Oh to go behind the scenes at a world class museum, to discover treasures that the public never sees.

Among the most compelling – and unexpected –  at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are a pair of crumbing scrapbooks, their pages thick with yellowing obituaries and death notices for a wide array of late 19th and early 20th-century painters, sculptors, and photographers.

Some names, like Auguste Rodin or Jules Breton, are still familiar to many 21st-century art lovers.

Others, like Francis Davis Millet, who served as a Union Army drummer boy during the Civil War and perished on the Titanic, were much admired in their day, but have largely faded from memory.

The vast majority are requiems of a sort for those who toiled in obscurity. They may not have received much attention in life, but the circumstances of their deaths by suicide, murder, or bizarre accident had the whiff […]

For many Open Culture readers, the Halloween season offers an opportunity — not to say an excuse — to re-experience classic horror films: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunted Castle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we suggest a home screening of the formidable work of vintage cinema that is 1968’s The Astro Zombies? Written, produced, and directed by Ted Mikels — auteur of The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Devils — it features not just “a mad astro-scientist” played by John Carradine and “two gore-crazed, solar-powered killer robot zombies,” but “a bloody trail of girl-next-door victims; Chinese communist spies; deadly Mexican secret agents led by the insanely voluptuous Tura Satana” and an “intrepid CIA agent” on the case of it all.

You can watch The Astro Zombies for free, and newly remastered in HD to boot, at Kino Cult, the new streaming site from film and video distributor Kino Lorber. Pull up the front page and you’ll be treated to a wealth of titillating viewing options of […]

The works will speak for themselves. – Artemisia Gentileschi

The praise Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi garnered during her lifetime is astonishing.

Not because the work isn’t deserving of the attention, but rather, because she was a young woman in 17th-century Florence.

The first female to be accepted into Florence’s prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, she was collected by the Medicis and respected by her peers – almost all of them male.

Her style was as dramatic as the subjects she depicted.

One of her most compelling ones, covered in Allison Leigh’s animated TED-Ed lesson, above, comes from an apocryphal book of the Old Testament. It concerns Judith, a comely Jewish widow who, assisted by her maidservant, beheaded the loutish Assyrian general Holofernes, whose forces threatened her town.

This story has attracted many artists over time: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Cristofano Allori, Goya, Klimt, Franz von Stuck, and Caravaggio, the painter whom Artemisia most sought to emulate as a teen.

Artemisia visited Judith and Holofernes several times throughout her career. […]

As Halloween radio broadcasts go, it would be hard to displace in American cultural memory the adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds that aired in 1938. Not every Halloween special can be directed by a young Orson Welles, of course, but that’s hardly a reason to ignore the countless other Halloween broadcasts from the Golden Age of Radio. This year you can tune them in with the Youtube playlist above, which collects 149 such spookiest-time-of-the-season episodes from such beloved shows as Lum and Abner, The Aldrich Family, Fibber McGee and Molly, Our Miss Brooks, The Great Gildersleeve, The Jack Benny Program, The Shadow, and more.

Whether comedy, drama, or another genre besides, old-time radio programs tended to seize upon the theme of every holiday that came down the pike, and Halloween — with its costume parties, ever-present threat of pranks, and door-to-door demands — offered their writers and performers a once-in-a-year opportunity for unwonted degrees of mischief.

For normally lighthearted shows, it was also a chance to go at least a little bit dark; for a […]

As previously mentioned here on OC, the film distributor Kino Lorber has been quietly making complete art films available to stream on YouTube and its own website. In recent weeks, they’ve uploaded to YouTube the documentaries, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint and M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity. Now comes Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil, which they describe as follows:

In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role. In preparation for the exhibition, a team of Dutch art historians crisscrosses the globe to unravel the secrets of his art. They use special infrared cameras to examine the sketches beneath the paint, in the hope of discovering more about the artist’s intentions. They also attempt to establish which of the paintings can be attributed with certainty to Bosch […]