Behold the Newly-Discovered Sketch by Vincent van Gogh Sketch, “Study for Worn Out” (1882)

in Art, History | September 23rd, 2021

Hav­ing been dead for more than 130 years now, Vin­cent van Gogh sel­dom comes up with a new piece of work. But when he does, you can be sure it will draw the art world’s atten­tion as few works by liv­ing artists could. Such has been the case with the new­ly dis­cov­ered Study for Worn Out, an 1882 sketch that recent­ly came into pos­ses­sion of the Van Gogh Muse­um, accord­ing to Margheri­ta Cole at My Mod­ern Met, “when a Dutch fam­i­ly request­ed that spe­cial­ists take a look at their unsigned draw­ing.” The fig­ure in the draw­ing strong­ly resem­bles the one in van Gogh’s 1890 paint­ing At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate. But it took the experts at the muse­um to deter­mine that the artist was none oth­er than van Gogh him­self.

“Today and yes­ter­day I drew two fig­ures of an old man with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands,” wrote the 29-year-old van Gogh to his broth­er in a let­ter from 1882. “What a fine sight an old work­ing man makes, in his patched bom­bazine suit with his bald head.” The imme­di­ate fruit of these labors was the pen­cil draw­ing Worn Out, for which “the artist employed one of his favorite mod­els, an elder­ly man named Adri­anus Jacobus Zuy­der­land who boast­ed dis­tinc­tive side­burns (and who appears in at least 40 of van Gogh’s sketch­es from this peri­od).” So writes Smithsonian.com’s Nora McGreevy, who adds that van Gogh revis­it­ed the work to adapt it as a paint­ing “just two months before his death” in an asy­lum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

“In draw­ings like these,”  says the Van Gogh Muse­um, “the artist not only dis­played his sym­pa­thy for the social­ly dis­ad­van­taged — no way infe­ri­or in his eyes to the well-to-do bour­geoisie — he active­ly called atten­tion to them too.” Anoth­er aim with Worn Out, adds McGreevy, was “to seek employ­ment at a British pub­li­ca­tion, but he either failed to fol­low through on this idea or had his work reject­ed.” This would have count­ed as just anoth­er seem­ing instance of fail­ure, the likes of which char­ac­ter­ized the painter’s short life. Lit­tle could he, his cor­re­spon­dents, or his mod­els have imag­ined that his works would one day become some of the most famous in the world — and cer­tain­ly not that one of his sketch­es would go on to be enshrined well over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, as it has been since last Fri­day at the muse­um that bears his name.

via My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000+ Art­works by Vin­cent Van Gogh Dig­i­tized & Put Online by Dutch Muse­ums: Enter Van Gogh World­wide

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

Rare Vin­cent van Gogh Paint­ing Goes on Pub­lic Dis­play for the First Time: Explore the 1887 Paint­ing Online

Expe­ri­ence the Van Gogh Muse­um in 4K Res­o­lu­tion: A Video Tour in Sev­en Parts

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.

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What Makes Basquiat’s Untitled Great Art: One Painting Says Everything Basquiat Wanted to Say About America, Art & Being Black in Both Worlds

in Art | September 14th, 2021

They wouldn’t have let Jean-Michel into a Tiffany’s if he want­ed to use the bath­room or if he went to buy an engage­ment ring and pulled a wad of cash out of his pock­et. 

– Stephen Tor­ton, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s stu­dio assis­tant

When Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Unti­tled (Skull) sold for $110.5 mil­lion in 2017 to Japan­ese bil­lion­aire Yusaku Mae­sawa, the artist joined the ranks of Da Vin­ci, De Koon­ing, and Picas­so as one of the top sell­ing painters in the world, sur­pass­ing a pre­vi­ous record set in 2013 by his men­tor Andy Warhol’s work. Unti­tled dates from 1982, dur­ing “the young Basquiat’s mer­cu­r­ial ear­ly years,” writes Ben Davis at Art­net, “even before his first gallery show at Anni­na Nosei, when he was still a Caribbean-Amer­i­can kid from Brook­lyn ener­get­i­cal­ly boot­strap­ping him­self into the lime­light of the down­town art scene.” It is this peri­od that most inter­ests col­lec­tors like Mae­sawa.

