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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Behold the Sola-Busca Tarot Deck, the Earliest Complete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

in History | April 9th, 2019

What­ev­er you think of the pre­dic­tive pow­er of tarot cards, the sto­ry of how human­i­ty has pro­duced them and put them to use pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the last 500 years or so. We’ve fea­tured a vari­ety of tarot decks here on Open Cul­ture, most­ly from the past cen­tu­ry: decks designed by Aleis­ter Crow­ley, Sal­vador Dalí, and H.R. Giger, as well as one fea­tur­ing the char­ac­ters from Twin Peaks. But today we give you the old­est extant exam­ple, and a high­ly dis­tinc­tive one for rea­sons not just his­tor­i­cal but aes­thet­ic: the Sola-Bus­ca tarot deck, dat­ing from the ear­ly 1490s, which L’I­ta­lo Amer­i­cano’s Francesca Bez­zone describes as “78, beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed cards, 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana, engraved on card­board and hand paint­ed with tem­pera col­ors and gold.”

The Sola-Bus­ca tarot deck, whose name derives from those of its last two own­ers Mar­quise Bus­ca and Count Sola, set a struc­tur­al prece­dent for decks to come by being divid­ed into those sets of major arcana (or “major secrets”) and minor arcana (or “minor secrets”).

In the cards of the major arcana, which trace the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, “Clas­si­cal and Bib­li­cal fig­ures take the place of tra­di­tion­al tarot illus­tra­tions: for instance, the arcana of jus­tice is Nero and that of the world is Neb­uchad­nez­zar. Among oth­ers rep­re­sent­ed Gaius Mar­ius, uncle of Juluis Cae­sar, and Bac­chus,” as well as now more dif­fi­cult-to-iden­ti­fy per­son­ages from lat­er cen­turies. The minor arcana cards, writes Bez­zone, “are also dif­fer­ent from all oth­er decks’, because they are fine­ly and rich­ly illus­trat­ed with scenes of dai­ly life.”

But even the every­day images con­tain secrets: “This is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in the suit of coins, which appar­ent­ly illus­trates the process of coin mint­ing, but in real­i­ty alludes to the com­plex and secret prac­tices of the Opus Alchemicum, that is, the method used to cre­ate the lapis philosopho­rum, the philosopher’s stone, alchemic instru­ment of immor­tal­i­ty and per­fec­tion.” But “in spite of the refined and del­i­cate artistry behind their illus­tra­tions, the name of the man, or men, who cre­at­ed them remained shroud­ed in dark­ness for cen­turies,” though in 1938 art his­to­ri­an Arthur Mayger Hind deter­mined that, based on the ref­er­ences to the Repub­lic of Venice in the deck­’s art­work, its was like­ly made for a Venet­ian client, pos­si­bly by the engraver Mat­tia Ser­rati da Cosan­dola or, accord­ing to anoth­er the­o­ry, the painter Nico­la di Mae­stro Anto­nio and his­to­ri­an Marin Sanudo.

Il seg­re­to dei seg­reti, an exhi­bi­tion on the Sola-Bus­ca deck at Milan’s Pina­cote­ca di Brera gallery, brings anoth­er Renais­sance fig­ure into the mix: “While large­ly unknown today, the Human­ist and Her­meti­cist Ludovi­co Laz­zarel­li from San Sev­eri­no Marche played a sig­nif­i­cant role in Ital­ian court Human­ism,” and because of “his per­son­al­i­ty, role, and inter­est in Her­met­ic and alchem­i­cal themes” as well as his rela­tions with pow­er­ful courts of the day “is believed to have designed the com­plex icono­graph­i­cal pro­gram of the Sola-Bus­ca tarots.” The tenets of Renais­sance Her­meti­cism held that mankind could trans­form nature by appre­hend­ing it, mak­ing it in some sense a fore­run­ner to mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. And while the notion that we can see our future in the turn of play­ing cards may not itself sound wild­ly sci­en­tif­ic, an arti­fact like the Sola-Bus­ca deck, all of whose 78 carts you can see here, still has more to teach us about our past. Decks can also be pur­chased online.

via L’I­ta­lo Amer­i­cano

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious, and Maybe a Way to Pre­dict the Future

