What Makes The Death of Socrates a Great Work of Art?: A Thought-Provoking Reading of David’s Philosophical & Political Painting

in Art, History, Philosophy | October 30th, 2017

When we think of polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da, we do not typ­i­cal­ly think of French Neo­clas­si­cal painter Jacques-Louis David. There’s some­thing debased about the term—it stinks of insin­cer­i­ty, stagi­ness, emo­tion­al manip­u­la­tion, qual­i­ties that can­not pos­si­bly belong to great art. But let us put aside this prej­u­dice and con­sid­er David’s 1787 The Death of Socrates. Cre­at­ed two years before the start of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, the paint­ing “gave expres­sion to the prin­ci­ple of resist­ing unjust author­i­ty,” and—like its source, Plato’s Phae­do—it makes a mar­tyr of its hero, who is the soul of rea­son and a thorn in the side of dog­ma and tra­di­tion.

Nonethe­less, as Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, shows us in the short video above, The Death of Socrates sit­u­ates itself firm­ly with­in the tra­di­tions of Euro­pean art, draw­ing heav­i­ly on clas­si­cal sculp­tures and friezes as well as the great­est works of the Renais­sance. There are echoes of da Vinci’s Last Sup­per in the num­ber of fig­ures and their place­ment, and a dis­tinct ref­er­ence of Raphael’s School of Athens in Socrates’ upward-point­ing fin­ger, which belongs to Pla­to in the ear­li­er paint­ing. Here, David has Pla­to, already an old man, seat­ed at the foot of the bed, the scene arranged behind him as if “explod­ing from the back of his head.”

Socrates, says Puschak, “has been dis­cussing at length the immor­tal­i­ty of the soul, and he doesn’t even seem to care that he’s about to take the imple­ment of his death in hand. On the con­trary, Socrates is defi­ant… David ide­al­izes him… he would have been 70 at the time and some­what less mus­cu­lar and beau­ti­ful than paint­ed here.” He is a “sym­bol of strength over pas­sion, of sto­ic com­mit­ment to an abstract ide­al,” a theme David artic­u­lat­ed with much less sub­tle­ty in an ear­li­er paint­ing, The Oath of the Hor­atii, with its Roman salutes and bun­dled swords—a “severe, moral­is­tic can­vas,” with which the artist “effec­tive­ly invent­ed the Neo­clas­si­cal style.”

In The Death of Socrates, David refines his moral­is­tic ten­den­cies, and Puschak ties the com­po­si­tion loose­ly to a sense of prophe­cy about the com­ing Ter­ror after the storm­ing of the Bastille. The Nerd­writer sum­ma­tion of the painting’s angles and influ­ences does help us see it anew. But Puschak’s vague his­tori­ciz­ing doesn’t quite do the artist jus­tice, fail­ing to men­tion David’s direct part in the wave of bloody exe­cu­tions under Robe­spierre.

David was an active sup­port­er of the Rev­o­lu­tion and designed “uni­forms, ban­ners, tri­umphal arch­es, and inspi­ra­tional props for the Jacobin Club’s pro­pa­gan­da,” notes a Boston Col­lege account. He was also “elect­ed a Deputy form the city of Paris, and vot­ed for the exe­cu­tion of Louis XVI.” His­to­ri­ans have iden­ti­fied over “300 vic­tims for whom David signed exe­cu­tion orders.” The sever­i­ty of his ear­li­er clas­si­cal scenes comes into greater focus in The Death of Socrates around the cen­tral fig­ure, a great man of his­to­ry, one whose hero­ic feats and trag­ic sac­ri­fices dri­ve the course of all events worth men­tion­ing.

Indeed, we can see David’s work as a visu­al pre­cur­sor to philoso­pher and his­to­ri­an Thomas Carlyle’s the­o­ries of “the hero­ic in his­to­ry.” (Car­lyle also hap­pened to write the 19th century’s defin­i­tive his­to­ry of the French Rev­o­lu­tion.) In 1793, David took his visu­al great man the­o­ry and Neo­clas­si­cal style and applied them for the first time to a con­tem­po­rary event, the mur­der of his friend Jean-Paul Marat, Swiss Jacobin jour­nal­ist, by the Girondist Char­lotte Cor­day. (Learn more in the Khan Acad­e­my video above.) This is one of three can­vas­es David made of “mar­tyrs of the Revolution”—the oth­er two are lost to his­to­ry. And it is here that we can see the evo­lu­tion of his polit­i­cal paint­ing from clas­si­cal alle­go­ry to con­tem­po­rary pro­pa­gan­da, in a can­vas wide­ly hailed, along with The Death of Socrates, as one of the great­est Euro­pean paint­ings of the age.

