Jorge Luis Borges Draws a Self-Portrait After Going Blind

in Art, Literature | April 12th, 2019

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), one of the great writ­ers to come out of Argenti­na, went blind when he was  only 55 years old. As unset­tling as it must have been, it was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly a sur­prise. He once told The New York Times, “I knew I would go blind, because my father, my pater­nal grand­moth­er, my great-grand­fa­ther, they had all gone blind.”

In the years fol­low­ing that life-chang­ing moment, Borges nev­er learned braille and could no longer read. But he did con­tin­ue to write; he served as the direc­tor of Argenti­na’s Nation­al Library; he trav­eled and deliv­ered an impor­tant series of lec­tures at Har­vard on poet­ry (click to lis­ten); and he even took a stab at draw­ing — some­thing he did fair­ly well ear­li­er in life. (See our pre­vi­ous post: Two Draw­ings by Jorge Luis Borges Illus­trate the Author’s Obses­sions.)

Above, you can see a self por­trait that Borges drew in the base­ment of the famous Strand Book­store in New York City. Accord­ing to the Times, he did this “using one fin­ger to guide the pen he was hold­ing with his oth­er hand.” After mak­ing the sketch, Borges entered the main part of the book­store and start­ed “lis­ten­ing to the room, the stacks, the books,” and made the remark­able obser­va­tion “You have as many books as we have in our nation­al library.”

If you’ve ever been to The Strand, you know how many books it holds. Indeed, the store boasts of being “New York City’s leg­endary home of 18 Miles of new, used and rare books.” My guess is that Argenti­na’s nation­al library might have a few more vol­umes than that. But who is real­ly count­ing?

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in March 2014.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Borges: Pro­file of a Writer Presents the Life and Writ­ings of Argentina’s Favorite Son, Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Chats with William F. Buck­ley on Fir­ing Line (1977)

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When the Nazis Declared War on Expressionist Art (1937)

in Art, Film, History | April 9th, 2019


The 1937 Nazi Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion dis­played the art of Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Georg Grosz, and many more inter­na­tion­al­ly famous mod­ernists with max­i­mum prej­u­dice. Ripped from the walls of Ger­man muse­ums, the 740 paint­ings and sculp­tures were thrown togeth­er in dis­ar­ray and sur­round­ed by deroga­to­ry graf­fi­ti and hell-house effects. Right down the street was the respectable Great Ger­man Art Exhi­bi­tion, designed as coun­ter­pro­gram­ming “to show the works that Hitler approved of—depicting stat­uesque blonde nudes along with ide­al­ized sol­diers and land­scapes,” writes Lucy Burns at the BBC.

View­ers were sup­posed to sneer and recoil at the mod­ern art, and most did, but whether they were gawk­ers, Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers, or art fans in mourn­ing, the exhib­it drew mas­sive crowds. Over a mil­lion peo­ple first attend­ed, three times more than saw the exhi­bi­tion of state-sanc­tioned art—or more specif­i­cal­ly, art sanc­tioned by Hitler the failed artist, who had endured watch­ing “the real­is­tic paint­ings of build­ings and land­scapes,” of stur­dy peas­ants and suf­fer­ing poets, “dis­missed by the art estab­lish­ment in favour of abstract and mod­ern styles.” The Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion “was his moment to get his revenge,” and he had it. Over a hun­dred artists were denounced as Bol­she­viks and Jews bent on cor­rupt­ing Ger­man puri­ty.

After­wards, thou­sands of works of art were destroyed or dis­ap­peared, as did many of their cre­ators. Many artists fled, many could not. Enraged by the eclipse of sen­ti­men­tal aca­d­e­m­ic styles and by his own igno­rance, Hitler railed against “works of art which can­not be under­stood in them­selves,” as he put it in a speech that sum­mer. These “will nev­er again find their way to the Ger­man peo­ple.” Many such quo­ta­tions sur­round­ed the offend­ing art. The 1993 doc­u­men­tary above, writ­ten, pro­duced, and direct­ed by David Gru­bin, tells the sto­ry of the exhi­bi­tion, which has in time proven Hitler’s great­est cul­ture war fol­ly. It accom­plished its imme­di­ate pur­pose, but as Jonathan Petropou­los, pro­fes­sor of Euro­pean His­to­ry at Clare­mont McKen­na Col­lege points out, “this art­work became more attrac­tive abroad…. I think that over the longer run it was good for mod­ern art to be viewed as some­thing that the Nazis detest­ed and hat­ed.”