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Sal­vador Dalí

The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleis­ter Crow­ley

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

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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The Fantastical Sketchbook of a Medieval Inventor: See Designs for Flamethrowers, Mechanical Camels & More (Circa 1415)

in History, Technology | April 5th, 2019

His­to­ry remem­bers, and will like­ly nev­er for­get, the name of Renais­sance Ital­ian inven­tor Leonar­do da Vin­ci. But what about the name of Renais­sance Ital­ian inven­tor Johannes de Fontana? Though he came along a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions before Leonar­do, Johannes de Fontana, also known as Gio­van­ni Fontana, seems to have had no less fer­tile an imag­i­na­tion. Where Leonar­do came up with every­thing from musi­cal instru­ments to hydraulic pumps to war machines to self-sup­port­ing bridges, Fontana’s inven­tions include “fire-breath­ing automa­tons, pul­ley-pow­ered angels, and the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing draw­ing of a mag­ic lantern device.”

Those words come from Port­land State Uni­ver­si­ty’s Ben­nett Gilbert, who takes a dive into Fontana’s note­book of “designs for a vari­ety of fan­tas­tic and often impos­si­ble inven­tions” at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Filled some time between the years 1415 and 1420, its 68 draw­ings meant to entice poten­tial patrons include plans for “mechan­i­cal camels for enter­tain­ing chil­dren, mys­te­ri­ous locks to guard trea­sure, flame-throw­ing con­trap­tions to ter­ror­ize the defend­ers of besieged cities, huge foun­tains, musi­cal instru­ments, actors’ masks, and many oth­er won­ders.”

It would seem that Fontana lacked the sense of prac­ti­cal­i­ty pos­sessed by his suc­ces­sor Leonar­do — and Leonar­do dreamed up not just a vari­ety of fly­ing machines but a mechan­i­cal knight. That may have to do with the era in which Fontana lived, “more than two hun­dred years before the dis­cov­er­ies of New­ton,” a time “of tran­si­tion from medieval knowl­edge of the world to that of the Renais­sance, which many now regard as the ori­gin of ear­ly mod­ern sci­ence.” And so his designs, many of them lib­er­al­ly dec­o­rat­ed with unearth­ly-look­ing crea­tures and bursts of flame, strike us today as at most half plau­si­ble and at least half fan­tas­ti­cal.

Fontana’s draw­ing style, too, reflects the state of human knowl­edge in the ear­ly fif­teenth cen­tu­ry: “The tow­ers and rock­ets, water and fire, noz­zles and pipes, pul­leys and ropes, gears and grap­ples, wheels and beams, and grids and spheres that were an engineer’s occu­pa­tion at the dawn of the Renais­sance fill Fontana’s sketch­book. His way of illus­trat­ing his ideas, how­ev­er, is dis­tinct­ly medieval, lack­ing per­spec­tive and using a lim­it­ed array of angles for dis­play­ing machine works.” Yet this makes Fontana’s note­book all the more fas­ci­nat­ing to 21st-cen­tu­ry eyes, and throws into con­trast some of his more plau­si­ble inven­tions, such as “a mag­ic lantern device, which trans­formed the light of fire into emo­tive dis­play.”

Will some bold schol­ar of the ear­ly Renais­sance one day argue that Fontana invent­ed motion pic­tures? But per­haps the man who designed “an awe-inspir­ing fire-illu­mi­nat­ed spec­ta­cle, most like­ly serv­ing as a pro­pa­gan­da machine, for use in war and in peace” would­n’t approve of a medi­um quite so ordi­nary. We might say that the most valu­able lega­cy of Johannes de Fontana, more so than any of his inven­tions them­selves, is the glimpse his note­book gives us into the the human imag­i­na­tion in his day, when fact and fan­ta­sy inter­min­gled as they will nev­er do again. And in the case of some tech­nolo­gies, we should prob­a­bly feel relieved that they won’t: Fontana’s “life sup­port sys­tem for patients under­go­ing grue­some surg­eries” may be fas­ci­nat­ing, but I can’t say I’d be eager to make use of it myself.