We can look to David for both for­mal mas­tery and didac­tic intent. But we should not look to him for polit­i­cal con­stan­cy. He was no John Mil­ton—the poet of the Eng­lish Rev­o­lu­tion who was still devot­ed to the cause even after the restora­tion of the monarch. David, on the oth­er hand, “could eas­i­ly be denounced as a bril­liant cyn­ic,” writes Michael Glover at The Inde­pen­dent. Once Napoleon came to pow­er and began his rapid ascen­sion to the self-appoint­ed role of Emper­or, David quick­ly became court painter, and cre­at­ed the two most famous por­traits of the ruler.

We’re quite famil­iar with The Emper­or Napoleon in His Study at the Tui­leries, in which the sub­ject stands in an awk­ward pose, his hand thrust into his waist­coat. And sure­ly know Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass, above. Here, the fin­ger point­ing upward takes on an entire­ly new res­o­nance than it has in The Death of Socrates. It is the ges­ture not of a man nobly pre­pared to leave the world behind, but of one who plans to con­quer and sub­due it under his absolute rule.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

Gus­tav Klimt’s Haunt­ing Paint­ings Get Re-Cre­at­ed in Pho­tographs, Fea­tur­ing Live Mod­els, Ornate Props & Real Gold

The MoMA Teach­es You How to Paint Like Pol­lock, Rothko, de Koon­ing & Oth­er Abstract Painters

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

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How the CIA Funded & Supported Literary Magazines Worldwide While Waging Cultural War Against Communism

in History, Literature, Politics | October 27th, 2017

Over the course of this tumul­tuous year, new CIA direc­tor Mike Pom­peo has repeat­ed­ly indi­cat­ed that he would move the Agency in a “more aggres­sive direc­tion.” In response, at least one per­son took on the guise of for­mer Chilean pres­i­dent Sal­vador Allende and joked, incred­u­lous­ly, “more aggres­sive”? In 1973, the reac­tionary forces of Gen­er­al Augus­to Pinochet over­threw Allende, the first elect­ed Marx­ist leader in Latin Amer­i­ca. Pinochet then pro­ceed­ed to insti­tute a bru­tal 17-year dic­ta­tor­ship char­ac­ter­ized by mass tor­ture, impris­on­ment, and exe­cu­tion. The Agency may not have orches­trat­ed the coup direct­ly but it did at least sup­port it mate­ri­al­ly and ide­o­log­i­cal­ly under the orders of Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon, on a day known to many, post-2001, as “the oth­er 9/11.”

The Chilean coup is one of many CIA inter­ven­tions into the affairs of Latin Amer­i­ca and the for­mer Euro­pean colonies in Africa and Asia after World War II. It is by now well known that the Agency “occa­sion­al­ly under­mined democ­ra­cies for the sake of fight­ing com­mu­nism,” as Mary von Aue writes at Vice, through­out the Cold War years. But years before some of its most aggres­sive ini­tia­tives, the CIA “devel­oped sev­er­al guis­es to throw mon­ey at young, bur­geon­ing writ­ers, cre­at­ing a cul­tur­al pro­pa­gan­da strat­e­gy with lit­er­ary out­posts around the world, from Lebanon to Ugan­da, India to Latin Amer­i­ca.” The Agency didn’t invent the post-war lit­er­ary move­ments that first spread through the pages of mag­a­zines like The Par­ti­san Review and The Paris Review in the 1950s. But it fund­ed, orga­nized, and curat­ed them, with the full knowl­edge of edi­tors like Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, him­self a CIA agent.