Not every anti-Nazi crit­ic saw mod­ern art as sub­vert­ing fas­cism. Ten years after the Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion, philoso­pher Theodor Adorno, him­self a refugee from Nazism, called Expres­sion­ism “a naïve aspect of lib­er­al trust­ful­ness,” on a con­tin­u­um between fas­cist tools like Futur­ism and “the ide­ol­o­gy of the cin­e­ma.” Nonethe­less, it was Hitler who most bore out Adorno’s gen­er­al obser­va­tion: “Taste is the most accu­rate seis­mo­graph of his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence…. React­ing against itself, it rec­og­nizes its own lack of taste.” The hys­ter­i­cal per­for­mance of dis­gust sur­round­ing so-called “degen­er­ate art” turned the exhib­it into a sen­sa­tion, a block­buster that, if it did not prove the virtues of mod­ernism, showed many around the world that the Nazis were as crude, dim, and vicious as they alleged their sup­posed ene­mies to be.

In the doc­u­men­tary, you’ll see actu­al footage of the the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion, jux­ta­posed with film of a 1992 Berlin exhi­bi­tion of much of that for­mer­ly degen­er­ate art. Restaged Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tions have become very pop­u­lar in the art word, bring­ing togeth­er artists who need no fur­ther expo­sure, in order to his­tor­i­cal­ly reen­act, in some fash­ion, the expe­ri­ence of see­ing them all togeth­er for the first time. From a recent his­tor­i­cal review at New York’s Neue Gal­lerie to the dig­i­tal exhib­it at MoMA.org, degen­er­ate art ret­ro­spec­tives show, as Adorno wrote, that indeed “taste is the most accu­rate seis­mo­graph of his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence.”

The orig­i­nal exhi­bi­tion “went on tour all over Ger­many,” writes Burns, “where it was seen by a mil­lion more peo­ple.” Thou­sands of ordi­nary Ger­mans who went to jeer at it were exposed to mod­ern art for the first time. Mil­lions more peo­ple have learned the names and styles of these artists by learn­ing about the his­to­ry of Nazism and its cult of pet­ti­ness and per­son­al revenge. Learn much more in the excel­lent doc­u­men­tary above and at our pre­vi­ous post on the Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion.

Degen­er­ate Art — 1993, The Nazis vs. Expres­sion­ism will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Titan­ic: The Nazis Cre­ate a Mega-Bud­get Pro­pa­gan­da Film About the Ill-Fat­ed Ship … and Then Banned It (1943)

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

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

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550 Million Years of Human Evolution in an Illustrated Flipbook

in Art, Science | April 9th, 2019

Graph­ic artist Juri­an Moller cre­at­ed a flip­book that lets you watch 550 mil­lion years of human evo­lu­tion unfold in a mat­ter of sec­onds. He writes: “This flip­book goes back in time and shows you the evo­lu­tion of the gen­er­a­tions in both a per­son­al and sci­en­tif­ic way. The dif­fer­ences between the gen­er­a­tions on each page are very dif­fi­cult to see, but the long, con­tin­u­ous ances­tral line goes right back to our very ori­gins.”

The action is on full dis­play above. Below, watch the same flip­book in an ani­mat­ed form. Pur­chase the book in var­i­ous for­mats at Moller’s site here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

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Neurons as Art: See Beautiful Anatomy Drawings by the Father of Neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal

in Art, Neuroscience, Science | April 8th, 2019

Art depends on pop­u­lar judg­ments about the uni­verse, and is nour­ished by the lim­it­ed expanse of sen­ti­ment. . . . In con­trast, sci­ence was bare­ly touched upon by the ancients, and is as free from the incon­sis­ten­cies of fash­ion as it is from the fick­le stan­dards of taste. . . . And let me stress that this con­quest of ideas is not sub­ject to fluc­tu­a­tions of opin­ion, to the silence of envy, or to the caprices of fash­ion that today repu­di­ate and detest what yes­ter­day was praised as sub­lime.

- San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal

The above draw­ing is the sort of sub­lime ren­der­ing that attracts throngs of vis­i­tors to the world’s great mod­ern art muse­ums, but that’s not the sort of renown the artist, Nobel Prize-win­ning father of mod­ern neu­ro­science San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal (1852 ‑1934), active­ly sought.

Or rather, he might have back before his father, a pro­fes­sor of anato­my, coerced his wild young son into trans­fer­ring from a provin­cial art acad­e­my to the med­ical school where he him­self was employed.