See his man­u­script online here.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Buck­min­ster Fuller Cre­ates Strik­ing Posters of His Own Inven­tions

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

The 10 Com­mand­ments of Chindōgu, the Japan­ese Art of Cre­at­ing Unusu­al­ly Use­less Inven­tions

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

in Books, History, Libraries, Philosophy | April 4th, 2019

West­ern civ­i­liza­tion may fast be going dig­i­tal, but it still retains its roots in Ancient Greece. And so it makes a cer­tain cir­cle-clos­ing sense to dig­i­tize the lega­cy left us by our Ancient Greek fore­bears and the medieval schol­ars who pre­served it. Cam­bridge and Hei­del­berg, two of Europe’s old­est uni­ver­si­ties, this month announced their joint inten­tion to embark upon just such a project. It will take two years and cost £1.6 mil­lion, reports the BBC, but it will dig­i­tize “more than 800 vol­umes fea­tur­ing the works of Pla­to and Aris­to­tle, among oth­ers.” As the announce­ment of the project puts it, the texts will then “join the works of Charles Dar­win, Isaac New­ton, Stephen Hawk­ing and Alfred Lord Ten­nyson on the Cam­bridge Dig­i­tal Library.”

These medieval and ear­ly mod­ern Greek man­u­scripts, which date more specif­i­cal­ly “from the ear­ly Chris­t­ian peri­od to the ear­ly mod­ern era (about 1500 — 1700 AD),” present their dig­i­tiz­ers with cer­tain chal­lenges, not least the “frag­ile state” of their medieval bind­ing.

But as Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty Library direc­tor Dr. Veit Prob­st says in the announce­ment, “Numer­ous dis­cov­er­ies await. We still lack detailed knowl­edge about the pro­duc­tion and prove­nance of these books, about the iden­ti­ties and activ­i­ties of their scribes, their artists and their own­ers – and have yet to uncov­er how they were stud­ied and used, both dur­ing the medieval peri­od and in the cen­turies beyond.” And from threads includ­ing “the anno­ta­tions and mar­gin­a­lia in the orig­i­nal man­u­scripts” a “rich tapes­try of Greek schol­ar­ship will be woven.”

This mas­sive under­tak­ing involves not just Cam­bridge and Hei­del­berg but the Vat­i­can as well. Togeth­er Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty and the Vat­i­can pos­sess the entire­ty of the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na, split between the libraries of the two insti­tu­tions, and the dig­i­ti­za­tion of the “moth­er of all medieval libraries” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, is a part of the project. This col­lect­ed wealth of texts includes not just the work of Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and Homer as they were “copied and recopied through­out the medieval peri­od,” in the words of Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Library Keep­er of Rare Books and Ear­ly Man­u­scripts Dr. Suzanne Paul, but a great many oth­er “mul­ti­lin­gual, mul­ti­cul­tur­al, mul­ti­far­i­ous works, that cross bor­ders, dis­ci­plines and the cen­turies” as well. And with luck, their dig­i­tal copies will stick around for cen­turies of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

Explore 5,300 Rare Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized by the Vat­i­can: From The Ili­ad & Aeneid, to Japan­ese & Aztec Illus­tra­tions

How the Mys­ter­ies of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives Are Being Revealed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

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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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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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Beauty of Brutalist Architecture: An Introduction in Six Videos

in Architecture, History | April 2nd, 2019

Some peo­ple hate the mas­sive con­crete build­ings known as Bru­tal­ist, but they at least approve of the style’s name, res­o­nant as it seem­ing­ly is with asso­ci­a­tions of insen­si­tive, anti-human­ist bul­ly­ing. Those who love Bru­tal­ism also approve of the style’s name, but for a dif­fer­ent rea­son: they know it comes from the French béton brut, refer­ring to raw con­crete, that mate­r­i­al most gen­er­ous­ly used in Bru­tal­ist build­ings’ con­struc­tion. We’ve all seen Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture, mas­sive­ly embod­ied by Boston City Hall, Lon­don’s Bar­bi­can Cen­tre, UC Berke­ley’s Wurster Hall, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to’s Robarts Library, FBI Head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., or any oth­er of the exam­ples that have stood since the style’s 1960s and 70s hey­day. But now, as more get slat­ed for demo­li­tion each year, it has fall­en to Bru­tal­is­m’s enthu­si­asts to defend an archi­tec­ture eas­i­ly seen as inde­fen­si­ble.

