Like most Japanese masters of ukiyo‑e woodblock art, Katsushika Hokusai is best known mononymously. But he’s even better known by his work — and by one piece of work in particular, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Even those who’ve never heard the name Hokusai have seen that print, arresting in its somehow calm turbulence, or at least they’ve seen one of its countless modern parodies and tributes (most recently, a large-scale homage in the medium of LEGO). But when he died in 1849, the prolific and long-lived artist left behind a body of work amounting to more than 30,000 paintings, sketches, prints, and illustrations (as well as a how-to-draw book).
None of those 30,000 works are quite as famous as his Great Wave off Kanagawa, but very few indeed are as ambitions as the series to which it belongs, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. It is that two-year project, the artistic fruit of an obsession with Fuji and its environs, that Taschen has taken as the material for their new book Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
Produced in a 224-page “XXL edition,” it gathers “the finest impressions from institutions and collections worldwide in the complete set of 46 plates alongside 114 color variations” — all sewn together, appropriately, with “Japanese binding.”
Not only does the book reproduce Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji with Taschen’s signature attention to image quality, it presents The Great Wave off Kanagawa in a way few actually see it: in context. For that most widely published of all Hokusai prints launched the series, which continued on to Fine Wind, Clear Morning, Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, and Kajikazawa in Kai Province, that last being an image held in especially high esteem by ukiyo‑e enthusiasts. One such enthusiast, east Asian art historian Andreas Marks, has performed this book’s editing and writing, as he did with Taschen’s previous Japanese Woodblock Prints (1680–1938). Experiencing the whole of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, more than one reader will no doubt become as transfixed by Hokusai as Hokusai was by his homeland’s most beloved mountain. You can pick up a copy of Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji here.
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 or on Facebook.
Art Historian Steven Zucker and the Khan Academy’s Sal Khan tackle the question head on in the below video, concluding that the work is not only a reflection of the time in which it was created, but that the enormity of its impact was made possible by that timing.
Forty-five years before Warhol escorted those lowly, instantly recognizable soup cans from the supermarket to the far loftier realm of museum and gallery, the art world was thrown into an uproar over Marcel Duchamp’s provocative readymade, Fountain, a prefabricated urinal submitted to the Society of Independent Artists inaugural exhibition as the work of the fictitious R. Mutt. The Tate Modern’s website summarizes its importance:
Fountain tested beliefs about art and the role of taste in the art world. Interviewed in 1964, Duchamp said he had chosen a urinal in part because he thought it had the least chance of being liked (although many at the time did find it aesthetically pleasing). He continued: ‘I was drawing people’s attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, exactly like an oasis appears in the desert. It is very beautiful until, of course, you are dying of thirst. But you don’t die in the field of art. The mirage is solid.’
Campbell’s soup cans possess a similar solidity.
A full page magazine ad from 1934 introduces Cream of Mushroom and Noodle with Chicken (soon to become Chicken Noodle) by reminding readers to “Look for the Red-and-White Label.”
By 1962, Campbell’s had given consumers their pick of 32 flavors, and Warhol painted all 32 of them. Not the contents. Just those uniform cans.
Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery sold five of them before gallerist Irving Blum realized that their impact was greatest when all 32 were displayed together, to echo how consumers were used to seeing the real thing.
Warhol had a personal connection to his subject matter, but it wasn’t like he set out to rep a lifelong favorite. Rather, he was following up on a friend’s suggestion to paint something everyone would would recognize, with or without passionate feelings. (He seemed to be without:)
I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.
As had industrialization as the overarching system by which most lives were ordered. The artist may not have offered overt comment on mass produced items, convenience foods, or brand loyalty. He just depended on the public to be so intimately acquainted with them, they had faded into the wallpaper of their daily lives.
Nor was the public overly accustomed to everyday objects reconceptualized as art. These days, we’re a bit blasé.
Warhol’s subject matter may have been prosaic, but his timing, Khan and Zucker tell us, could not have been better.
As Campbell’s is to soup, Marilyn Monroe is to celebrity — an enduring household name. Her sexy, youthful image is imprinted on fans born decades after her death.
The most universal Marilyn is the one from the Niagara publicity still, immortalized in acrylic and silkscreen in Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych. One of his most defining works, it was produced the same year as his soup cans (and Monroe’s suicide at the age of 36).
