Discover the Sarajevo Haggadah, the Medieval Illuminated Manuscript That Survived the Inquisition, Holocaust & Yugoslav Wars

in Art, History, Museums, Religion | April 14th, 2023

If you attended a seder this month, you no doubt read aloud from the Haggadah, a Passover tradition in which everyone at the table takes turns recounting the story of Exodus.

There’s no definitive edition of the Haggadah. Every Passover host is free to choose the version of the familiar story they like best, to cut and paste from various retellings, or even take a crack at writing their own.

As David Zvi Kalman, publisher of the annual, illustrated Asufa Haggadah told the New York Times, “The Haggadah in America is like Kit Kats in Japan. It’s a product that accepts a wide variety of flavors. It’s probably the most accessible Jewish book on the market.”

21st century adaptations have included Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Seinfeld, Harry Potter, and Curb Your Enthusiasm themed Haggadot.

There are Haggadot tailored toward feminists, Libertarians, interfaith families, and advocates of the Black Lives Matter movement.

One of the oldest is the miraculously-preserved Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript created by anonymous artists and scribes in Barcelona around 1350.

Though it bears the coats of arms of two prominent families, its provenance is not definitively known.

Leora Bromberg of the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library notes that it is “especially striking for its colorful illuminations of biblical and Passover ritual scenes and its beautifully hand-scribed Sephardic letterforms:”

As precious as this Haggadah was, and still is, Haggadot are books that are meant to be used in festive and messy settings—sharing the table with food, wine, family and guests. The Sarajevo Haggadah was no exception to this; its pages show evidence that it was well used, with doodles, food and red wine stains marking its pages.

Some brave soul took care to smuggle this essential volume out with them when 1492’s Alhambra Decree expelled all Jews from Spain.

The manuscript’s travels thereafter are shrouded in mystery.

It survived the Roman Inquisition by virtue of its contents. As per a 1609 note jotted on one of its pages, nothing therein seemed to be aimed against the Church.

More handwritten notes place the book in the north of Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries, though its new owner is not mentioned by name.

Eventually, it found its way to the hands of a man named Joseph Kohen who sold it to the National Museum of Sarajevo in 1894.

It was briefly sent to Vienna, where a government official replaced its original medieval binding with cardboard covers, chopping its 142 bleached calfskin vellum down to 6.5” x 9” in order to fit them.

It had a narrow escape in 1942, when a high-ranking Nazi official, Johann Fortner, visited the museum, intent on confiscating the priceless manuscript.

The chief librarian, Dervis Korkut, a Muslim, secreted the Haggadah inside his clothing, reputedly telling Fortner that museum staff had turned it over to another German officer.

After that folklore takes over. Korkut either stowed it under the floorboards of his home, buried it under a tree, gave it to an imam in a remote village for safekeeping, or hid it on a shelf in the museum’s library.

Whatever the case, it reappeared in the museum, safe and sound, in 1945.

The museum was ransacked during 1992’s Siege of Sarajevo, but the thieves, ignorant of the Haggadah’s worth, left it on the floor. It was removed to an underground bank vault, where it survived untouched, even as the museum sustained heavy artillery damage.

The president of Bosnia presented it to Jewish community leaders during a Seder three years later.

Shortly thereafter, the head of Sarajevo’s Jewish Community sought the United Nations’ support to restore the Haggadah, and house it in a suitably secure, climate-controlled setting.

A number of facsimiles have been created, and the original codex once again resides in the museum where it is stored under the prescribed conditions, and displayed on rare special occasions, as “physical proof of the openness of a society in which fear of the Other has never been an incurable disease.”

UNESCO added it to its Memory of the World Register in 2017, “praising the courage of the people who, even in the darkest of times during World War II, appreciated its importance to Jewish Heritage, as well as its embodiment of diversity and intercultural harmony depicted in its illustration:”

Regardless of their own religious beliefs, they risked their lives and did all in their power to safeguard the Haggadah for future generations. Its destruction would be a loss for humanity. Protecting it is a symbol of the values which we hold dear.

For those interested, the Sarajevo Haggadah figures centrally in the bestselling 2008 novel People of the Book, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. You can read an New Times review here.

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds

in Art, Books | April 14th, 2023

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a national panic). After the occurrence, reports Phil Klass, the actor remarked, “I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.”

