity.” Gropius, for his part, “worked tirelessly to keep the school alive,” preventing students from attending protests and gathering up leaflets printed by fellow Bauhaus instructor Oskar Schlemmer calling the school a “rallying point for all those who, with faith in the future and willingness to storm the heavens, wish to build the cathedral of socialism.” In their zeal to purge “degenerate art,” the Nazis closed the Bauhaus’ Dessau school in 1932 and its Berlin branch the following year.

Though some of his followers may have been firebrands, Gropius himself “was typically a moderating influence,” writes Anderson, “preferring to achieve his socially conscious progressivism through design rather than politics; creating housing for workers and safe, clean workplaces filled with light and air (like the Fagus Factory) rather than agitating for them.” He also openly declared the apolitical nature of the Bauhaus early on, but historians of the movement can still debate how apolitical it remained, during its lifetime as well as in its lasting effects. A 2009 MoMA exhibition even drew attention to the Bauhaus figures who worked with the Nazis, most notably the painter and architect Franz Ehrlich. But as Anderson puts it, “there are many Bauhaus tales,” and together “they show not a simple Bauhaus-versus-the-Nazis dichotomy but rather how, to varying degrees of bravery and caprice, individuals try to survive in the face of tyranny.”

How the Radical Buildings of the Bauhaus Revolutionized Architecture: A Short Introduction

The Bauhaus Bookshelf: Download Original Bauhaus Books, Journals, Manifestos & Ads That Still Inspire Designers Worldwide

An Oral History of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Interviews (in English) with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & More

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

The Nazi’s Philistine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

William Burroughs Meets Francis Bacon: See Never-Broadcast Footage (1982)

in Art, Literature, Television | October 14th, 2019

The writing of William S. Burroughs and the paintings of Francis Bacon take us into often troubling but nevertheless compelling realities we couldn’t possibly glimpse any other way. Some of that effect has to do with the inimitable (if often unsuccessfully imitated) styles they developed for themselves, and some with what was going on in their unusual lives as well as the even wilder realms of their minds. And though no scholars have yet turned up a Burroughs monograph on Bacon’s art, or Bacon-painted illustrations for a Burroughs novel — just imagine Naked Lunch given that treatment — those minds did meet now and again in life, starting in Morocco six decades ago.

“The two men first met in Tangiers in the 1950s when Burroughs was technically on the run for murdering his wife after a ‘shooting accident’ during a drunken game of William Tell,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher. “Bacon was then in a brutal and near fatal relationship with a violent sadist called Peter Lacey who used to beat him with a leather studded belt.” None other than Allen Ginsberg made the introduction between the two men, “as he thought Bacon painted the way Burroughs wrote.” But Burroughs saw more differences than similarities: “Bacon and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum,” he once said. “He likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I think it’s the one thing of importance. Of course we’re associated because of our morbid subject matter.”

Bacon and Burroughs reminisce about their first meeting — what they can remember of it, anyway — in an encounter filmed by the BBC for a 1982 documentary on the writer. “Arena followed him to the home and studio of old friend Francis Bacon, where he drops in for a cup of tea and a catch up,” says the BBC’s site. “This meeting has never been broadcast.” But you can see their conversation presented in a ten-minute edit in the video above. Gallagher notes that the camera-shy Burroughs gets into the spirit of things only when the talk turns to his favorite subjects at the time: “Jajouka” — a Moroccan village with a distinct musical tradition — “Mayans, and immortality.” Bacon, “waspish, bitchy, gleeful like a naughty schoolboy,” throws out barbs left and right about his fellow artists and Burroughs’ fellow writers.

Bacon also recalls his and Burroughs’ “mutual friendship with Jane and Paul Bowles,” the famously bohemian married couple known for their writing as well as their expat life in Morocco, “going on to discuss Jane Bowles’ mental decline and the tragedy of her last years being tended to by nuns, a situation which Bacon thought ghastly. Ironically, Bacon died just over a decade later being tended to by nuns after becoming ill in Spain (an asthma attack).” Even the most knowledgable fans of Burroughs, Bacon, and all the illustrious figures in their worldwide circles surely don’t know the half of what happened when they got together. And though this ten-minute chat adds little concrete information to the record, it still gets us imagining what all these artistic associations might have been like — firing up our imaginations being the strong suit of creators like Bacon and Burroughs, even decades after they’ve left us to our own reality.

via Dangerous Minds

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Who Was Joan Vollmer, the Wife William Burroughs Allegedly Shot While Playing William Tell?

