The Haunting Paintings of Francisco Goya: A Deep Dive into His Dark, Late Works

in Art | January 17th, 2023

Back in October, we featured the first of a planned series of videos on the “Black Paintings” created at the end of Francisco Goya’s life. Last week, the YouTube channel Great Art Explained completed the series and rolled them up into a 51-minute documentary, which you can watch above. It comes with this preface from curator James Payne:

In this full-length film, I look at Francisco Goya’s later works. At the age of 46, Goya suffered from a severe illness that caused loss of vision and hearing, tinnitus, dizziness, right-sides paralysis, weakness and general malaise. Although he recovered from a cerebral stroke which accompanied it, he went completely deaf. From this point on his work took a darker tone.

To understand Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings, we need to understand how he went from a popular well-loved royal portrait artist to painting deeply disturbing imagery on the bare walls of his house in total isolation.

His darker work was never really seen in his lifetime. His series of etchings known as Los Caprichos was withdrawn from public sale for fear of attack by the Inquisition, and his deeply pessimistic ‘Disasters of War’ was so gruesome and radical it had to wait until his death to be published. Even his masterpiece, The Third of May 1808, was censored by the king and hidden away.

His wife and most of his friends were dead and he had become isolated. He was 73-years old, sick, and completely deaf. His long life was coming to a close… BUT he wasn’t finished yet. The man who had once painted crucifixions, miracles, saints, and priests, now painted terrifying, demonic, raw and brutal works – works without even a hint of God.

His last years were spent in isolation secretly creating some of the most horrific images in Western art, The Black Paintings.

Using footage from my earlier short films, Goya Part 1 and Goya Part 2, I have added about 25 minutes of new footage to make this full-length film.

For more videos from Great Art Explained, visit their channel here.

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European Paintings: From Leonardo to Rembrandt to Goya — A Free Online Course from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M)

Art Lovers Rejoice! New Goya and Rembrandt Databases Now Online

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A Creative Animation Tells the Story of Maximilien Robespierre, One of the Most Influential Figures of the French Revolution

in Animation, Art, Fashion, History | January 13th, 2023

Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a few months, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse.

— François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution

Cal Arts animation student Michelle Cheng’s character design primer, above, draws attention to the many hats an animator must be prepared to wear when bringing to life a figure who actually existed:

Artist…

Researcher…

Costume designer…

Hairstylist…

Psychologist…

Her choice of Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, suggests that Cheng enjoys a challenge.

As historian Peter McPhee writes in The Robespierre Problem: An Introduction:

Was Robespierre the first modern dictator, icily fanatical, an obsessive who used his political power to try to impose his rigid ideal of a land of Spartan ‘virtue’? Or was he a principled, self-abnegating visionary, the great revolutionary martyr who, with his Jacobin allies, succeeded in leading the French Revolution and the Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds?

Cheng believes an animator’s first job is to understand any given character’s role in the larger story, and her research suggests that “there is never just one story.”

In the end, animators make choices based on the narrative they wish to push, enlisting palettes and styles that will support their favored approach.

Cheng went into this assignment perceiving Robespierre to be “a prime example of situational irony, a fanatical dictator who had sent hundreds of people to the guillotine only to be guillotined himself in the end.”

This, she readily admits, is a two-dimensional understanding.

Though he only lived to thirty-six, the man evolved. Robespierre, the symbol of the Reign of Terror, is distinct from Robespierre the individual citizen.

This duality led her to concoct a range of Robespierres — evil, good, and neutral.

A not particularly distinguished-looking fellow, he was widely acknowledged to be fastidious about his appearance.

All three animated characters are garbed in the neoclassical fashion typical of a progressive gentleman of the period — shirt, breeches, stockings, waistcoat, coat, a lacy cravat, and a curled wig.

Cheng, in consultation with fellow Cal Arts animator Janelle Feng, equipped the “evil” version with an ominous, figure-concealing black cloak lined in blood red. Angles and points are emphasized, the face draws on his opponents’ sinister descriptions of his habitual expressions, and subtle nods to punk and Goth cater to modern sensibilities.

