The Greatest Art Heist in History: How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen from the Louvre (1911)
If you happen to go to the Louvre to have a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get especially close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cellphone photographers, and more so to the painting’s having been installed behind a wooden barrier and encased in a sturdy-looking glass box. These are suitable precautions, you might imagine, for the single most famous work of art in the world. But there wasn’t always so much security, and indeed, nor was Mona Lisa always so dearly prized. A little more than a century ago, you could just walk out of the Louvre with it.
You could do so, that is, provided you had a knowledge of the Louvre’s internal operations, the nerve to pluck a masterpiece off its walls, and the willingness to spend a night in one of the museum’s closets. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian immigrant who’d worked there as a cleaner and reframer of paintings, had all those qualities. On the evening of Sunday, August 20th, 1911, Peruggia entered the Louvre wearing one of its standard-issue employee coats. The next day, he emerged into an almost empty museum, closed as it was to the public every Monday. You can find out what happened next by watching the Primal Space video above, which visualizes each step of the heist and its aftermath.
Why did Peruggia dare to steal the Mona Lisa in broad daylight, an act worthy of Arsène Lupin (himself created just a few years earlier)? Discovered a couple years later, having hidden the painting in the false bottom of a trunk nearly all the while, Peruggia cast himself as an Italian patriot attempting to return a piece of cultural patrimony to its homeland. Another possibility, elaborated upon in the video, is that he was nothing more than a pawn in a larger scheme masterminded by the forger Eduardo de Valfierno, who planned to make several copies of the missing masterpiece and sell them to credulous American millionaires.
That, in any case, is what one Saturday Evening Post story reported in 1932, though it could well be that, in reality, Peruggia acted alone, out of no higher motive than a need for cash. (In a way, it would have been a more interesting story had the culprits actually been Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose unrelated possession of statues stolen from the Louvre drew police suspicion.) However the heist occurred, it wouldn’t have happened if its object hadn’t already been widely known, at least among art enthusiasts. But soon after La Gioconda was returned to her rightful place, she became the face of art itself — and the reason museums do things much differently now than they did in the nineteen-tens. The Louvre, you’ll notice, is now closed on Tuesdays instead.
Related content:
What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes
What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Painting: A Deep Dive
Why Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Painting is Not the Mona Lisa
How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II
When Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire Were Accused of Stealing the Mona Lisa (1911)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...When Queen’s Freddie Mercury Performed with Opera Superstar Montserrat Caballé in 1988: A Meeting of Two Powerful Voices
Combining pop music with opera was always the height of pretension. But where would we be without the pretentious? As Brian Eno observed in his 1995 diary, “My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.” And with Freddie Mercury and Queen, if it wasn’t for pretense we wouldn’t have “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Hell, we wouldn’t have Queen, period.
But in 1988 the gamble didn’t exactly pay off. To the British music press, Mercury was coasting on Live Aid fumes and the shadow of his unsuccessful solo album. And then to hear that he’d teamed up with opera singer Montserrat Caballé? Despite what any hagiographic tale of Mercury might say, this passed your average rock fan by.
Outside the whims of the charts, however, Mercury’s teaming up with Caballé was the fulfillment of a goal he’d had since 1981. The singer had fallen in love with Caballé’s voice in 1981 when he’d seen her perform alongside Luciano Pavarotti.
Then began a dance between the two artists. Mercury was worried that Caballé would not take this rock star seriously. Caballé, on the other hand, was a rock music fan just like so many people. They owned each other’s albums. Finally, in early 1986, the two met: Caballé’s brother was the music director of the upcoming 1992 Barcelona Olympics and ‘Who better to do a theme song with than Freddie Mercury?’ said the singer.
According to Peter Freestone, Mercury’s personal assistant and longtime friend, meeting Caballé was the most nervous he’d ever been. Mercury was worried the opera singer would be aloof and distant. But she was as down to earth as Mercury in their offstage moments.
As Freestone recounted, “Freddie assumed they’d only make one song together. Then Montserrat said: ‘How many songs do you put on a rock album?’ When Freddie told her eight or 10, she said: ‘Fine – we will do an album.’”
Mercury had two deadlines: one based around Caballé’s schedule, and the other based around his recent AIDS virus diagnosis. Though he had composed the opening song “Barcelona” to sing alongside Caballé at the 1992 opening ceremonies, he told her that he probably wouldn’t be around for that to happen. (Caballé instead sang “Amigos para siempre (Friends forever)” with Spanish tenor José Carreras.) They did manage to perform together, singing “Barcelona” at a promotional event at Ku nightclub in Ibiza in May, 1987.
Mercury wrote the eight songs on the Barcelona album with Mike Moran, the songwriter who’d also worked with Mercury on his previous solo album and whose “Exercises in Free Love” was adapted into “Ensueño” for the album, with Caballé helping in the rewrite.