The aes­thet­ic of Bru­tal­ism, says host Roman Mars in an episode of the pod­cast 99% Invis­i­ble on the style, “can con­jure up asso­ci­a­tions with bomb shel­ters, Sovi­et-era or ‘third-world’ con­struc­tion, but as harsh as it looks, con­crete is an utter­ly opti­mistic build­ing mate­r­i­al.” In the 1920s “con­crete was seen as being the mate­r­i­al that would change the world. The mate­r­i­al seemed bound­less — read­i­ly avail­able in vast quan­ti­ties, and con­crete sprang up every­where — on bridges, tun­nels, high­ways, side­walks, and of course, mas­sive build­ings.”

It “pre­sent­ed the most effi­cient way to house huge num­bers of peo­ple, and gov­ern­ment pro­grams all over the world loved it — par­tic­u­lar­ly Sovi­et Rus­sia, but also lat­er in Europe and North Amer­i­ca.” Philo­soph­i­cal­ly, “con­crete was seen as hum­ble, capa­ble, and honest—exposed in all its rough glo­ry, not hid­ing behind any paint or lay­ers.”

How­ev­er noble the inten­tions behind these works of archi­tec­ture, though, it did­n’t take human­i­ty long to turn on Bru­tal­ism. Part of the prob­lem had to do with the dis­re­pair into which many of the high­est-pro­file Bru­tal­ist build­ings — social hous­ing com­plex­es, tran­sit cen­ters, gov­ern­ment offices — were allowed to fall imme­di­ate­ly after the ide­olo­gies that drove their con­struc­tion passed out of favor. But Bru­tal­ism also fell vic­tim to a pre­dictable cycle of fash­ion: as archi­tec­ture crit­ics often point out, the pub­lic of any era con­sis­tent­ly admires hun­dred-year-old build­ings, but con­demns (often lit­er­al­ly) fifty-year-old build­ings. New York­ers still lament the loss of their grand old Penn Sta­tion, but its ornate Beaux-Arts style no doubt looked as heavy-hand­ed and out-of-touch to as many peo­ple in the ear­ly 1960s, the time of its demo­li­tion, as Bru­tal­ism does today.

What, then, is the case for Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture? “It’s a sense of place. It’s a sense of the dra­ma of the space that they sur­round,” says This Bru­tal World author Peter Chad­wick the BBC clip at the top of the post. “It is sculp­ture. It’s gone beyond being just func­tion­al. It’s just beau­ti­ful sculp­ture that mir­rors its envi­ron­ment.” In the DW Euro­maxx video below, Deutsches Architek­tur­mu­se­um cura­tor Oliv­er Elser sees in Bru­tal­ism a valu­able les­son for build­ing today: “Make more from less. I think this way of think­ing, spa­tial gen­eros­i­ty with sim­pler mate­ri­als, is a time­ly stance for archi­tec­ture.” Archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Elain Har­wood calls Bru­tal­ism “a par­tic­u­lar archi­tec­ture for ambi­tious times gripped by a fer­vor for change. What­ev­er style you call it, the results are unique and have a hero­ic beau­ty than sets them apart from the archi­tec­ture of any oth­er era.” (In fact, some Bru­tal­ism enthu­si­asts who dis­like the label have put up the term “Hero­ic” instead.)

What­ev­er the artic­u­la­cy of Bru­tal­is­m’s defend­ers, the most effec­tive argu­ments for its preser­va­tion have been made with not words but images. Chad­wick first made his mark with his This Bru­tal House accounts on Twit­ter and Insta­gram, and a search on the lat­ter for the hash­tag #bru­tal­ism reveals the aston­ish­ing range and inten­si­ty of the style’s 21st-cen­tu­ry fan­dom. A fair few videos have also tak­en indi­vid­ual works of Bru­tal­ism as their sub­jects, from a reflex­ive­ly loathed sur­vivor like Boston City Hall to the unlike­ly upper-mid­dle-class oasis of the Bar­bi­can Cen­tre to a high-mind­ed projects now under the wreck­ing ball like Robin Hood Gar­dens. Despite how many peo­ple seem hap­py to see Bru­tal­ist build­ings go, some, like Aus­tralian archi­tect Shaun Carter in his TEDx Syd­ney Salon talk below, remind us of the val­ue of keep­ing our his­to­ry con­cretized, as it were, in the built envi­ron­ment around us.