The “good” version employs rosy Rococo hues to lean into the Robespierre his friends and family knew — a poet who loved his pet pigeons.

History prevents Cheng from ditching his signature wig entirely, but she granted herself some leeway, softening it for a more natural look.

This Robespierre is as dreamy as any Miyazaki hero.

Between these two poles is the “neutral” Robespierre, perhaps the most challenging to depict.

Feng took the lead on this one, seeking to strike a balance between his reportedly unprepossessing appearance and his revolutionary fire.

She retained the striped coat of his most iconic portrait, but updated it to a cool green palette. His nickname — the Incorruptible — is embodied in his firm comportment.

The video draws to a close with a review of the various ways Robespierre has been depicted in art and film over the years, a vivid reminder of Cheng’s assertion that “there is never just one story.”

See more of Michelle Cheng’s animations on her lemoncholy YouTube channel.

See more of Janelle Feng’s French Revolution era designs here.

Enter a Digitized Collection of 38,000 Pamphlets & Periodicals From the French Revolution

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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An Introduction to Hokusai’s Great Wave, One of the Most Recognizable Artworks in the World

in Art, Travel | January 10th, 2023

You need not be a student of Japanese Ukiyo‑e woodblock prints to recognize artist Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave Off Kanagawa — or the Great Wave, as it has come to be known.

Like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, it’s been reproduced on all manner of improbable items and subjected to liberal reimagining — something Sarah Urist Green, describes in the above episode of her series The Art Assignment as “numerous crimes against this image perpetrated across the internet.”

Such repurposing is the ultimate compliment.

The Great Wave is so graphically indelible, anyone who co-opts it can expect it to do a lot of heavy lifting.

For those who bother looking closely enough to take in the three boatloads of fishermen struggling to escape with their lives, it’s also narratively gripping, a terrifying woodblock still from an easily imagined disaster film.

It’s also an homage to Mount Fuji, one of a series of 36.

Thousands of prints were produced in the early 1830s for the domestic tourist trade. Visitors to Mount Fuji snapped these souvenirs up for about the same price as a bowl of noodle soup.

Green, a curator and educator, points out how the water-obsessed Hokusai borrowed elements from both the Rinpa school and Western realism for the Great Wave. The latter can be seen in the use of linear perspective, a low horizon line, and Prussian blue.

An 1867 posthumous showing at the International Exhibition in Paris turned such notable artists as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec into major Ukiyo‑e fans.

Without them, this iconic plunging breaker might never have spilled over onto our dorm room walls, our shower curtains, our yoga mats, t‑shirts, Doc Martens, street art, and tattoos.

Hell, there’s even a Lego set and an official Sanrio characters greeting card showing Hello Kitty nonchalantly surfing the crest in a two piece bathing suit, more interested in disporting herself than considering the sort of extreme oceanic events we can expect more of, owing to climate change.

Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: A Deluxe New Art Book Presents Hokusai’s Masterpiece, Including The Great Wave Off Kanagawa

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

View 103 Discovered Drawings by Famed Japanese Woodcut Artist Katsushika Hokusai

Download 215,000 Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters Spanning the Tradition’s 350-Year History

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

American Gothic Explained: How Grant Wood Created His Iconic American Painting (1930)

in Art, History | December 27th, 2022

“We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist and every school of artists should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire.” Gertrude Stein wrote those words after seeing American Gothic, the 1930 painting that would become one of the most iconic images created in the United States. Yet Wood himself “said he painted American Gothic to extol rural American values, real people in their well-ordered world: an image of reassurance during the onset of the Great Depression.” That’s how Art History School host Paul Priestley puts it in the video above, which asks of the painting, “Is it a satire, or a positive statement of American rural life?”

