Cocktails with a Curator: The Frick Pairs Weekly Art History Lectures with Cocktail Recipes

Once upon a time, not so long ago, First Fri­days at the Frick were a gra­cious way for New York­ers to kick off the week­end. Admis­sion was waived, par­tic­i­pants could take part in open sketch­ing ses­sions or enjoy live per­for­mance, and cura­tors were on hand to give mini lec­tures on the sig­nif­i­cance and his­tor­i­cal con­text of cer­tain prized paint­ings in the col­lec­tion.

Rather than pull the plug entire­ly when the muse­um closed due to the pan­dem­ic, the Frick sought to pre­serve the spir­it of this long­stand­ing tra­di­tion with week­ly episodes of Cock­tails with a Cura­tor, match­ing each selec­tion with recipes for make-at-home themed drinks, with or with­out alco­hol.

Much as we miss these com­mu­nal live events, there’s some­thing to be said for enjoy­ing these wild­ly enter­tain­ing, edu­ca­tion­al mini-lec­tures from the com­fort of one’s own couch, drink in hand, no need to crane past oth­er vis­i­tors for a view, or wor­ry that one might keel over from lock­ing one’s knees too long.

Deputy Direc­tor and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Cura­tor Xavier F. Salomon makes for an espe­cial­ly engag­ing host. His cov­er­age of James McNeill Whistler’s Sym­pho­ny in Flesh Col­or and Pink: Por­trait of Mrs. Frances Ley­land, above, touch­es on the artist’s affin­i­ty for but­ter­flies, music, Japan­ese themes and build­ing his own frames.

But the great­est delight is Salomon’s tal­ent for imbu­ing 19th-cen­tu­ry art world gos­sip with a sense of imme­di­a­cy.

Sip a sake high­ball (or a vir­gin san­gria-style refresh­er of plum juice and mint) and chew on the true nature of the artist’s rela­tion­ship with his ship­ping mag­nate patron’s wife.

Sake High­ball
sake (of your choice)
club soda (as much/little as need­ed)
lots of ice

Alter­na­tive Mock­tail
plum juice

ice
cut orange, lemon and apple (san­gria style)
mint leaves
sug­ar (as need­ed)

Salomon returns to con­sid­er one of the Frick’s most icon­ic hold­ings, François Bouch­er’s roco­co Four Sea­sons.

Com­mis­sioned in 1755 to serve as over-door dec­o­ra­tions for King Louis XV’s mis­tress Madame de Pom­padour, they now reside in the Frick’s ornate Bouch­er Room.

Salomon draws com­par­isons to anoth­er swoon­ing Frick favorite, Jean-Hon­oré Frag­o­nard’s series Progress of Love. While the roman­tic nature of these works is hard­ly a secret, Salomon is able to speak to the erot­ic sig­nif­i­cance of dol­phins, grapes, and tiny 18th-cen­tu­ry shep­herdess bon­nets.

Those who are respect­ing COVID pro­to­cols by court­ing out­doors this win­ter will wel­come Salomon’s thoughts on Winter’s cen­tral fig­ure, a coquette rid­ing in a sleigh dri­ven by a well-bun­dled man in Tar­tar dress:

Her hands may be warmed by a muff, but her upper body is com­plete­ly exposed. It’s a com­bi­na­tion of lux­u­ry and seduc­tion typ­i­cal of Bouch­er, all treat­ed in a fan­ci­ful, even humor­ous man­ner.

Also, is it just us, or is Cura­tor Salomon tak­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to enjoy his Proust-inspired Time Regained cock­tail in a kimono? (A perk of the vir­tu­al office…)

Time Regained
2 oz. Scotch whisky
0.75 oz. Dry ver­mouth
0.5 oz. Pis­co
0.25 oz. Jas­mine tea syrup (equal parts of jas­mine tea and sug­ar)

Alter­na­tive Mock­tail
Cold jas­mine tea
One spoon­ful of gold­en syrup
Top with ton­ic water

Salomon hands host­ing duties to col­league Aimee Ng for Ver­meer’s Mis­tress and Maid, one of three works by the Dutch Mas­ter in the Frick­’s col­lec­tion.

