How Georgia O’Keeffe Became Georgia O’Keeffe: An Animated Video Tells the Story
When Georgia O’Keeffe first saw the home in Abiquiú, in Northern New Mexico that she would purchase from the Catholic Church in 1945 “the 5,000-square-foot compound was in ruins,” writes the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. The artist immediately seized on its potential: “As I climbed and walked about in the ruin,” she remembers, “I found a patio with a very pretty well house and bucket to draw up water. It was a good-sized patio with a long wall with a door on one side. That wall with a door in it was something I had to have.”
Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998, the “pueblo-style adobe (mud brick) hacienda” became one of the most renowned of artists’ houses, associated as closely with O’Keeffe as Frida Kahlo’s Blue House is with her work. O’Keeffe moved to the Southwest for good in 1949, three years after her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s death. Her spiritual connection to the region began with a visit to Taos in 1929, and she continued to visit and paint the area throughout the 30s and 40s.
The story about her discovery of the famous house—photographed hundreds of times by her and dozens of others—seems emblematic of the decades of decisive, mature painting and photography. Her vision seems supremely confident and entirely sui generis—a passionate way of seeing as distinctive as van Gogh’s. But like van Gogh, and every other famous artist, O’Keeffe served an apprentice period, which at the turn of the 20th century meant learning classical techniques. Once in New York, she became known for experimental paintings of skyscrapers and her stunning abstract flowers.
In the TED-Ed lesson above by Iseult Gillespie, we learn how O’Keeffe turned her early formal training into her first series of abstract drawings, in charcoal. These works “defy easy classification, suggesting, but never quite matching, any specific natural reference.” O’Keeffe mailed the drawings to a friend in New York, who showed them to Stieglitz, who “became entranced.” Soon after, he arranged her first exhibit. Her student days at an end, she moved to New York in 1918 and quickly became associated with a circle of American Modernists.
She married Stieglitz, but O’Keeffe’s path would take her away from her husband, and from the metropolitan centers most associated with early 20th century Modernism, and into the hermetic desert solitude for which she became known—a path the painter Agnes Martin would follow decades later. O’Keeffe’s process was that of a desert ascetic—“based on ritual and close observation. She paid meticulous attention to small details, and spent hours mixing paints to find exactly the right colors.” She kept track of her blazing palette with handmade color cards.
O’Keeffe’s work has often been reduced to prurient speculation about the resemblance of her flowers to female genitalia, a Freudian lens she categorically dismissed: “She resented the male gaze that dominated the art world and demanded her work be respected for its emotional evocation of the natural world.” See high-resolution scans of O’Keeffe’s body of work, from the 1900s to the 1980s, at the Georgia O’Keeffe Collections Online and learn more about her at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Library and Archive.
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The Real Georgia O’Keeffe: The Artist Reveals Herself in Vintage Documentary Clips
Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art, a Short Documentary on the Painter Narrated by Gene Hackman
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Martin Amis Explains His Method for Writing Great Sentences
Why does Martin Amis writes sentences well? As a novelist, he naturally has a high degree of professional interest in the matter. But why does he write sentences so well? One might put forth the influence of his father Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim, an enduring contender for the title of the funniest novel in the English language. But given how seldom one acclaimed novelist sires another — an event, in fact, nearly unheard of — the heritability of literary talent remains unknowable. As for the direct influence of Amis père on Amis fils, we can almost entirely rule it out: not only did Kingsley never encourage Martin to follow in his footsteps, only once did he offer any kind of writerly advice.
“We sat in high-bourgeois splendor, my father and I,” writes the younger Amis in his memoir Experience, “having a pre-lunch drink and talking about his first published story, ‘The Sacred Rhino of Uganda’ (1932: he was ten).” The father-son dialogue runs as follows:
— It was awful in all the usual ways. And full of false quantities. Things like: ‘Raging and cursing in the blazing heat …’
— What’s wrong with that? I mean I can see it’s old fashioned …
— You can’t have three ings like that.
— Can’t you?
— No. It would have to be: ‘Raging and cursing in the … intolerable heat.’
You couldn’t have three ings like that. And sometimes you couldn’t even have two. The same went for -ics, -ives, -lys and -tions. And the same went for all prefixes too.
43 years later, Martin Amis would find himself in the role of literary advice-giver, delivering his father’s principle of writing onstage at the Chicago Humanities Festival. The process of imbuing every sentence with “minimum elegance and euphony,” he says in the clip above (drawn from a longer interview viewable here) involves “saying the sentence, subvocalizing it in your head until there’s nothing wrong with it. This means not repeating in the same sentence suffixes and prefix. If you’ve got a confound, you can’t have a conform. If you’ve got invitation, you can’t have execution. You can’t repeat those, or an -ing, or a -ness: all that has to be one per sentence. I think the prose will give a sort of pleasure without you being able to tell why.”