According to Freestone, watching Caballé was the most emotional he’d seen the usually reserved singer: “When Montserrat sang ‘Barcelona’, after her first take was the nearest I ever saw Freddie to tears. Freddie was emotional, but he was always in control of his emotions, because he could let them out in performing or writing songs. He grabbed my hand and said: ‘I have the greatest voice in the world, singing my music!’ He was so elated.”
In time, the album has gained in reputation, but critics point out that the label spent most of its budget on the title track—full orchestration, the works, as befits a meeting of two operatic minds—and relied on synths for the remaining songs. Fans are asking for a rerecording that brings the full orchestra to all the tracks. We’ve certainly seen odder requests granted in the last few years, like the remix of what many consider Bowie’s worst album. So who indeed can tell? Watch this space.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...A Meditative Tour of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Masterpiece
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is a “house museum,” first designed as a residence, and now open to the public. In fact, as the institution’s director Justin Gunther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of the modern movement to open as a public site,” having begun offering tours in 1964. The openness of Fallingwater owes a great deal to the efforts of Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the son of the Pittsburgh department-store magnate who commissioned the house in the first place. The family happened to own a piece of land in southern Pennsylvania that was once an employee retreat, and Kaufmann fils, high on a reading of Wright’s recently published autobiography, knew just who should design a weekend home for the site.
Not that it was a simple process, even for the son of a tycoon. But luckily, “Frank Lloyd Wright had just established an apprenticeship program at Taliesin.” The young Kaufmann applied, “and of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, knowing who the Kaufmanns were, could sniff out a good potential client.”
Soon accepted, Kaufmann spent about six months studying under Wright, during which time his visiting parents also became “enamored with Wright’s ideas of organic architecture.” No other living architect, perhaps, could deliver on the promise of a house fully inspired by its natural context, which in this case included a waterfall. Still, one wonders if even his most eager clients understood just what they were getting into.
“The Kaufmanns thought that they were going to have a house that was looking at the falls, and then, of course, Wright had different ideas. He thought that if you put the most dramatic part of a landscape in your view constantly, it would become something that’s tiresome. You would just become used to it.” But “if you were forced out into the landscape to see it, then it would always have an impact.” Built atop the waterfall instead, by local laborers and using stone quarried right there at the site, the house makes a unique impression, and one that makes perfect aesthetic sense: as Gunther puts it, “the waterfall can’t live without the house, and the house can’t live without the waterfall.” Nor, these nearly nine decades after the main building’s completion, is the course of American architecture quite imaginable without Fallingwater.
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Inside the Beautiful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)
A Beautiful Visual Tour of Tirranna, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remarkable, Final Creations
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Miles Davis’ Album On the Corner Tried to Woo Young Rock & Funk Fans: First Considered a Disaster, It’s Now Hailed as a Masterpiece
Miles Davis didn’t put out any studio albums from 1973 until the middle of 1981. In explaining the reasons for this lacuna in his recording career, Milesologists can point to a variety of factors in the man’s professional and personal life. But one in particular looms large: the failure of his 1972 album On the Corner. Davis wasn’t known for occupying any one style of jazz for very long, to put it mildly, but the On the Corner sessions find him very nearly breaking with jazz itself. In a bid to recapture the attention of young black listeners, he took the plunge into a mix of what he later described as “Stockhausen plus funk plus Ornette Coleman.”
“Miles wanted the kids who were into rock,” writes JazzTimes’ Colin Fleming. “That was the target demo, an audience he’d been courting since 1970’s Bitches Brew. He played for that audience on the psychedelic ballroom circuit, doing so with rock groups — the Steve Miller Band, for instance — that he had no respect for as musicians. Davis thought he was slumming it while sharing such bills, but he also believed in the listening skills of youth, which is usually a wise thing to do.” “The resulting, seemingly incongruous mix of musical experiences and desires led him and a host of collaborators — including Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, and James Mtume — to make ‘one holy hell of a grooving, minimalist racket.’”
Upon its release, On the Corner “was derided as an affront to taste, an insult to listeners, a sham perpetuated by a man who wanted to rub your face in something most unpleasant, just because he thought he could.” And yet, hearing it in this era — as I did not long ago while listening through Davis’ entire discography — you’d struggle to understand the source of the offense. Indeed, a twenty-first-century listener may well be more troubled by Corky McCoy’s infamous cover art, with its stereotypical street scene whose characters range from prostitute to pimp, hustler to homosexual. The image has been described as “ghettodelic,” a word that could also label the inchoate musical subgenre Davis was attempting to forge.