After a stint as an army med­ical offi­cer, the artist-turned-anatomist con­cen­trat­ed on inflam­ma­tion, cholera, and epithe­lial cells before zero­ing in on his true muse—the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem.

At the time, retic­u­lar the­o­ry, which held that every­thing in the ner­vous sys­tem was part of a sin­gle con­tin­u­ous net­work, pre­vailed.

Ramón y Cajal was able to dis­prove this wide­ly held belief by using Gol­gi stains to sup­port the exis­tence of indi­vid­ual ner­vous cells—neurons—that, while not phys­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed, com­mu­ni­cat­ed with each oth­er through a sys­tem of axons, den­drites, and synaps­es.

He called upon both his artis­tic and med­ical train­ing in doc­u­ment­ing what he observed through his micro­scope. His metic­u­lous free­hand draw­ings are far more accu­rate than any­thing that could be pro­duced by the micro­scop­ic-image pho­to­graph­ic tools avail­able at the time.

His pre­ci­sion was such that his illus­tra­tions con­tin­ue to be pub­lished in med­ical text­books. Fur­ther research has con­firmed many of his sup­po­si­tions.

As art crit­ic Rober­ta Smith writes in The New York Times, the draw­ings are “fair­ly hard-nosed fact if you know your sci­ence”:

If you don’t, they are deep pools of sug­ges­tive motifs into which the imag­i­na­tion can dive. Their lines, forms and var­i­ous tex­tures of stip­pling, dash­es and faint pen­cil cir­cles would be the envy of any mod­ern artist. That they con­nect with Sur­re­al­ist draw­ing, bio­mor­phic abstrac­tion and exquis­ite doo­dling is only the half of it.

The draw­ings’ prag­mat­ic titles cer­tain­ly take on a poet­ic qual­i­ty when one con­sid­ers the con­text of their cre­ation:

Axon of Purk­in­je neu­rons in the cere­bel­lum of a drowned man

The hip­pocam­pus of a man three hours after death

Glial cells of the cere­bral cor­tex of a child

His spec­i­mens were not lim­it­ed to the human world:

Reti­na of lizard

The olfac­to­ry bulb of the dog

In his book Advice for a Young Inves­ti­gator, Ramón y Cajal took a holis­tic view of the rela­tion­ship between sci­ence and the arts:

The inves­ti­ga­tor ought to pos­sess an artis­tic tem­pera­ment that impels him to search for and admire the num­ber, beau­ty, and har­mo­ny of things; and—in the strug­gle for life that ideas cre­ate in our minds—a sound crit­i­cal judg­ment that is able to reject the rash impuls­es of day­dreams in favor of those thoughts most faith­ful­ly embrac­ing objec­tive real­i­ty.

Explore more of Ramón y Cajal’s cel­lu­lar draw­ings in Beau­ti­ful Brain: The Draw­ings of San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal, the com­pan­ion book to a recent trav­el­ing exhi­bi­tion of his work. Or immerse your­self at the neur­al lev­el by order­ing a repro­duc­tion on a beach tow­el, yoga mat, cell phone case, show­er cur­tain, or oth­er neces­si­ty on Sci­ence Source.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

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

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City April 15 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online

in Archives, Art, Books, Literature, Poetry, Religion | April 5th, 2019

Too often those in pow­er lump thou­sands of years of Mid­dle East­ern reli­gion and cul­ture into mono­lith­ic enti­ties to be feared or per­se­cut­ed. But at least one gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion is doing exact­ly the oppo­site. For Nowruz, the Per­sian New Year, the Library of Con­gress has released a dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of its rare Per­sian-lan­guage man­u­scripts, an archive span­ning 700 years. This free resource opens win­dows on diverse reli­gious, nation­al, lin­guis­tic, and cul­tur­al tra­di­tions, most, but not all, Islam­ic, yet all dif­fer­ent from each oth­er in com­plex and strik­ing ways.

“We nowa­days are pro­grammed to think Per­sia equates with Iran, but when you look at this it is a mul­ti­re­gion­al col­lec­tion,” says a Library spe­cial­ist in its African and Mid­dle East­ern Divi­sion, Hirad Dinavari. “Many con­tributed to it. Some were Indi­an, some were Tur­kic, Cen­tral Asian.” The “deep, cos­mopoli­tan archive,” as Atlas Obscura’s Jonathan Carey writes, con­sists of a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of manuscripts—only 155. That may not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant giv­en the enor­mi­ty of some oth­er online col­lec­tions.