Basquiat’s tran­si­tion from graf­fi­ti artist to art world dar­ling was dra­mat­ic, cel­e­bra­to­ry, and self-destruc­tive, all char­ac­ter­is­tics of his work. But crit­i­cal prim­i­tivism reduced him to a token — an art world atti­tude saw Basquiats as objects to be stripped of con­text, turned into dec­o­ra­tive badges of authen­tic­i­ty and world­li­ness. “Maezawa’s head paint­ing pos­sess­es a loud, gnash­ing, and con­fi­dent aura,” Shan­non Lee writes at Art­sy. But the artist’s “use of skulls… is deeply root­ed in his iden­ti­ty as a Black artist in Amer­i­ca. They are strong­ly evoca­tive of African masks, which have been so fetishized by the art mar­ket since mod­ernists like Picas­so appro­pri­at­ed them from their native con­texts.”

But head/skull motifs in Basquiat’s work are not only state­ments of dias­poric Black iden­ti­ty — they emerge through his the­mat­ic play of human embod­i­ment, men­tal illness/health, the com­pe­ti­tions of the graf­fi­ti world and the headgames of the art world, which Basquiat both mas­tered and cri­tiqued as a can­ny out­sider. “No sub­ject is more pow­er­ful or more sought after in the oeu­vre of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” notes Christie’s New York, “than the sin­gu­lar skull.” Though maybe not the most repro­duced of Basquiat’s heads, 1982’s Unti­tled — argues the Great Art Explained video above — exem­pli­fies the themes.

At only 22 years old, Basquiat pro­duced “a sin­gle paint­ing” that said “every­thing he want­ed to say about Amer­i­ca, about art and about being black in both worlds.” So sin­gu­lar is Unti­tled that it became its own one-paint­ing show in 2018 when its new own­er sent it on a tour of the world, begin­ning in the artist’s home­town at the Brook­lyn Muse­um. Maesawa’s deci­sion to share the paint­ing presents a con­trast to the way Basquiat has been treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly by oth­er own­ers of his work like Tiffany & Co., who explain their pur­chase and recent, con­tro­ver­sial com­mer­cial use of his Equals Pi by cit­ing his “affin­i­ty for the company’s state­ment blue col­or,” writes Tirhakah Love at Dai­ly Beast — a col­or they trade­marked ten years after Basquiat’s death.

The pro­pri­etary co-opta­tion of Basquiat’s life and work to sell sym­bols of colo­nial­ism like dia­monds, among oth­er lux­u­ry goods — and the turn­ing of his work into the ulti­mate lux­u­ry good — debas­es his pur­pos­es. Why show Equals Pi “as a prop to an ad?” asked his friend and for­mer room­mate Alex­is Adler. “Loan it out to a muse­um. In a time where there were very few Black artists rep­re­sent­ed in West­ern muse­ums, that was his goal: to get to a muse­um.” Find out in the Great Art Explained video how one of his most famous — and most expen­sive — works encap­su­lates that strug­gle through its vivid col­or and sym­bol­ic visu­al lan­guage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by Taschen

The Sto­ry of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Chaot­ic Bril­liance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Home­less Graf­fi­ti Artist to Inter­na­tion­al­ly Renowned Painter

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

 

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Zoom Into a Super High Resolution Photo of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”

in Art, Google, Music | September 14th, 2021

“Just as we take the train to get to Taras­con or Rouen, we take death to reach a star,” Vin­cent Van Gogh wrote to his broth­er from Arles in the sum­mer of 1888:

What’s cer­tain­ly true in this argu­ment is that while alive, we can­not go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train.

The fol­low­ing sum­mer, as a patient in the asy­lum of Saint-Paul-de-Mau­sole in Provence, he paint­ed what would become his best known work — The Star­ry Night.

The sum­mer after that, he was dead of a gun­shot wound to the abdomen, com­mon­ly believed to be self-inflict­ed.

Judg­ing from thoughts expressed in that same let­ter, Van Gogh may have con­ceived of such a death as a “celes­tial means of loco­mo­tion, just as steam­boats, omnibus­es and the rail­way are ter­res­tri­al ones”:

To die peace­ful­ly in old age would be to go there on foot.