Here the dra­ma is less explic­it­ly informed by the boudoir, though there’s a big reveal around the 10 minute mark, thanks to recent advances in infrared reflec­tog­ra­phy and some well-coor­di­nat­ed art sleuthing.

As to the con­tents of the mes­sage the maid prof­fers her ermine trimmed mis­tress, we’ll nev­er know, although those of us with ready access to the Dutch spir­it gen­ev­er can have fun spec­u­lat­ing over a glass of Gen­ev­er Brûlée.

Gen­ev­er Brûlée
2 oz gen­ev­er
1 tea­spoon brown sug­ar
A few dash­es of clas­sic bit­ters
A dash of orange bit­ters
A splash of sparkling water
Gar­nished with a caramelized orange slice

Alter­na­tive Mock­tail

Juice of half an orange
2 dash­es orange blos­som water
A splash of sparkling water
Gar­nished with a caramelized orange slice

To explore a playlist of every Cock­tails with a Cura­tor episode, cov­er­ing such notable works as Velázquez’s King Philip IV of SpainClaude Monet’s Vétheuil in Win­ter, and Hans Holbein’s Sir Thomas More, click here.

To read more in-depth cov­er­age of each episode’s fea­tured art­work, along with its cock­tail and mock­tail recipes, click here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it 2+ Mil­lion Free Works of Art from 20 World-Class Muse­ums Free Online

14 Paris Muse­ums Put 300,000 Works of Art Online: Down­load Clas­sics by Mon­et, Cézanne & More

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Jimi Hendrix Revisits His Searing Performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: The Dick Cavett Show (September 9, 1969)

On the final August morn­ing of Wood­stock, after a pre­vi­ous day’s down­pour had turned most of the field near the stage into mud, after an evening of blues and rock and the come­down of what­ev­er drugs had peaked every­body ear­li­er, as the sun­light crept over what was left of the 500,000 music lovers, now less than half in num­ber, wrapped in blan­kets and still vib­ing, Jimi Hen­drix took the stage. Now, the Star-Span­gled Ban­ner wasn’t his final song, but it was a finale of sorts, a coda for a three-day event where love tri­umphed for just a lit­tle while over war, that war rag­ing across the ocean in the sim­i­lar mud of Viet­nam. Hen­drix ripped the Nation­al Anthem, with its famous lyrics about bombs and its hid­den stan­zas about slaves, a new one. He turned that gui­tar into its own kind of weapon, sound­ing like those jet bombers rain­ing fire and napalm down, inter­rupt­ing Fran­cis Scott Key’s melody like a pro­tes­tor beg­ging to dif­fer at the Chica­go con­ven­tion. Hen­drix was going to send his audi­ence out into Amer­i­ca, back into soci­ety, with some­thing to chew on.

“All I did was play it. I’m Amer­i­can, so I played it,” Hen­drix tells Dick Cavett in the above clip from Sep­tem­ber 9, 1969, less than a month after the con­cert. “They made me sing it in school, so it was a flash­back, you know?”

But there was more to it than that. Hen­drix him­self was a vet­er­an. He joined the 101st Air­borne Divi­sion in 1961 under duress—it was either that or jail. He last­ed a year, dis­charged for “behav­ior prob­lems,” “lit­tle regard for reg­u­la­tions,” and “mas­tur­bat­ing in pla­toon area while sup­posed to be on detail.” Even while there, he had time to play gui­tar. Did this give him a “buffer” to lam­baste the war? Not real­ly. Right wing Amer­i­cans tend to be very touchy about the anthem, and any­thing that strays from the usu­al army band arrange­ment brings dis­trust and nasty let­ters, as Cavett notes in the video. (And being a per­son of col­or sure­ly had some­thing to do with it too.) To wit: folk singer José Feli­ciano per­formed a soul­ful ver­sion of the anthem before Game Five of the 1968 World Series in Detroit, where the Tigers played the Car­di­nals. Nowhere near the cor­us­cat­ing ver­sion of Hen­drix, but still the audi­ence, even the play­ers them­selves, were divid­ed.