Surely Welles knew that is precisely why the broadcast had the effect it did, especially in such an anxious pre-war climate. The 1898 novel also startled its first readers with its verisimilitude, playing on a late Victorian sense of apocalyptic doom as the turn-of-the-century approached.

But what contemporary circumstances eight years later, we might wonder, fueled the imagination of Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose 1906 illustrations of the novel you can see here? Wells himself approved of these incredible drawings, praising them before their publication and saying, “Alvim Corrêa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.”

Indeed they capture the novel’s uncanny dread. Martian tripods loom, ghastly and cartoonish, above blasted realist landscapes and scenes of panic. In one illustration, a grotesque, tentacled Martian ravishes a nude woman. In a surrealist drawing of an abandoned London above, eyes protrude from the buildings, and a skeletal head appears above them. The alien technology often appears clumsy and unsophisticated, which contributes to the generally terrifying absurdity that emanates from these finely rendered plates.

Alvim Corrêa was a Brazilian artist living in Brussels and struggling for recognition in the European art world. His break seemed to come when the War of the Worlds illustrations were printed in a large-format, limited French edition of the book, with each of the 500 copies signed by the artist himself.

Unfortunately, Corrêa’s tuberculosis killed him four years later. His War of the Worlds drawings did not bring him fame in his lifetime or after, but his work has been cherished since by a devoted cult following. The original prints you see here remained with the artist’s family until a sale of 31 of them in 1990. (They went up for sale again recently, it seems.) You can see many more, as well as scans from the book and a poster announcing the publication, at Monster Brains and the British Library site.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Edward Gorey Illustrates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inimitable Gothic Style (1960)

The War of the Worlds: Orson Welles’ 1938 Radio Drama That Petrified a Nation

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

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How to Spot a Communist by Using Literary Criticism: A 1955 Manual from the U.S. Military

in History, Literature | April 13th, 2023

In 1955, the United States was entering the final stages of McCarthyism or the Second Red Scare. During this low point in American history, the US government looked high and low for Communist spies. Entertainers, educators, government employees and union members were often viewed with suspicion, and many careers and lives were destroyed by the flimsiest of allegations. Congress, the FBI, and the US military, they all fueled the 20th century version of the Salem Witch trials, partly by encouraging Americans to look for Communists in unsuspecting places.

In the short Armed Forces Information Film above, you can see the dynamic at work. Some Communists were out in the open; however, others “worked more silently.” So how to find those hidden communists?

Not to worry, the US military had that covered. In 1955, the U.S. First Army Headquarters prepared a manual called How to Spot a Communist. Later published in popular American magazines, the propaganda piece warned readers, “there is no fool-proof system in spotting a Communist.” “U.S. Communists come from all walks of life, profess all faiths, and exercise all trades and professions. In addition, the Communist Party, USA, has made concerted efforts to go underground for the purpose of infiltration.” And yet the pamphlet adds, letting readers breathe a sigh of relief, “there are, fortunately, indications that may give him away. These indications are often subtle but always present, for the Communist, by reason of his “faith” must act and talk along certain lines.” In short, you’ll know a Communist not by how he walks, but how he talks. Asking citizens to become literary critics for the sake of national security, the publication told readers to watch out for the following:

While a preference for long sentences is common to most Communist writing, a distinct vocabulary provides the more easily recognized feature of the “Communist Language.” Even a superficial reading of an article written by a Communist or a conversation with one will probably reveal the use of some of the following expressions: integrative thinking, vanguard, comrade, hootenanny, chauvinism, book-burning, syncretistic faith, bourgeois-nationalism, jingoism, colonialism, hooliganism, ruling class, progressive, demagogy, dialectical, witch-hunt, reactionary, exploitation, oppressive, materialist.

This list, selected at random, could be extended almost indefinitely. While all of the above expressions are part of the English language, their use by Communists is infinitely more frequent than by the general public…

Rather chillingly, the pamphlet also warned that Communists revealed themselves if and when they talked about “McCarthyism,” “violation of civil rights,” “racial or religious discrimination” or “peace.” In other words, they were guilty if they suggested that the government was overstepping its bounds.