The culture has long since caught up with the particular sonic experiment run in On the Corner, which “has been hailed in recent years as the album that helped birth hip-hop, funk, post-punk, electronica, and just about any other popular music with a repetitive beat, which was quite the feat for a record that not many people have ever listened to.” But if you join those ranks, you can hardly avoid noticing the textures its sonic collage shares with popular genres of the past few decades, thanks not least to the splicing, and looping that was the specialty of producer Teo Macero (also Davis’ collaborator on Sketches of Spain, In a Silent Way, and Bitches Brew). Maybe, when all this proved to be a bit much for the early seventies, Davis had no choice but to take a break, having finally gotten a few too many miles ahead.
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Miles Davis’ Entire Discography Presented in a Stylish Interactive Visualization
Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sorry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fillmore East (1970)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Hōshi: A Short Documentary on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japanese Family for 46 Generations
Hōshi, a traditional Japanese inn in Komatsu, Japan, holds the distinction of being the second oldest hotel in the world—and “the oldest still running family business in the world.” Built in 718 AD, Hōshi has been operated by the same family for 46 consecutive generations. Count them. 46 generations.
Japan is a country with deep traditions. And when you’re born into a family that’s the caretaker of a 1,300-year-old institution, you find yourself struggling with issues most of us can’t imagine. That’s particularly true when you’re the daughter of the Hōshi family, a modern woman who wants to break free from tradition. And yet history and strong family expectations keep calling her back.
The story of Hōshi Ryokan is poignantly told in a short documentary above. It was shot in 2014 by the German filmmaker Fritz Schumann.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in April, 2015.
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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Read More...The Roman Colosseum Deconstructed: 3D Animation Reveals the Hidden Technology That Powered Rome’s Great Arena
Most tourists in Rome put the Colosseum at the top of their to-see list. (My own sister-in-law, soon to head out on her Italian honeymoon, plans to head to that storied ruin more or less straight from the airport.) Even those with no particular interest in ancient Roman civilization, stepping into the space that was once the arena — from the Latin harena, referring to the sand laid down to absorb blood shed in combat — fills the imagination with images of gladiators, lions, senators glowering from their courtside seats, and the baying masses behind them. But their visions may not include other such true-to-history details as trap doors, staged naval battles, and a subterranean system of tunnels and elevators, all of which are explained in the new Deconstructed video above.
Even casual Rome enthusiasts all know that competitors and other performers, both human and animal, made their official Colosseum entrances through the floor. (Announcements were made some years ago to the effect that the mechanized floor that made such theatrics possible would be rebuilt by 2023 — a project that seems not to have made much progress as yet, though whether it will end up being put off as long as the Strait of Messina Bridge remains to be seen.)
But only the most obsessive already have a clear understanding of exactly how it worked, which this video clearly explains in both words and 3D renderings, restoring elements of not just the building itself but also its immediate urban context that have long since been lost to time.
Take the velarium, a retractable awning consisting of “long strips of fabric wound around drums, which were mounted on a wooden frame and supported by 240 masts fixed into sockets along the amphitheater’s upper cornice.” With each of its 240 strips operated by a separate winch, it required at least as many human operators to deploy or retract at speed — a greater speed, perhaps, than the operation of some of the retractable roofs incorporated into sports facilities today. Not “just a feat of engineering, but also a precursor for modern stadium design,” the velarium addressed a problem that will hardly escape the notice of modern tourists today — especially those who visit the Colosseum in the middle of a summer day.
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...How Zaha Hadid Revolutionized Architecture & Drew Inspiration from Russian Avant-Garde Art
Zaha Hadid died in 2016, at the age of 65. She certainly wasn’t old, by the standards of our time, though in most professions, her best working years would already have been behind her. She was, however, an architect, and by age 65, most architects are still very much in their prime. Take Rem Koolhaas, who today remains a leader of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in his eighties — and who, back in the seventies, was one of Hadid’s teachers at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. It was there that Koolhaas gave his promising, unconventional student the assignment of basing a project on the art of Kazimir Malevich.
Specifically, as architect Michael Wyetzner explains in the new Architectural Digest video above, Hadid had to adapt one of Malevich’s “arkhitektons,” which were “objects that took his ideas of shapes that he used in his paintings” — the most widely known among them being Black Square, from 1915, previously featured here on Open Culture — “and turned them into a 3D piece.”
To understand Hadid’s formation, then, we must go back to the early-twentieth-century Russia in which Malevich operated as an avant-garde artist, and in which he launched the movement he called Suprematism, whose name reflects “the idea that his art was concerned with the supremacy of pure feeling, as opposed to the representation of the real world.”
As a pioneer of “non-objective” art, Malevich did his part to inspire Hadid on her path to designing buildings that come as close to abstraction as technologically possible. In fact, during the initial phases of Hadid’s career, what we think of as her signature curve-intensive architectural style — exemplified by buildings like the London Aquatics Centre and the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul — wasn’t technologically possible. Examining her early paintings, such as the one of the arkhitekton-based bridge hotel she turned in to Koolhaas, or her first built projects like the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, shows us how her ideas were already evolving in directions then practically unthinkable in architecture. Zaha Hadid has now been gone nearly a decade, but her field is in many ways still catching up with her.
