It is not often noted that the surrealist movement in the 1920s originated with poets like Paul Éluard and André Breton, himself a trained psychologist, who drew explicitly from the work of Sigmund Freud, “the private world of the mind,” as the Metropolitan Museum of Art puts it. And yet we certainly see the influence of Freudian poetry in the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Man Ray. We also see it, inexplicably, in the work of Hieronymus Bosch, that 15th century Dutch painter of bizarre works like The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych that becomes exponentially more nightmarish as one scans across it from left to right. (Take a virtual tour of the painting here), and from which photographer Lori Pond draws in the astonishing photographs you see here.
How does such a faraway figure as Bosch, whom we know so little about, seem to communicate so closely with our epoch’s artistic movements? The Garden of Earthly Delights, writes Stephen Holden at the New York Times, “outstrips in boldness many of the extreme digital fantasies in Hollywood horror films.” Bosch’s incredibly detailed paintings “feel startlingly contemporary.… Reproductions of his paintings have adorned rock album covers, been parodied on The Simpsons and printed on silk bodices designed by Alexander McQueen.” And he was, in fact, named “Trendiest Apocalyptic Medieval Painter of 2014.”
We might well wonder what Bosch would have done with the same technologies as those who now pay him tribute. Perhaps something very much like Pond has with her Bosch Redux series, a collection of photographs of very close-up details in several of Bosch’s paintings, featuring one or two characters. To make these photos, writes Alyssa Coppelman at Adobe’s Create blog, Pond “bought props online, in antique stores, and at swap meets, and friends donated her old Halloween costumes.” She hired a prosthetics designer and her “taxidermy teacher.” For photos like that above from the central panel of the triptych, Pond even hired a set builder to create a life-sized boat that could fit the two real-life models.
Many of these effects might have been accomplished by early twentieth century surrealists, and indeed, when these details from Bosch’s work are amplified they resemble nothing so much as those psychoanalytic modernists. But Pond admits, “I fully abide by the maxim, ‘A photograph isn’t a photograph until it goes through Photoshop.’” She makes the usual adjustments, adds filters and effects, then employs “textures, backgrounds, and other small details from the original paintings,” making Bosch a collaborator in these close-up remixes, which come from The Last Judgment, The Temptation of St. Anthony, and The Garden of Earthly Delights, of course—the painting that first gave her the inspiration when Pond saw it at the Prado in Madrid. You can see many more examples of the series at Pond’s website, sixteen surreally apocalyptic visions in all.
On Friday, a person who has insulted, demeaned, and threatened tens of millions of the country’s citizens will take the oath of office for the presidency of the United States. That’s an extraordinary thing, and the reaction will also be extraordinary—a Women’s March the following day in Washington, DC expected to draw hundreds of thousands of every gender, race, creed, and orientation. Sister marches and protests will take place in every major city on the East and West Coast and everywhere in-between, as well as internationally in cities like London, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Calgary, Barcelona, Dar es Salaam… the list goes on and on and on.
Why Women’s Marches if these events are all-inclusive? In addition to responding to the public displays of contempt for women we’ve witnessed over and over in the past year, the events intend to reaffirm the rights of all people. The organizers succinctly state that “women’s rights are human rights. We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us.”
A Rawlsian progressive notion, and also a “Kingian” one, a description the march applies to its nonviolent principles. What they don’t say is that there is also significant historical precedent for the action. Over 100 years ago, another women’s march coincided with a presidential swearing-in, this time of Woodrow Wilson in March of 1913.
Marching for the cause of suffrage, women from around the country and the world arrived in DC on March 3rd, the day before Wilson’s inauguration. Many of those marchers had hiked 234 miles from New York in 17 days, bearing a letter to the President-elect, writes Mashable, “demanding that he make suffrage a priority of his administration and warning that the women of the nation would be watching ‘with an intense interest such as has never before been focused upon the administration of any of your predecessors.’” Organized by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the march promised, in their words, “the most conspicuous and important demonstration that has ever been attempted by suffragists in this country.”
