Who Painted the First Abstract Painting?: Wassily Kandinsky? Hilma af Klint? Or Another Contender?

in Art, History | September 14th, 2017

Kandinsky, Untitled, 1910

Many painters today concentrate on producing abstract work — and a fair few of those have only ever produced abstract work. But look not so very far back in human history, and you’ll find that to paint meant to paint representatively, to replicate on canvas the likenesses of the actual people, places, and things out there in the world. Humanity, of course didn’t evolve with its representational art skills pre-installed: though some cave paintings do recognizably depict men and beasts, many strike us today as what we would call abstract, or at least abstracted. So which modern artists can lay claim to having rediscovered abstraction first?

Kandinsky, Composition V, 1911

If you’ve studied any art history, you might well name the early 20th-century Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (whose first abstract watercolor from 1910 appears at the top of the post). But “while Kandinsky is today hailed as the father of abstract painting,” writes Artsy’s Abigail Cain, “he was by no means the only player in the development of non-representational painting,” though “his work Komposition V did, admittedly, jumpstart public interest in abstract painting.”

First exhibited in Munich in December 1911, “this monumental work was just barely representational” and also “the first such work to be put on display,” inspiring the art world not just to take abstraction seriously but to see it as the future.

Hilma af Klint, Svanen, 1915

Kandinsky, inspired by Goethe’s Theory of Colors, had already given the subject of abstraction no small amount of thought. He’d first written a manifesto defining abstract art a few years earlier, titling it On the Spiritual in Art, a title that would have resonated with Hilma af Klint, a painter who might have actually gone abstract first. “Af Klint, who was born in Stockholm, showed an early interest in nature, mathematics and art, and she began studying at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1882,” writes the New York Times’ Natalia Rachlin. She made her name as a landscape and portrait painter after graduation, but at the same time “also continued a more private pursuit: she had begun showing an interest in the occult and attending séances as early as 1879, at the age of 17.”

Hilma af Klint, ‘Staggering’: The Ten Largest, Youth, 1907.

Af Klint’s “curiosity about the spiritual realm soon developed into a lifelong interest in spiritism, theosophy and anthroposophy,” and during one séance she heard a spirit tell her to “make paintings that would represent the immortal aspects of man. This proved to be the turning point in af Klint’s work: from the naturalistic to the abstract, from portrayals of physical reality to conveying the invisible.” She went on to produce the 193 abstract Paintings for the Temple. The exhibitions of her representational work continued, but she kept the rest private, and in her will “even asked that her abstract paintings not be shown in public until at least twenty years after her death, noting that audiences were not yet capable of understanding her work.”

Francis Picabia, Caoutchouc, 1909.

Both Kandinsky and Af Klint look like plausible candidates for the first abstract painter — it just depends on how you define the beginning of abstraction — but they’re hardly the only ones. Cain also brings up the Czech-born, Paris-based artist František Kupka, or his colleague in the French avant-garde Francis Picabia, whose 1909 watercolor Caoutchouc (Rubber), pictured just above, came before Kandinsky had painted an abstract image or even completed any writing on the subject. Still, some objectors note that “the work still retains some semblance of form, reminiscent of a bouquet of flowers.” These questions of purity, innovation, and especially originality do get complicated. As Clive James once said, “It’s very hard to be totally inventive, so I’m not terribly interested in originality. Vitality is all I care about” — a quality that all these works exude still today.

via Artsy/Tate

Goethe’s Colorful & Abstract Illustrations for His 1810 Treatise, Theory of Colors: Scans of the First Edition

Time Travel Back to 1926 and Watch Wassily Kandinsky Make Art in Some Rare Vintage Video

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online

in Books, History | September 12th, 2017

If you don’t much care for modern medicine, entire industries have arisen to provide you with more “alternative” or “natural” varieties of remedies, mostly involving the consumption of plants. Publishers have put out guides to their use by the dozens. In a way, those books have a place in a long tradition, stretching back to a time well before modern medicine existed as something to be an alternative to. Just recently, the British Library digitized the oldest such volume, a thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript known as the Cotton MS Vitellius C III. The book, writes the British Library’s Alison Hudson, “is the only surviving illustrated Old English herbal, or book describing plants and their uses.” (The sole condition note: “leaves damaged by fire in 1731.”)

The manuscript’s Old English is actually the translation of “a text which used to be attributed to a 4th-century writer known as Pseudo-Apuleius, now recognized as several different Late Antique authors whose texts were subsequently combined.” It also includes “translations of Late Antique texts on the medicinal properties of badgers” and another text “on medicines derived from parts of four-legged animals.”