In considering this work for his ongoing series, Great Art Explained, gallerist James Payne delves into Warhol’s fascination with multiples, celebrity, religious iconography, machination, and death, noting that “both Warhol and Marilyn understood transformation”:
From early on in his career, Andy Warhol had an extraordinary ability of finding the sacred in the profane.… He was a product of the Eastern European immigrant experience who himself became an icon, a shy, gay, working class man who became the court painter of the 1970s, an artist who embraced consumerism, celebrity and the counterculture and changed modern art in the process.
Like many artists whose abstractions cemented their legacy, Hilma af Klint was trained to paint portraits, botanicals, and landscapes.
The naturalist works of her early adulthood depict bourgeois, late-19th century Swedish life, and, by association, the sort of subject matter and approach that were deemed most fitting for a female artist, even in a society where women were allowed to work alongside men.
But something else was afoot with Hilma, as artist and educator Paul Priestley points out in the above episode from his Art History School series.
Her 10-year-old sister’s death from the flu may have caused her to lean into an existing interest in spiritualism, but as Iris Müller-Westermann, director of Moderna Museet Malmö told The Guardian’s Kate Kellaway, the “mathematical, scientific, musical, curious” teen was likely motivated by her own thirst for knowledge as by this family tragedy:
You have to understand this was the age when natural sciences went beyond the visible: Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves [1886], Wilhelm Röntgen invented the x‑ray [1895]…Hilma is like Leonardo – she wanted to understand who we are as human beings in the cosmos.
Her interest in the occult did not make her an outsider. Spiritualism was considered a respectable intellectual preoccupation. Abstract painters Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich and Frantisek Kupka were also using their art to try and get at that which the eye could not see.
They were generated by such ventures into mysticism as Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, Eastern philosophy, and various Eastern and Western religions. Spiritual ideas were not peripheral to these artists’ lives, not something that happened to pop into their minds as they stood by their canvas. Kupka participated in seances and was a practicing medium. Kandinsky attended private fetes involved with magic, black masses and pagan rituals. Mondrian was a member of the Dutch Theosophical Society and lived briefly in the quarters of the French Theosophical Society in Paris. He said once that he ”got everything from the Secret Doctrine” of Theosophy, which was an attempt by its founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to do nothing less than read, digest and synthesize all religions. It has been known for some time how much of Mondrian’s symbolism — including the ubiquitous vertical and horizontal lines — and how much of his utopianism, was shaped by Theosophical doctrine.
Reviewer Michael Brenson devotes one sentence to Hilma, “a previously unknown Swedish artist whose somewhat mechanical abstract paintings and drawings of organic, geometrical forms were marked by Theosophy and Anthroposophy.”
Thirty-five years later, she’s receiving much more credit. As Priestley says in his video biography, Hilma, and not Kandinsky, is now hailed as the first painter to experiment with abstraction.
Would Hilma have welcomed such a distinction?
She maintained that she was but a receiving instrument for Amaliel, a “high master” from another dimension, who made contact during the séances she participated in regularly with four friends who met weekly to practice automatic drawing and writing.
Amaliel charged her with creating the artwork for the interior of a temple that was part of the high masters’ vision. The Guggenheim’s classroom materials for The Paintings for the Temple note that her friends warned Hilma against accepting this otherworldly commission, “that the intensity of this kind of spiritual engagement could drive her into madness.”
But Hilma threw herself into the assignment, producing 111 paintings during a one-and-a-half year period, claiming:
The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke.
For whatever reason, the paintings proved too much for Rudolph Steiner, the founder of the Anthroposophical Society, whom she had invited to view them, paying his travel expenses in hope that he would provide a detailed analysis and interpretation of the images. Instead, he counseled her that no one would understand them, and that the only course of action would be to keep the paintings out of sight and out of mind for fifty years. To do otherwise might endanger her health.
A disappointing response that ultimately led to the paintings being socked away for an even longer period.
Good news for Kandinsky… and possibly for Steiner.
At any rate, the competition was coerced into eliminating herself, inadvertently planting the seeds for some major, if delayed art world excitement. Hilma, who died more than forty years before the L.A. County Museum show, was not able to bask in the attention on any earthly plane.
For those curious in a take that is not entirely rooted in the art world, Lightforms Art Center in Hudson, New York hosted a recent Hilma Af Klint exhibit. Their strong ties to the Anthroposophical community make for some interesting exhibit commentary.