The parade was filled with pageantry. “Clad in a white cape astride a white horse,” writes the Library of Congress, “lawyer Inez Mulholland led the great woman suffrage parage down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital. Behind her stretched a long line with nine bands, four mounted brigades, three heralds, about twenty-four floats, and more than 5,000 marchers.” As you can see in the film footage at the top and the images here from the LoC—including the drawing of the parade route above by Little Nemo cartoonist Winsor McKay—the parade drew a huge global coalition. It also drew ridicule, harassment, and violence from groups in DC for the following day’s festivities. As the LoC writes:
[A]ll went well for the first few blocks. Soon, however, the crowds, mostly men in town for the following day’s inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, surged into the street making it almost impossible for the marchers to pass. Occasionally only a single file could move forward. Women were jeered, tripped, grabbed, shoved, and many heard “indecent epithets” and “barnyard conversation.” Instead of protecting the parade, the police “seemed to enjoy all the ribald jokes and laughter and in part participated in them.” One policeman explained that they should stay at home where they belonged.
Many marchers were injured; “two ambulances ‘came and went constantly for six hours, always impeded and at times actually opposed, so that doctor and driver literally had to fight their way to give succor.’” The event included several prominent figures, including Helen Keller, “who was unnerved by the experience.” Also present was Jeannette Rankin, who, writes Mashable, “would become the first woman elected to the House of Representatives four years later.” Nelly Bly marched, as did journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, “who marched with the Illinois delegation despite the complaints of some segregationist marchers.”
In fact, though the selective images suggest otherwise, the march was more inclusive than the suffragist movement is generally given credit for. Over the objections of mostly Southern delegates, many black women joined the ranks. After “telegrams and protests poured in” protesting segregation, members of the National Association of Colored Women “marched according to their State and occupation without let or hindrance,” noted the NAACP journal Crisis. And yet, when the women’s vote was finally achieved in 1920, that general category still did not include black women. The misogyny on display that day was vicious, but still perhaps not as endemic as the country’s racism, which existed in large degree within suffragist groups as well.
Once the press broadcast news of the marchers’ mistreatment, there was a massive public outcry that helped reinvigorate the suffrage movement. Several other artists than McKay found inspiration in the march; Cleveland Plain Dealer cartoonist James Donahey, for example, “substituted women for men in a cartoon based on the famous painting ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware,’” writes the Library of Congress. Another cartoonist, George Folsom, documented the stages of the hike from New York, with captions addressed to male readers. The strip above says, “they are making history mates—be sure you save it for your descendants.” Another strip reads “Brave women all, none braver mates. Put this away and look at it when they win.”
The German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno had much to say about what was wrong with society, and even now, nearly fifty years after his death, his adherents would argue that his diagnoses have lost none of their relevance. But what, exactly, did he think ailed us? This animated introduction from Alain de Botton’s School of Life on the “the beguiling and calmly furious work” of the author of books like Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and The Authoritarian Personalityoffers a brief primer on the critical theory that constituted Adorno’s entire life’s work.
Well, almost his entire life’s work: “Until his twenties, Adorno planned for a career as a composer, but eventually focused on philosophy.” He then became an exile from his homeland in 1934, eventually landing in Los Angeles, where he found himself “both fascinated and repelled by Californian consumer culture, and thought with unusual depth about suntans and drive-ins.”
This eventually brought him to define “three significant ways in which capitalism corrupts and degrades us,” the first being that “leisure time becomes toxic” (due in large part to the “omnipresent and deeply malevolent entertainment machine which he called the Culture Industry”), the second that “capitalism doesn’t sell us the things we really need,” and the third that “proto-fascists are everywhere.”