The Agency waged a cold cul­ture war against inter­na­tion­al Com­mu­nism using many of the peo­ple who might seem most sym­pa­thet­ic to it. Revealed in 1967 by for­mer agent Tom Braden in the pages of the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, the strat­e­gy involved secret­ly divert­ing funds to what the Agency called “civ­il soci­ety” groups. The focal point of the strat­e­gy was the CCF, or “Con­gress for Cul­tur­al Free­dom,” which recruit­ed lib­er­al and left­ist writ­ers and edi­tors, often­times unwit­ting­ly, to “guar­an­tee that anti-Com­mu­nist ideas were not voiced only by reac­tionary speak­ers,” writes Patrick Iber at The Awl. As Braden con­tend­ed in his exposé, in “much of Europe in the 1950s, social­ists, peo­ple who called them­selves ‘left’—the very peo­ple whom many Amer­i­cans thought no bet­ter than Communists—were about the only peo­ple who gave a damn about fight­ing Com­mu­nism.”

No doubt some lit­er­ary schol­ars would find this claim ten­den­tious, but it became agency doc­trine not only because the CIA saw fund­ing and pro­mot­ing writ­ers like James Bald­win, Gabriel Gar­cia Márquez, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hem­ing­way as a con­ve­nient means to an end, but also because many of the pro­gram’s founders were them­selves lit­er­ary schol­ars. The CIA began as a World War II spy agency called the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices (OSS). After the war, says Guer­ni­ca mag­a­zine edi­tor Joel Whit­ney in an inter­view with Bomb, “some of the OSS guys became pro­fes­sors at Ivy League Uni­ver­si­ties,” where they recruit­ed peo­ple like Matthiessen.

The more lib­er­al guys who were part of the brain trust that formed the CIA saw that the Sovi­ets in Berlin were get­ting mass­es of peo­ple from oth­er sec­tors to come over for their sym­phonies and films. They saw that cul­ture itself was becom­ing a weapon, and they want­ed a kind of Min­istry of Cul­ture too. They felt the only way they could get this paid for was through the CIA’s black bud­get. 

McCarthy-ism reigned at the time, and “the less sophis­ti­cat­ed reac­tionar­ies,” says Whit­ney, “who rep­re­sent­ed small states, small towns, and so on, were very sus­pi­cious of cul­ture, of the avant-garde, the lit­tle intel­lec­tu­al mag­a­zines, and of intel­lec­tu­als them­selves.” But Ivy League agents who fan­cied them­selves tastemak­ers saw things very dif­fer­ent­ly.

Whitney’s book, Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writ­ers, doc­u­ments the Agency’s whirl­wind of activ­i­ty behind lit­er­ary mag­a­zines like the Lon­don-based Encounter, French Preuves, Ital­ian Tem­po Pre­sente, Aus­tri­an Forum, Aus­tralian Quad­rant, Japan­ese Jiyu, and Latin Amer­i­can Cuader­nos and Mun­do Nue­vo. Many of the CCF’s founders and par­tic­i­pants con­ceived of the enter­prise as “an altru­is­tic fund­ing of cul­ture,” Whit­ney tells von Aue. “But it was actu­al­ly a con­trol of jour­nal­ism, a con­trol of the fourth estate. It was a con­trol of how intel­lec­tu­als thought about the US.”

While we often look at post-war lit­er­a­ture as a bas­tion of anti-colo­nial, anti-estab­lish­ment sen­ti­ment, the pose, we learn from researchers like Iber and Whit­ney, was often care­ful­ly cul­ti­vat­ed by a num­ber of inter­me­di­aries. Does this mean we can no longer enjoy this lit­er­a­ture as the artis­tic cre­ation of sin­gu­lar genius­es? “You want to know the truth about the writ­ers and pub­li­ca­tions you love,” says Whit­ney, “but that shouldn’t mean they’re ruined.” Indeed, the Agency’s cul­tur­al oper­a­tions went far beyond the lit­tle mag­a­zines. The Con­gress of Cul­tur­al Free­doms used jazz musi­cians like Louie Arm­strong, Dave Brubeck, and Dizzy Gille­spie as “good­will ambas­sadors” in con­certs all over the world, and fund­ed exhi­bi­tions of Abstract Expres­sion­ists like Mark Rothko, Jack­son Pol­lack, and Willem de Koon­ing.