Although his win­dow at the asy­lum afford­ed him a sun­rise view, and a pri­vate audi­ence with the promi­nent morn­ing star he men­tioned in anoth­er let­ter to Theo, Star­ry Night’s vista is “both an exer­cise in obser­va­tion and a clear depar­ture from it,” accord­ing to 2019’s MoMA High­lights: 375 Works from The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art:

The vision took place at night, yet the paint­ing, among hun­dreds of art­works van Gogh made that year, was cre­at­ed in sev­er­al ses­sions dur­ing the day, under entire­ly dif­fer­ent atmos­pher­ic con­di­tions. The pic­turesque vil­lage nes­tled below the hills was based on oth­er views—it could not be seen from his window—and the cypress at left appears much clos­er than it was. And although cer­tain fea­tures of the sky have been recon­struct­ed as observed, the artist altered celes­tial shapes and added a sense of glow.

Those who can’t vis­it MoMA to see The Star­ry Night in per­son may enjoy get­ting up close and per­son­al with Google Arts and Cul­ture’s zoomable, high res dig­i­tal repro­duc­tion. Keep click­ing into the image to see the paint­ing in greater detail.

Before or after for­mu­lat­ing your own thoughts on The Star­ry Night and the emo­tion­al state that con­tributed to its exe­cu­tion, get the per­spec­tive of singer-song­writer Mag­gie Rogers in the below episode of Art Zoom, in which pop­u­lar musi­cians share their thoughts while nav­i­gat­ing around a famous can­vas.

Bonus! Throw your­self into a free col­or­ing page of The Star­ry Night here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

Vin­cent Van Gogh’s “The Star­ry Night”: Why It’s a Great Paint­ing in 15 Min­utes

1,000+ Art­works by Vin­cent Van Gogh Dig­i­tized & Put Online by Dutch Muse­ums: Enter Van Gogh World­wide

Rare Vin­cent van Gogh Paint­ing Goes on Pub­lic Dis­play for the First Time: Explore the 1887 Paint­ing Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Art History School: Learn About the Art & Lives of Toulouse-Lautrec, Gustav Klimt, Frances Bacon, Edvard Munch & Many More

in Art, History, Life | September 13th, 2021

Artist and video­g­ra­ph­er Paul Priest­ly is an enthu­si­as­tic and gen­er­ous sort of fel­low.

His free online draw­ing tuto­ri­als abound with encour­ag­ing words for begin­ners, and he clear­ly rel­ish­es lift­ing the cur­tain to reveal his home stu­dio set up and self designed cam­era rig.

But we here at Open Cul­ture think his great­est gift to home view­ers are his Art His­to­ry School pro­files of well-known artists like Hen­ri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vin­cent Van Gogh.

An avid sto­ry­teller, he’s drawn to those with trag­ic his­to­ries — the deci­sion to piv­ot from imper­son­at­ing the artist, as he did with Van Gogh, to serv­ing as a reporter inter­est­ed in how such details as syphilis and alco­holism informed lives and careers is a wise one.

Priest­ly makes a con­vinc­ing case that Lautrec’s aris­to­crat­ic upbring­ing con­tributed to his mis­ery. His short stature was the result, not of dwarfism, but Pykn­odysos­to­sis (PYCD) a rare bone weak­en­ing dis­ease that sure­ly owed some­thing to his par­ents’ sta­tus as first cousins.

His appear­ance made him a sub­ject of life­long mock­ery, and ensured that the free­wheel­ing artist scene in Mont­martre would prove more wel­com­ing than the blue­blood milieu into which he’d been born.

Priest­ly makes a meal of that Demi-monde, intro­duc­ing view­ers to many of the play­ers.

He height­ens our appre­ci­a­tion for Lautrec’s mas­ter­piece, At the Moulin Rouge, by briefly ori­ent­ing us to who’s seat­ed around the table: writer and crit­ic Édouard Dujardin, dancer La Mac­arona, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Paul Secau, and “cham­pagne sales­man and debauchee” Mau­rice Guib­ert, who ear­li­er posed as a lech­er­ous patron in Lautrec’s At the Café La Mie.

