Hieronymus Bosch Figurines: Collect Surreal Characters from Bosch’s Paintings & Put Them on Your Bookshelf

in Art | December 5th, 2020

Few painters have cre­at­ed as rich a world as Hierony­mus Bosch did in The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights. The late 15th- or ear­ly 16th-cen­tu­ry trip­tych, which depicts the cre­ation of man, the licen­tious frol­ick­ing of all crea­tures on a par­a­disi­a­cal Earth, and the sub­se­quent fall into damna­tion, draws a scruti­ny — and caus­es an amuse­ment — as intense as ever. As we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, you can now take a vir­tu­al tour of the paint­ing (there’s even an app for it), see it brought to life with mod­ern ani­ma­tion, and hear the song tat­tooed on the pos­te­ri­or of one of the work’s many char­ac­ters.

Bosch not only cre­at­ed a world with The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, he pop­u­lat­ed it thor­ough­ly. And despite the human-cen­tric sto­ry the work appears to take as its basis, the cast with which it retells it extends far beyond mere human­i­ty: the pan­els fea­ture not just wildlife of all shapes and sizes but a vari­ety of myth­i­cal grotesques, from imps to chimeras to hybrids of man and ani­mal to much more besides.

He drew from the same sur­re­al imag­i­na­tive well to fill his oth­er paint­ings, and you can now pull out a few of these col­or­ful, men­ac­ing, pre­pos­ter­ous, and dark­ly humor­ous char­ac­ters your­self in col­lectible fig­urine form.

Though “not a big knick­knack per­son,” Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Tara McGin­ley admits to dig­ging this selec­tion of “tiny objects” straight from the mind of Bosch, all “kin­da cool-look­ing in their own obvi­ous­ly weird way” and none “too expen­sive. The fig­urines start at around $45, depend­ing on qual­i­ty, size and detail.” (You can find them on Ama­zon.) She high­lights such issues as “Hel­met­ed Bird Mon­ster,” which accord­ing to man­u­fac­tur­ers Para­s­tone fea­tures a sev­ered foot “swing­ing from the bird’s hel­met refer­ring to the hor­ri­ble cor­po­ral pun­ish­ments which could be expect­ed in hell.”

“Dev­il on Night Chair,” one of the most rec­og­niz­able denizens of The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights’ third pan­el, comes cast in his famous posi­tion, “eat­ing a per­son on a chair where he will excrete the human remains.” The con­sid­er­ably less sat­is­fied “Fat Bel­ly with Dag­ger” comes from the third pan­el of a dif­fer­ent trip­tych, The Temp­ta­tion of Saint Antho­ny, the dag­ger in his bel­ly show­ing “the con­se­quences of intem­per­ance. His eyes look out at you in acknowl­edg­ment.” Its mak­ers promise that “you will look at it in won­der as to how Bosch’s mind con­ceived of such an unusu­al lit­tle fel­low.” Find oth­er artis­tic scenes fea­tured on Ama­zon’s Bosch fig­urine page , and con­sid­er them for your­self or as gifts for friends and fam­i­ly. Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Cre­ates Stun­ning Real­is­tic Por­traits That Recre­ate Sur­re­al Scenes from Hierony­mus Bosch Paint­ings

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

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

Lis­ten to a Record­ing of a Song Writ­ten on a Man’s Butt in a 15-Cen­tu­ry Hierony­mus Bosch Paint­ing

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch “Jackson Pollock 51,” a Historic Short Film That Captures Pollock Creating Abstract Expressionist Art on a Sheet of Glass

in Art, Film | December 4th, 2020

Jack­son Pol­lock was described as an “action painter,” a label that sure­ly would­n’t have stuck if the pub­lic nev­er had the chance to see him in action. In that sense, only the era of pho­tog­ra­phy could have pro­duced an artist like him: not just because that tech­nol­o­gy pushed paint­ing toward abstrac­tion, but because it could dis­sem­i­nate images of the artist him­self far and wide. One pho­tog­ra­ph­er did more for this cause than any oth­er: the Ger­man-born Hans Namuth, who despite a lack of ini­tial inter­est in Pol­lock­’s work nev­er­the­less took up the chal­lenge of cap­tur­ing his cre­ative process — and there­by doing much to craft the artist’s image of raw, intu­itive and indi­vid­u­al­is­tic phys­i­cal­i­ty. Namuth accom­plished this even more mem­o­rably with a motion pic­ture: the short “Jack­son Pol­lock 51,” which you can watch above.