But its qual­i­ty and vari­ety mark it as espe­cial­ly valu­able, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of much larg­er bod­ies of work in the arts, sci­ences, reli­gion, and phi­los­o­phy, dat­ing back to the 13th cen­tu­ry and span­ning regions from India to Cen­tral Asia and the Cau­cus­es, “in addi­tion to the native Per­sian speak­ing lands of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajik­istan,” the LoC notes.

Promi­nent­ly rep­re­sent­ed are works like the epic poem of pre-Islam­ic Per­sia, the Shah­namah, “likened to the Ili­ad or the Odyssey,” writes Carey, as well as “writ­ten accounts of the life of Shah Jahan, the 17th-cen­tu­ry Mughal emper­or who over­saw con­struc­tion of the Taj Mahal.”

The Library points out the archive includes the “most beloved poems of the Per­sian poets Saa­di, Hafez, Rumi and Jami, along with the works of the poet Niza­mi Gan­javi.” Some read­ers might be sur­prised at the pic­to­r­i­al opu­lence of so many Islam­ic texts, with their col­or­ful, styl­ized bat­tle scenes and group­ings of human fig­ures.

Islam­ic art is typ­i­cal­ly thought of as icon­o­clas­tic, but as in Chris­t­ian Europe and North Amer­i­ca, cer­tain sects have fought oth­ers over this inter­pre­ta­tion (includ­ing over depic­tions of the Prophet Moham­mad). This is not to say that the icon­o­clasts deserve less atten­tion. Much medieval and ear­ly mod­ern Islam­ic art uses intri­cate pat­terns, designs, and cal­lig­ra­phy while scrupu­lous­ly avoid­ing like­ness­es of humans and ani­mals. It is deeply mov­ing in its own way, rig­or­ous­ly detailed and pas­sion­ate­ly exe­cut­ed, full of math­e­mat­i­cal and aes­thet­ic ideas about shape, pro­por­tion, col­or, and line that have inspired artists around the world for cen­turies.

The page from a lav­ish­ly illu­mi­nat­ed Qur’ān, above, cir­ca 1708, offers such an exam­ple, writ­ten in Ara­bic with an inter­lin­ear Per­sian trans­la­tion. There are reli­gious texts from oth­er faiths, like the Psalms in Hebrew with Per­sian trans­la­tion, there are sci­en­tif­ic texts and maps: the Rare Per­sian-Lan­guage Man­u­script Col­lec­tion cov­ers a lot of his­tor­i­cal ground, as has Per­sian lan­guage and cul­ture “from the 10th cen­tu­ry to the present,” the Library writes. Such a rich tra­di­tion deserves care­ful study and appre­ci­a­tion. Begin an edu­ca­tion in Per­sian man­u­script his­to­ry here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

15,000 Col­or­ful Images of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Online, Cour­tesy of the British Library

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

800+ Trea­sured Medieval Man­u­scripts to Be Dig­i­tized by Cam­bridge & Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ties

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

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

in Art | April 3rd, 2019

Reduc­ing an artist’s work to their biog­ra­phy pro­duces crude under­stand­ing. But in very many cas­es, life and work can­not be teased apart. This applies not only to Sylvia Plath and her con­tem­po­rary con­fes­sion­al poets but also to James Joyce and Mar­cel Proust and writ­ers they admired, like Dante and Cer­vantes.

Such an artist too is Fri­da Kahlo, a prac­ti­tion­er of nar­ra­tive self-por­traits in a mod­ern­iz­ing idiom that at the same time draws exten­sive­ly on tra­di­tion. The lit­er­ary nature of her art is a sub­ject much neglect­ed in pop­u­lar dis­cus­sions of her work. She wrote pas­sion­ate, elo­quent love poems and let­ters to her hus­band Diego Rivera and oth­ers, full of the same kind of vis­cer­al, vio­lent, ver­dant imagery she deployed in her paint­ings.

More gen­er­al­ly, the “obses­sion with Kahlo’s biog­ra­phy,” writes Maria Gar­cia at WBUR, ends up focus­ing “almost voyeuristically—on the trag­ic expe­ri­ences of her life more than her artistry.” Those ter­ri­bly com­pound­ed tragedies include sur­viv­ing polio and, as you’ll learn in Iseult Gillespie’s short TED-Ed video above, a bus crash that near­ly tore her in half. She began paint­ing while recov­er­ing in bed. She was nev­er the same and lived her life in chron­ic pain and fre­quent hos­pi­tal­iza­tions.