Queen of the Can­can La Goulue hangs out in the back­ground with anoth­er dancer, the won­der­ful­ly named La Môme Fro­mage.

Lautrec places him­self square­ly in the mix, look­ing very much at home.

Con­sid­er that these names, like those of fre­quent Lautrec sub­jects acro­bat­ic dancer Jane Avril and chanteuse Yvette Guil­bert were as cel­e­brat­ed in Belle Epoque Mont­martre as many of the painters Lautrec rubbed shoul­ders with — Degas, Pis­sar­ro, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Manet.

In an arti­cle in The Smith­son­ian, Paul Tra­cht­man recounts how Lautrec dis­cov­ered the mod­el for Manet’s famous nude Olympia, Vic­torine Meurent, “liv­ing in abject pover­ty in a top-floor apart­ment down a Mont­martre alley. She was now an old, wrin­kled, bald­ing woman. Lautrec called on her often, and took his friends along, pre­sent­ing her with gifts of choco­late and flow­ers — as if court­ing death itself.”

Mean­while Degas sniffed that Lautrec’s stud­ies of women in a broth­el “stank of syphilis.”

Per­haps Priest­ly will delve into Degas for an upcom­ing Art His­to­ry School episode … there’s no short­age of mate­r­i­al there.

Above are three more of Paul Priestly’s Art His­to­ry School pro­files that we’ve enjoyed on Frances Bacon, Edvard Munch and Gus­tav Klimt. You can sub­scribe to his chan­nel here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Art His­to­ry Web Book

Art His­to­ri­an Pro­vides Hilar­i­ous & Sur­pris­ing­ly Effi­cient Art His­to­ry Lessons on Tik­Tok

Free Art & Art His­to­ry Cours­es 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Evolution of Kandinsky’s Painting: A Journey from Realism to Vibrant Abstraction Over 46 Years

in Art, History | September 13th, 2021

Like most renowned abstract painters, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky could also paint real­is­ti­cal­ly. Unlike most renowned abstract painters, he only took up art in earnest after study­ing eco­nom­ics and law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Moscow. He then found ear­ly suc­cess teach­ing those sub­jects, which seem to have proven too world­ly for his sen­si­bil­i­ties: at age 30 he enrolled in the Munich Acad­e­my to con­tin­ue the study of art that he’d left off while grow­ing up in Odessa. The sur­viv­ing paint­ings he pro­duced at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry and the begin­ning of the 20th, dis­played on Wikipedi­a’s list of his works, include a vari­ety of land­scapes, most pre­sent­ing Ger­man and Russ­ian (or today Ukrain­ian) land­scapes undis­turbed by a sin­gle human fig­ure.

Kandin­sky made dra­mat­ic change come with 1903’s The Blue Rid­er (above). The pres­ence of the tit­u­lar fig­ure made for an obvi­ous dif­fer­ence from so many of the images he’d cre­at­ed over the pre­vi­ous half-decade; a shift in its very per­cep­tion of real­i­ty made for a less obvi­ous one.

This is not the world as we nor­mal­ly see it, and Kandin­sky’s track record of high­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive paint­ings tells us that he must delib­er­ate­ly have cho­sen to paint it it that way. With fel­low artists like August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Mün­ter, he went on to form the Blue Rid­er Group, whose pub­li­ca­tions argued for abstract art’s capa­bil­i­ty to attain great spir­i­tu­al heights, espe­cial­ly through col­or.

“Grad­u­al­ly Kandin­sky makes depar­tures from the exter­nal ‘world as a mod­el’ into the world of ‘paint as a thing in itself,’ ” writes painter Markus Ray. “Still depict­ing ‘world­ly scenes,’ these paint­ings start to take on pur­er col­ors and shapes. He reduces vol­umes into sim­ple shapes, and col­ors into bright and vibrant hues. One can still make out the scene, but the shapes and col­ors begin to take on a life of their own.” This is espe­cial­ly true of the scenes Kandin­sky paint­ed in Bavaria, such as 1909’s Rail­way near Mur­nau above. The out­break of World War I five years lat­er sent him back to Rus­sia, where he con­tin­ued his pio­neer­ing jour­ney toward a visu­al art equal in expres­sive pow­er to music, which he called his “ulti­mate teacher.” But by the ear­ly 1920s it had become clear that his increas­ing­ly indi­vid­u­al­is­tic and non-rep­re­sen­ta­tive ten­den­cies would­n’t sit well with the Sovi­et cul­tur­al pow­ers that be.