Hen­drix raised the game and the ire. It was all jour­nal­ists want­ed to ask Hen­drix, hop­ing to goad him into a state­ment about the war. Hen­drix didn’t take the bait. “We’re all Amer­i­cans,” he answered at a press con­fer­ence after the con­cert. “…it was like ‘Go, Amer­i­ca!’”

But then the more telling line fol­lowed. “We play it the way the air is in Amer­i­ca today. The air is slight­ly sta­t­ic, see.”

Cavett is kinder, allow­ing Hen­drix to cor­rect him when he calls the ver­sion unortho­dox.

“No, no. I thought it was beau­ti­ful,” the mod­est musi­cian says. “But there you go, you know?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hendrix’s Home Audio Sys­tem & Record Col­lec­tion Gets Recre­at­ed in His Lon­don Flat

How Sci­ence Fic­tion Formed Jimi Hen­drix

Watch Rare Footage of Jimi Hen­drix Per­form­ing “Voodoo Child” in Maui, Plus a Trail­er for a New Doc­u­men­tary on Jimi Hendrix’s Leg­endary Maui Per­for­mances (1970)

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.

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Ver­meer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring for many rea­sons, not least that it looks exact­ly like a girl with a pearl ear­ring. Or at least it does from a dis­tance, as the mas­ter of light him­self no doubt stepped back to con­firm count­less times dur­ing the paint­ing process, at any moment of which he would have been more con­cerned with the brush­strokes con­sti­tut­ing only a small part of the image. But even Ver­meer him­self could have per­ceived only so much detail of the paint­ing that would become his mas­ter­piece.

Now, more than 350 years after its com­ple­tion, we can get a clos­er view of Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring than any­one has before through a new­ly released 10 bil­lion-pix­el panora­ma. At this res­o­lu­tion, writes Petapix­el’s Jason Schnei­der, we can “see the paint­ing down to the lev­el of 4.4‑microns per pix­el.”

Under­tak­en by Emi­lien Leon­hardt and Vin­cent Sabati­er of 3D micro­scope mak­er Hirox Europe “in order to eval­u­ate the sur­face con­di­tion of the paint­ing, mea­sure cracks, and see the topog­ra­phy of var­i­ous key areas while assess­ing past restora­tions,” the project required tak­ing 9,100 pho­tos, which “were auto­mat­i­cal­ly cap­tured and stitched togeth­er to form one fin­ished panora­ma image where one pix­el equals 4.4 microns.”

You’ll under­stand what this means if you view the panora­ma and click the plus sym­bol on the bot­tom con­trol bar to zoom in — and click it again, and again, and again. (Or just click it and hold it down.) Before long, Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring will look less like a girl with a pearl ear­ring than what she real­ly is: cen­turies-old oil paints on a cen­turies-old can­vas. The phys­i­cal­i­ty of this work of art, one so often held up as the real­iza­tion of aes­thet­ic ide­al, becomes even less ignor­able if you click the “3D” but­ton. This presents ten indi­vid­ual sec­tions of the paint­ing scanned in three dimen­sions, which you can freely rotate and even light from all direc­tions.