Per­haps a cer­tain cult of Kahlo does place mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion above real appre­ci­a­tion for her vision. “There’s a com­pul­sion that’s sati­at­ed only through con­sum­ing Kahlo’s agony,” Gar­cia writes. But it’s also true that we can­not rea­son­ably sep­a­rate her sto­ry from her work. It’s just that there is so more to the sto­ry than suf­fer­ing, all of it woven into the texts of her paint­ings. Kahlo’s mythol­o­gy, or “inspi­ra­tional per­son­al brand,” ties togeth­er her com­mit­ments to Marx­ism and Mex­i­co, indige­nous cul­ture, and native spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.

Like all self-mythol­o­giz­ers before her, she fold­ed her per­son­al sto­ry into that of her nation. And unlike Euro­pean sur­re­al­ists, who “used dream­like images to explore the uncon­scious mind, Kahlo used them to rep­re­sent her phys­i­cal body and life expe­ri­ences.” The expe­ri­ence of dis­abil­i­ty was no less a part of her ecol­o­gy than mor­tal­i­ty, sym­bol­ic land­scapes, flo­ral tapes­tries, ani­mals, and the phys­i­cal­ly anguished expe­ri­ences of love and loss.

Gen­er­ous approach­es to Kahlo’s work, and this short overview is one of them, implic­it­ly rec­og­nize that there is no need to sep­a­rate the life from the work, to the extent that the artist saw no rea­son to do so. But also, there is no need to iso­late one nar­ra­tive theme, whether intense phys­i­cal or emo­tion­al suf­fer­ing, from themes of self-trans­for­ma­tion and trans­fig­u­ra­tion or exper­i­ments in re-cre­at­ing per­son­al iden­ti­ty as a polit­i­cal act.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

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

Fri­da Kahlo’s Pas­sion­ate Love Let­ters to Diego Rivera

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

 

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The First American Picture Book, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928)

in Art, Books, History, K-12, Literature | April 2nd, 2019

For bet­ter (I’d say), or worse, the inter­net has turned cat peo­ple into what may be the world’s most pow­er­ful ani­mal lob­by. It has brought us fas­ci­nat­ing ani­mat­ed his­to­ries of cats and ani­mat­ed sto­ries about the cats of goth­ic genius and cat-lov­ing author and illus­tra­tor Edward Gorey; cats blithe­ly leav­ing inky paw­prints on medieval man­u­scripts and polite­ly but firm­ly refus­ing to be denied entry into a Japan­ese art muse­um. It has giv­en us no short­age of delight­ful pho­tos of artists with their cat famil­iars…

Cat antics and awe have always been a very online phe­nom­e­non, but the mys­te­ri­ous and ridicu­lous, diminu­tive beasts of prey have also always been insep­a­ra­ble from art and cul­ture. As fur­ther evi­dence, we bring you Mil­lions of Cats, like­ly the “first tru­ly Amer­i­can pic­ture book done by an Amer­i­can author/artist,” explains a site devot­ed to it.

“Pri­or to its pub­li­ca­tion in 1928, there were only Eng­lish pic­ture books for the children’s perusal.” The book “sky rock­et­ed Wan­da Gág into instant fame and set in stone her rep­u­ta­tion as a children’s author and illus­tra­tor.”

It set a stan­dard for Calde­cott-win­ning children’s lit­er­a­ture for close to a hun­dred years since its appear­ance, though the award did not yet exist at the time. The book’s cre­ator was “a fierce ide­al­ist and did not believe in alter­ing her own aes­theti­cism just because she was pro­duc­ing work for chil­dren. She liked to use styl­ized human fig­ures, asym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tions, strong lines and slight spa­tial dis­tor­tion.” She also loved cats, as befits an artist of her inde­pen­dent tem­pera­ment, one shared by the likes of oth­er cat-lov­ing artists like T.S. Eliot and Charles Dick­ens.

Mil­lions of Cats’ author and illus­tra­tor may not share in the fame of so many oth­er artists who took pic­tures with their cats, but she and her cat Noopy were as pho­to­genic as any oth­er feline/human artis­tic duo, and she was a peer to the best of them. The book’s edi­tor, Ernes­tine Evans, wrote in the Nation that Mil­lions of Cats “is as impor­tant as the librar­i­ans say it is. Not only does it bring to book-mak­ing one of the most tal­ent­ed and orig­i­nal of Amer­i­can lith­o­g­ra­phers… but it is a mar­riage of pic­ture and tale that is per­fect­ly bal­anced.”