According to Corliss Lamont’s book, Freedom Is As Freedom Does, the First Army withdrew the pamphlet after Murray Kempton slammed it in The New York Post and The New York Times wrote its own scathing op-ed. In 1955, the press could take those risks. The year before, Joseph Welch had faced up to Joe McCarthy, asking with his immortal words, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared our site in 2013.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Bertolt Brecht Testifies Before the House Un-American Activities Committee (1947)

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

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The History of Ancient Japan: The Story of How Japan Began, Told by Those Who Witnessed It (297‑1274)

in History | April 13th, 2023

Here in the twenty-first century, many of us around the world think of Japan as essentially unchanging. We do so not without cause, given how much of what goes on there, including the operation of certain businesses, has been going on for centuries and centuries. But the political, cultural, religious, economic, and ethnic composition of the civilization we’ve long known as Japan has, in fact, transformed a great deal over the course of its existence. Some of the most dramatic changes occurred between the third and thirteenth centuries, the span of time covered by the video above.

“How Japan Began” comes from Voices of the Past, a Youtube channel previously featured here on Open Culture for its videos on a first-hand account of the destruction of Pompeii, an ancient Chinese historian’s description of the Roman Empire, and how the first Japanese visitor to the United States and Europe saw life there.

In telling the story of how ancient Japan (though mostly in a time span that falls within Europe’s Middle Ages) assumed something like its current form, the video adheres to its usual method of directly incorporating as many primary or close-to-primary sources as possible: the Chinese Records or History of the Three Kingdoms, eighth-century court edicts and national histories, the thirteenth-century émigré Chinese Buddhist monk Mugaku Sogen.

As for the rest of the narration, Voices of the Past credits Thomas Lockley, co-author of the book African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan. Yasuke, whom we’ve also featured before, arrived in Japan in 1579, three centuries after the events chronicled in “How Japan Begin” — and thus quite deep indeed into the history of a volatile land of religious shifts, political ambitions, and (voluntary or involuntary) cultural exchanges, all amid an internal state oscillating between fragmentation and consolidation as well as an ever-changing relationship to the world at large. We can’t say what mixture of stability and instability will characterize Japan’s next millennium, but we can hope its future chroniclers are up to the task.

When a UFO Came to Japan in 1803: Discover the Legend of Utsuro-bune

The 17th Century Japanese Samurai Who Sailed to Europe, Met the Pope & Became a Roman Citizen

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 Smithsonian Puts 4.5 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Use

in Archives, History, Museums | April 12th, 2023

That vast repository of American history that is the Smithsonian Institution evolved from an organization founded in 1816 called the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences. Its mandate, the collection and dissemination of useful knowledge, now sounds very much of the nineteenth century — but then, so does its name. Columbia, the goddess-like symbolic personification of the United States of America, is seldom directly referenced today, having been superseded by Lady Liberty. Traits of both figures appear in the depiction on the nineteenth-century fireman’s hat above, about which you can learn more at Smithsonian Open Access, a digital archive that now contains some 4.5 million images.

“Anyone can download, reuse, and remix these images at any time — for free under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license,” write My Modern Met’s Jessica Stewart and Madeleine Muzdakis. “A dive into the 3D records shows everything from CAD models of the Apollo 11 command module to Horatio Greenough’s 1840 sculpture of George Washington.”

The 2D artifacts of interest include “a portrait of Pocahontas in the National Portrait Gallery, an image of the 1903 Wright Flyer from the National Air and Space Museum, and boxing headgear worn by Muhammad Ali from the National Museum of African American History and Culture.”

The NMAAHC in particular has provided a great many items relevant to twentieth-century American culture, like James Baldwin’s inkwell, Chuck Berry’s guitar Maybellene, Public Enemy’s boombox, and the poster for a 1968 Nina Simone concert. The more obscure object just above, a Native American kachina figure with the head of Mickey Mouse, comes from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “When Disney Studios put a mouse hero on the silver screen in the 1930s,” explain the accompanying notes, “Hopi artists saw in Mickey Mouse a celebration of Tusan Homichi, the legendary mouse warrior who defeated a chicken-stealing hawk” — and were thus themselves inspired, it seems, to sum up a wide swath of American history in a single object.