The 3D-scanned por­tions include the tit­u­lar pearl ear­ring, which appears to have a bit of a gouge in it. They’re more clear­ly vis­i­ble in 5x topo­graph­i­cal view­ing mode (selec­table on the top con­trol bar). This offi­cial Hirox video offers a glimpse of the pro­ce­dure required to achieve the kind of unprece­dent­ed­ly high-res­o­lu­tion view of Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring that allows us to behold details hereto­fore prac­ti­cal­ly invis­i­ble. At more than 10,000 megapix­els, the back­ground reveals itself to be in fact a dark green cur­tain, and the girl her­self has clear­ly defined eye­lash­es. But as for her long-spec­u­lat­ed-about iden­ti­ty, well, there are some things microscopy can’t deter­mine. Take a close look at Ver­meer’s paint­ing here. And if you’d like to take a sim­i­lar look at Rem­brandt’s The Night Watch, click here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why is Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring Con­sid­ered a Mas­ter­piece?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Mas­ter of Light: A Close Look at the Paint­ings of Johannes Ver­meer Nar­rat­ed by Meryl Streep

Down­load All 36 of Jan Vermeer’s Beau­ti­ful­ly Rare Paint­ings (Most in Bril­liant High Res­o­lu­tion)

The Largest & Most Detailed Pho­to­graph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­terBooks 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

How Quentin Tarantino Shoots a Film at 3 Different Budget Levels: Reservoir Dogs ($1 Million), Pulp Fiction ($8 Million), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ($95 Million)

Quentin Taran­ti­no has nev­er shied away from talk­ing, at length and at a rapid clip, about his process. “In anoth­er life,” Col­in Mar­shall writes in a pre­vi­ous post on the sub­ject, he might have become a “fore­most prac­ti­tion­er” of the video essay on cin­e­ma. His metic­u­lous analy­ses of not only his own films but also the hun­dreds he references–or out­right steals from–can be dizzy­ing, the rav­ings of an over­ac­tive cre­ative mind that seems impos­si­ble to rein in.

Taran­ti­no has also giv­en us sig­nif­i­cant insight into his screen­writ­ing process, say­ing “I was put on Earth to face the blank page” and claim­ing that he watch­es the entire film in his mind’s eye before putting pen to paper. He wrote Pulp Fic­tion “off and on,” Mark Seal notes at Van­i­ty Fair, “in a one-room apart­ment with no phone or fax” in Ams­ter­dam. Then he sought out vet­er­an Hol­ly­wood typ­ist Lin­da Chen, who agreed to type, and edit, the man­u­script for free.

“His hand­writ­ing is atro­cious,” says Chen. “He’s a func­tion­al illit­er­ate. I was aver­ag­ing about 9,000 gram­mat­i­cal errors per page. After I would cor­rect them, he would try to put back the errors, because he liked them.”

As a writer, Tarantino’s quirks don’t actu­al­ly seem out of place. As a direc­tor, his process would not seem to lend itself to the most dis­ci­plined pro­duc­tion. The final prod­uct of that error-rid­den script, how­ev­er, became what Roger Ebert called “the most influ­en­tial” movie of the 90s, “so well writ­ten in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zom­bie writ­ers who take ‘screen­writ­ing’ class­es that teach them the for­mu­las for ‘hit films.’” Of course, great writ­ing is an indis­pens­able part of mak­ing a great film, but so too is great film­mak­ing.…

How did Taran­ti­no go from fever­ish­ly hand-scrib­bled script to a “most influ­en­tial” film as a direc­tor? He has worked with­in strict lim­i­ta­tions, as on his direc­to­r­i­al debut, Reser­voir Dogs, with larg­er bud­gets and bet­ter sets, as on Pulp Fic­tion, and on his most recent film, the $95 mil­lion Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood. But he has always main­tained a con­sis­tent visu­al style eas­i­ly rec­og­niz­able across all nine of his films.