The motives behind fund­ing and pro­mot­ing mod­ern art might mys­ti­fy us unless we include the con­text in which such cul­tur­al war­fare devel­oped. After the Cuban Rev­o­lu­tion and sub­se­quent Com­mu­nist fer­vor in for­mer Euro­pean colonies, the Agency found that “soft lin­ers,” as Whit­ney puts it, had more anti-Com­mu­nist reach than “hard lin­ers.” Addi­tion­al­ly, Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­dists could eas­i­ly point to the U.S.‘s socio-polit­i­cal back­ward­ness and lack of free­dom under Jim Crow. So the CIA co-opt­ed anti-racist writ­ers at home, and could silence artists abroad, as it did in the mid-60s when Louis Arm­strong went behind the Iron Cur­tain and refused to crit­i­cize the South, despite his pre­vi­ous strong civ­il rights state­ments. The post-war world saw thriv­ing free press­es and arts and lit­er­ary cul­tures filled with bold exper­i­men­tal­ism and philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal debate. Know­ing who real­ly con­trolled these con­ver­sa­tions offers us an entire­ly new way to view the direc­tions they inevitably seemed to take.

via The Awl

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Par­ti­san Review Now Free Online: Read All 70 Years of the Pre­em­i­nent Lit­er­ary Jour­nal (1934–2003)

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

Read the CIA’s Sim­ple Sab­o­tage Field Man­u­al: A Time­less, Kafkaesque Guide to Sub­vert­ing Any Orga­ni­za­tion with “Pur­pose­ful Stu­pid­i­ty” (1944)

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

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2,800 JFK Assassination Documents Just Released by the National Archives

in History | October 26th, 2017

Moments ago, the Nation­al Archives released a trove of 2,800 doc­u­ments that will shed more light on the assas­si­na­tion of John F. Kennedy. Accord­ing to the Archives, the release includes “FBI, CIA, and oth­er agency doc­u­ments (both for­mer­ly with­held in part and for­mer­ly with­held in full) iden­ti­fied by the Assas­si­na­tion Records Review Board as assas­si­na­tion records.” You can find the doc­u­ments here.

This data dump was meant to include even more doc­u­ments. But, accord­ing to The New York Times, Don­ald Trump “bowed to protests by the C.I.A. and F.B.I. by with­hold­ing thou­sands of addi­tion­al papers pend­ing six more months of review.” If those ever see the light of day, we’ll let you know.

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Where Did the English Language Come From?: An Animated Introduction

in English Language, History | October 26th, 2017

If you’ve ever delib­er­ate­ly stud­ied the Eng­lish lan­guage — or, even worse, taught it — you know that bot­tom­less aggra­va­tion awaits any­one fool­ish enough to try to explain its “rules.” What makes Eng­lish so appar­ent­ly strange and dif­fer­ent from oth­er lan­guages, and how could such a lan­guage go on to get so much trac­tion all over the world? Whether you speak Eng­lish native­ly (and thus haven’t had much occa­sion to give the mat­ter thought) or learned it as a sec­ond lan­guage, the five-minute TED-Ed les­son above, writ­ten by Yale lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor Claire Bow­ern and ani­mat­ed by Patrick Smith, will give you a sol­id start on under­stand­ing the answer to those ques­tions and oth­ers.

“When we talk about ‘Eng­lish,’ we often think of it as a sin­gle lan­guage,” says the lesson’s nar­ra­tor, “but what do the dialects spo­ken in dozens of coun­tries around the world have in com­mon with each oth­er, or with the writ­ings of Chaucer? And how are any of them relat­ed to the strange words in Beowulf?”

The answer involves Eng­lish’s dis­tinc­tive evo­lu­tion­ary path through gen­er­a­tions and gen­er­a­tions of speak­ers, expand­ing and chang­ing all the while. Along the way, it’s picked up words from Latin-derived Romance lan­guages like French and Span­ish, a process that began with the Nor­man inva­sion of Eng­land in 1066. So also emerged Old Eng­lish, a mem­ber of — you guessed it — the Ger­man­ic lan­guage fam­i­ly, one brought to the British isles in the fifth and sixth cen­turies. Then, of course, you’ve got the Viking invaders bring­ing in their Old Norse from the eighth to the eleventh cen­turies.