It could be neither; then again, it could be both. That very ambiguity goes some way to explaining American Gothic’s success — as well as its persistence in the culture through frequent and unceasing parody. Yet in its day, the painting also angered some of its viewers: “An Iowan farmer’s wife who’d seen the picture in the papers in 1930 telephoned Wood to express her anger,” says Priestly.

“She claimed she wished to come over and smash his head for depicting her countrymen as grim Bible-thumpers.” Wood maintained that he was one of them, “dressing in rugged overalls after the painting was completed and telling the press, ‘All the really good ideas I’d ever had come to me while I was milking a cow.’

Yet Wood was no farmer. A son of Cedar Rapids, he traveled extensively to Europe to study Impressionism and post-Impressionism. There he first saw the work of Jan van Eyck, whose combination of visual clarity and complexity inspired him to develop the signature look and feel of the movement that would come to be known as Regionalism. He became “half European artiste, half Iowan farm boy,” as Vox’s Phil Edwards puts it in the video just above, all the better to straddle his homeland’s widening divide between town and country. “In 1880, almost half of all Americans were on the farm,” but by 1920 more than half the population lived in cities. American Gothic came a decade later, and most of a century thereafter, it still makes Americans ask themselves — earnestly or sardonically — just what kind of people they are.

The Models for “American Gothic” Pose in Front of the Iconic Painting (1942)

The Art Institute of Chicago Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Resolution

Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7 Famous Paintings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Whitney Museum Puts Online 21,000 Works of American Art, By 3,000 Artists

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Behold! The Very First Christmas Card (1843)

in Art, Design, History, Museums | December 23rd, 2022

Christmas cards aren’t just an anachronism.

They’re almost an endangered species, the victim of the Internet, postal rate increases, and the jettisoning of any time consuming tradition whose execution has been found to bring the opposite of joy.

Above, Victoria and Albert Museum curators Alice Power and Sarah Beattie take us on a backwards trip to a time when the exchange of Christmas cards was a source of true social merriment.

Christmas cards must hold a special place in both the V&A’s collections and heart, given that the museum’s founder, Henry Cole, inadvertently invented them in 1843.

As a well respected man about town, he received a great many more holiday letters than he had time or inclination to respond to, but neither did he wish to appear rude.

So he enlisted his friend, painter J.C. Horsley, to create a festive illustration with a built-in holiday greeting, leaving just enough space to personalize with a recipient’s name and perhaps, a handwritten line or two.

He then had enough postcard-sized reproductions printed up to send to 1000 of his friends.

(It’s hell being popular…)

Talk about zeitgeist: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was first published that very same holiday season.

No wonder everyone wanted in on the fun.

Part of the reason the cards in the V&A’s collection are so well preserved is that their recipients prized them enough to keep them in souvenir albums.

Understandably. They’re very appealing little artifacts.

The upper crust could afford such fancy design elements as clever die-cut shapes, pop up elements, and translucent windows that encouraged the recipients to hold them up to actual windows.

Technological advances in the printing industry, and the creation of the cost-effective Penny Post allowed those whose budgets were more modest than Mr. Cole’s to participate too.

Their cards tended to be simpler in execution, though not necessarily concept.

In addition to the views we’ve come to expect — winter, Father Christmas, holly — the Victorians had a thing for jolly anthropomorphized food and some truly shameless puns.

Enjoy these Ghosts of Christmas Past, dear readers. We’re almost inspired to revive the tradition!

Read more about the advent of this tradition, including how it jumped the pond, in Smithsonian Magazine’s History of the Christmas Card.