A return to Ger­many was in order. “In 1921, at the age of 55, Kandin­sky moved to Weimar to teach mur­al paint­ing and intro­duc­to­ry ana­lyt­i­cal draw­ing at the new­ly found­ed Bauhaus school,” says Christie’s. “There he worked along­side the likes of Paul Klee, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers,” and also expand­ed on Goethe’s the­o­ries of col­or. A true believ­er in the Bauhaus’ “phi­los­o­phy of social improve­ment through art,” Kandin­sky also wound up among the artists whose work was exhib­it­ed in the Nazi Par­ty’s “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937. By that time the Bauhaus was dis­solved and Kandin­sky had reset­tled in Paris, where until his death in 1944 (as evi­denced by Wikipedi­a’s list of his paint­ings) he kept push­ing fur­ther into abstrac­tion, seek­ing ever-pur­er expres­sions of the human soul until the very end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Time Trav­el Back to 1926 and Watch Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Make Art in Some Rare Vin­tage Video

Helen Mir­ren Tells Us Why Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Is Her Favorite Artist (And What Act­ing & Mod­ern Art Have in Com­mon)

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Syncs His Abstract Art to Mussorgsky’s Music in a His­toric Bauhaus The­atre Pro­duc­tion (1928)

An Inter­ac­tive Social Net­work of Abstract Artists: Kandin­sky, Picas­so, Bran­cusi & Many More

How to Paint Like Kandin­sky, Picas­so, Warhol & More: A Video Series from the Tate

The Guggen­heim Puts Online 1700 Great Works of Mod­ern Art from 625 Artists

Take a Jour­ney Through 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

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.

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William Blake’s 102 Illustrations of The Divine Comedy Collected in a Beautiful Book from Taschen

in Art, Books, Literature | September 10th, 2021

In his book on the Tarot, Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky describes the Her­mit card as rep­re­sent­ing mid-life, a “pos­i­tive cri­sis,” a mid­dle point in time; “between life and death, in a con­tin­u­al cri­sis, I hold up my lit lamp — my con­scious­ness,” says the Her­mit, while con­fronting the unknown. The fig­ure recalls the image of Dante in the open­ing lines of the Divine Com­e­dy. In Mandelbaum’s trans­la­tion at Columbi­a’s Dig­i­tal Dante, we see evi­dent sim­i­lar­i­ties:

When I had jour­neyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself with­in a shad­owed for­est,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that sav­age for­est, dense and dif­fi­cult,
which even in recall renews my fear:

so bitter—death is hard­ly more severe!

This is not to say the lit­er­ary Dante and occult Her­meti­cism are his­tor­i­cal­ly relat­ed; only they emerged from the same matrix, a medieval Catholic Europe steeped in mys­te­ri­ous sym­bols. The Her­mit is a por­tent, mes­sen­ger, and guide, an aspect rep­re­sent­ed by the poet Vir­gil, whom William Blake — in 102 water­col­or illus­tra­tions made between 1824 and 1827 — dressed in blue to rep­re­sent spir­it, while Dante wears his usu­al red — the col­or, in Blake’s sys­tem, of expe­ri­ence.

Blake did not read the Divine Com­e­dy as a medieval Catholic believ­er but as a vision­ary 18th and 19th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish artist and poet who invent­ed his own reli­gion. He “taught him­self Ital­ian in order to be able to read the orig­i­nal” and had a “ com­plex rela­tion­ship” with the text, writes Dante schol­ar Sil­via De San­tis.

His inter­pre­ta­tion drew from a “wide­spread ‘selec­tive use’” of the poet,” dat­ing from 16th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish Protes­tant read­ings which saw Dante’s satir­i­cal skew­er­ing of cor­rupt indi­vid­u­als as indict­ments of the insti­tu­tions they rep­re­sent — the church and state for which Blake had no love.