After attempt­ing some shoot­ing at the artist’s East Hamp­ton, Long Island home,“Namuth was unhap­py about hav­ing to choose between focus­ing on the paint­ing or on Pol­lock,” as the New York Times’ Sarah Box­er puts it. “He want­ed to catch painter and paint at once.” Namuth even­tu­al­ly hit upon a solu­tion: “The paint­ing would have to be on glass, and I would film from under­neath.”

The film first shows Pol­lock paint­ing more or less as usu­al (albeit out­doors, to obvi­ate the need for light­ing), and in lacon­ic voiceover the artist describes his devel­op­ment and process. “I can con­trol the flow of the paint,” he says. “There is no acci­dent, just as there is no begin­ning and no end. Some­times, I lose a paint­ing.” Indeed, he admits, “I lost con­tact with my first paint­ing on glass, and I start­ed anoth­er one.”

This hints at the rig­or­ous stan­dards — and stan­dards entire­ly his own — to which Pol­lock held his work. But he also left his sec­ond glass paint­ing to ruin, hav­ing by some accounts entered per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al freefall imme­di­ate­ly after he and Namuth wrapped this shoot. The two got into a shout­ing match that night, accus­ing one anoth­er of phoni­ness; at its height, Pol­lock action-paint­ed the din­ing-room floor by over­turn­ing the laden din­ner table in anger. “Accord­ing to Pol­lock lore, his rela­tion­ship with the cam­era was a Faus­t­ian bar­gain,” writes Box­er. “After that night [with Namuth], Pol­lock nev­er stopped drink­ing.… Six years lat­er, bloat­ed, depressed and drunk, he drove his car into a tree, killing him­self and a friend.” “The impli­ca­tion is that Namuth killed Pol­lock, that the pho­tographs stole the artist’s ‘sav­age’ spir­it. In doing things for the cam­era that he once did more spon­ta­neous­ly, Pol­lock came to feel he was indeed a pho­ny.” But it’s also thanks to Namuth, too-active a direc­tor of the action though he may have been, that we can look at a Pol­lock can­vas today and so vivid­ly imag­ine its cre­ation.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Por­trait of an Artist: Jack­son Pol­lock, the 1987 Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed by Melvyn Bragg

Was Jack­son Pol­lock Over­rat­ed? Behind Every Artist There’s an Art Crit­ic, and Behind Pol­lock There Was Clement Green­berg

The MoMA Teach­es You How to Paint Like Pol­lock, Rothko, de Koon­ing & Oth­er Abstract Painters

Dripped: An Ani­mat­ed Trib­ute to Jack­son Pollock’s Sig­na­ture Paint­ing Tech­nique

Vin­tage Footage of Picas­so and Jack­son Pol­lock Paint­ing… Through Glass

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A 1913 Children’s Book Lampoons Duchamp, Picasso & Other Avant-Garde Artists: Read The Cubies’ ABC Online

in Art, Books, History | December 3rd, 2020

Igor Stravin­sky’s The Rite of Spring pre­miered in 1913, and its vio­lent break from musi­cal and chore­o­graph­ic tra­di­tion, so the sto­ry goes, pushed the gen­teel Parisian audi­ence to vio­lent rebel­lion. That tale may have grown taller over the past cen­tu­ry, but pub­lic dis­taste for then-nov­el trends in all forms of “mod­ern art” has left a paper trail. Here we have a par­tic­u­lar­ly amus­ing exhib­it, and long an obscure one: The Cubies’ ABC, a pic­ture book by a cou­ple named Mary Mills and Earl Har­vey Lyall. They were inspired by anoth­er major cul­tur­al event of 1913, the Inter­na­tion­al Exhi­bi­tion of Mod­ern Art, or “Armory Show,” which offered the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca its first look at ground­break­ing work by Mar­cel Duchamp, Pablo Picas­so, and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, among a host of oth­er for­eign artists.