Bunkers, Bru­tal­ism and Blood­y­mind­ed­ness: Con­crete Poet­ry writer Jonathan Meades puts it more force­ful­ly: “The destruc­tion of Bru­tal­ist build­ings is more than the destruc­tion of a par­tic­u­lar mode of archi­tec­ture. It is like burn­ing books. It’s a form of cen­sor­ship of the past, a dis­com­fit­ing past, by the present. It’s the revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur.” To his mind, it’s the destruc­tion of evi­dence of “a deter­mined opti­mism that made us more potent than we have become,” of the fact that “we don’t mea­sure up against those who took risks, who flew and plunged to find new ways of doing things, who were not scared to exper­i­ment, who lived lives of per­pet­u­al inquiry.” If Bru­tal­ism has to go, it has to go because it reminds us that “once upon a time, we were not scared to address the Earth in the knowl­edge that the Earth would not respond, could not respond.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times 

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

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

1,300 Pho­tos of Famous Mod­ern Amer­i­can Homes Now Online, Cour­tesy of USC

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

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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Killer Rabbits in Medieval Manuscripts: Why So Many Drawings in the Margins Depict Bunnies Going Bad

in Art, Books, Comedy, History | March 29th, 2019

In all the king­dom of nature, does any crea­ture threat­en us less than the gen­tle rab­bit? Though the ques­tion may sound entire­ly rhetor­i­cal today, our medieval ances­tors took it more seri­ous­ly — espe­cial­ly if they could read illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, and even more so if they drew in the mar­gins of those man­u­scripts them­selves. “Often, in medieval man­u­scripts’ mar­gin­a­lia we find odd images with all sorts of mon­sters, half man-beasts, mon­keys, and more,” writes Sexy Cod­i­col­o­gy’s Mar­jolein de Vos. “Even in reli­gious books the mar­gins some­times have draw­ings that sim­ply are mak­ing fun of monks, nuns and bish­ops.” And then there are the killer bun­nies.

Hunt­ing scenes, de Vos adds, also com­mon­ly appear in medieval mar­gin­a­lia, and “this usu­al­ly means that the bun­ny is the hunt­ed; how­ev­er, as we dis­cov­ered, often the illu­mi­na­tors decid­ed to change the roles around.”

Jon Kaneko-James explains fur­ther: “The usu­al imagery of the rab­bit in Medieval art is that of puri­ty and help­less­ness – that’s why some Medieval por­tray­als of Christ have mar­gin­al art por­tray­ing a ver­i­ta­ble pet­ting zoo of inno­cent, non­vi­o­lent, lit­tle white and brown bun­nies going about their busi­ness in a field.” But the cre­ators of this par­tic­u­lar type of humor­ous mar­gin­a­lia, known as drollery, saw things dif­fer­ent­ly.

“Drol­leries some­times also depict­ed comedic scenes, like a bar­ber with a wood­en leg (which, for rea­sons that escape me, was the height of medieval com­e­dy) or a man saw­ing a branch out from under him­self,” writes Kaneko-James.

This enjoy­ment of the “world turned upside down” pro­duced the drollery genre of “the rab­bit’s revenge,” one “often used to show the cow­ardice or stu­pid­i­ty of the per­son illus­trat­ed. We see this in the Mid­dle Eng­lish nick­name Stick­hare, a name for cow­ards” — and in all the draw­ings of “tough hunters cow­er­ing in the face of rab­bits with big sticks.”

Then, of course, we have the bun­nies mak­ing their attacks while mount­ed on snails, snail com­bats being “anoth­er pop­u­lar sta­ple of Drol­leries, with groups of peas­ants seen fight­ing snails with sticks, or sad­dling them and attempt­ing to ride them.”

Giv­en how often we denizens of the 21st cen­tu­ry have trou­ble get­ting humor from less than a cen­tu­ry ago, it feels sat­is­fy­ing indeed to laugh just as hard at these drol­leries as our medieval fore­bears must have — though many more of us sure­ly get to see them today, cir­cu­lat­ing as rapid­ly on social media as they did­n’t when con­fined to the pages of illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts owned only by wealthy indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions.