More items are being added to Smithsonian Open Access all the time, each with its own story to tell — and all accessible not just to Americans, but internet users the world over. In that sense it feels a bit like the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, better known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, with its mission of revealing America’s scientific, technological, and artistic genius to the whole of human civilization. You can see a great many photos and other artifacts of this landmark event at Smithsonian Open Access, or, if you prefer, you can click the “just browsing” link and behold all the historical, cultural, and formal variety available in the Smithsonian’s digital collections, where the spirit of Columbia lives on.

via Kottke/My Modern Met

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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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16-Year-Old Dave Grohl Demonstrates His Emerging Drumming Talent, Playing in His Punk Band “Mission Impossible” (1985)

in Music | April 12th, 2023

Before Foo Fighters, before Nirvana, before even Dain Bramage, Scream and other bands, Dave Grohl played in the Springfield, Virginia punk band Mission Impossible. Above, we have footage of Grohl, only 16 years old, giving us a preview of performances to come. The camera puts Grohl center stage around the 1:30 mark.

This July 1985 footage was captured by Sohrab Habibion, who documented shows from the 1980s DC punk scene. His recordings now reside at the Punk Archive at the DC Public Library. Likewise, you can stream them on his YouTube channel. Among other things, you can watch vintage performances by Fugazi, GWAR, the Lemonheads, Dain Bramage (another Grohl band) & more. Stream them online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Laughing Squid

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Al Jaffee, the Longest Working Cartoonist in History, Dies at 102: Discover How He Invented the Iconic “Folds-Ins” for Mad Magazine

in Comics/Cartoons, Life | April 11th, 2023

Note: Yesterday, Mad Magazine legend Al Jaffee died at the age of 102. Below, we present our 2016 post featuring Jaffee talking about how he invented the iconic Fold-ins for the satirical magazine.

Keep copying those Sunday funnies, kids, and one day you may beat Al Jaffee’s record to become the Longest Working Cartoonist in History.

You’ll need to take extra good care of your health, given that the Guinness Book of World Records notified Jaffee, above, of his honorific on his 95th birthday.

Much of his legendary career has been spent at Mad Magazine, where he is best-known as the father of Fold-ins.

Conceived of as the satirical inverse of the expensive-to-produce, 4‑color centerfolds that were a staple of glossier mags, the first Fold-In spoofed public perception of actress Elizabeth Taylor as a man-eater. Jaffe had figured it as a one-issue gag, but editor Al Feldstein had other ideas, demanding an immediate follow up for the June 1964 issue.

Jaffe obliged with the Richard Nixon Fold-in, which set the tone for the other 450 he has hand-rendered in subsequent issues.

For those who made it to adulthood without the singular pleasure of creasing Mad’s back cover, you can digitally fold-in a few samples using this nifty interactive feature, courtesy of The New York Times.

With all due respect, it’s not the same, just enough to give a feel for the thrill of drawing the outermost panel in to reveal the visual punchline lurking within the larger picture. The print edition demands precision folding on the reader’s part, if one is to get a satisfactory answer to the rhetorical text posed at the outset.

Jaffe must be even more precise in his calculations. In an interview with Sean Edgar of Paste Magazine, he described how he turned a Republican primary stage shared by Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater into a surprise portrait of the man who would become president five years hence:

The first thing I did was draw Richard Nixon’s face, not in great detail, just a very rough establishment of where the eyes, nose and mouth would be, and the general shape. I did an exaggerated caricature of Nixon and then I cut it in half, and moved it apart. Once the face was cut in half, it didn’t have the integrity of a face anymore — it was sort of a half of face. Then I looked at what the eyes were like, and I said, ‘what can I make out of the eyes?’ He had these heavy eyebrows. I played around with many things, but I had to keep in mind all the time what the big picture was. So there they (Goldwater and Rockefeller) were up on a stage somewhere, doing a debate, and I thought, ‘What kind of stage prop can I put alongside these guys that would seem natural there?’ I decided that I could make eyes out of the lamps, and as far as the nose was concerned, that could come out of the figures — their clothing. Then I figured the mouth; I could use some sort of table that could give me those two sides. That’s how it all came about. You have to have some kind of visual imagination to see the possibilities. I had to concentrate on stuff that looked natural on a stage.