In the video essay above from In Depth Cine, you can learn more of the sto­ry of how Taran­ti­no accom­plished his direc­to­r­i­al visions, and how that style fol­lowed him from film to film. The video gets into tech­ni­cal details like the choice of 35mm cam­eras and the light­ing place­ment. It also tells the sto­ry of how three films—Reser­voir DogsPulp Fic­tion, and Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood—used their vast­ly dif­fer­ent bud­get lev­els, while all remain­ing true to each oth­er and to their writer and direc­tor’s inten­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

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

When the Grateful Dead Performed on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark & Secretly Dosed Everyone With LSD (1969)

At one time, what­ev­er else peo­ple did with it, they real­ly did read Play­boy for the arti­cles. And what­ev­er oth­er vic­ar­i­ous thrills they might obtain from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy’s Pent­house vari­ety show or its fol­low-up, Play­boy After Dark, they def­i­nite­ly tuned in for the music. Guests includ­ed Ike & Tina Turn­er, The Byrds, Bud­dy Rich, Cher, Deep Pur­ple, Fleet­wood Mac, Step­pen­wolf, James Brown, and many more. On Jan­u­ary 18, 1969, the Grate­ful Dead per­formed, and it went exact­ly as one might expect, mean­ing “things got total­ly out-of-hand,” Dave Melamed writes at Live for Live Music, “but every­thing wound up work­ing out just fine.

Things worked out more than fine, despite, or because of, the fact that the band’s leg­endary sound-man Owsley “Bear” Stan­ley (at that time the largest sup­pli­er of LSD in the coun­try) dosed the cof­fee pot on set. Dead drum­mer Bill Kreutz­mann tells the sto­ry in the Conan clip below. It all start­ed, he says, dur­ing sound­check, when he noticed that the crew was act­ing “kin­da loose.” Know­ing Stan­ley as he did, he imme­di­ate­ly sus­pect­ed the cause: “the whole crew, all of you” he says point­ing toward the Conan cam­era oper­a­tors, “was high on acid.”

There’s not much evi­dence of it in the footage. There don’t seem to be any tech­ni­cal prob­lems in the clip at the top. In their brief, jovial inter­view, Hefn­er and Gar­cia seem plen­ty relaxed. Jer­ry tells the Play­boy founder why the band has two drum­mers. (They “chase each oth­er around, sort of like the ser­pent that eats its own tail” and “make a fig­ure in your mind” if you stand between them.) Then he takes the stage and the band plays “Moun­tains of the Moon” and “St. Stephen.”

Hefn­er was so appre­cia­tive of what­ev­er hap­pened on set that he sent a per­son­al let­ter of thanks the fol­low­ing month (below), addressed to each mem­ber of the band. “Your par­tic­i­pa­tion played an impor­tant part in the suc­cess of this par­tic­u­lar show.” He enclosed a film of the per­for­mances and expressed his grat­i­tude “for hav­ing made the tap­ing ses­sion as enjoy­able to do as I think it will be to watch.”

Kreutz­mann relates some oth­er anec­dotes in his 2015 Conan inter­view, includ­ing a fun­ny bit about how the band got its name. But the best part of the appear­ance is watch­ing him imi­tate Hefn­er, who was appar­ent­ly plas­tered to the wall by the end of the set, the cof­fee real­ly start­ing to kick in.

This strange chap­ter of Grate­ful Dead his­to­ry is one of many memo­ri­al­ized in the new graph­ic nov­el, Grate­ful Dead Ori­gins.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound System–Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

Watch the Grate­ful Dead Slip Past Secu­ri­ty & Play a Gig at Colum­bia University’s Anti-Viet­nam Protest (1968)

Take a Long, Strange Trip and Stream a 346-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Live Grate­ful Dead Per­for­mances (1966–1995)

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

“The Most Intelligent Photo Ever Taken”: The 1927 Solvay Council Conference, Featuring Einstein, Bohr, Curie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger & More

A curi­ous thing hap­pened at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry and the dawn­ing of the 20th. As Euro­pean and Amer­i­can indus­tries became increas­ing­ly con­fi­dent in their meth­ods of inven­tion and pro­duc­tion, sci­en­tists made dis­cov­ery after dis­cov­ery that shook their under­stand­ing of the phys­i­cal world to the core. “Researchers in the 19th cen­tu­ry had thought they would soon describe all known phys­i­cal process­es using the equa­tions of Isaac New­ton and James Clerk Maxwell,” Adam Mann writes at Wired. But “the new and unex­pect­ed obser­va­tions were destroy­ing this rosy out­look.”