(Somehow one doesn’t imagine those latter sections playing quite as well with today’s alternative-medicine market.) Each entry about a plant or animal features “its name in various languages; descriptions of ailments it can be used to treat; and instructions for finding and preparing it.”

Quite a few of the species with which the guide deals would have been directly known to few or no Anglo-Saxons in those days, and some of the entries, such as the one describing dragonswort as ideally “grown in dragon’s blood,” seem more fanciful than others. As with many a Medieval work, the book freely mixes fact and lore: to pick the mandrake root (pictured at the top of the post), “said to shine at night and to flee from impure persons,” the guide recommends “an iron tool (to dig around it), an ivory staff (to dig the plant itself up), a dog (to help you pull it out), and quick reflexes.” You can behold these and other pages of the Cotton MS Vitellius C III in zoomable high resolution at the British Library’s online manuscript viewer. While the remedies themselves might never have been particularly effective, their accompanying illustrations do remain strange and amusing even a millennium later — and isn’t laughter supposed to be the best medicine?

via Hyperallergic

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Trigonometry Discovered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Babylonian Tablet

in History, Math, Science | September 6th, 2017

One presumption of television shows like Ancient Aliens and books like Chariots of the Gods is that ancient people—particularly non-western people—couldn’t possibly have constructed the elaborate infrastructure and monumental architecture and statuary they did without the help of extra-terrestrials. The idea is intriguing, giving us the hugely ambitious sci-fi fantasies woven into Ridley Scott’s revived Alien franchise. It is also insulting in its level of disbelief about the capabilities of ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, South Americans, South Sea Islanders, etc.

We assume the Greeks perfected geometry, for example, and refer to the Pythagorean theorem, although this principle was probably well-known to ancient Indians. Since at least the 1940s, mathematicians have also known that the “Pythagorean triples”—integer solutions to the theorem—appeared 1000 years before Pythagoras on a Babylonian tablet called Plimpton 322. Dating back to sometime between 1822 and 1762 B.C. and discovered in southern Iraq in the early 1900s, the tablet has recently been re-examined by mathematicians Daniel Mansfield and Norman Wildberger of Australia’s University of New South Wales and found to contain even more ancient mathematical wisdom, “a trigonometric table, which is 3,000 years ahead of its time.”

In a paper published in Historia Mathematica the two conclude that Plimpton 322’s Babylonian creators detailed a “novel kind of trigonometry,” 1000 years before Pythagoras and Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who has typically received credit for trigonometry’s discovery. In the video above, Mansfield introduces the unique properties of this “scientific marvel of the ancient world,” an enigma that has “puzzled mathematicians,” he writes in his article, “for more than 70 years.” Mansfield is confident that his research will fundamentally change the way we understand scientific history. He may be overly optimistic about the cultural forces that shape historical narratives, and he is not without his scholarly critics either.

Eleanor Robson, an expert on Mesopotamia at University College London has not published a formal critique, but she did take to Twitter to register her dissent, writing, “for any historical document, you need to be able to read the language & know the historical context to make sense of it. Maths is no exception.” The trigonometry hypothesis, she writes in a follow-up tweet, is “tediously wrong.” Mansfield and Wildberger may not be experts in ancient Mesopotamian language and culture, it’s true, but Robson is also not a mathematician. “The strongest argument” in the Australian researchers’ favor, writes Kenneth Chang at The New York Times, is that “the table works for trigonomic calculations.” As Mansfield says, “you don’t make a trigonomic table by accident.”

Plimpton 322 uses ratios rather than angles and circles. “But when you arrange it such a way so that you can use any known ratio of a triangle to find the other side of a triangle,” says Mansfield, “then it becomes trigonometry. That’s what we can use this fragment for.” As for what the ancient Babylonians used it for, we can only speculate. Robson and others have proposed that the tablet was a teaching guide. Mansfield believes “Plimpton 322 was a powerful tool that could have been used for surveying fields or making architectural calculations to build palaces, temples or step pyramids.”

Whatever its ancient use, Mansfield thinks the tablet “has great relevance for our modern world… practical applications in surveying, computer graphics and education.” Given the possibilities, Plimpton 322 might serve as “a rare example of the ancient world teaching us something new,” should we choose to learn it. That knowledge probably did not originate in outer space.