“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.” — Mark Rothko
In 2012, a Russian artist calling himself Vladimir Umanets wrote his name and the words “A potential piece of yellowism” in black marker on the corner of Mark Rothko’s 1958 canvas Black on Maroon. The damage to the painting, housed at the Tate Modern since 1970, was substantial, and it turned out to be one of the museum’s most challenging restoration projects, as well as one of its most successful — “far more successful than any of us dared hope,” said Tate director Nicholas Serota. The painting went back on display in May of 2014.
Due to Rothko’s layered technique, the painting’s “surface is really delicate and it turned out that most of the solvent systems that could dissolve and remove the ink could potentially damage the painting as well.” Patricia Smithen, the Tate’s head of conservation, told The Guardian. The video above from the museum shows the art and science that went into restoring the famous work, an eighteen-month-long process that involved some reverse engineering from a canvas donated by the Rothko family.
Black on Maroon seemed like an odd choice for a protest, as a blogger at Art History Abroad wrote the following day: “‘Why Rothko?’. His paintings [are] often criticised by those who don’t favour their abstraction, but rarely deemed politically or socially motivated to a point that they might provoke vandalism.” The presence of Black on Maroon and other Seagram Murals at the Tate, in fact, mark an act of protest by Rothko himself (who committed suicide the day the paintings arrived at the London museum).
The Seagram Murals were originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in New York, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Seven paintings were commissioned, Rothko made 30. He reportedly told Harper’s editor John Fischer he wanted to create “something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.” When he finally got the chance to dine at the completed restaurant, he was disgusted, withdrew his work, and returned his commission, writing, “it seemed clear to me at once that the two were not for each other.” He spent the next decade thinking about how and where to display the paintings.
Umanets did not seem to care much about the history of the murals in the Tate’s Rothko Room and claims his choice had no meaning. “I didn’t single out Rothko to make my statement,” he wrote in a public letter of apology published after he spent a year and a half in prison. “I would have done the same had the artist been Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. It was a spontaneous decision and nothing personal.” Likewise, his Dada-esqe “Manifesto of Yellowism” outlines a program with a distinct lack of concern for specificity and a vaguely satirical desire to flatten art into one color, one purpose, one meaning.
Even as he publicly abjured his act of protest (maybe by order of the court?), Umanets also expressed a genuine concern for the future of art, “Art has become a business, which appears to serve only the needs of the art market. As a result the art world no longer has radical thinkers and polemicists willing to scythe new and different pathways. Everyone is playing safe.” He might have made his point more clearly by going after Jeff Koons. Rothko was a radical thinker, and his Seagram Murals represent a final refusal to compromise with the demands of the art market.
His dark, dramatic works incorporate the kind of lighting we associate with horror films. Figures, twisted and contorted in tortuous poses, emerge from deep, black shadows. Instead of beatific smiles, his saints wear grimaces and furrowed frowns, as in The Denial of St. Peter, one of the few Caravaggios in the U.S., and a canvas depicting the weakest moment in the life of the Gospel character whose name means “the rock.” Caravaggio’s work came to be called tenebrism after the Latin for “dark or obscure,” for both its style and its substance.
There’s little evidence that Caravaggio (1571–1610) was a practitioner of the occult arts, but he was unafraid to look into the darkest realms of the human psyche, and to depict them on canvas. He was also drawn to artist’s models who looked weathered and worn down by life, and his hyper-realistic Biblical scenes scandalized many people and thrilled more, and made him the most famous painter in Rome, for a time.
Caravaggio himself was a scandalous character who brawled and fornicated his way through Rome, then in exile in Naples, where he died an early death at age 38, from either an unspecified fever or lead poisoning. (A new film by Italian actor and director Michele Placido imagines Caravaggio in 1600, “a brilliant and subversive artist who lives with the burden of a death sentence. The shadow of a merciless, occult power is about to loom over him.”)
He left no writing behind, the details of his life are sketchy at best, and he fell into obscurity for many years after his death, but not before his paintings showed the way forward for Baroque painters who followed him as Caravaggisti or tenebrosi (“shadowists”), including such great masters as Peter Paul Rubins and Rembrandt. So, how did he do it? How did Caravaggio invent modern painting, as some critics have claimed?