These obser­va­tions includ­ed X‑rays, the pho­to­elec­tric effect, nuclear radi­a­tion and elec­trons; “lead­ing physi­cists, such as Max Planck and Wal­ter Nernst believed cir­cum­stances were dire enough to war­rant an inter­na­tion­al sym­po­sium that could attempt to resolve the sit­u­a­tion.” Those sci­en­tists could not have known that over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, we would still be star­ing at what physi­cist Dominic Wal­li­man calls the “Chasm of Igno­rance” at the edge of quan­tum the­o­ry. But they did ini­ti­ate “the quan­tum rev­o­lu­tion” in the first Solvay Coun­cil, in Brus­sels, named for wealthy chemist and orga­niz­er Ernest Solvay.

“Rever­ber­a­tions from this meet­ing are still felt to this day… though physics may still some­times seem to be in cri­sis” writes Mann (in a 2011 arti­cle just months before the dis­cov­ery of the Hig­gs boson). The inau­gur­al meet­ing kicked off a series of con­fer­ences on physics and chem­istry that have con­tin­ued into the 21st cen­tu­ry. Includ­ed in the pro­ceed­ings were Planck, “often called the father of quan­tum mechan­ics,” Ernest Ruther­ford, who dis­cov­ered the pro­ton, and Heike Kamer­lingh-Onnes, who dis­cov­ered super­con­duc­tiv­i­ty.

Also present were math­e­mati­cian Hen­ri Poin­caré, chemist Marie Curie, and a 32-year-old Albert Ein­stein, the sec­ond youngest mem­ber of the group. Ein­stein described the first Solvay con­fer­ence (1911) in a let­ter to a friend as “the lamen­ta­tions on the ruins of Jerusalem. Noth­ing pos­i­tive came out of it.” The ruined “tem­ple,” in this case, were the the­o­ries of clas­si­cal physics, “which had dom­i­nat­ed sci­en­tif­ic think­ing in the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry.” Ein­stein under­stood the dis­may, but found his col­leagues to be irra­tional­ly stub­born and con­ser­v­a­tive.

Nonethe­less, he wrote, the sci­en­tists gath­ered at the Solvay Coun­cil “prob­a­bly all agree that the so-called quan­tum the­o­ry is, indeed, a help­ful tool but that it is not a the­o­ry in the usu­al sense of the word, at any rate not a the­o­ry that could be devel­oped in a coher­ent form at the present time.” Dur­ing the Fifth Solvay Coun­cil, in 1927, Ein­stein tried to prove that the “Heisen­berg Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple (and hence quan­tum mechan­ics itself) was just plain wrong,” writes Jonathan Dowl­ing, co-direc­tor of the Horace Hearne Insti­tute for The­o­ret­i­cal Physics.

Physi­cist Niels Bohr respond­ed vig­or­ous­ly. “This debate went on for days,” Dowl­ing writes, “and con­tin­ued on 3 years lat­er at the next con­fer­ence.” At one point, Ein­stein uttered his famous quote, “God does not play dice,” in a “room full of the world’s most notable sci­en­tif­ic minds,” Aman­da Macias writes at Busi­ness Insid­er. Bohr respond­ed, “stop telling God what to do.” That room full of lumi­nar­ies also sat for a por­trait, as they had dur­ing the first Solvay Coun­cil meet­ing. See the assem­bled group at the top and fur­ther up in a col­orized ver­sion in what may be, as one Red­di­tor calls it, “the most intel­li­gent pic­ture ever tak­en.”