J.R.R. Tolkien Sent Illustrated Letters from Father Christmas to His Kids Every Year (1920–1943)

Langston Hughes’ Homemade Christmas Cards From 1950

Watch Terry Gilliam’s Animated Short, The Christmas Card (1968)

Hear Neil Gaiman Read A Christmas Carol Just Like Charles Dickens Read It

An Oscar-Winning Animation of Charles Dickens’ Classic Tale, A Christmas Carol (1971)

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The History of Western Art in 23 Minutes: From the Prehistoric to the Contemporary

in Art, History | December 20th, 2022

Among the ranks of Open Culture readers, there are no doubt more than a few art-history majors. Perhaps you’ve studied the subject yourself, at one time or another — and perhaps you find that by now, you remember only certain scattered artists, works, and movements. What you need is a grand narrative, a broad story of art itself, and that’s just what you’ll find in the video above from Youtube channel Behind the Masterpiece. True to its title, “A Brief History of Art Movements” briefly describes, and provides a host of visual examples to illustrate, 22 phases in the development of art in just 23 minutes.

The journey begins in prehistory, with cave paintings from 40,000 years ago apparently created “as a way to share information.” Then comes the art of antiquity, when increasingly literate societies “started creating the earliest naturalistic images of human beings,” not least to enforce “religious and political ideologies.” The religiosity intensified in the Middle Ages, when artists “depicted clear, iconic images of religious figures” — as well as their oddly aged-looking babies — “and decorated them with extensive use of gold and jewels as a way to attract more people to the church.”

When many us think of art history — whether we studied it or not — our minds go straight to the subsequent period, the Renaissance, during which “artists started to appreciate cultural subjects like art, music, and theater” as well. They created “portrait paintings, anatomically correct sculptures, and symmetrical architecture,” and the invention of the printing press greatly expanded the pool of potential appreciators. Then, in the Baroque movement, enormously skilled artists like Bernini and Caravaggio “emphasized extravagance and emotion,” and other forms followed suit with more intense embellishments of their own.

From eighteenth-century France emerged the “playful and utopian” Rococo period, which was followed by the backward-looking “interest in renewed simplicity” that characterized Neoclassicism, which was followed by Romanticism, a movement whose artists “looked within and found inspiration in their own imaginations, and the nature around them.” It was the leveling French Revolution that brought about the conditions for the rise of Realism, with its focus on “depicting real people in everyday life,” the kind of subjects to that point overlooked in major works of art.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the development of art hit the gas, bringing on the imperfect vitality of Impressionism, the daring subjectivity of Post-Impressionism, the extreme subjectivity of Expressionism, and the sinuous luxury of Art Nouveau. Technology had always been a factor in how art changes, but in the twentieth century — as Cubism gave way to Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Bauhaus — it came to the fore. This brings us up to living memory: movements like Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and the inclination of today’s artists to deal in “ideas rather than aesthetics,” all on display in most any museum you care to visit. Or at least they are in the museums of the West, there being, after all, a whole world of other art histories out there to understand besides.

Related content:

Free Art & Art History Courses

An Online Guide to 350 International Art Styles & Movements: An Invaluable Resource for Students & Enthusiasts of Art History

100,000 Free Art History Texts Now Available Online Thanks to the Getty Research Portal

An Introduction to 100 Important Paintings with Videos Created by Smarthistory

One Minute Art History: Centuries of Artistic Styles Get Packed Into a Short Experimental Animation

Tate Kids Presents Introductions to Art Movements: Cubism, Impressionism, Surrealism & More

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Disturbing Paintings of Hieronymus Bosch: A Short Introduction

in Art, History, Psychology | December 13th, 2022

Most casual viewers of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings must acknowledge his artistic skill, and many must also wonder whether he was completely out of his mind. But insanity, however vividly suggested by his imagery, isn’t an especially compelling explanation for that imagery. Bosch painted in a particular place and time — the Netherlands of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, to be specific — but he also painted within a dominant worldview.“He grew up in a time of deep religious anxiety,” says Youtuber Hochelaga in the video essay above. “Ideas about sin, death, and the devil were becoming more sophisticated,” and “there was a genuine fear that demonic forces lived amongst the population.”

Hence the analyses like that of Great Art Explained, which frames Bosch’s best-known painting The Garden of Earthly Delights as an expression of “hardcore Christianity.” But something about the triptych’s sheer elaborateness and grotesquerie demands further inquiry. Hochelaga explores the possibility that Bosch worked in a condition of not just fearful piety, but psychological affliction.