Eng­lish thus came to its char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly rich (and often con­fus­ing) mix­ture of words drawn from all over the place quite some time ago, leav­ing mod­ern lin­guists to per­form the qua­si-archae­o­log­i­cal task of trac­ing each word back to its ori­gins through its sound and usage. Go far enough and you get to the tongues we call “Pro­to-Ger­man­ic,” spo­ken cir­ca 500 BC, and “Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean,” which had its hey­day six mil­len­nia ago in mod­ern-day Ukraine and Rus­sia. Eng­lish now often gets labeled, right­ly or wrong­ly, a “glob­al lan­guage,” but a look into its com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry — and thus the his­to­ry of all Euro­pean lan­guages — reveals some­thing more impres­sive: “Near­ly three bil­lion peo­ple around the world, many of whom can­not under­stand each oth­er, are nev­er­the­less speak­ing the same words, shaped by 6,000 years of his­to­ry.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Eng­lish Lessons

The His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Lan­guage in Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

The Largest His­tor­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish Slang Now Free Online: Cov­ers 500 Years of the “Vul­gar Tongue”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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New Digital Archive Puts Online 4,000 Historic Images of Rome: The Eternal City from the 16th to 20th Centuries

in Architecture, Archives, Art, History | October 20th, 2017

The poet Tibul­lus first described Rome as “The Eter­nal City” in the first cen­tu­ry BC, and that evoca­tive nick­name has stuck over the thou­sands of years since. Or rather, he would have called it “Urbs Aeter­na,” which for Ital­ian-speak­ers would have been “La Cit­tà Eter­na,” but regard­less of which lan­guage you pre­fer it in, it throws down a daunt­ing chal­lenge before any his­to­ri­an of Rome. Each schol­ar has had to find their own way of approach­ing such a his­tor­i­cal­ly for­mi­da­ble place, and few have built up such a robust visu­al record as Rodol­fo Lan­ciani, 4000 items from whose col­lec­tion became avail­able to view online this year, thanks to Stan­ford Libraries.

As an “archae­ol­o­gist, pro­fes­sor of topog­ra­phy, and sec­re­tary of the Archae­o­log­i­cal Com­mis­sion,” says the col­lec­tion’s about page, Lan­ciani, “was a pio­neer in the sys­tem­at­ic, mod­ern study of the city of Rome.”

Hav­ing lived from 1845 to 1929 with a long and fruit­ful career to match, he “col­lect­ed a vast archive of his own notes and man­u­scripts, as well as works by oth­ers includ­ing rare prints and orig­i­nal draw­ings by artists and archi­tects stretch­ing back to the six­teenth cen­tu­ry.” After he died, his whole library found a buy­er in the Isti­tu­to Nazionale di Arche­olo­gia e Sto­ria dell’Arte (INASA), which made it avail­able to researchers at the 15th-cen­tu­ry Palaz­zo Venezia in Rome.

Enter a team of pro­fes­sors, archae­ol­o­gists, and tech­nol­o­gists from Stan­ford and else­where, who with a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foun­da­tion, and in part­ner­ship with Italy’s Min­istry of Cul­tur­al Her­itage and Activ­i­ties and Tourism and the Nation­al Insti­tute, began dig­i­tiz­ing it all. Their efforts have so far yield­ed an exhi­bi­tion of about 4,000 of Lan­cian­i’s draw­ings, prints, pho­tographs and sketch­es of Rome from the 16th cen­tu­ry to the 20th. Not only can you exam­ine them in high-res­o­lu­tion in your brows­er as well as down­load them, you can also see the loca­tions of what they depict pin­point­ed on the map of Rome. That fea­ture might come in espe­cial­ly handy when next you pay a vis­it to The Eter­nal City, though for many of the fea­tures depict­ed in Lan­cian­i’s col­lec­tion, you hard­ly need direc­tions. Enter the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion here.

via Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Rome in 179 Pod­casts

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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An Online Trove of Historic Sewing Patterns & Costumes

in Design, History, Life, Museums, Random | October 20th, 2017

As Hal­loween draws nigh, our thoughts turn to cos­tumes.

Not those rub­bery, poor­ly con­struct­ed, sexy and/or gory off-the-rack ready­mades, but the sort of lav­ish, his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate, home-sewn affairs that would have earned praise and extra can­dy, if only our moth­er had been inclined to spend the bulk of Octo­ber chained to a sewing machine.