The full list of par­tic­i­pants is below:

Front row: Irv­ing Lang­muir, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hen­drik Lorentz, Albert Ein­stein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, C.T.R Wil­son, Owen Richard­son.

Mid­dle row: Peter Debye, Mar­tin Knud­sen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hen­drik Antho­ny Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Comp­ton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr.

Back row: Auguste Pic­card, Émile Hen­ri­ot, Paul Ehren­fest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Don­der, Erwin Schrödinger, JE Ver­schaf­felt, Wolf­gang Pauli, Wern­er Heisen­berg, Ralph Fowler, Léon Bril­louin.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Quan­tum Physics Made Rel­a­tive­ly Sim­ple: A Mini Course from Nobel Prize-Win­ning Physi­cist Hans Bethe

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

Hear Albert Ein­stein Read “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” (1941)

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

How to Make a Savile Row Suit: A Short Documentary from the Museum of Modern Art

Sav­ile Row is unfash­ion­able. This, of course, is its great strength: not for noth­ing does that Lon­don street stand as the last word in time­less tai­lor­ing. Since at least the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, men have gone to Sav­ile Row not just to com­mis­sion hand­made suits from their favorite shops, but to par­tic­i­pate in as many fit­tings as nec­es­sary through­out the process of bring­ing those suits ever clos­er to per­fec­tion. The result, over decades and indeed gen­er­a­tions of reg­u­lar patron­age, is the cul­ti­va­tion of not fash­ion but style. Even so, Sav­ile Row fig­ures in the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s online course Fash­ion as Design, whose videos on the mak­ing of a bespoke three-piece suit you can see here.

It all hap­pens at Ander­son & Shep­pard, a fix­ture on the Row since 1906. In the first video, “behind a drawn cur­tain, a mas­ter cut­ter” — whose job includes not just cut­ting the cloth but inter­act­ing with the client — “takes an ini­tial series of 27 mea­sure­ments: 20 for the jack­et, 7 for the trousers. From these mea­sure­ments, the cut­ter fash­ions a pat­tern in heavy brown paper.”

We then see the cloth cut to this pat­tern, “and the many pieces of fab­ric are rolled for each gar­ment into tiny pack­ages, which await the tai­lors.” The sec­ond, which begins in the back of the house, shows how these tai­lors “receive their bun­dles of fab­ric and set about deci­pher­ing the cutter’s notes. Three weeks after a client’s mea­sure­ments have been tak­en, his suit will be ready for a first fit­ting.”

Empha­sis on “first”: though the young man being fit­ted here only appears for one ses­sion, some bespoke suits can require two, three, or more, worn each time as a wear­able rough draft held togeth­er with bright white thread and marked up for lat­er cor­rec­tion. This reflects not the tai­lor’s inabil­i­ty to get it right the first time, but the rig­or­ous desire of the Sav­ile Row habitué for an ide­al fit. (Ander­son & Shep­pard’s list of for­mer clients include such noto­ri­ous­ly per­fec­tion­ist dressers as Fred Astaire, Bryan Fer­ry, and Prince Charles.) Watch­ing this process from start fin­ish under­scores the truth of those famous words, “The dif­fer­ence between style and fash­ion is qual­i­ty” — famous words spo­ken by no less a detrac­tor of Sav­ile Row than Gior­gio Armani, but true ones nonethe­less.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dress Like an Intel­lec­tu­al Icon with Japan­ese Coats Inspired by the Wardrobes of Camus, Sartre, Duchamp, Le Cor­busier & Oth­ers

Recall­ing Albert Camus’ Fash­ion Advice, Noam Chom­sky Pans Glenn Greenwald’s Shiny Pur­ple Tie

Fash­ion Design­ers in 1939 Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Browse a Col­lec­tion of Over 83,500 Vin­tage Sewing Pat­terns

How Ladies & Gen­tle­men Got Dressed in the 18th Cen­tu­ry: It Was a Pret­ty Involved Process

