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.”
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.
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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.
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.”
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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.
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.
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.
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 historyhere.
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.
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.
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.”
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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