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

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When Albert Einstein Championed the Creation of a One World Government (1945)

in History, Politics | September 6th, 2017

Image by Ferdinand Schmutzer, via Wikimedia Commons

The concept of one-world government has long been a staple of violent apocalyptic prophecy and conspiracy theories involving various popes, the UN, FEMA, the Illuminati, and lizard people. In the real world, one-world government has been a goal of the global Comintern and many of the corporate oligarchs who triumphed over the Soviets in the Cold War. For good reason, perhaps—with the exception of sci-fi utopias like Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek—we generally tend to think of global government as a threatening idea. But that has not always been the case, or least it wasn’t for Albert Einstein who proposed global governance after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Einstein’s role in the development of those weapons may have been minimal, according to the physicist himself (the truth is a little more complicated). But he later expressed regret, or at least a total rethinking of the issue, in his many interviews, letters, and speeches. In 1952, for example, Einstein wrote a short essay called “On My Participation in the Atom Bomb Project” in which he recommended that all nations “abolish war by common action” and referred to the pacifist example of Gandhi, “the greatest political genius of our time.”

Five years earlier, we find Einstein in a less than hopeful mood. In a 1947 open letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations, he laments that “since the victory over the Axis powers… no appreciable progress has been made either toward the prevention of war or toward agreement in specific fields such as control of atomic energy and economic cooperation.” The solution as he saw it required a “modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty.” It’s a clause that might have launched a thousand militia manifestoes. Einstein elaborates:

For as long as atomic energy and armaments are considered a vital part of national security no nation will give more than lip service to international treaties. Security is indivisible. It can be reached only when necessary guarantees of law and enforcement obtain everywhere, so that military security is no longer the problem of any single state. There is no compromise possible between preparation for war, on the one hand, and preparation of a world society based on law and order on the other.

So far this sounds not simply like a one-world government but like a one-world police state. But Einstein’s proposal gets a much more comprehensive treatment in an earlier Atlantic Monthly editorial published in 1945. Here, he admits that many of his ideas are “abstractions” and lays out a scheme to ostensibly protect against global totalitarianism.

Membership in a supranational security system should not, in my opinion, be based on any arbitrary democratic standards. The one requirement from all should be that the representatives to supranational organization—assembly and council—must be elected by the people in each member country through a secret ballot. These representatives must represent the people rather than any government—which would enhance the pacific nature of the organization.

The greatest obstacle to a global government was not, Einstein thought, U.S. mistrust, but Russian unwillingness. After making every effort to induce the Soviets to join, he writes in his UN letter, other nations should band together to form a “partial world Government… comprising at least two-thirds of the major industrial and economic areas of the world.” This body “should make it clear from the beginning that its doors remain wide open to any non-member.”

Einstein corresponded with many people on the issue of one-world government, recommending in one letter that a “permanent world court” be established to “constrain the executive branch of world government from overstepping its mandate which, in the beginning, should be limited to the prevention of war and war-provoking developments.” He does not foresee the problem of an executive who seizes power through nefarious means and ignores institutional checks on power and privilege. As for the not-insignificant matter of the economy, he writes that “the freedom of each country to develop economic, political and cultural institutions of its own choice must be guaranteed at the outset.”

Ideological conflicts over economics seemed to him “quite irrational,” as he wrote in his Atlantic editorial. “Whether the economic life of America should be dominated by relatively few individuals, as it is, or these individuals should be controlled by the state, may be important, but it is not important enough to justify all the feelings that are stirred up over it.” Like any honest intellectual, Einstein reserved the right to change his mind. By 1949 he had come to see socialism as a necessary antidote to the “grave evils of capitalism”—the gravest of which, he wrote, is “an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society”—even one, presumably, with global legislative reach.

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

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Learn the Untold History of the Chinese Community in the Mississippi Delta

in History | September 5th, 2017

The word “nativist” always sounds odd to me given that most of those to whom it applies descend from people who arrived in North America one or two hundred years ago to find people who had been on the continent for many thousands of years. But if we were, in defiance of history, to confer native status upon the many waves of European immigrants who populated the country before and after the Civil War, then we must also grant such status to the many Chinese immigrants who did so, building railroads and businesses all over the U.S., including on the western frontier in Mississippi.

Chinese immigrants first arrived in the Mississippi Delta after the end of slavery, responding to cotton planters’ need for a newly exploitable workforce. Chinese laborers, says the narrator in the Al Jazeera video above, “were cheap, disposable, and politically voiceless.” But they were, at least, paid for their work, and free to leave it, as most of them did when they could, to build their own economic means—largely businesses “serving the black community when the white community wouldn’t.” In an NPR profile of the Delta Chinese community, Melissa Block interviewed Raymond Wong, whose family arrived somewhat later, in the 1930s. “We were in-between,” he tells her, “We’re not black, we’re not white. So that by itself gives you some isolation.”