The Lyalls, evi­dent­ly, were not impressed. In order to ridicule what they seem to have con­sid­ered the pre­ten­sions of the avant-garde, they came up with the Cubies, a trio of angu­lar, wild-haired trou­ble­mak­ers bent on dis­card­ing all estab­lished con­ven­tions in the name of Ego, the Future, and Intu­ition.

Those three con­cepts get their own pages in this alpha­bet­i­cal­ly orga­nized book, as do artists — not that the authors would uniron­i­cal­ly grant them the title — like Duchamp, “the Deep-Dyed Deceiv­er, who, draw­ing accor­dions, labels them stairs”; Kandin­sky, painter of “Kute ‘impro­vi­sa­tions’ ”; and even Gertrude Stein, “elo­quent scribe of the Futur­ist soul.” X stands, of course, for “the Xit,” a direc­tion “Xtreme­ly allur­ing when Cubies invite us to study their Art.”

“We tend to for­get, now that the Cubists and Futur­ists have become as inte­gral to the his­to­ry of art as the painters of the Dutch Gold­en Age and the Ital­ian Renais­sance, how hos­tile most peo­ple — even most artists — felt toward the non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al inno­va­tions of the artists on dis­play at the Armory,” says the Pub­lic Domain Review, where you can read The Cubies’ ABC in full.

You can also buy a copy of the reprint orga­nized by gal­lerist Fran­cis Nau­mann in com­mem­o­ra­tion of the Armory show’s cen­te­nary. “Peo­ple in those days thought that they could stop mod­ern art in its tracks,” says Nau­mann in a New York­er piece on the book. Did the Lyalls think the Cubies’ antics would land a deci­sive blow against abstrac­tion and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty? Then again, could they have imag­ined us enjoy­ing them more than a hun­dred years lat­er, in a time unknow­able to even the most far-sight­ed Futur­ist?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the 1913 Exhi­bi­tion That Intro­duced Avant-Garde Art to Amer­i­ca

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

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

24,000 Vin­tage Car­toons from the Library of Con­gress Illus­trate the His­to­ry of This Mod­ern Art Form (1780–1977)

The Anti-Slav­ery Alpha­bet: 1846 Book Teach­es Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Japanese Art Installation Lets People Play Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” As They Walk on Socially-Distanced Notes on the Floor

in Art, Life, Music | December 2nd, 2020

The glob­al pan­dem­ic has revealed the depths of sys­tem­at­ic cru­el­ty in cer­tain places in the world that have refused to com­mit resources to pro­tect­ing peo­ple from the virus or refused to even acknowl­edge its exis­tence. Oth­er respons­es show a dif­fer­ent way for­ward, one in which every­one con­tributes mean­ing­ful­ly through the prin­ci­pled actions of wear­ing masks and social dis­tanc­ing or the prin­ci­pled non-action of stay­ing home to slow the spread.

Then there’s the crit­i­cal role of art, design, and music in our sur­vival. As we have seen—from spon­ta­neous bal­cony ser­e­nades in Italy to poignant ani­mat­ed video poet­ry—the arts are no less cru­cial to our sur­vival than pub­lic health. Human beings need delight, won­der, humor, mourn­ing, and cel­e­bra­tion, and we need to come togeth­er to expe­ri­ence these things, whether online or in real, if dis­tant, life. Ide­al­ly, pub­lic health and art can work togeth­er.

Japan­ese design­er Eisuke Tachikawa has put his skills to work doing exact­ly that. When cas­es began spik­ing in his coun­try in April, Tachikawa and his design firm Nosign­er made some beau­ti­ful­ly designed, and very fun­ny, posters to encour­age social dis­tanc­ing as part of an ini­tia­tive called Pandaid. Then they cre­at­ed Super Mario Broth­ers coin stick­ers to place six feet (or two meters, or one tuna) apart. In its Eng­lish trans­la­tion, at least, the text on Nosigner’s site is direct about their inten­tions: “As this con­tin­ues we want­ed to val­ue-trans­late the social con­straints of social dis­tanc­ing into some­thing pos­i­tive and enjoy­able.”