“The testimonies of his contemporaries are scarce and imprecise regarding the procedure he adopted to complete his work,” notes the Artenet video above, an exploration of Caravaggio’s technique. We do know a few details: he worked from models, who held the acrobatic poses in his paintings while he worked; he had a studio in which light streamed in from above; and he worked quickly — “He could paint up to three heads in a single day.”
The lack of unfinished work by Caravaggio has made it difficult to trace his process backward, but some evidence remains. See Caravaggio’s “entire pictorial process” recreated, and learn how a painter called “the master of light” made his luminous figures by surrounding them with darkness.
Even if the name Utagawa Hiroshige doesn’t ring a bell, “Hiroshige” by itself probably does. And on the off chance that you’ve never heard so much as his mononym, you’ve still almost certainly glimpsed one of his portrayals of Tokyo — or rather, one of his portrayals of Edo, as the Japanese capital, his hometown, was known during his lifetime. Hiroshige lived in the 19th century, the end of the classical period of ukiyo‑e, the art of woodblock-printed “pictures of the floating world.” In that time he became one of the form’s last masters, having cultivated not just a high level of artistic skill but a formidable productivity.
In total, Hiroshige produced more than 8,000 works. Some of those are accounted for by his well-known series of prints like The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. But his mastery encompassed more than the urban and rural landscapes of his homeland, as evidenced by this much humbler project: a set of omocha‑e, or instructional pictures for children, explaining how to make shadow puppets.
Hiroshige explains in clear and vivid images “how to twist your hands into a snail or rabbit or grasp a mat to mimic a bird perched on a branch,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert. “Appearing behind a translucent shoji screen, the clever figures range in difficulty from simple animals to sparring warriors and are complete with prop suggestions, written instructions for making the creatures move — ‘open your fingers within your sleeve to move the owl’s wings’ or ‘draw up your knee for the fox’s back’ — and guides for full-body contortions.” The difficulty curve does seem to rise rather sharply, beginning with puppets requiring little more than one’s hands and ending with full-body performances surely intended more for amusement than imitation.
But then, kids take their fun wherever they find it, whether in 2021 or in 1842, when these images were originally published. Though it was a fairly late date in the life of Hiroshige, at that time modern Japan hadn’t even begun to emerge. The children who entertained themselves with his shadow puppets against the shoji screens of their homes would have come of age with the arrival of United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s “black ships,” which began the long-closed Japan’s process of re-opening itself to world trade — and set off a whirlwind of civilizational transformation that, well over a century and a half later, has yet to settle down.
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 or on Facebook.
“Culture has come to prize this quality in creative work: the ability to grab people quickly,” and “above pretty much anything else” at that. So says Evan Puschak, who should know: as the Nerdwriter, he runs a popular eponymous channel on Youtube, where everything depends on getting and holding the viewer’s increasingly fleeting attention. Even under such pressures, Puschak has managed to maintain one of the most thoughtful cultural channels around, previously featured here on Open Culture for its video essays on everything from the films of Jean-Luc Godard to the paintings of Edward Hopper to the music of Fleetwood Mac.
But it is Frida Kahlo whom the Nerdwriter credits as a master manipulator of audience attention. “Yes, there’s a sensationalistic obsession with the drama of her life, but that wouldn’t arouse nearly as much interest if it weren’t for the drama of her art — which is also sensational, but in the good way.”
The sensationalistic quality of Kahlo’s paintings owes to the “intimacy of the images” they depict, especially when they communicate “her vulnerability, her physical and emotional pain, but also her defiance and self-confidence, and the pride she so clearly has in her culture.” This comes through with special clarity in the self-portraits she created quite prolifically, and in so doing defined herself as well as the new 20th-century Mexican culture with which she came of age.
“I really, really hesitate to bring up the word selfie,” says Puschak, but “insomuch as her self-portraits are always simultaneously a recording and a performance of identity, they’re bound to be relatable to modern audiences.” In the first half of the 20th century during which Kahlo lived, painting was a relatively efficient way to produce images of oneself. Today, many of us do it dozens of times a day, at the touch of a button, marshaling few artistic resources in the process. But if selfies lack the impact of Kahlo’s self-portraits, it may owe to the ironic reason that the selfies look too good. Kahlo’s painting “has a bit of an amateurish quality to it, in its flattening of depth and skewed perspectives and anatomy.” But she used that style on purpose, paying homage to the folk art of her homeland and also making you feel as if “someone you know” painted these works. Puschak, who refers to her on a first-name basis, seemingly feels that way; but then, he’s far from the only Frida fan to do so.