Not that one needs the excuse of a hol­i­day to suit up in a fluffy 50’s crino­line, a Tudor-style kir­tle gown, or a 16th-cen­tu­ry Flem­ish out­fit with all the trim­mings.…

Accoun­tant Artemisia Moltaboc­ca, cre­ator of the his­tor­i­cal and cos­play cos­tum­ing blog Cos­tum­ing Diary, has primed our pump with a list of free his­tor­i­cal medieval, Eliz­a­bethan and Vic­to­ri­an pat­terns, includ­ing ones for the gar­ments men­tioned above.

Click through the many links on her site and you may find your­self tum­bling down a rab­bit hole of some oth­er cos-play­er’s gen­eros­i­ty.

That link to the cus­tom corset pat­tern gen­er­a­tor may set you on the road to cre­at­ing a per­fect­ly fit­ted Viking apron or a good-for-begin­ners tunic. (“Bring out yer dead!”)

Fan­cy even more choic­es? Moltabocca’s Free His­tor­i­cal Cos­tume Pat­terns Pin­ter­est board is a ver­i­ta­ble trove of dress-up fun.

The Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art’s Cos­tume and Tex­tiles Project has detailed down­load­able PDFs to walk you through con­struc­tion of such anachro­nis­tic fin­ery as a 1940’s Zoot Suit, a 19th-cen­tu­ry boy’s frock (above), and a man’s vest with remov­able chest pads (hub­ba hub­ba).

An 1812 Ohio Mili­tia Officer’s Coat from the Ohio His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety.

A pair of Nan­keen Trousers cour­tesy of the Roy­al Ontario Muse­um.

A bul­let bra (hub­ba bub­ba redux!)—pair it with a 1940s Vogue hat and hand­bag and you’re ready to go!

A Regency Drawn Bon­net and an Improved Seam­less Whale­bone Under­skirt from E. & J. Holmes & Co, Boston, 1857.

If you’re feel­ing less than con­fi­dent about your sewing abil­i­ties, you might make like an upper-class Roman in an Ion­ian chi­ton.

Or just curl a syn­thet­ic wig!

Press some­one else’s seams with a straight­en­ing iron, then kick back and enjoy the vin­tage ads, pho­tos of antique gar­ments, and the peri­od infor­ma­tion that often accom­pa­nies these how-tos. And check out the 1913 patent appli­ca­tion for Marie Perillat’s Bust Reduc­er, a mir­a­cle inven­tion designed to “pre­vent flesh bulging while pro­vid­ing self adjustable, com­fort­able, hygien­ic sup­port.”

Begin with some of Cos­tum­ing Diary’s his­tor­i­cal sewing pat­terns before delv­ing into its mas­sive pat­tern col­lec­tion board on Pin­ter­est.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Browse a Col­lec­tion of Over 83,500 Vin­tage Sewing Pat­terns

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her cur­rent sewing project is 19 head­pieces for Theater of the Apes Sub-Adult Division’s upcom­ing pro­duc­tion of Ani­mal Farm at the Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Maria Anna Mozart Was a Musical Prodigy Like Her Brother Wolfgang, So Why Did She Get Erased from History?

in Gender, History, Music | October 19th, 2017

When peo­ple ask why we have specif­i­cal­ly black his­to­ries, or queer his­to­ries, or women’s his­to­ries, it can be hard for many who do his­tor­i­cal research to take the ques­tion seri­ous­ly. But in fair­ness, such ques­tions point to the very rea­son that alter­na­tive or “revi­sion­ist” his­to­ries exist. We can­not know what we are not told about history—at least not with­out doing the kind of dig­ging pro­fes­sion­al schol­ars can do. Vir­ginia Woolf’s trag­ic, but fic­tion­al, his­to­ry of Shakespeare’s sis­ter notwith­stand­ing, the claims made by cul­tur­al crit­ics about mar­gin­al­iza­tion and oppres­sion aren’t based on spec­u­la­tion, but on case after case of indi­vid­u­als who were ignored by, or shut out of, the wider cul­ture, and sub­se­quent­ly dis­ap­peared from his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry.