Tachikawa and Nosign­er have “devel­oped a brand,” they announced recent­ly, called SOCIAL HARMONY “in order to spread the cul­ture of social dis­tanc­ing in a humor­ous way.” Their lat­est instal­la­tion, how­ev­er, does not incor­po­rate jokes or Nin­ten­do ref­er­ences. Rather it draws on one of the most pop­u­lar and beloved pieces of min­i­mal­ist clas­si­cal music, Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” (pro­claimed by Clas­sic FM as “the most flat-out relax­ing piece of piano music ever writ­ten”). “Peo­ple stand on a large music sheet on the floor and notes are played the moment you step on them. By respect­ing social dis­tances and going one note at a time, the pub­lic is able to play” Satie’s piece.

Even for such a suc­cinct com­po­si­tion, this must require a rig­or­ous amount of coor­di­na­tion. But it is nec­es­sary to play the notes in order: “Since the melody changes with every stop, one can cre­ate one’s own Gymnopédie No. 1, since the played melody changes with every step.” The piece was installed at the entrance hall to the Yoko­hama Minatomi­rai Hall for DESIGNART TOKYO 2020, where it will remain until the end of the year. Sure­ly there will be oth­er forms of “social har­mo­ny” to come from the Japan­ese design­ers. Like the prac­tice of social dis­tanc­ing itself, we can only hope such projects catch on and go glob­al, until the wide­spread vac­ci­na­tion and an end to the pan­dem­ic can bring us clos­er again.

via Spoon & Tam­a­go 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Dig­i­tal Archive Pre­serves Black Lives Mat­ter & COVID-19 Street Art

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beau­ti­ful Short Ani­ma­tion on the Real­i­ties of Social Iso­la­tion in 2020

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

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

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Salvador Dalí Gets Surreal with 1950s America: Watch His Appearances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)

in Art, Television | December 1st, 2020

When was the last time you saw a Sur­re­al­ist (or even just a sur­re­al­ist) painter appear on nation­al tele­vi­sion? If such a fig­ure did appear on nation­al tele­vi­sion today, for that mat­ter, who would know? Per­haps sur­re­al­ist paint­ing does not, in our time, make the impact it once did, but nor does nation­al tele­vi­sion. So imag­ine what a spec­ta­cle it must have been in 1950s Amer­i­ca, cra­dle of the “mass media” as we once knew them, when Sal­vador Dalí turned up on a major U.S. tele­vi­sion net­work. Such a fab­u­lous­ly incon­gru­ous broad­cast­ing event hap­pened more than once, and in these clips we see that, among the “big three,” CBS was espe­cial­ly recep­tive to his impul­sive, oth­er­world­ly artis­tic pres­ence.

On the quiz show What’s My Line?, one of CBS’ most pop­u­lar offer­ings through­out the 50s, con­tes­tants aimed to guess the occu­pa­tion of a guest. They did so wear­ing blind­folds, with­out which they’d have no trou­ble pin­ning down the job of an instan­ta­neous­ly rec­og­niz­able celebri­ty like Dalí — or would they? To the pan­el’s yes-or-no ques­tions, the only kind per­mit­ted by the rules, Dalí near­ly always responds flat­ly in the affir­ma­tive.

Is he asso­ci­at­ed with the arts? “Yes.” Would he ever have been seen on tele­vi­sion? “Yes.” Would he be con­sid­ered a lead­ing man? “Yes.” At this host John Charles Daly steps in to clar­i­fy that, in the con­text of the ques­tion, Dalí would not, in fact, be con­sid­ered a lead­ing man. One con­tes­tant offers an alter­na­tive: “He’s a mis­lead­ing man!” Few titles have cap­tured the essence of Dalí so neat­ly.