Even if you don’t buy all the dangers Adorno ascribes to capitalism itself, his core observation still holds up: “Psychology comes ahead of politics. Long before someone is racist, homophobic, or authoritarian, they are, Adorno skillfully suggested, likely to be suffering from psychological frailties and immaturities, which is the task of a good society to get better at spotting and responding to.” In order to address this, “we should learn to understand the psychology of everyday insanity from the earliest moments.” What would Adorno, who “recognized that the primary obstacles to social progress are cultural and psychological rather than narrowly political or economic,” make of our 21st-century social media age? Maybe it would surprise him — and maybe it wouldn’t surprise him at all.
Materials like carbon fiber and Lucite have been making their way into classical stringed instrument design for many years, and we’ve recently seen the 3‑D printed electric violin come into being. It’s an impressive-sounding instrument, one must admit. But trained classical violinists, luthiers, music historians, and collectors all agree: the violin has never really been improved upon since around the turn of the 18th century, when two its finest makers—the Amati and Stradivari families—were at their peak. A few studies have tried to poke holes in the argument that such violins are superior in sound to modern makes. There are many reasons to view these claims with skepticism.
By the time the most expert Italian luthiers began making violins, the instrument had already more or less assumed its final shape, after the long evolution of its f‑holes into the perfect sonic conduit. However, Amati and Stradivari not only refined the violin’s curves, edges, and neck design, they also introduced new chemical processes meant to protect the wood from worms and insects.
One biochemistry professor discovered that these chemicals “had the unintended result of producing the unique sounds that have been almost impossible to duplicate in the past 400 years.”
Knowing they had hit upon a winning formula, the top makers passed their techniques down for several generations, making hundreds of violins and other instruments. A great many of these instruments survive, though a market for fakes thrives alongside them. The instruments you see in the videos here are the real thing, four of the world’s oldest and most priceless violins, all of them residing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These date from the late 1600s to early 1700s, and were all made in Cremona, the Northern Italian home of the great masters. At the top of the post, you can see Sean Avram Carpenter play Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor on a 1669 violin made by Nicolò Amati.
The next three videos are of violins made by Antonio Stradivari, perhaps once an apprentice of Amati. Each instrument has its own nickname: “The Gould” dates from 1693 and is, writes the Met, “the only [Stradivari] in existence that has been restored to its original Baroque form.” We can see Carpenter play Bach’s Sonata in C major on this instrument further up. Both “The Gould” and the Amati violin were made before modifications to the angle of the neck created “a louder, more brilliant tone.” Above you can hear “The Francesca,” from 1694. Carpenter plays from “Liebesleid” by Fritz Kreisler with the pianist Gabriela Martinez. See if you can tell the difference in tone between this instrument and the first two, less modern designs.
The last violin featured here, “The Antonius,” made by Stradivari in 1717, gets a demonstration in front of a live audience by Eric Grossman, who plays the chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor. This instrument comes from what is called Stradivari’s “Golden Period,” the years between 1700 and 1720. Some of the most highly valued of Stradivarii in private hands date from around this time. And some of these instruments have histories that may justify their staggering price tags. The Molitor Stradivarius, for example, was supposedly owned by Napoleon. But no matter the previous owner or number of millions paid, every violin created by one of these makers carries with it tremendous prestige. Is it deserved? Hearing them might make you a believer. Joseph Nagyvary, the Texas A&M professor emeritus who is discovering their secrets, tells us, “the great violin masters were making violins with more humanlike voices than any others of the time.” Or any since, most experts would agree.
Ullmann and Bergman’s cinematic legacies are inextricably linked. When you think of one, you think of the other. And yet Ullmann had an acting career before and after Bergman. Above, you can watch The Danish Poet, narrated by Ullmann herself. Winner of the 2007 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, The Danish Poet follows “Kasper, a poet whose creative well has run dry, on a holiday to Norway to meet the famous writer, Sigrid Undset. As Kasper’s quest for inspiration unfolds, it appears that a spell of bad weather, an angry dog, slippery barn planks, a careless postman, hungry goats and other seemingly unrelated factors might play important roles in the big scheme of things after all.”