Each Fold-In is a reflection of the zeitgeist. Past preoccupations have included Vietnam, feminism, illegal drug use and, more recently, the Jersey Shore.

via Gothamist

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

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Historical Italian Cooking: How to Make Ancient Roman & Medieval Italian Dishes

in Food & Drink, History | April 11th, 2023

Italy is widely celebrated for having vigilantly preserved its food culture, with the result that many dishes there are still prepared in more or less the same way they have been for centuries. When you taste Italian food at its best, you taste history — to borrow the name of a Youtube channel whose success has revealed a surprisingly widespread enthusiasm for the cuisine of bygone eras. But some of Italy’s most globally beloved comestibles aren’t quite as deeply rooted in the past as people tend to assume: there are no records of tiramisu, for instance, before the nineteen-sixties; ciabatta, the Italian answer to the baguette, was invented in the early nineteen-eighties.

Neither of them appear anywhere in Historical Italian Cooking, a bilingual blog in English and Italian that teaches how to partake in far more venerable culinary traditions. A variety of periods are represented: the nineteenth century (Neapolitan calamari, tagliatelle and beef stew), the Renaissance (crostini with guanciale and sage, elderflowers fritters), the Middle Ages (monk’s stuffed-egg soup, quails with sumac), and even the time of ancient Rome (cuttlefish cakes, Horace’s lagana and chickpeas).

You can also see these and other dishes prepared on Historical Italian Cooking’s Youtube channel, which offers playlists organized by era, region, and chief ingredient: Medieval Tuscan recipes, ancient fish recipes, early medieval recipes at the court of the Franks.

Historical Italian Cooking’s most popular video shows every step involved in making “the most famous ancient Mediterranean sauce, garum.” The recipe comes straight from De Re Coquinaria, the oldest known cookbook in existence, which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. If you’d like to try your hand at making this bold condiment, make sure you’ve got the time: you’ll have to let the fish it’s made of it sit for at least a few days, stirring it three or four times per day, though some recipes suggest continuing this process for three or four months before the garum is ready to eat. If, on further consideration, you’d prefer to make a pizza, Historical Italian Cooking can help with that as well: just make sure you’ve got enough lard and quails.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

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

Behold the World’s First Modern Art Amusement Park, Featuring Attractions by Salvador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein & More (1987)

in Art, History | April 10th, 2023

Think of the names David Hockney, Jean Michel-Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, and Keith Haring, and one time period comes vividly to mind: the nineteen-eighties, the blast radius of whose explosion of shape, color, and motion encompassed everything from mainstream pop culture to the avant-garde. One could experience this through movies, clothes, paintings, graphic design, architecture, and even furniture. But did anyone really know the aesthetic of the eighties, in its full high-low span, who did not visit Luna Luna, the first and only modern-art amusement park?

Staged in the summer of 1987 in Hamburg, the largest city in then West Germany, Luna Luna was conceived by the Austrian artist André Heller. Inspired by the cultural memory of fairgrounds like Coney Island’s Luna Park and its many imitators around the world, Heller made use of all his connections to solicit designs for attractions from the superstar artists of the day.

“Visitors could get a little lost inside Salvador Dalí’s mirrored fun house and spin around on a Keith Haring carousel,” writes Atlas Obscura’s Sarah Durn. “They could take in the view from atop a dazzling Jean-Michel Basquiat Ferris wheel while listening to Miles Davis.”

Elsewhere on the grounds, writes Jessica Stewart at My Modern Met, “Roy Lichtenstein took the opportunity to design a colorful glass structure called the Pavilion of the Glass Labyrinth. Fittingly, it was accompanied by music by Philip Glass.” One wonders what John Cage would have contributed to Luna Luna’s soundtrack, but the composer of “4’33”’ was the only artist to turn Heller down. So reports the New York Times’ Joe Coscarelli, in a piece on the current project to restore the nearly forgotten Luna Luna (whose components have spent the intervening decades languishing in warehouses) and take it on tour. With a budget nearing $100-million, it’s becoming a reality thanks to the involvement of a surprising party: the rap superstar Drake, who knows full well the value of embodying the zeitgeist.

To complement the restoration of his project, André Heller published this year Luna Luna: The Art Amusement Park, a new book that documents in photographs this one-of-a-kind amusement park. You can purchase copies of the 300+ page book online.

via Colossal

When Salvador Dalí Dressed — and Angrily Demolished — a Department Store Window in New York City (1939)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

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

Discover Leonora Carrington, Britain’s Lost Surrealist Painter

in Art, Life | April 10th, 2023

I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist. — Leonora Carrington

In some ways, Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s story is a familiar one, given her gender and generation.