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 or on Facebook.
The Venus de Milo is one of art’s most widely recognized female forms.
The Mona Lisa may be the first stop on many Louvre visitors’ agendas, but Venus, by virtue of being unclothed, sculptural, and prominently displayed, lends herself beautifully to all manner of souvenirs, both respectful and profane.
Renoir is that rare bird who was impervious to her 6’7” charms, describing her as the “big gendarme.” His own Venus, sculpted with the help of an assistant nearly 100 years after the Venus de Milo joined the Louvre’s collection, appears much meatier throughout the hip and thigh region. Her celebrity cannot hold a candle to that of her armless sister.
In the Vox Almanac episode above, host Phil Edwards delves into the Venus de Milo’s appeal, taking a less delirious approach than sculptor Auguste Rodin, who rhapsodized:
…thou, thou art alive, and thy thoughts are the thoughts of a woman, not of some strange, superior being, artificial and imaginary. Thou art made of truth alone, outside of which there is neither strength nor beauty. It is thy sincerity to nature which makes thee all powerful, because nature appeals to all men. Thou art the familiar companion, the woman that each believes he knows, but that no man has ever understood, the wisest not more than the simple. Who understands the trees? Who can comprehend the light?
Edwards opts instead for a Sharpie and a tiny 3‑D printed model, which he marks up like a plastic surgeon, drawing viewers’ attention to the missing bits.
The arms, we know.
Also her earlobes, most likely removed by looters eager to make off with her jewelry.
One of her massive marble feet (a man’s size 15) is missing.
Interestingly, the plinth was among the items discovered by accident on the Greek island of Milos in 1820, along with two pillars topped with busts of Hercules and Hermes, the bisected Venus, and assorted marble fragments, including — maybe — an upper arm and hand holding a round object (a golden apple, mayhaps?)
What he’s most interested in is that plinth, which would have given the lie to the long-standing assertion that the Venus de Milo was created in the Classical era.
This incorrect designation made the Louvre’s newest resident a most welcome replacement for the loot France had been compelled to return to the Vatican in the wake of Napoleon’s first abdication.
The plinth may have been “lost” under mysterious circumstances, but its inscription was preserved in a sketch by A. Debay, whose father had been a student of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon’s now-banished First Painter, a Neo-Classicist.
(David’s final painting, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces, completed a couple of years after Venus de Milo was installed in the Louvre, was considered a bust.)
Debay’s faithful recreation of the plinth’s inscription as part of his study of the Venus de Milo offers clues as to her creator — “ …andros son of …enides citizen of …ioch at Meander made.”
It also dates her creation to 150–50 BCE, corroborating notes French naval officer Jules d’Urville had made in Greece weeks after the discovery.
The birth of this Venus should have been attributed to the Hellenistic, not Classical period.
Had her true author been known, she likely would’ve been locked away in the museum’s archive, if not sold off. Hellenistic art had by then been denigrated by Renaissance scholars who re-conceived it in anti-classical terms, finding in its expressive, experimental form and emotional content a provocative realism that defied everything their era stood for: modesty, intellect, and equanimity…It helped that the Venus de Milo possessed several classical attributes. Her strong profile, short upper lip, and smooth features, for example, were in keeping with Classical figural conventions, as was the continuous line connecting her nose and forehead. The partially-draped figure with its attenuated silhouette – which the Regency fashion of the day imitated with its empire bust-line – also recalled classical sculptures of Aphrodite, and her Roman counterpart, Venus. Yet despite all these classical identifiers, the Venus de Milo flaunted a definitive Hellenistic influence in her provocatively low-slung drapery, high waist line, and curve-enhancing contrapposto—far more sensual and exaggerated than classical ideals allowed.
It took the Louvre over a hundred years to come clean as to its star sculpture’s true provenance.
What happened to the plinth remains anyone’s guess.
The only mystery the museum’s website seems concerned with is one of identity — is she Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, or Poseidon’s wife, Amphitrite, the sea goddess worshipped on the island on which she was discovered?
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