Clearly writing a sentence that has “nothing wrong with it” goes well beyond adhering to the rules of spelling and grammar. And even after you’ve eliminated all ungainly repetition, you may still have considerable work to do before the sentence rises to a standard worth upholding. There are other questions to ask: do you, for example, truly possess each and every one of the words you’ve used, not just in meaning but sound and rhythm? In order to do so, Amis recommends acquainting yourself more intimately with the dictionary and thesaurus. If all this makes the task of the aspiring writer sound needlessly daunting, follow instead the much simpler advice Amis provides in the clip just above: “Get to the end of the novel, then worry, because you’ve got something in front of you that you can work on. Save the anxiety for the end.”
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V.S. Naipaul Creates a List of 7 Rules for Beginning Writers
Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style (1882)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Barcelona Opera Re-Opens with a Performance for 2,300 Potted Plants: Watch It Online
Writes The Guardian: “Barcelona’s El Liceu opera house reopened on Monday with a concert to an audience of 2,292 potted plants. The event took place a day after Spain’s state of emergency came to an end after more than three months. It was the work of Spanish conceptual artist Eugenio Ampudia, who said the inspiration came from a connection he built with nature during the pandemic: ‘I watched what was going on with nature during all this time. I heard many more birds singing. And the plants in my garden and outside growing faster. And, without a doubt, I thought that maybe I could now relate in a much more intimate way with people and nature.’ ”
You can watch the performance below. It begins at the 8:30 mark. And do know that plants will be donated to frontline health workers.
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Read More...A Collection of 500 Free Textbooks from Springer
FYI. To help support everyone during the COVID-19 lockdown, Springer has released a ton of free textbooks. Since the Springer website isn’t super user-friendly, someone created a webpage that makes it easier to find and even download these texts. The books will remain free at least through the end of July. So start rummaging now.
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!
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The 150 Best Podcasts to Enrich Your Mind Read More...Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self: A Dark, Comedic Reflection on the Last Few Months
What would happen if I tried to explain what’s happening now to the January 2020 version of myself? That’s the question that Julie Nolke asked and answered in early April.
Now she’s back with a sequel where she tries to explain the events of June to her April self.
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!
Read More...How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopranos
Warning: watching the above video essay with David Chase, Matthew Weiner, Terence Winter, and the other writers of The Sopranos (along with select longer-form videos below) may send you into a binge watch (or re-watch) of the HBO series. Just saying, because you might want to set aside some time.
It is hard to believe that the series premiere was over 20 years ago, since its insights into America, our love affair with violence, and the mob hasn’t changed. (I mean, look at the gangsters currently running the country).
David Chase originally balked at the idea of a Godfather-type show after it was pitched to him, but the gangster idea stuck and mutated into an idea for a feature film about a mob boss seeking therapy. Across town in one of those Hollywood coincidences, Harold Ramis was having the same idea for a film called Analyze This.
Ramis’ film would be a perfectly fine comedy and Chase wound up taking his feature idea and turning it into a television series. It would go on to revolutionize television and change the gangster genre for good. For now here was a show about gangsters who were all very aware of the film and television history of the genre, and they acted according to the roles that they idolized from The Godfather and from Good Fellas. Yet, as Chase points out, the characters never really know how to feel about all this:
To me it wasn’t just the ending that was ambiguous. There was ambiguity going on all the time. And you know what that comes down to now that I think about it—the characters in the piece were ambiguous themselves. They didn’t know how they felt. When you write a scene sometimes you think, does this guy really believe what he’s saying? Does he really feel this? Or is this just a placeholder in his mind? ‘I’ll say this line just so I can eat my sandwich’…That’s why [the show] is so fun to write, because usually you are writing what people are thinking of feeling, but in The Sopranos you’re always writing what they’re *not* thinking or feeling.
These were brutish, dumb guys who believed they were the clever, funny guys they grew up watching, and you can extrapolate that to quite a lot of our history from the Cold War and beyond—electing people based on who we want them to be, or for the role they play, not for who they actually are. The end point of Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions is not that he was “cured,” but that he learned the language of therapy in order to justify his actions to himself. As Weiner says, Dr. Melfi’s realization was, “This was all a waste of time. He can’t be helped. I’ve just made him be a better criminal.” Once a sociopath, always a sociopath.