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­terBooks 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Innovative Pinscreen Animations of Kafka’s “Before the Law”, Gogol’s “The Nose” & Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” (1932–1972)

What do Franz Kaf­ka, Niko­lai Gogol, and Mod­est Mus­sorgsky have in com­mon? They stand alone among their peers for their dark­ly humor­ous sen­si­bil­i­ties, fas­ci­na­tion with the grotesque, imag­i­na­tive takes on cul­tur­al tra­di­tions, and a pre­dis­po­si­tion for the pro­to-sur­re­al. Like the odd fig­ure lurch­ing through the first move­ment of Mussorgsky’s Pic­tures at an Exhi­bi­tion, they are gnom­ic artists: enig­mat­ic and ambigu­ous, giv­en to the apho­ris­tic in sto­ries and tone poems of mon­strous and mar­velous beings. It’s easy to imag­ine the three of them, or their works at least, in cryp­tic con­ver­sa­tion with each oth­er.

We might imag­ine that con­ver­sa­tion as we watch three works by these major Euro­pean artists—all of which we’ve fea­tured on the site before—animated via the painstak­ing pin­screen method pio­neered by hus­band-and-wife, Russ­ian-and-French duo Alexan­der Alex­eieff and Claire Park­er.

The two invent­ed the tech­nique in the 1930s. Ded­i­cat­ed to this extreme­ly labor-inten­sive process, they made 6 short films over a peri­od of 50 years, includ­ing adap­ta­tions of Kafka’s “Before the Law,” nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles, Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Moun­tain.

We know the Mus­sorgsky piece as a ter­ri­fy­ing vignette from Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia. Sev­en years before that mar­riage of clas­si­cal music and ani­ma­tion came out in 1940, Alex­eieff and Park­er released their ver­sion, at the top. Steve Stanch­field at Car­toon Research calls it “one of the most unusu­al and unique look­ing ani­mat­ed films ever cre­at­ed.” Its “delight­ful and at times hor­ri­fy­ing imagery… chal­lenge the view­er to com­pre­hend both their mean­ing and the mys­tery of how they were cre­at­ed.” The same could be said of “The Nose” (1963), whose impro­vised sound­track by Hai-Minh adds dra­mat­ic ten­sion to the eerie ani­ma­tion.

Each of these films uses the same method, a hand­made pin­screen device in which thou­sands of pins are pushed by hand out­ward and inward for each frame to cre­ate areas of light or dark. The pair intend­ed to move beyond the flat­ness of con­ven­tion­al cel ani­ma­tion tech­niques and cap­ture the depth and con­trast of chiaroscuro. They achieved this through the most aching­ly slow process imag­in­able, yet “the illu­sion of dimen­sion­al draw­ing in ani­ma­tion has rarely been cre­at­ed bet­ter,” Stanch­field writes, not even in the most sophis­ti­cat­ed com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed imagery.

Alex­eieff and Parker’s “Before the Law,” from a para­ble in Kafka’s The Tri­al, takes a pic­ture-book approach to the ani­ma­tion that would reward younger view­ers. Welles’ nar­ra­tion anchors the pro­duc­tion with even more than his usu­al grav­i­tas. In 1972, they returned to Mus­sorgsky, in the short Pic­tures at an Exhi­bi­tion, above. Here, after a pro­logue in French and the styl­iza­tions of the open­ing Pre­lude, the fig­ure of the “The Gnome” appears, a translu­cent homuncu­lus hatch­ing from an egg and danc­ing across the piano keys. I like to think Mus­sorgsky, Kaf­ka, and Gogol would find this imagery irre­sistible.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kafka’s Para­ble “Before the Law” Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles & Illus­trat­ed with Pin­screen Art

Night on Bald Moun­tain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pin­screen Ani­ma­tion Based on Mussorgsky’s Mas­ter­piece

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

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

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