Many of us in these past few generations first heard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while reading E. L. Konigsburg’s novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. More than a few of us also fantasized about running away to live in that vast cultural institution like the book’s young protagonists Claudia and Jamie Kincaid. Yet among other, more practical concerns, we might have wondered where we were going to secure enough reading material to get us through those long after-hours nights. Konigsburg had Claudia and Jamie visit the former Donnell Library Center, but what about in the Met itself?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Last Friday, The Cure celebrated the release of their new album, Songs of a Lost World, with a three-hour set at the Troxy in London. The band kicked off the show by performing all eight tracks from the album, before then playing another 23 songs, mostly hits from their large catalog of music. Originally live streamed on YouTube, you can now watch the entire show online. Just click play above.
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When the names of French poet Paul Éluard and German artist Max Ernst arise, one subject always follows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “marriage à trois,” as a New York Times article by Annette Grant once put it. It started in 1921, Grant writes, when the Surrealist movement’s co-founder André Breton put on an exhibition for Ernst in Paris. “Éluard and his Russian wife, Gala, were fascinated by the show and arranged to meet Ernst in the Austrian Alps and later in Germany. Ernst, Éluard and Gala quickly became inseparable. The artist and the poet started a lifelong series of collaborations on books even as Ernst and Gala started an affair.”
This arrangement “eventually propelled the trio on a journey from Cologne to Paris to Saigon,” which constitutes quite a story in its own right. But on pure artistic value, no result of the encounter between Éluard and Ernst has remained as fascinating as Les Malheurs des immortels, the book on which they collaborated in 1922.
“It appears that Ernst, still in Germany at that stage, created the images first: twenty-one collages composed of engravings cut out of nineteenth-century magazines and catalogues,” writes Daisy Sainsbury at The Public Domain Review. Unlike in the Dada works known at the time, “the artist is careful to disguise the images’ composite nature. He blends each section into a seamless, coherent whole.”
“Ernst and Éluard then worked together on twenty prose poems to accompany the illustrations, sending fragments of text to each other to revise or supplement.” The result, which predates by two years Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, “represents a proto-Surrealist experiment par excellence.” In the text, phrases like “Le petit est malade, le petit va mourir” recall “children’s nursery rhymes, with a sing-song quality stripped of sense”; in the images, “a caged bird, an upturned crocodile, and a webbed foot transformed through collage into the ultimate symbol of human frivolity, a fan, evoke the classification systems of modern science (and religion before that) as well as their potential misuse in human hands.”
It’s worth putting all this in its historical context, a Europe after the First World War in which modern life no longer made quite as much sense as it once seemed. The often-inexplicable responses of cultural figures involved in movements like Surrealism — in their work or in their lives — were attempts at hitting the reset button, to use an anachronistic metaphor. Not that, a century later, humanity has made much progress in coming to grips with our place in a world of rapidly evolving technology and large-scale geopolitics. Or at least we might feel that way while reading Les Malheurs des immortels, available online at the Internet Archive and the University of Iowa’s digital Dada collection, and regarding these textual-visual constructions as deeply strange as anything designed by our artificial-intelligence engines today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Update: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for non-commercial use. When you browse the Met collection and find an image that you fancy, just look at the lower left-hand side of the image. If you see an “OA” icon and the words “public domain” (as shown in the example below), you’re free to use the image, provided that you abide by the Met’s terms.
It takes a little patience. But once you start surfing through the Met’s digital collections, you can find and download images of some wonderful masterpieces. We’ve embedded a few of our favorite picks. At the top, you will find the 1874 painting “Boating,” by Édouard Manet. In the middle, Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait” from 1660. At the bottom, a 1907 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz called “The Steerage.” And that’s just starting to scratch the surface.
Happy rummaging. And, when you have some free time on your hands, you should also check out another open initiative from the Met. The museum has also put 500+ free art books online. You can learn about them here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014. We have updated it to reflect some of the changes made in the Met collection over the past decade.
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One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expression fascist pig, writes Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” “used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits.” In the forties, on the other hand, the fight against fascism was a “moral duty for every good American.” (And every good Englishman and French partisan, he might have added.)
Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” It did, however, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” The dark humor of the comment indicates a critical consensus about fascism. As a form of extreme nationalism, it ultimately takes on the contours of whatever national culture produces it.
It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many different cultural manifestations of authoritarianism, across Europe and even South America. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country,” and got to name the political system. But Eco is perplexed “why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements.” For one thing, he writes, fascism was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.”
While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
One detail of Eco’s essay that often goes unremarked is his characterization of the Italian opposition movement’s unlikely coalitions. The Resistance included Communists who “exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property,” and leaders like Eco’s childhood hero Franchi, “so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups.” This itself may be a specific feature of an Italian resistance, one not observable across the number of nations that have resisted totalitarian governments. As for the seeming total lack of common interest between these parties, Eco simply says, “Who cares?… Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.”
In a future where humanity has been driven underground by an apocalyptic event, a prisoner is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing a man gunned down at an airport. A group of scientists make him their time-traveling guinea pig, hoping that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the society they once knew. In one of his forced journeys into the past, he falls for a strangely familiar-looking woman who convinces him not to return to his own time period. Alas, things go wrong, culminating in the final realization that the death he had witnessed so long ago was, in fact, his own.
You may recognize this as the plot of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, from 1995, and also as the plot of Chris Marker’s La Jeteé, from 1962. 12 Monkeys, a full-scale Hollywood picture starring the likes of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, attained critical acclaim and box-office success. But LaJeteé, which inspired it, stands as the more impressive cinematic achievement, despite — or perhaps owing to — its being a black-and-white short composed almost entirely of still photographs. That unusual (and unusually effective) form is the subject of the new video above from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter.
“When you think about it, Terry Gilliam is using still images too,” says Puschak. “It’s just that he’s using 24 still images every second, while Marker uses, on average, one image every four seconds.” In La Jeteé, we’re “forced to sit with every frame,” and thus to notice that “they’re dead: all movement is gone, and we’re left with these lifeless fragments of time, an appropriate thing in a world obliterated by war.” Marker “shows us that the movement of moving pictures, even though it resembles life, is illusory; it’s really just another form of memory, and memory is always fragmentary and lifeless, re-animated only by the meaning we impose on it from the present.”
Yet this photo-roman, as Marker calls it, does contain one moving image, which depicts the lady with whom the protagonist gets involved waking up on one of their mornings together. Puschak describes it as “in the running for the most poignant bit of motion in all of cinema” and interprets it as saying that “love, human connection somehow transcends, somehow escapes the trap of time. It may be cliché to say that, but there is nothing cliché about the way Marker shows it.” Marker’s inventive nouvelle vague colleague Jean-Luc Godard once called cinema “truth 24 times per second” — a definition broken wide open, characteristically, by Marker himself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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