Chase also reveals how the show was structured for each of its seven, 13-episode seasons, with character arcs originally being plotted as separate stories. But inevitably in the writers’ room, the thematic connections between the stories would reveal themselves and the scripts would be tweaked accordingly. Conversations in the room would often be about everything *except* the story and the characters. In the end this was all material that would wind up in the show, the mulch that would create the garden.
This is a good time indeed for a rewatch. Not only did critics Matthew Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall drop the lovingly detailed The Soprano Sessions last year, but actors Michael Imperioli (Christopher Moltisanti) and Steve Schirripa (Bobby Baccalieri) have a podcast where they are currently rewatching and commenting on the show, one episode at a time. You can find all their episodes so far on this youtube playlist. The show is also listed in our new collection, The 150 Best Podcasts to Enrich Your Mind.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...How the Visionary Artist Christo (RIP) Changed the Way We See the World
Husband and wife team Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced what is arguably the most grandiose body of work in modern history. Their temporary monuments to the very idea of hugeness were viewable from space and impossible to ignore on the ground: Entire islands wrapped in miles of pink fabric. Gargantuan yellow and blue umbrellas placed up and down the coasts of California and Japan. The Reichstag bundled up in white fabric like a massive, shiny Christmas gift.
These projects left an indelible impression on millions not only in the months after their unveiling, but decades later. The iconic sites the two artists transformed always bear the memory of having once served as a canvas for their creations.
After removing the wrapping from the Biscayne Bay islands, a project he called “my Water Lilies” in honor of Claude Monet,” Christo remarked that Surrounded Islands lived on, “in the mind of the people.” So too will Christo live on—remembered by millions as an artist who did things no one else would ever have conceived of, much less carried out.
The artist, who passed away from natural causes at age 84 yesterday, seemed to savor the controversy and bewilderment that met his incredibly labor-intensive outdoor sculptures. “If there are questions, if there’s a public outcry,” he said of their 2005 Central Park installation The Gates, “we know how the public can be angry at art, which I think is fantastic.” I remember walking through The Gates when it debuted and thinking, as most everyone does at some point in response to his massive outdoor installations, “but, why?”
The effect was undeniably striking, hundreds of saffron flags waving between rectangular steel archways. Spring bloomed around the rows of gates that twisted around the Park’s footpaths, 7,503 gates in all. From a short distance away from the park, The Gates could be breathtaking. Up close, it could be crowded and obtrusive, as masses of tourists and locals made their way through the gauntlet of orange steel structures.
Hardly does it occur to us in museums to ask why the art exists. We enter with lofty, readymade ideas about its value and importance. But we were never given scripts to make sense of Christo’s whimsical intrusions into the landscape. Instead, he and Jeanne-Claude invented new forms and new venues for art, and made the multi-year process of planning and building each work from scratch a part of the work itself.
That process included lobbying legislatures and bureaucracies, sketching and planning, and coordinating with thousands who installed and removed the finished products. Each Christo and Jeanne-Claude creation seemed more ostentatious than the last. “His grand projects,” writes William Grimes at The New York Times, “often decades in the making and all of them temporary, required the cooperation of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of landowners, government officials, judges, environmental groups, local residents, engineers and workers, many of whom had little interest in art and a deep reluctance to see their lives and their surroundings disrupted by an eccentric visionary.”
And yet, “again and again, Christo prevailed, through persistence, charm and a childlike belief that eventually everyone would see things the way he did.” This meant that everyone who had to live with Christo’s creations in their backyards had to see things his way too, for as long as the public art existed. Christo “remained stoic in the face of mounting criticism,” as Alex Greenberger at Artnews puts it. Associated early with Situationism and France’s Nouveau Réalisme movement, the artist shared the latter group’s goal of discovering “new ways of perceiving the real” and the former movement’s commitment to spectacle as a means of mass disruption.
In the short video introductions to some of Christo and Jean-Claude’s most famous works here, you can see how the two revealed new realities to the world, driving up tourism while spurning corporate dollars. Instead, the artists financed their own projects by selling off the drawings and plans used to conceive them. Their operation was a self-sustaining entity, a thriving, successful company of its own. What they made were “beautiful things,” the artist said, “unbelievably useless, totally unnecessary,” and also totally inspiring, infuriating, and unforgettable.