“There is a disease called St. Anthony’s fire,” he says, contracted “by eating a poisonous black fungus called ergots that grow on rye crops. Symptoms include sores, convulsions, and a fierce burning sensation in limbs and extremities,” as well as “frightening and overpowering hallucinations that can last for hours at a time.”

This psychoactive power is now “believed to be behind the many Dancing Plagues recorded throughout the Middle Ages.” This explanation came together when, “in the mid-twentieth century, it was discovered that when ergots are baked in an oven, they transform into a form of lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD.” Did Bosch himself receive the bizarre visions he painted from inadvertently consuming that now well-known hallucinogenic substance? The many paintings he made of St. Anthony “may have been a form of devotional prayer, done so in the hopes that the saint would rid him of his debilitating illness.” Look at The Garden of Earthly Delights even today, and you’ll feel that if you saw these murderous bird-human hybrids around you, you’d try whatever you could to get rid of them, too.

A Digital Archive of Hieronymus Bosch’s Complete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Surreal Art

The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

Hieronymus Bosch’s Medieval Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights Comes to Life in a Gigantic, Modern Animation

New App Lets You Explore Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in Virtual Reality

The Musical Instruments in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Horrible”

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Behold a 15th-Century Italian Manuscript Featuring Medicinal Plants with Fantastical Human Faces

in Art, Books, Health, History | December 12th, 2022

No matter where you may stand on herbal medicine as a viable 21st-century option, it’s not hard to imagine we’d have all been true believers back in the 15th-century.

In an article for Heart Views, cardiologist Rachel Hajar lists some common herbal treatments of the Middle Ages:

Headache and aching joints were treated with sweet-smelling herbs such as rose, lavender, sage, and hay. A mixture of henbane and hemlock was applied to aching joints. Coriander was used to reduce fever. Stomach pains and sickness were treated with wormwood, mint, and balm. Lung problems were treated with a medicine made of liquorice and comfrey. Cough syrups and drinks were prescribed for chest and head-colds and coughs.

If nothing else, such approaches sound rather more pleasant than bloodletting.

Monks were responsible for the study and cultivation of medicinal herbs.

You may recall how one of Friar Lawrence’s daily tasks in Romeo and Juliet involved venturing into the monastery garden, to fill his basket full “baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers.”

(The powerful sleeping potion he concocted for the young lovers may have had disastrous consequences, but no one can claim it wasn’t effective.)

Monks preserved their herbal knowledge in illustrated books and manuscripts, many of which cleaved closely to works of classical antiquity such as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia and Dioscordes’ De Materia Medica.

These early medical texts can still be appreciated as art, particularly when they contain fantastical embellishments such as can be seen in Erbario, above, a handmade 15th-century herbal from northern Italy that was recently added to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s collection of rare books and manuscripts.

In addition to straightforward botanical illustrations, there are some roots, leaves, flowers and fruit (pardon the pronoun) of a decidedly anthropomorphic bent.

Fancying up drawings of plants with human faces and or dragon-shaped roots was a medieval convention.

Mandrake roots — prescribed as an anesthetic, an aphrodisiac, a fertility booster, and a sleep aid — were frequently rendered as humans.

Wired’s Matt Simon writes that mandrake roots “can look bizarrely like a human body and legend holds that it can even come in male and female form:”

It’s said to spring from the dripping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a monstrous scream, bestowing agony and death to all those within earshot.

Yikes! Can we get a spoonful of sugar to help that go down?

No wonder Juliet, preparing to quaff Friar Lawrence’s sleeping potion in the family tomb, fretted that it might wear off prematurely, leaving her subject to “loathsome smells” and “shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth.”

Methinks some chamomile might have calmed those nerves…

View a digitized copy of Erbario here, or at the Public Domain Review.