Photo by Marion Post Wolcott/Library of Congress

That in-between-ness also grants a good deal of invisibility to communities that don’t fit into the binary patterns of thinking in Southern culture and history or the oversimplifications of U.S. demographic history in general. As historian David Reimers demonstrates in his book Other Immigrants, in addition to native Amerindians, Europeans, and enslaved African people, the country has been inhabited by free Black, Caribbean, Asian, and Latin American communities since the 16th century and up to, and after, the harsh exclusion acts of the 19th century. The U.S. would not be recognizable without such communities. As far back as the eighteenth century, he writes, “Pennsylvania and New York City, with their ethnically diverse populations, became models for the American future, a pluralist society.”

In the South, non-European immigrant communities have been smaller minorities, like the Delta Chinese. Nonetheless, as Mississippi resident Frieda Quon recalls of growing up in segregated Mississippi, the Chinese immigrants who settled from Memphis to Vicksburg “really filled a particular need”—first for labor then for services—“because nobody else wanted to do it.” Even after the community endured many years of bigotry and legal discrimination during the exclusion acts, several men distinguished themselves among the 13,000 Chinese Americans who served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II.

The 10-minute trailer above for Honor and Duty, a three part documentary series about the Mississippi Delta Chinese community, begins with a brief profile of the almost two hundred Chinese American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen from the region. Director E. Samantha Cheng made the film as part of her larger mission to tell Asian-American history, which few Americans of any descent know very much about. In fact, she took on her mission after recovering from the shock of learning as an adult about the U.S.‘s Japanese internment camps during the war, something she had never been taught in New York City public schools.

Cheng was surprised during her filming to meet so many Chinese-Americans with molasses-thick Southern accents. “Even their Chinese accent has a Southern twang to it,” she tells NBC. That’s because, though accent alone does not a “native” make, the Chinese communities in the Mississippi Delta are, as much as anyone else in the region, Southerners.

The AJ video is part of a series on 150 years of Chinese culture and cuisine in the U.S. See Part One, on San Francisco, here, and the Part Two, covers Los Angeles, here.

Albert Einstein Gives a Speech Praising Diversity & Immigrants’ Contributions to America (1939)

Ian McKellen Reads a Passionate Speech by William Shakespeare, Written in Defense of Immigrants

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

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The Roman Roads of Britain Visualized as a Subway Map

in History, Maps | August 28th, 2017

Walk around London with someone who knows its deep history — not hard to arrange, given the way London enthusiasts treat historical knowledge as a hypercompetitive sport — and you’ll have more than a few paths of “Roman roads” pointed out to you. Even in the city of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, the Shard and the Gherkin, chicken shops and curry houses, there remain fragments and traces of the 2,000 miles of roads the Roman Army built between British towns and cities between 43 and 410 AD, Britain’s centuries as a province of the Roman Empire.

Though some of Britain’s Roman Roads have become modern motorways, most no longer exist in any form but those bits and pieces history buffs like to spot. This makes it difficult to get a sense of how they all ran and where — or at least it did until Sasha Trubetskoy made a Roman Roads of Britain Network Map in the graphic-design style of the subway maps you’ll find in London or any other major city today. Trubetskoy, an undergraduate statistics major at the University of Chicago, first found cartographical fame a few months ago with his “subway map” of roads across the entire Roman Empire circa 125 AD.

“Popular request,” he writes, demanded a Britain-specific follow up, a project he describes as “far more complicated than I had initially anticipated.” The challenges included not just the sheer number of Roman Roads in Britain but a lack of clarity about their exact location and extents. As in his previous map, Trubetskoy admits, “I had to do some simplifying and make some tough choices on which cities to include.” While this closer-up view demanded a more geographical faithfulness, he nevertheless “had to get rather creative with the historical evidence” in places, to the point of using such “not exactly Latin-sounding” names as “Watling Street” and “Ermin Way.”