“Christo lived his life to the fullest,” a statement released by his office reads, “not only dreaming up what seemed impossible but realizing it. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artwork brought people together in shared experiences across the globe, and their work lives on in our hearts and memories.” Christo hasn’t finished with us yet. The artist died while in the final planning stages of what will be his final work, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (Project for Paris, Place de l’Étoile – Charles de Gaulle), first conceived in 1962. That project, which will swaddle Paris’s Arc de Triomphe in 269,097 feet of fabric, is still expected to debut in 2021.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...
Albert Einstein Explains Why We Need to Read the Classics
Two pieces of reading advice I’ve carried throughout my life came from two early favorite writers, Herman Melville and C.S. Lewis. In one of the myriad pearls he tosses out as asides in his prose, Melville asks in Moby Dick, “why read widely when you can read deeply?” Why spread our minds thin? Rather than agonize over what we don’t know, we can dig into the relatively few things we do until we’ve mastered them, then move on to the next thing.
Melville’s counsel may not suit every temperament, depending on whether one is a fox or a hedgehog (or an Ahab). But Lewis’ advice might just be indispensable for developing an outlook as broad-minded as it is deep. “It is a good rule,” he wrote, “after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”
Many other famous readers have left behind similar pieces of reading advice, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of notorious opener “It was a dark and stormy night.” As though refining Lewis’ suggestion, he proposed, “In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. New books revive and redecorate old ideas; old books suggest and invigorate new ideas.”
Albert Einstein shared neither Lewis’ religion nor Bulwar-Lytton’s love of semicolons, but he did share both their outlook on reading the ancients. Einstein approached the subject in terms of modern arrogance and ignorance and the bias of presentism, writing in a 1952 journal article:
Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.
There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium.
Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist’s snobbishness.
Einstein himself read both widely and deeply, so much so that he “became a literary motif for some writers,” as Dr. Antonia Moreno González notes, not only because of his paradigm-shattering theories but because of his generally well-rounded public genius. He was frequently asked, and happy to volunteer, his “ideas and opinions”—as the title of a collection of his writing calls his non-scientific work, becoming a public philosopher as well as a scientist.
We might credit Einstein’s liberal attitude toward reading and education—in the classical sense of the word “liberal”— as a driving force behind his endless intellectual curiosity, humility, and lack of prejudice. His diagnosis of the problem of modern ignorance may strike us as grossly understated in our current political circumstances. As for what constitutes a “classic,” I like Italo Calvino’s expansive definition: “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
via Mental Floss
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Expansive Vocal Range of Joni Mitchell: From the Early to Later Years
It’s quite a testament to Joni Mitchell’s musicianship that her “voice is arguably the most underrated aspect of her music.” So writes a contributor to The Range Place, an online project that analyzes the vocal ranges of popular singers. This is not to say that Mitchell’s voice is underrated—far from it—but her adventurous, deeply personal lyricism and experimental songwriting are how she is most often distinguished from the cohort of 60s singer-songwriters who emerged from the folk scene. (She first became known as the writer of Judy Collins’ hit, “Both Sides, Now.”)
That said, there’s no mistaking her for any other singer. “With very wide vibrato, she would frequently reach into her upper register comfortably with a blissful falsetto while still being able to reach some smooth lower notes with ease.” You can hear examples of her vocal range above, in excerpts from dozens of songs, both studio and live versions, recorded throughout her career. “She was a mezzo-soprano through the late sixties and seventies, with her voice standing out among other singer-songwriters due to its unusual comfort in the fifth octave.”
There are many other qualities that set Mitchell’s voice apart, including her incredible sense of pitch and rhythm. As session singer and vocal coach Jaime Babbitt writes, “singers who study singing and play instruments that make chords are better than all the rest. Joni Mitchell played many: dulcimer, guitar, piano, and flute, even ukulele as a child.” Mitchell’s instrumental skill gave her precise vocal timing, “a critical and often overlooked singer-skill,” and one that contributes hugely to a vocal performance.
Her love of jazz infuses even her folkiest songs with rhythmic vocal patterns that run up and down the scale. (Hear an example in the isolated vocals from 1971’s “River,” just above.) Just as every singer’s voice will do, Mitchell’s range narrowed with age. “Her voice nowadays,” writes The Range Place (though she no longer performs), “is closer to that of a contralto than to that of a mezzo-soprano, having lowered substantially more than other singers from the seventies”—a likely outcome of her lifelong smoking habit.
It’s common to say of an older singer that “she can’t hit the high notes anymore,” but this judgment misses out on the richness of a mature voice. Mitchell’s “indomitable technique” never wavered in her later years, Paul Taylor argues at The Independent. Her later voice was “stunning (bereft, bewildered, stoical),” transformed from the ambitious, piercing falsetto to “radiant/rueful” and wise.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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