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made
During World War II, Walt Disney entered into a contract with the US government to develop 32 animated shorts. Nearly bankrupted by Fantasia (1940), Disney needed to refill its coffers, and making American propaganda films didn’t seem like a bad way to do it. On numerous occasions, Donald Duck was called upon to deliver moral messages to domestic audiences (see The Spirit of ’43 and Der Fuehrer’s Face). But that wasn’t the case with Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi, a film shown in U.S. movie theaters in 1943.
Based on a book written by Gregor Ziemer, this animated short used a different lineup of characters to show how the Nazi party turned innocent youth into Hitler’s corrupted children. Unlike other topics addressed in Disney war films (e.g. taxes and the draft), this theme—the cultivation of young minds—hit awfully close to home. And it’s perhaps why it’s one of Disney’s better wartime films.
Spiegel Online has more on Disney’s WW II propaganda films here, and you can find some of these films in the Relateds below. Also find links to other WWII propaganda films by Dr. Seuss, Mel Blanc, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra and more.
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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Neuroscience and Propaganda Come Together in Disney’s World War II Film, Reason and Emotion
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Read More...The Extreme Life and Philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism and the American Condition
Hunter S. Thompson has been gone for two decades now. When he went out, as the new Pursuit of Wonder video on his life and work reminds us, he did so in a highly American manner: with a gun, and at the moment of his own choosing. Even his longtime fans who respected something about the agency evident in that choice naturally regretted that he’d made it; many of us have wished aloud that we could read his judgments of the past twenty years’ developments in U.S. politics, culture, and society, which would certainly fit in well enough with the narrative of decline he’d pursued since the late sixties.
At the same time, we recognize that Thompson’s manner of living would hardly have allowed him to live into his late eighties (the man himself expressed surprise to have reached his sixties), and that it was inextricable from his manner of writing. Which is not to call it the main ingredient: as generations of imitators have proven, ingestion of controlled substances and a disrespect for traditional narrative structure do not, by themselves, constitute a recipe for the “gonzo journalism” Thompson pioneered. In fact, he had a healthy respect for structure, cultivated through his early career in workaday reportage and a self-imposed training regime that involved re-typing the whole of A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby.
Gonzo journalism, according to the narrator of the video, actually has a serious question to ask: “Are not the particular subjective filters by which facts and events are processed and imagined in a moment in history as relevant as the facts themselves in understanding the truth of that moment, or at least a slice of the truth?” Thompson’s most widely read books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 stand as two attempts at an answer. But from the late seventies onward, as his “lifelong companions of drugs and chaotic behavior nestled closer, the lines between his larger-than-life character in his work, his public persona, and his true self began to blur.”
It could be said that Thompson never recovered the deceptive clarity of his Fear and Loathing-era work, though he remained prolific to the end. Indeed, there’s much of value in his last three decades of writing for readers attuned to who he really was. “He was not merely the character he portrayed in his work and public life, but the man who cared enough, and was talented enough, to create this character in order to explore, understand, and represent a very nuanced condition of the world during his time.” It would, perhaps, have been better if he’d been able, at some point, to retire the drugs, the firearms, the sunglasses, and the paranoia and come up with a new persona. What kept him from doing so? Maybe the notion, as articulated by his great inspiration Fitzgerald, that there are no second acts in American lives.
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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 and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His Final Interview (1996)
Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) continued doing what he did all along — popularizing science and “enthusiastically conveying the wonders of the universe to millions of people on television and in books.” Whenever Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson during the 70s and 80s, his goal was to connect with everyday Americans — people who didn’t subscribe to Scientific American — and increase the public’s understanding and appreciation of science.
At the end of his life, Sagan still cared deeply about where science stood in the public imagination. But while losing a battle with myelodysplasia, Sagan also sensed that scientific thinking was losing ground in America, and even more ominously within the chambers of the Newt Gingrich-led Congress.
During his final interview, aired on May 27, 1996, Sagan issued a strong warning, telling Charlie Rose:
We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it.
And he also went on to add:
And the second reason that I’m worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious who comes ambling along.
Nearly 30 years later, we have reached that point. Under the second Trump administration, DOGE has rushed to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of our government, haphazardly cutting the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and NASA. Next, they’re going after our leading research universities, intentionally weakening the research engine that has fueled the growth of American corporations—and the overall American economy—since World War II. And they’re replacing scientific leaders with charlatans like RFK Jr. who dabble in the very pseudoscience that Sagan warned us about. Needless to say, our competitors aren’t making the same mistakes. Few serious governments are stupid enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.
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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