The artist, show­man, and human con­scious-alter­ing sub­stance lat­er appeared on The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view. Host­ed by the for­mi­da­ble CBS news­man well before he became one of the faces of 60 Min­utes, the show fea­tured a range of guests from Aldous Hux­ley and Frank Lloyd Wright to Eleanor Roo­sevelt and Ayn Rand. In this broad­cast, Wal­lace and Dalí dis­cuss “every­thing from sur­re­al­ism to nuclear physics to chasti­ty to what artists in gen­er­al con­tribute to the world,” as Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va describes it. A curi­ous if occa­sion­al­ly bemused Wal­lace, writes The Wall­break­ers’ Matt Weck­el, “asks Dalí such gems as ‘What is philo­soph­i­cal about dri­ving a car full of cau­li­flow­ers?’ and ‘Why did you lec­ture with your head enclosed in a div­ing hel­met?’ ” But they also seri­ous­ly dis­cuss “the fear of death, and their own mor­tal­i­ty,” top­ics to which Amer­i­can air­waves have hard­ly grown more accom­mo­dat­ing over the past six­ty years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with Mike Wal­lace (1958)

Sal­vador Dalí Strolls onto The Dick Cavett Show with an Anteater, Then Talks About Dreams & Sur­re­al­ism, the Gold­en Ratio & More (1970)

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Great Orson Welles

Q: Sal­vador Dalí, Are You a Crack­pot? A: No, I’m Just Almost Crazy (1969)

Sal­vador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Con­tributed “Noth­ing” to Art (1986)

Sal­vador Dalí Goes Com­mer­cial: Three Strange Tele­vi­sion Ads

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Beatles Create an Abstract Collaborative Painting, Images of a Woman, During Three Days of Lockdown in Japan (1966)

in Art, Music | November 26th, 2020

One of the ear­li­est known non-human visu­al artists, Con­go the chim­panzee, learned to draw in 1956 at the age of two. Moody, fierce­ly pro­tec­tive of his work, and par­tic­u­lar about his process, he made around 400 draw­ings and paint­ings in a style described as “lyri­cal abstract impres­sion­ism.” He appeared sev­er­al times on British tele­vi­sion before his death in 1964. He count­ed Picas­so among his fans and, in a 2005 auc­tion, out­sold Warhol and Renoir.

One won­ders if who­ev­er gave the four-head­ed beast known as the Bea­t­les can­vas and paint (“pos­si­bly Bri­an Epstein or their Japan­ese pro­mot­er, Tats Nagashima”) remem­bered Con­go as the fab four bounced off the walls in their hotel rooms in Tokyo dur­ing their last, 1966 tour, when extra secu­ri­ty forced them to stay inside for three full days. Or per­haps their keep­ers were inspired by the humane prac­tice of art ther­a­py, com­ing into its own at the same time in men­tal health cir­cles with the found­ing of the British Asso­ci­a­tion of Art Ther­a­pists in 1964.

“Accord­ing to pho­tog­ra­ph­er Robert Whitak­er,” David Wol­man writes at The Atlantic, the Bea­t­les’ man­ag­er “brought the guys a bunch of art sup­plies to help pass the time. Then Epstein set a large can­vas on a table and placed a lamp in the mid­dle. Each mem­ber of the group set to work paint­ing a corner—comic strip­py for Ringo, psy­che­del­ic for John.” Paul’s cor­ner resem­bles an odd­ly erot­ic sea crea­ture, George’s the spir­i­tu­al abstrac­tions of Kandin­sky. Accord­ing to the Bea­t­les Bible, it was Nagashima “who sug­gest­ed that the com­plet­ed paint­ing be auc­tioned for char­i­ty.”

Whitak­er doc­u­ment­ed the exper­i­ment and lat­er pro­nounced it an imme­di­ate suc­cess: “I nev­er saw them calmer, more con­tent­ed than at this time… They’d stop, go and do a con­cert, and then it was ‘Let’s go back to the pic­ture!’” Once fin­ished, the lamp was lift­ed, all four signed their names in the cen­ter, and the paint­ing was titled Images of A Woman, which may be no indi­ca­tion of the artists’ inten­tions. Who knows what kind of scouser humor passed between them as they worked.

The paint­ing then passed to cin­e­ma exec­u­tive Tet­sus­aburo Shi­moya­ma, whose wid­ow auc­tioned it in 1989 to wealthy record store own­er Takao Nishi­no, who had seen them at Budokan in 1966 dur­ing the same his­toric tour that pro­duced the paint­ing. Then it end­ed up under a bed for twen­ty years before being auc­tioned again in 2012. It’s cer­tain­ly true the band, most espe­cial­ly Paul and John, had always tak­en to visu­al art, as artists them­selves or as col­lec­tors and appre­ci­a­tors. But this is some­thing spe­cial. It rep­re­sents their only col­lab­o­ra­tive art­work, aside from some doo­dles on a card sent to the Mon­ter­rey orga­niz­ers.