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

in Art | October 9th, 2019

The early 20th century artistic and literary revolution called Modernism appears in history as an almost entirely European-American phenomenon. Textbooks and syllabi tend to leave out important modernist movements on other continents, which means we miss out on important cross-continental conversations. Though, to be fair, very few English-speaking textbook writers and teachers have known much about the work of, Mavo, an avant-garde group of Japanese artists from the 1920s.

Scant literature has been available in translation. Critics “were often dismissive of the group,” notes Margaret Carrigan at Hyperallergic, “and art historians have all but ignored them in favor of larger contemporaneous movements, like German Expressionism.” Whatever the reasons for the slighting of early Japanese modernism, we can now try to rectify the imbalance thanks to online sources covering the fascinating history of Mavo—both its interesting parallels with European Modernism and its important differences.

Or we can begin to get an intriguing sense of these things, more or less, depending on our level of familiarity with Japanese language and culture. MAVO magazine, edited by Tatsuo Okada and Tomoyoshi Murayama, “appeared in 7 issues between July 1924 and August 1925,” writes Monoskop, who host six of those issues in high resolution scans. (Click on the PDF link under the image of each cover.) “By the third issue, the magazine was thick with advertisements and the usage of actual newspaper as its pages.” The original linocuts and “photographic reproductions of assemblage, painting, and graphic works” are small and sometimes inscrutable in grayscale.

There are many affinities with European modernisms—dichotomies of playfulness and precision, the love of collage and industrial machinery. The history of Mavo, like that of modernists worldwide, is a history of anarchic, confrontational art, charged with contempt for tradition. In 1923, the Shin-aichi newspaper, notes The Japan Times, covered the story of a Mavo exhibit in which artist Takamizawa Michinao tossed rocks through the windows of a state-sponsored, traditional art exhibit while Mavo artists displayed their own abstract canvases outside the gallery.

Mavo came about as the rebranding of an earlier group, “Japan’s Association of Futurist Artists, which became the local offshoot of the European Futurist phenomenon that began in Italy in 1909.” They were eclectic, publishing criticism, designing posters, buildings, and dance and theater pieces, incorporating Cubism and Dadaist tendencies. Unlike the Italian Futurists, who became increasingly fascist in their orientation, Mavo opposed the conservative state. “The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1924 brought about a proletarian and socialist bent to Mavo activities.”

See more of MAVO magazine at Monoskop, and learn more about the movement at The Japan Times, Hyperallergic, and Monoskop’s bibliography of a few scholarly sources in English (and Japanese, if you read the language). Also see Gennifer Weisenfeld’s book, MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931. If the phrase Japanese avant-garde calls up names like Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama, now it may also bring to mind the earlier Mavo and the many artists under its umbrella who adapted European influences for Japanese modes of artistic revolution.

Extensive Archive of Avant-Garde & Modernist Magazines (1890–1939) Now Available Online

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Talking Heads Songs Become Midcentury Pulp Novels, Magazines & Advertisements: “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and More

in Art, Design, Music | October 8th, 2019

Do you like Talking Heads? Writer and visual artist Douglas Coupland once proposed that question as the truest test of whether you belong to the cohort named by his novel Generation X. Coupland’s contemporary colleague in letters Jonathan Lethem summed up his own early Talking Heads mania thus: “At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.” What makes the band that recorded “Psycho Killer,” “This Must Be the Place,” “Once In a Lifetime,” and “Burning Down the House” so appealing to the bookish, and especially the both bookish and visual, born after the Baby Boom or otherwise?

Whatever the essence at work, screenwriter and “graphic-arts prankster” Todd Alcott taps into it with his latest round of popular songs-turned-midcentury book covers, posters, magazine covers, and other pieces of non-musical graphic design. You may remember Alcott’s previous adaptations of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, and Radiohead appearing here on Open Culture.

The culturally literate and obliquely referential catalogue of Talking Heads, however, may have provided his most suitable material yet: “Burning Down the House” becomes a “a 1950s pulp novel,” “Life During Wartime” a “1950s men’s adventure magazine,” “This Must Be the Place” an “advertisement for a 1950s suburban housing development,” and “Take Me to the River” the “cover of a 1950s-era issue of Field & Stream, with the four members of the band enjoying a day on the lake.”

Amusing even at first glance, these cultural mash-ups also repay knowledge of the band’s work and history. “Psycho Killer,” with its French lyrics, becomes an issue of Cahiers du Cinéma featuring David Byrne on a cover dated March 1974, “the earliest date the song ‘Psycho Killer’ is known to have been performed by David Byrne’s band The Artistics.” “Once in a Lifetime,” quite possibly the band’s most impressive piece of songcraft, becomes an equally layered Alcott image: a “a magazine advertisement for the 1962 classic The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, based on the best-seller by Sloan Wilson” — in other words, an ad designed for a magazine meant to sell a movie based on a book, and a book as tied up with the themes of alienation in postwar America as “Once in a Lifetime” itself.