Still, barring a revolutionary discovery in Roman history, you’re unlikely to find a more rigorous example of subway-mapped Roman Roads in Britain than this one. And for $9 USD you can have it as a “crisp PDF” suitable for printing as a poster and giving to anyone passionate about the history of Britain — or the history of Rome, or graphic design, or maps that aren’t what they might seem at first glance.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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

Gonzo Illustrator Ralph Steadman Draws the American Presidents, from Nixon to Trump

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Current Affairs, History, Politics | August 28th, 2017

In a 2012 interview with National Public Radio, cartoonist Ralph Steadman, best known for his collaborations with Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, lamented the quality of the candidates in that year’s Presidential race:

The problem is there are no Nixons around at the moment. That’s what we need — we need a real good Nixon to give something for other people to get their teeth into, to really … loathe him, to become themselves more effective as opposition leaders.

Alas, his prayers have been answered.

Steadman, who has brought his inky sensibilities to bear on such works as Animal Farm and Alice in Wonderland, has a new American president to add to the collection he discussed several years ago, in the video above.

Steadman’s pen was the sword that rendered Gerald Ford as a scarecrow, Ronald Reagan as a vampire, and George W. Bush as a monkey in a cage of his own making.

Barack Obama, one of the candidates in that comparatively bland 2012 election, is depicted as a tenacious, slender vine, straining ever upward.

Jimmy Carter, somewhat less benignly, is a puppy eagerly fetching a stick with which to pardon Nixon, the Welsh cartoonist’s dark muse, first encountered when he accompanied Thompson on the road trip that yielded Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.

And now…

Donald Trump has given Steadman reason to come out fighting. With luck, he’ll stay out as long as his services are required. The above portrait, titled “Porky Pie,” was sent, unsolicited, to Gerry Brakus, an editor of the New Statesman, who published it on December 17, 2015.

At the time, Steadman had no reason to believe the man he’d anthropomorphized as a human pig hybrid, squeezed into bloody flag-print underpants, would become the 45th president:

Trump is unthinkable. A thug and a molester. Who wants him?

The portrait’s hideousness speaks volumes, but it’s also worth looking beyond the obvious-seeming inspiration for the title to a reference few Americans would get. “Pork pie”—or porky—is Cockney rhyming slang for “a lie.”

See a gallery of Steadman’s portraits of American presidents on his website.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

The Web Site “Centuries of Sound” is Making a Mixtape for Every Year of Recorded Sound from 1860 to Present

in History, Music | August 24th, 2017

The vibrations of the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad in Manhattan, a recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the announcements issuing forth from an inventor’s attempt at a talking clock — hardly a mix with which to get the party started, but one that provides the closest experience we can get to traveling in a sonic time machine. With Centuries of Sound, James Errington has assembled those recordings and a few others into its 1878–1885 mix, an early chapter in his project of creating one listening experience for each year in the history of recorded sound.

“Things get a little more listenable in 1887 with a recording of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’ ” writes The A.V. Club’s Matt Gerardi. “It’s also with this third mix that we start to get a sense for Centuries Of Sound’s editing style, as speeches start to be layered over musical performances, creating a listening experience that’s as pleasurable as it is educational.”

In so doing, “Errington calls attention to the issue of representation, as one of his primary goals is to paint a global, multi-cultural picture of recording history,” digging past all the “marching bands, sentimental ballads, novelty instrumentals and nothing much else” in the historical archives while putting out the call for expert help sourcing and evaluating “Rembetika, early microtonal recordings, French political speeches, Tagore songs or anything else.”

Putting up another year’s mix each month, Centuries of Sound has so far made it up to 1893, the year of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago which “set the tone for the next twenty-five years of architecture, arts, culture and the electrification of the world,” and also the first age of “ ‘hits’ – music produced with an eye to selling, even if only as a souvenir or a fun novelty.” With a decade remaining until Centuries of Sound catches up with the present moment, Errington has put together a taste of what its sonic dose of the almost-present will sound like with a 2016 preview mix featuring the likes of the final album by A Tribe Called Quest and Lazarus, the musical by David Bowie, both of whom took their final bows last year. We’re definitely a long way from the time of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” But how will it all sound to the ears of 2027?

via The A.V. Club

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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

Who Painted the First Abstract Painting?: Wassily Kandinsky? Hilma af Klint? Or Another Contender?

1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online

Trigonometry Discovered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Babylonian Tablet

When Albert Einstein Championed the Creation of a One World Government (1945)

Learn the Untold History of the Chinese Community in the Mississippi Delta

The Roman Roads of Britain Visualized as a Subway Map

Gonzo Illustrator Ralph Steadman Draws the American Presidents, from Nixon to Trump

The Web Site “Centuries of Sound” is Making a Mixtape for Every Year of Recorded Sound from 1860 to Present

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