A creative young woman, stifled by her conventional upbringing, escapes to Paris, falls in love with an older male artist, gains a degree of recognition destined always to be smaller than that of her celebrated lover’s, suffers hardships, continues working, lives a very long time and is the subject of nearly as many exhibitions in the decade and a half following her death as in the 70 years preceding it.

Certainly, Carrington, who died in 2011, would be deeply rankled by this, or any attempt to condense her narrative into an easily-grasped package. Witness the brusque way she rejects her younger cousin Joanna Moorhead’s invitations, above, to describe the inspiration behind various canvases:

You’re trying to intellectualize something, desperately, and you’re wasting your time! That’s not a way of understanding to make …a sort of mini logic. You’ll never understand by that road.

The story of how Moorhead connected with her notorious cousin is a fascinating one.

Growing up in England, Moorhead knew next to nothing about the family’s absent black sheep — who had taken up with the 46-year-old Max Ernst at the age of 20, hobnobbed with Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton in Paris, and wound up in Mexico City after WWII.

All she was told was that Carrington, known to the family as Prim, had “run off with an artist to become his model.”

As Moorhead writes in The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington:

…there were occasional snatches: a hushed phone call where the word ‘Mexico’ was just audible; a whispered conversation on the sofa after Sunday lunch between (great aunt) Maurie and (grandmother) Miriam. There were guffawas occasionally from (uncle) Gerard and my father: “And then she painted a creature with three breasts!”

In 2006, Moorhead was at a party, making polite conversation with another guest, an art historian who lived in Mexico, “scrap(ing) together a few questions about the only Mexican artist I knew anything about — Frida Kahlo”, when she suddenly remembered her bohemian and seldom spoken of relative, who might even be dead by now for all she knew…

Her fellow guest was amazed by both the blood connection and Moorhead’s ignorance, describing Carrington as Mexico’s most famous living artist, and a “national treasure” who Mexico happily claimed as one of its own.

Gobsmacked, Moorhead Googled “Leonora Carrington”, discovering a wealth of photos from various phases of life, as well as the prodigious output from her brush:

A strange, Hieronymus Bosch-style world filed with horse-like creatures who floated, danced and curled their way across alien landscapes…Some of her pictures depicted unfamiliar and sinister-looking worlds: one showed a country with. Red sky and amber hills across which trapised a procession of people wearing white robes. More figures, wearing black, huddled around a huge eunuch like creature, while an outsize turquoise snake unfurled itself dramatically in mid-air. There seemed to be various elements competing to be the centre of the action in that painting: a globe, a God-like effigy and a cathedral all nestled below a rainbow. And the story, whatever it was, didn’t end there because (Carrington) had painted an underworld in which more people (dead, presumably) seemed to have been transformed into animals with pointy, black heads. They were crawling, or trying to crawl, and their efforts were being watched, ominously, by a sharp-toothed, one-eyed tiger.

Driven to find out more, Moorhead traveled to Mexico City, where Carrington had lived off and on since 1942. Her cousin was now in her late 80s, isolated with an infirm second husband, but still painting and championing Surrealism as a visual expression that couldn’t be captured with words:

There was no softness around the edges with Leonora; she had taken a hard path, suffered a great deal as a result, and she wore her toughness like a badge of honour she had earned from herself. It is far more of an honour than the certificate Blu-Tacked to her cupboard door, the honour the Mexican government had given her; it was certainly more of an honour than the OBE she had belatedly been awarded by the British, receiving it on a visit from Prince Charles on a visit he made to Mexico in 2000. She was bemused by these late accolades, but never impressed by them. Early on in her life, she had decided there was only one thing she could ever rely on, and that was the steeliness in her heart. External events, the trappings of wealth and success, the opinions of others, all these were swept away, dismissed, ignored. She was as unconcerned by the approval of others as by their disapproval.

See more of Leonora Carrington’s work here.

Listen to Joanna Moorhead interviewed about Leonora Carrington on the Great Women Artists Podcast (with the understanding that the subject would have resisted that gender-based categorization…). And read more about her at The New Yorker.