Talking Heads fans will recognize in Alcott’s graphics the very same kind of genius for resounding literal-mindedness coupled with subtle, sometimes obscure wit that characterizes the work of Byrne and his collaborators. You can buy prints of these images at his Etsy shop, which also offers many other works of interest to those for whom music, books, magazines, media, and history constitute not separate subjects but one vast, densely interconnected cultural field. To those who see the world that way, Alcott’s designing the cover for an album by Byrne or another of the ex-Heads — or indeed a Jonathan Lethem novel — is only a matter of time. Enter Todd Alcott’s store here.

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Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers & Vintage Movie Posters

How Talking Heads and Brian Eno Wrote “Once in a Lifetime”: Cutting Edge, Strange & Utterly Brilliant

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

19th-Century Skeleton Alarm Clock Reminded People Daily of the Shortness of Life: An Introduction to the Memento Mori

in Art, History, Life | October 2nd, 2019

Victorian culture can seem grim and even ghoulish to us youth-obsessed, death-denying 21st century moderns. The tradition of death photography, for example, both fascinates and repels us, especially portraiture of deceased children. But the practice “became increasingly popular,” notes the BBC, as “Victorian nurseries were plagued by measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, rubella—all of which could be,” and too often were, “fatal.”

Adults did not fare much better when it came to the epidemic spread of killer diseases. Surrounded inescapably by death, Victorians coped by investing their world with totemic symbols, cultural artifacts known as memento mori, meaning “remember, you must die.” Tuberculosis, cholera, influenza… at any moment, one might take ill and waste away, and there would likely be little medical science could do about it.

Perhaps the best approach, then, was an acceptance of death while in the bloom of health, in order to not waste the moment and to learn to pay attention to what mattered while one could. Memento mori drawings, paintings, jewelry, photographs, and trinkets have populated European cultural history for centuries; death as an ever-present companion, not to be hidden away and feared but solemnly, respectfully given its due.

Or maybe not so respectfully, as the case may be. Some of these novelties, like the skeleton alarm clock at the top, look more like they belong at the bottom of a fish tank than a proper parlor mantle. “Presumably when the alarm went off,” writes Allison Meier at Hyperallergic, “the skeleton would shake its bones.” Wake up, life is short, you could die at any time. “Part of the collections of Science Museum, London, it’s believed to be of English origin and date between 1840 and 1900.”

The Tim Burton-esque tchotchke appeared in a 2014 British Library exhibit called Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, with many other such objects of varying degrees of artistry: “200 objects from a span of 250 years, all centered on the Gothic tradition in art, literature, music, fashion, and most recently film.” Memento mori artifacts offer visceral reminders that real, daily confrontations with disease and death were “at the base of much of Gothic literature and art.”

Where we now tend to read the Gothic as primarily reflective of social, cultural, and religious anxieties, the prevalence of memento mori in European homes both low and high (such as Mary Queen of Scots’ skull watch, in an 1896 illustration above) shows us just how much the gloomy strain of thinking that became the modern horror genre derives from a desire to confront mortality head on, so to speak, and finding that looking death in the face brings on ancient uncanny dread as much as healthy gallows humor and stoic, stiff-upper-lip reckoning with the ultimate fact of life.

via Lindsey Fitzharris

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete Digital Scan

in Art, Books | October 1st, 2019

Human beings got along perfectly well for hundreds of millennia without standardized taxonomies of color, but they didn’t do so in a globally connected culture full of logos, brands, and 24/7 screens. It’s arguable whether the world as we now see it would have been possible without monopolistic color systems like Pantone. They may circumscribe the visual world and dictate color from above. But they also enable international design principles and visual languages that translate easily everywhere.

These circumstances did not yet exist in 1692, when Dutch artist A. Boogert created a huge, almost 900-page book on color, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau. But they were slowly coming into being, thanks to studies by philosopher-scientists like Isaac Newton.

Boogert’s book took enlightenment work on optics in a more rigorous design direction than any of his contemporaries, anticipating a number of influential books on color to come in the following centuries, such as the art history-making studies by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and a book on color used by Charles Darwin during his Beagle voyage.