Approach­ing the project at the end of his life, not the mid­dle, Blake drew pri­mar­i­ly on themes that Dante schol­ar Robin Kil­patrick describes as a “search­ing analy­sis of all of the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic fac­tors that had destroyed Flo­rence .… Hell is a diag­no­sis of what, in so many ways, can prove to be divi­sive in human nature. Sin, for Dante, is not trans­gres­sion of an ordi­nary kind … against some law… it’s a trans­gres­sion against love.”

Blake died before he could fin­ish the series, com­mis­sioned by his friend John Lin­nell in 1824. He had intend­ed to engrave all 102 illus­tra­tions, con­ceived, he wrote, “dur­ing a fort­night’s ill­ness in bed.” You can see all of his stun­ning water­col­ors online here and find them lov­ing­ly repro­duced in a new book pub­lished by Taschen with essays by Blake and Dante experts, help­ing con­tex­tu­al­ize two poets who found a com­mon lan­guage across a span of 500 years. The book, orig­i­nal­ly priced at $150, now sells for $40. A beau­ti­ful XL edi­tion sells at a high­er price.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rarely-Seen Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Are Now Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Uffizi Gallery

A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Ear­li­est Illus­trat­ed Edi­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1487–1568)

Explore Divine Com­e­dy Dig­i­tal, a New Dig­i­tal Data­base That Col­lects Sev­en Cen­turies of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

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

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Tove Jansson, Beloved Creator of the Moomins, Illustrates The Hobbit

in Art, Books | September 9th, 2021

What is a Hob­bit? A few char­ac­ters in J.R.R Tolkien’s clas­sic work of children’s fan­ta­sy won­der them­selves about the diminu­tive title char­ac­ters who don’t get out much. Tolkien describes them thor­ough­ly, a hand­ful of well-known British and Amer­i­can actors immor­tal­ized them on screen, but the last word on what a Hob­bit looks like belongs to the read­er. Or — in an edi­tion as rich­ly illus­trat­ed as the Swedish and Finnish edi­tions of the book were in 1962 and 1973 — to the Swedish/Finnish artist, Tove Jans­son, most famous for her cre­ation of inter­na­tion­al­ly beloved children’s char­ac­ters, the Moomins.

Like Bil­bo Bag­gins him­self, The Hob­bit is full of sur­pris­es — while pre­sent­ing itself as a book for kids, it con­tains adult lessons one nev­er out­grows. So, too, was Jans­son, “an acer­bic and wit­ty anti-fas­cist car­toon­ist dur­ing the Sec­ond World War,” write James Williams at Apol­lo.

“She wrote a pic­ture book for chil­dren about the immi­nent end of the world and spare, ten­der fic­tion for adults about love and fam­i­ly.” Jans­son had exact­ly the sen­si­bil­i­ty to bridge Tolkien’s worlds of imag­i­na­tive fan­cy and adult dan­ger and moral ambi­gu­i­ty. But first, she want­ed to cast off all asso­ci­a­tions with her most famous cre­ation.

As Jans­son wrote to a friend when she end­ed the Moomins, “I nev­er spare them a thought now it’s over. I’ve com­plete­ly drawn a line under all that. Just as you wouldn’t want to think back on a time you had a toothache.” The Moomins were a cre­ative mill­stone, and she strug­gled to get their style from around her neck.

“This led to an attempt to change the way in which she drew,” notes Moomin.com. “Tove tried dif­fer­ent tech­niques and drew each fig­ure freely again and again 20–60 times until she was hap­py with the result. From the book vignette illus­tra­tions, it is impos­si­ble to notice how the indi­vid­ual fig­ures are past­ed togeth­er into ‘a patch­work’ that made up each vignette.”