When The Surrealists Expelled Salvador Dalí for “the Glorification of Hitlerian Fascism” (1934)

Three Female Artists Who Helped Create Abstract Expressionism: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning & Helen Frankenthaler

Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Joni Mitchell Perform George Gershwin’s “Summertime”

in Libraries, Music | April 7th, 2023

“I’ve been a painter all my life. I’ve been a musician most of my life. If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words.” — Joni Mitchell

There’s been a lot of love for Joni Mitchell circulating of late, the sort of heartfelt outpouring that typically accompanies news of an artist’s death.

Fortunately, the beloved singer-songwriter has shown herself to be very much alive, despite a 2015 brain aneurysm that initially left her unable to speak, walk, or play music.

As she quipped in a recent interview with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, “I’m hard to discourage and hard to kill.”

How wonderful, then to be so fully alive as a windfall of testimonials roll in, describing the personal significance of her work, from the famous friends feting her last month with a concert of her own compositions as she was awarded the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song to ordinary citizens with fond memories of singing “The Circle Game” at camp.

Mitchell says that song, which you can hear her singing above, along with last month’s all-star line up, “kind of became like Old MacDonald Had a Farm” owing to its campfire popularity, though she resisted Hayden’s invitation to explain its timeless appeal:

I don’t know. Why was Old MacDonald Had a Farm so timeless?

This 79-year-old legend’s growing tendency to goof her way through interviews is endearing, but the Gershwin Prize is serious business, intended to “celebrate the work of an artist whose career reflects the influence, impact and achievement in promoting song as a vehicle of musical expression and cultural understanding.”

Performer Cyndi Lauper reflected that Mitchell’s influence is not confined to the realm of music:

When I was growing up the landscape of music was mostly men. There were a few women — far and few from me — and Joni Mitchell was the first artist who really spoke about what it was like to be a woman navigating in a male world … You taught me that I could be a multimedia artist if I wanted, because you painted and you wrote and you played and that’s what I wanted and I thought, “Well, if you could do it, maybe I can do it too.”

Mitchell trained as a commercial artist. Her paintings and self-portraits are featured on the covers of seventeen albums. When Hayden asked whether she primarily conceives of herself as a musician or artist, Mitchell went with artist, “because it’s more general.”

I think that, you know, my songs are kind of, they’re not folk music, they’re not chat. They’re kind of art songs and they embody classical things and jazzy things and folky things, you know, long line poetry. So yeah, I forged my identity very early as an artist. I’ve always thought of myself as an artist, but not specifically as a musician. You know, in some ways I’m just not a normal musician because I play in open tunings. I never learned the neck of my guitar well enough to jam with other people. I can jam if I lead, but I can’t really follow.

She believes her painting practice enriches her songwriting, much as crop rotation helps a field to remain fertile.

Not every artist switches lanes so effortlessly.

When Georgia O’Keeffe — who once told ARTnews she’d choose to be reincarnated as a “blond soprano who could sing high, clear notes without fear” — confided that she would have liked to be a musician as well as an artist, “but you can’t do both”, Mitchell claims to have responded, “Yeah, you can. You just have to give up TV.”

Songwriters George and Ira Gershwin, namesakes of the Prize for Popular Song, were closer to Mitchell in terms of creative omnivorousness. Their self-portraits hang in the National Portrait Gallery and the Library of Congress’ Gershwin room.

Mitchell was thrilled when Library staff presented her with a copy of the handwritten original score for her favorite George Gershwin tune, “Summertime,” which she recorded for Herbie Hancock’s 1998 album, Gershwin’s World, seven years after an Interview magazine piece in which she referred to her voice as “middle-aged now…like an old cello.”

Twenty-five years later, singing “Summertime” at the end of the concert in her honor, that cello’s tones are seasoned…and even more mellow.

I love the melody of (Summertime) and I like the simplicity of it. And I don’t know, I just I really get a kick out of singing it.

Stream Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize, an all-star concert featuring Brandi Carlile, Annie Lennox, James Taylor, Herbie Hancock, Cyndi Lauper, and other luminaries, including the Lady of the Canyon herself, for free on PBS through April 28.

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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

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Watch Joni Mitchell Perform George Gershwin’s “Summertime”

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