Boogert’s exhaustive study includes handwritten notes and descriptions and hundreds of hand-painted color swatches. This above-and-beyond effort was not, however, made for scientific or industrial purposes but as a guide for artists, showing how to mix watercolors to make every color in the spectrum. The author even includes a comprehensive unit on whites, grays, and blacks. How much historical influence did Boogert’s text have on the development of standardized color systems, we might wonder? Hardly any at all. Its single copy, notes Colossal, “was probably seen by very few eyes.”

The obscure book disappeared in the archives of the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France. That is, until its discovery recently by Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel, who posted scans on his Tumblr and translated some of the introduction from the original Dutch. Since then, the complete text has come online: 898 pages of high-resolution digital scans at the Bibliothèque Méjanes site. (Go to this page, click on the picture, then click on the arrows in the lower right side of the page to move through the book.)

If you read Dutch, all the better to appreciate this rare historic artifact. But you don’t need to understand A. Boogert’s explanations on watercolor technique to be staggered by the incredible amount of work that went into this early, overlooked labor of love for systematic approaches to color. Enter the full text here.

h/t David Hale

The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)

Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting

Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour, the 19th-Century “Color Dictionary” Used by Charles Darwin (1814)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

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

in Art, Books | September 30th, 2019

Everyone in Japan knows the story of Momotaro, the boy born from a peach who goes on to defeat the marauding ogres known as oni. The oldest known written versions of Momotaro’s adventures date back to the 17th century, but even then the tale almost certainly had a long history of passage through oral tradition. And though Momotaro may well be the best-known Japanese folk hero, his story is just one in a body of folklore vast enough that few, even among avid enthusiasts, can claim to have mastered it in its entirety.

That vast body of Japanese folklore has provided no small amount of inspiration to comics, animation, and the other modern forms of storytelling that have brought many of these folktales to wider audiences — even global audiences, a project that began in the late 19th century.

Their Western popularization has no greater figurehead than Lafcadio Hearn. A Greek-British writer who moved to Japan in 1890, Hearn later became a naturalized Japanese citizen and wrote such books as Japanese Fairy Tales, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, and The Boy Who Drew Cats.

That last title, an English version of a Japanese folktale about a child who vanquishes a goblin rat in a monastery by drawing its natural enemies on the monastery walls, was also adapted in a series of beautifully illustrated crêpe-paper children’s books put out by an enterprising Japanese publisher named Takejiro Hasegawa. “In twenty volumes, published between 1885 and 1922, the Fairy Tale series introduced traditional Japanese folk tales, first to readers of English and French, and later to readers of German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian,” writes the Public Domain Review’s Christopher DeCou.

Wanting to model the books on Japanese anthologies published in the sixteenth century, Hasegawa hired traditional Japanese woodblock printers like Kobyashi Eitaku, Suzuki Kason, and Chikanobu to illustrate them. And, for the translation work, he drew on the local missionary community to which his own English education had put him in contact. “The earliest volumes in the Japanese Fairy Tale Series really were very much a product of Tokyo’s close-knit expat community,” DeCou writes. A growing Western interest in Japonisme, as well as “Hasewaga’s wheeling and dealing at World’s Fairs” and the good sense to bring the famous Hearn aboard the project, made the Japanese Fairy Tale Series into an enduring international success.

“At a time when publishing houses in London and New York dominated the market,” DeCou writes, “Hasegawa’s press in Tokyo was producing equally beautiful volumes using traditional Japanese craftwork and broadcasting Japan’s culture to the world.” You can see more pages of the Japanese Fairy Tale Books at the Public Domain Review, and complete digitizations at the site of book dealer George Baxley as well as at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County and the Internet Archive. Like Hearn, Hasegawa understood that Japanese folklore had the appeal to cross temporal and cultural boundaries. But could even he have imagined that the very books in which he published them would still draw such fascination more than a century later?

via Public Domain Review

Splendid Hand-Scroll Illustrations of The Tale of Genjii, The First Novel Ever Written (Circa 1120)

A Wonderfully Illustrated 1925 Japanese Edition of Aesop’s Fables by Legendary Children’s Book Illustrator Takeo Takei

A Japanese Illustrated History of America (1861): Features George Washington Punching Tigers, John Adams Slaying Snakes & Other Fantastic Scenes

The First Museum Dedicated to Japanese Folklore Monsters Is Now Open

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

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How to Paint Like Willem De Kooning: Watch Visual Primers from the Museum of Modern Art

The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

William Burroughs Meets Francis Bacon: See Never-Broadcast Footage (1982)

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

Talking Heads Songs Become Midcentury Pulp Novels, Magazines & Advertisements: “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and More

19th-Century Skeleton Alarm Clock Reminded People Daily of the Shortness of Life: An Introduction to the Memento Mori

A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete Digital Scan

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

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