Despite her best efforts to escape her pre­vi­ous char­ac­ters, how­ev­er, “the major­i­ty of the full-page illus­tra­tions fol­low the char­ac­ter­is­tic style of Tove’s illus­tra­tions for the Moomin books.” Her own reser­va­tions aside, this is all to the good as Jansson’s Moomin books and com­ic strips were built from the same mix of sen­si­bil­i­ty — child­like won­der, grown-up ethics, and a respect for the deep ecol­o­gy of myth. Both Tolkien and Jans­son wrote dur­ing, after, and in response to Hitler’s rise to pow­er and drew on “a Nordic folk tra­di­tion of trolls and forests, light and dark,” writes Williams. But Jans­son brought her own artis­tic vision to The Hob­bit. See more of her illus­tra­tions at Lithub.

via LitHub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sub­lime Alice in Won­der­land Illus­tra­tions of Tove Jans­son, Cre­ator of the Glob­al­ly-Beloved Moomins (1966)

Before Cre­at­ing the Moomins, Tove Jans­son Drew Satir­i­cal Art Mock­ing Hitler & Stal­in

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

Illus­tra­tions Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit from the Sovi­et Union (1976)

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A Restored Vermeer Painting Reveals a Portrait of a Cupid Hidden for Over 350 Years

in Art | September 8th, 2021

Botched art restora­tions make good head­lines, but rarely are we asked to con­sid­er if a posthu­mous change to a great mas­ter’s work rep­re­sents an improve­ment. And yet, when images of a restored Girl Read­ing a Let­ter at an Open Win­dow by Jan Ver­meer cir­cu­lat­ed recent­ly, the world had the chance to com­pare the restored orig­i­nal paint­ing, at the left, with an unknown painter’s revi­sion, long thought to be Ver­meer’s work. (Click here to view the paint­ings side by side in a larg­er for­mat.) Sev­er­al peo­ple announced that they pre­ferred the doc­tored paint­ing on the right, first attrib­uted to Ver­meer in 1880 (and pre­vi­ous­ly attrib­uted to Dutch mas­ters Rem­brandt and Hals).

As con­ser­va­tors found at the con­clu­sion of a restora­tion project begun in 2017, it is the paint­ing on the left that Ver­meer intend­ed as his final state­ment on the sub­ject of a girl read­ing a let­ter at an open win­dow. That paint­ing puts the sub­ject in a very dif­fer­ent light. The naked Cupid behind the young woman — in place of an ambigu­ous­ly dour patch of beige — revis­es over a cen­tu­ry of art his­tor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion. “With the recov­ery of Cupid in the back­ground, the actu­al inten­tion of the Delft painter becomes rec­og­niz­able,” says Stephan Koja, direc­tor of the Old Mas­ters Pic­ture Gallery.

Art his­to­ri­ans and con­ser­va­tors had long known the oth­er paint­ing was under­neath, hav­ing dis­cov­ered it via X‑ray in 1979. But they assumed it was Ver­meer him­self who made the change. “As it was not uncom­mon for artists to paint over their work,” My Mod­ern Met writes, “schol­ars ini­tial­ly accept­ed that Ver­meer had sim­ply changed his mind and decid­ed to keep the wall bare.” Instead, thanks to the 2017 restora­tion project, “researchers were able to con­clude that the over­paint­ing was com­plet­ed over sev­er­al decades after the can­vas was fin­ished.”

“Ver­meer often incor­po­rat­ed emp­ty back­grounds in his genre paint­ings,” a fea­ture that has become some­thing of a hall­mark thanks to the fame of paint­ings like The Milk­maid. This is one rea­son the Cupid went under­cov­er for so long, despite an unbal­anced com­po­si­tion with­out it. But Ver­meer also incor­po­rat­ed back­grounds filled with art, includ­ing the same Cupid paint­ing, which appears in his less­er known A Young Woman Stand­ing at a Vir­ginal and may have been a paint­ing he him­self owned. “There has been much spec­u­la­tion,” the Nation­al Gallery notes, that this paint­ing (and anoth­er, sim­i­lar­ly titled work) rep­re­sent “fideli­ty” and “a venal, mer­ce­nary approach to love.” What approach might be sug­gest­ed by the new­ly restored Girl Read­ing a Let­ter at an Open Win­dow?

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

See the Com­plete Works of Ver­meer in Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty: Google Makes Them Avail­able on Your Smart­phone

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

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

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

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