One such extra­or­di­nary case involves the real sis­ter of anoth­er tow­er­ing Euro­pean fig­ure whose life we know much more about than Shakespeare’s. Before Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart began writ­ing his first com­po­si­tions, his old­er sis­ter Maria Anna Mozart, nick­named Nan­nerl, had already proven her­self a prodi­gy.

The two toured Europe togeth­er as children—she was with her broth­er dur­ing his 18-month stay in Lon­don. “There are con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous reviews prais­ing Nan­nerl,” writes Sylvia Milo, “and she was even billed first.” A 1763 review, for exam­ple, sounds indis­tin­guish­able from those writ­ten about young Wolf­gang.

Imag­ine an eleven-year-old girl, per­form­ing the most dif­fi­cult sonatas and con­cer­tos of the great­est com­posers, on the harp­si­chord or fortepi­ano, with pre­ci­sion, with incred­i­ble light­ness, with impec­ca­ble taste. It was a source of won­der to many.

18th cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal audi­ences first came to know Wolf­gang as part of a broth­er-sis­ter duo of “wun­derkinder.” But the sis­ter half has been air­brushed out of the pic­ture. She does not appear in the defin­i­tive Hol­ly­wood treat­ment, Milos Forman’s Amadeus. And, more­over, she only recent­ly began to emerge in the aca­d­e­m­ic and clas­si­cal worlds. “I grew up study­ing to be a vio­lin­ist,” writes Sylvia Milo. “Nei­ther my music his­to­ry nor my reper­toire includ­ed any female com­posers.”

With my braid­ed hair I was called “lit­tle Mozart” by my vio­lin teacher, but he meant Wolfi. I nev­er heard that Amadeus had a sis­ter. I nev­er heard of Nan­nerl Mozart until I saw that fam­i­ly por­trait.

In the por­trait (top), Nan­nerl and Wolf­gang sit togeth­er at the harp­si­chord while their father Leopold stands near­by. Nan­nerl, in the fore­ground, has an enor­mous pom­padour crown­ing her small oval face. Of the hair­do, she wrote to her broth­er, in their typ­i­cal­ly play­ful rap­port, “I am writ­ing to you with an erec­tion on my head and I am very much afraid of burn­ing my hair.”

After dis­cov­er­ing Nan­erl, Milo poured through the his­tor­i­cal archives, read­ing con­tem­po­rary accounts and per­son­al let­ters. The research gave birth to a one-woman play, The Oth­er Mozart, which has toured for the last four years to crit­i­cal acclaim. (See a trail­er video above). In her Guardian essay, Milo describes Nannerl’s fate: “left behind in Salzberg” when she turned 18. “A lit­tle girl could per­form and tour, but a woman doing so risked her rep­u­ta­tion…. Her father only took Wolf­gang on their next jour­neys around the courts of Europe. Nan­nerl nev­er toured again.” We do know that she wrote music. Wolf­gang praised one com­po­si­tion as “beau­ti­ful” in a let­ter to her. But none of her music has sur­vived. “Maybe we will find it one day,” Milo writes. Indeed, an Aus­tralian researcher claims to have found Nannerl’s “musi­cal hand­writ­ing” in the com­po­si­tions Wolf­gang used for prac­tice.

Oth­er schol­ars have spec­u­lat­ed that Mozart’s sis­ter, five years his senior, cer­tain­ly would have had some influ­ence on his play­ing. “No musi­cians devel­op their art in a vac­u­um,” says musi­cal soci­ol­o­gist Ste­van Jack­son. “Musi­cians learn by watch­ing oth­er musi­cians, by being an appren­tice, for­mal­ly or infor­mal­ly.” The ques­tion may remain an aca­d­e­m­ic one, but the life of Nan­nerl has recent­ly become a mat­ter of pop­u­lar inter­est as well, not only in Milo’s play but in sev­er­al nov­els, many titled Mozart’s Sis­ter, and a 2011 film, also titled Mozart’s Sis­ter, writ­ten and direct­ed by René Féret and star­ring his daugh­ter in the tit­u­lar role. The trail­er above promis­es a rich­ly emo­tion­al peri­od dra­ma, which—as all enter­tain­ments must do—takes some lib­er­ties with the facts as we know, or don’t know, them, but which also, like Milo’s play, gives flesh to a sig­nif­i­cant, and sig­nif­i­cant­ly frus­trat­ed, his­tor­i­cal fig­ure who had, for a cou­ple hun­dred years, at least, been ren­dered invis­i­ble.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1200 Years of Women Com­posers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