Gág (rhymes with “jog”) was “a cel­e­brat­ed artist… in the Green­wich Vil­lage-cen­tic Mod­ernist art scene in the 1920s,” writes Lithub, “a free-think­ing, sex-pos­i­tive left­ist who also designed her own clothes and trans­lat­ed fairy tales.” She adapt­ed the text from “a sto­ry she had made up to enter­tain her friends’ chil­dren,” with the mil­lions of cats mod­eled on Noopy. Gág is the found­ing moth­er of children’s book dynas­ties like The Cat in the Hat and Pete the Cat, an artist whom mil­lions of cat lovers can dis­cov­er again or for the first time in a New­bery-win­ning 2006 collector’s edi­tion.

Read a sum­ma­ry of the charm­ing sto­ry of Mil­lions of Cats at Lithub and learn more about her, the tal­ent­ed Gág fam­i­ly of artists, and her charm­ing, very cat-friend­ly house here.

via LitHub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Insane­ly Cute Cat Com­mer­cials from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, Hayao Miyazaki’s Leg­endary Ani­ma­tion Shop

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

A Dig­i­tal Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA

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

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Modern Corporate Logos Reimagined in a Classic Bauhaus Style: Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Bauhaus Movement Today

in Art, Design | April 1st, 2019

Image by Vladimir Nikolic

Amer­i­can chil­dren, a study found a few years ago, rec­og­nize over 1,000 cor­po­rate logos but almost no plants. To some it was a damn­ing indict­ment of the mod­ern world; to oth­ers it was noth­ing more than a descrip­tion of the mod­ern world (in the 21st cen­tu­ry, after all, which skill is more help in find­ing food?); and to a few it was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­claim that, for the sake of the chil­dren, the mod­ern world could use some bet­ter cor­po­rate logos.

Image by dell­fi

The artists, archi­tects, and design­ers of the Bauhaus, the mod­ernist art-school-turned-move­ment with its ori­gins in Weimar Ger­many, might well have agreed. Right from the Bauhaus’ foun­da­tion in 1919, its mem­bers worked on shap­ing the aes­thet­ics of the future.

Now, for the school’s 100th anniver­sary (today!), 99designs has com­mis­sioned revi­sions of cur­rent cor­po­rate logos in the Bauhaus style. “It out­last­ed a century’s worth of com­pet­ing styles,” writes 99designs’ Matt Ellis, “sur­vived the ini­tial crit­i­cisms from tra­di­tion­al­ists, and although the Nazis shut down the insti­tu­tion in 1933, the Bauhaus move­ment itself lives on to this day.”

Image by Ars­De­signs

Ellis goes on to quote the still-inspir­ing words of Bauhaus founder Wal­ter Gropius: “The artist is a height­ened man­i­fes­ta­tion of the crafts­man. Let us form… a new guild of crafts­men with­out the class divi­sions that set out to raise an arro­gant bar­ri­er between crafts­men and artists! Let us togeth­er cre­ate the new build­ing of the future which will be all in one: archi­tec­ture and sculp­ture and paint­ing.” This project put up the five pil­lars of the Bauhaus style: “form fol­lows func­tion,” “min­i­mal­ism,” “rev­o­lu­tion­ary typog­ra­phy,” “pas­sion for geom­e­try,” and “pri­ma­ry col­ors.”

Image by dnk

The reimag­ined cor­po­rate logos made for the cen­te­nary of the Bauhaus stand on all those pil­lars, turn­ing the emblems of prod­ucts and ser­vices that many of us con­sume and use every day — or per­haps, as we scroll through Insta­gram on our iPhones or Android devices at Star­bucks in our Adi­das­es, all at the same time — into designs that merge the cut­ting-edge aes­thet­ics of inter­war Europe with those of the thor­ough­ly glob­al­ized 2010s.

Image by Pono­marevD­mit­ry

Whether a pure Bauhaus revival will result in the actu­al adop­tion of logos like these remains to be seen, but in a way, the exer­cise sim­ply dou­bles down on an influ­ence that already runs deep. As Art­sy’s Kelsey Ables puts it, “It is a tes­ta­ment to the long­stand­ing influ­ence of Bauhau­sian min­i­mal­ist ideals that the select­ed logos were already stream­lined to begin with; many of the design­ers who reimag­ined ‘Bauhaus style’ logos had to add visu­al ele­ments. Per­haps Google and its brethren are more Bauhaus than the Bauhaus itself.”

Image by Ars­De­signs

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion of the Found­ing of the Bauhaus School 100 Years Ago

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

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

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

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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