You can see more mar­gin­al scenes of the rab­bit’s revenge at Sexy Cod­i­col­o­gy, Colos­sal, and Kaneko-James’ blog. But one his­tor­i­cal ques­tion remains unan­swered: to what extent did they influ­ence that pil­lar of mod­ern cin­e­mat­ic com­e­dy, Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Explo­sive Cats Imag­ined in a Strange, 16th Cen­tu­ry Mil­i­tary Man­u­al

David Lynch Made a Dis­turb­ing Web Sit­com Called “Rab­bits”: It’s Now Used by Psy­chol­o­gists to Induce a Sense of Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis in Research Sub­jects

Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail Cen­sor­ship Let­ter: We Want to Retain “Fart in Your Gen­er­al Direc­tion”

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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Newly Discovered Shipwreck Proves Herodotus, the “Father of History,” Correct 2500 Years Later

in History | March 28th, 2019

The truth, they say, is stranger than fic­tion — or at least it is in the work of Herodotus, the ancient Greek writer and trav­el­er often described as “the Father of His­to­ry” (and a favorite writer of none oth­er than Jorge Luis Borges). But go back far enough in his­to­ry itself, and the bound­ary between truth and fic­tion grows much blur­ri­er than it is even today: men­tion Herodotus in mixed com­pa­ny, and some­one will sure­ly bring up the phoenix­es, horned ser­pents, winged snakes, gold-dig­ging giant ants, and every­thing else for whose exis­tence he implau­si­bly vouch­es in The His­to­ries (440 BC). And what of the baris, a boat made of “thorny aca­cia,” in Herodotus’ words, that “can­not sail up the riv­er unless there be a very fresh wind blow­ing, but are towed from the shore?”

Images cour­tesy of Christoph Gerigk/Franck Goddio/Hilti Foun­da­tion

“They have a door-shaped crate made of tamarisk wood and reed mats sewn togeth­er,” Herodotus’ descrip­tion of the baris con­tin­ues, “and also a stone of about two tal­ents weight bored with a hole.” Despite the detail he went into, one trans­la­tion of which you can read here, no archae­o­log­i­cal find­ings ever con­firmed the exis­tence of such a boat — or at least, they did­n’t until very recent­ly.

Accord­ing to the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge, “a ‘fab­u­lous­ly pre­served’ wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Tho­nis-Her­a­cleion has revealed just how accu­rate the his­to­ri­an was.” The sunken Ship 17, as it has been named, has “a vast cres­cent-shaped hull and a pre­vi­ous­ly undoc­u­ment­ed type of con­struc­tion involv­ing thick planks assem­bled with tenons – just as Herodotus observed, in describ­ing a slight­ly small­er ves­sel.”

“Pri­or to Ship 17’s dis­cov­ery,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Meilan Sol­ly, “con­tem­po­rary archae­ol­o­gists had nev­er encoun­tered this archi­tec­tur­al style. But upon exam­in­ing the hull’s well-pre­served remains, which con­sti­tute some 70 per­cent of the orig­i­nal struc­ture, researchers found a sin­gu­lar feat of design.” Though Herodotus may have indulged in exag­ger­a­tion now and again, Ship 17 turns out to be more impres­sive than the boat in The His­to­ries: “At the peak of its mar­itime career, Ship 17 like­ly mea­sured up to 92 feet — sig­nif­i­cant­ly longer than the baris described by Herodotus.” You can learn more about Ship 17 and its his­tor­i­cal impli­ca­tions from the Ancient Archi­tects video at the top, as well as from arti­cles at Atlas Obscu­ra, History.com, and Sci­ence Alert. All this makes the engi­neer­ing skills of the ancient Egyp­tians, as well as the record­ing skills of Herodotus, look that much more impres­sive. But it does raise an impor­tant ques­tion: should we now start think­ing about how best to hide our gold from the ants?

The images above come from

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did the Egyp­tians Make Mum­mies? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Ancient Art of Mum­mi­fi­ca­tion

Try the Old­est Known Recipe For Tooth­paste: From Ancient Egypt, Cir­ca the 4th Cen­tu­ry BC

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

The Ancient Egyp­tians Wore Fash­ion­able Striped Socks, New Pio­neer­ing Imag­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Imag­ing Reveals

An Ancient Egypt­ian Home­work Assign­ment from 1800 Years Ago: Some Things Are Tru­ly Time­less

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Per­son­al Library

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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