Hear the Pieces Mozart Com­posed When He Was Only Five Years Old

Read an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eye­wit­ness Account of 8‑Year-Old Mozart’s Extra­or­di­nary Musi­cal Skills

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

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200,000+ Vintage Records Being Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

in Archives, History, Internet Archive, Music | October 17th, 2017

It may be a great irony that our age of cul­tur­al destruc­tion and—many would argue—decline also hap­pens to be a gold­en age of preser­va­tion, thanks to the very new media and big data forces cred­it­ed with dumb­ing things down. We spend ample time con­tem­plat­ing the loss­es; archival ini­tia­tives like The Great 78 Project, like so many oth­ers we reg­u­lar­ly fea­ture here, should give us rea­sons to cel­e­brate.

In a post this past August, we out­lined the goals and meth­ods of the project. Cen­tral­ized at the Inter­net Archive—that mag­nan­i­mous cit­i­zens’ repos­i­to­ry of dig­i­tized texts, record­ings, films, etc.—the project con­tains sev­er­al thou­sand care­ful­ly pre­served 78rpm record­ings, which doc­u­ment the dis­tinc­tive sounds of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry from 1898 to the late-1950s.

Thanks to part­ners like preser­va­tion com­pa­ny George Blood, L.P. and the ARChive of Con­tem­po­rary Music, we can hear many thou­sands of records from artists both famous and obscure in the orig­i­nal sound of the first mass-pro­duced con­sumer audio for­mat.

Just a few days ago, the Inter­net Archive announced that they would be joined in the endeav­or by the Boston Pub­lic Library, who, writes Wendy Hana­mu­ra, “will dig­i­tize, pre­serve” and make avail­able to the pub­lic “hun­dreds of thou­sands of audio record­ings in a vari­ety of his­tor­i­cal for­mats,” includ­ing not only 78s, but also LP’s and Thomas Edison’s first record­ing medi­um, the wax cylin­der. “These record­ings have nev­er been cir­cu­lat­ed and were in stor­age for sev­er­al decades, uncat­a­logued and inac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic.”

The process, notes WBUR, “could take a few years,” giv­en the siz­able bulk of the col­lec­tion and the metic­u­lous meth­ods of the Inter­net Archive’s tech­ni­cians, who labor to pre­serve the con­di­tion of the often frag­ile mate­ri­als, and to pro­duce a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ver­sions, “from remas­tered to raw.” The object, says Boston Pub­lic Library pres­i­dent David Leonard, is to “pro­duce record­ings in a way that’s inter­est­ing to the casu­al lis­ten­er as well as to the hard-core music lis­ten­er in the research busi­ness.”

Thus far, only two record­ings from BPL’s exten­sive col­lec­tions have become avail­able—a 1938 record­ing called “Please Pass the Bis­cuits, Pap­py (I Like Moun­tain Music)” by W. Lee O’Daniel and His Hill­bil­ly Boys and Edvard Grieg’s only piano con­cer­to, record­ed by Fred­dy Mar­tin and His Orches­tra in 1947. Even in this tiny sam­pling, you can see the range of mate­r­i­al the archive will fea­ture, con­sis­tent with the tremen­dous vari­ety the Great 78 Project already con­tains.

While we can count it as a great gain to have free and open access to this his­toric vault of record­ed audio, it is also the case that dig­i­tal archiv­ing has become an urgent bul­wark against total loss. Cur­rent record­ing for­mats instant­ly spawn innu­mer­able copies of them­selves. The phys­i­cal media of the past exist­ed in finite num­bers and are sub­ject to total era­sure with time. “The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter,” archivist George Blood tells the BPL, “is most audio­vi­su­al record­ings will be lost. These 78s are dis­ap­pear­ing left and right. It is impor­tant that we do a good job pre­serv­ing what we can get to, because there won’t be a sec­ond chance.”

via WBUR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

BBC Launch­es World Music Archive

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

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