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David Lynch meditates, and he meditates hard. Beginning his practice in earnest after it helped him solve a creative problem during the production of his breakout 1977 film Eraserhead, he has continued meditating assiduously ever since, going so far as to found the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and Peace and publish a pro-meditation book called Catching the Big Fish.
It might seem nonsensical to hear an artist of the grotesque like Lynch speak rapturously about voyaging into his own consciousness, let alone in his fractured all-American, askew-Jimmy-Stewart manner, but he does meditate for a practical reason: it gives him ideas.
Only by meditating, he says, can he dive down and catch the “big fish” he uses as ingredients in his inimitable film, music, and visual art. You can hear more of his thoughts on meditation, consciousness, and creativity in his nine-minute speech above.
If you’d like to hear more, the video just above offers a nearly two-hour presentation at UC Berkeley with Lynch as its star. You’ll also hear from outspoken quantum physicist John Hagelin and Fred Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition Maharishi University of Management. Some of what they say might make good sense to you: after all, we could all use a method to clear our minds so we can create what we need to create. Some of what they say might strike you as total nonsense. But if you feel tempted to dismiss all as too bizarre for serious consideration, you might meditate, as it were, on other things Lynchian: backwards-talking dwarves, severed ears on suburban lawns, alien babies, women living in radiators, sitcom families in rabbit suits. He’s certainly pitched us weirder concepts than meditation.
For some secular introductions to meditation, you may wish to try out some of these resources.
Though he’s hardly a household name like Kandinsky or Klee, Hungarian painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy was just as influential as those members of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus during the 1920s. As a teacher and one of the collective’s “leading figures,” Fiona MacCarthy argues, he may have indeed been, “the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists.” Where all of the school’s members embraced, and sometimes critiqued, emerging technologies, materials, and modes of production, perhaps none did so with such conviction as Moholy-Nagy.
“Everyone is equal before the machine,” he once wrote, “I can use it; so can you. It can crush me; the same can happen to you.” His cool “grasp of new technologies,” writes MacCarthy, “was prophetic.… Entranced by the mechanized production of artworks,” he ridiculed “the artists’ traditional stance as individual creator.” Many modern artists shunned advertising work, but in Moholy-Nagy’s case, the transition seems perfectly natural and consistent with his theory. He also needed the money. Having fled the Nazis and settled in London in 1935, the artist found himself, notes Hyperallergic, “looking to pick up some work to support his displaced life.”
He found it in 1936 through the UK’s Imperial Airways, who commissioned him to apply “his constructivist style” to a map (view it in a larger format here) intended to reassure nervous potential customers of the safety of air travel, a still new and frightening prospect for most travelers. He did so in a way that “makes air travel seem as approachable as stepping on the subway,” with his officiously color-coded “Map of Empire & European Air Routes.” The map, according to Rumsey, “draws on the pioneering information design work of Harry Beck and his London subway maps,” made in 1933 and “originally considered too radical.”
In addition to this businesslike presentation of orderly and predictable flight patterns, Moholy-Nagy created a brochure for the British airline (see the cover above and more pageshere). Incorporating the so-called “Speedbird symbol,” these designs, writes Paul Jarvis, made “the point that Imperial spanned the empire and in time would span the world.” Not everyone was impressed. British transit executive Frank Pick, who presided over the visual identity of the London Underground, called Mohagy-Nagy “a gentleman with a modernistic tendency… of a surrealistic type, and I am not at all clear why we should fall for this.” His comments underscore MacCarthy’s argument that the Hungarian artist’s reputation suffered in England because of nationalist hostilities.
Mohagy-Nagy’s art “is international,” said Pick, “or at least continental. Let us leave the continent to pursue their own tricks.” The statement now seems a bit uncanny, though of course Pick could have had nothing like Brexit in mind. As far as Imperial Airlines was concerned, Mohagy-Nagy’s “continental” avant-gardism was exactly what the company needed to entice wary, yet adventurous passengers. You can download free high resolution scans of the map, or buy a print, at the David Rumsey Map Collection (an original vintage poster will cost you between four and six thousand dollars). And see some of Mohagy-Nagy’s less commercial work at this downloadable collection of Bauhaus books and journals.
Back in September, we featured Every Frame a Painting’s video essay on how bland and unoriginal so much film music has become. As the essay makes clear—and as the Coen brothers and Carter Burwell revealed in a recent roundtable—part of the problem is the ubiquity of “temp music”—the music directors and editors use as temporary scores in rough cuts. Some kind of inertia has trapped Hollywood composers into copying classical works, and each other, in ways that often verge on plagiarism.
In contrast to this tendency, some directors simply find that their temp music is so compelling that they are compelled to keep it. In perhaps the best example of this, Stanley Kubrick tossed out Alex North’s score for the final cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey and kept the music of Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss, of Ligeti, Khachaturian, and others. North famously didn’t find out until the film’s premiere. Comparing North’s mild score with, for example, Thus Spake Zarathustra, we can hardly fault the director’s choice, but he could have communicated it better.
This episode might have deterred another Kubrick composer, Wendy Carlos, who ended up providing music for two of his best-known later films. Fans of both Kubrick and Carlos will be grateful that it didn’t, though the experience became a frustrating one for Carlos, who often found her music nudged out as well. Nonetheless, her contributions to A Clockwork Orange and The Shining are indispensable in creating the dread and horror that carry through these cinematic masterpieces. As you can hear in the opening title music for both films, at the top and below, Carlos’ synth scores set up the near-unbearable tensions in Kubrick’s worlds.
In fact, Carlos came to prominence by doing what many a film composer does, interpreting the work of classical composers. But her reworkings of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart are unique, made on early Moog synthesizers, which she had a hand in designing while a student at Columbia University’s Electronic Music Center in the sixties. Her album Switched on Bach, released the same year as 2001, won the composer three Grammy Awards, put Baroque music on the pop charts, garnered the highest praise from no less a keyboard authority than Glenn Gould, and “made electronic music mainstream.”
The album also put Carlos on Kubrick’s radar and he hired her and producer Rachel Elkind to compose the score for 1972’s A Clockwork Orange. Much of the music Carlos wrote or interpreted for the film wound up being cut, but what remained—the haunting arrangement of Henry Purcell in the film’s opening title, for example—has become inseparable from the classical and futuristic elements commingled in Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess. Carlos’ complete original score has since been released as a CD, which you can purchase. The first track, “Timesteps,” as the album’s liner notes inform us, was both the only original composition that made it into the film and the first recording Carlos sent to Kubrick.
As Carlos herself writes on her website, she found the abridgement of her music “frustrating… as these were among the best things we’d done for the project.” Eight years later, during her work on The Shining, she would almost suffer the same fate as Alex North when she and Elkind wrote a complete score for the film and Kubrick—writes site The Overlook Hotel—“ended up using only two of their complete tracks, ‘The Shining’ (Main Title), and ‘Rocky Mountains.’” As with 2001, the perfectionistic director instead decided on several classical compositions—from Ligeti, Penderecki, Bartok and others.
And who can fault his choice? As The Cinemologists observe, his use of music has ended up informing horror film scores ever since, as Bernard Hermann’s Psycho score had twenty years earlier. But Carlos was soured on the relationship and vowed never again to work with Kubrick on another project. Yet again, we can be grateful for the collaboration. Her music for the title sequence (with Elkind’s distorted voice)—so weirdly, dissonantly ominous—provides the perfect accompaniment to one of the most complex opening sequences in film history.
In this case also, we can hear what Carlos intended, with the release of two volumes of Carlos’ “lost scores” that include her Shining compositions along with those from A Clockwork Orange and Tron. You can purchase those compilations here and here and read liner notes here and here. Carlos has worked hard to safeguard her privacy, and you’ll find little of her music online. Yet her strangely compelling soundtracks are well worth tracking down in any form you can find them.
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