When look­ing at Whitaker’s pho­tographs of the band at work (see video mon­tage above), one doesn’t, of course, think of Con­go the chimp or the patients of a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. Instead, they look like stu­dents in a ‘60s alter­na­tive school, set loose to cre­ate with­out inter­rup­tion (but for the occa­sion­al mega-con­cert) to their hearts’ con­tent. Maybe Epstein or Nagashima had just seen the 1966 Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da doc­u­men­tary Sum­mer­hill, about just such a school in Eng­land? What­ev­er inspired the zeitgeist‑y moment, we can see why it nev­er came again. That year, they played their final con­cert and retired to the stu­dio, where they could lock them­selves away with their pre­ferred means of cre­ative dis­trac­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When the Bea­t­les Refused to Play Before Seg­re­gat­ed Audi­ences on Their First U.S. Tour (1964)

Meet Con­go the Chimp, London’s Sen­sa­tion­al 1950s Abstract Painter

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Audio: The Bea­t­les Play Their Final Con­cert at Can­dle­stick Park, 1966

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

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A Mysterious Monolith Appears in the Utah Desert, Channeling Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Art | November 25th, 2020

Peo­ple do weird things in the desert. A spokesman for the Utah Divi­sion of Wildlife Resources acknowl­edges that wide­ly under­stood truth in a recent New York Times arti­cle about a mys­te­ri­ous mono­lith dis­cov­ered in Red Rock Coun­try. “A team that was count­ing bighorn sheep by heli­copter spot­ted some­thing odd and land­ed to take a clos­er look,” writes Alan Yuhas. “It was a three-sided met­al mono­lith, about 10 to 12 feet tall, plant­ed firm­ly in the ground with no clear sign of where it came from or why it was there.” What­ev­er the dif­fer­ences in size, shape, and col­or, this still-unex­plained object brings to mind noth­ing so much as 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its most famous mono­lith of all.

Though Stan­ley Kubrick shot that par­tic­u­lar scene in Lon­don’s Shep­per­ton Stu­dios, plen­ty of oth­er pro­duc­tions have made use of the Utah Desert, includ­ing install­ments of the spec­ta­cle-dri­ven Indi­ana Jones and Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble series. But as far as any­one knows, the mono­lith isn’t a piece of set dress­ing.

Crowd­sourc­ing guess­es on social media, the Utah High­way Patrol received such respons­es as “a ‘res­o­nance deflec­tor,’ ‘an eye­sore,’ ‘some good met­al.’ Some the­o­rized, vague­ly, that it was a satel­lite bea­con. Oth­ers joked that it was a Wi-Fi router.” Who­ev­er assem­bled and installed it, they did so with “human-made riv­ets” and a skilled enough hand to cut a per­fect­ly shaped hole into the rock — the kind of com­bi­na­tion of appar­ent skill and inex­plic­a­bil­i­ty that once stirred up so much fas­ci­na­tion over crop cir­cles.

Image by Utah Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safe­ty

The Art News­pa­per’s Gabriel­la Angeleti describes the mono­lith as “resem­bling the free­stand­ing plank sculp­tures of the late Min­i­mal­ist artist John McCrack­en.” Though McCrack­en nev­er offi­cial­ly made an instal­la­tion in the Utah desert, he did spend the last years of his life not far away (at least by the stan­dards of the south­west­ern Unit­ed States) in north­ern New Mex­i­co, and any­one famil­iar with his work will sense a cer­tain affin­i­ty with it in this new­ly dis­cov­ered object. “While this is not a work by the late Amer­i­can artist John McCrack­en,” says a spokesman for the gallery that rep­re­sents him, “we sus­pect it is a work by a fel­low artist pay­ing homage.” Whether or not the mono­lith has an intend­ed mes­sage, the reac­tions now going viral around the world already have many of us won­der­ing how far we’ve real­ly evolved past the apes.

The mono­lith is appar­ent­ly view­able on Google Earth here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

The CIA Puts Hun­dreds of Declas­si­fied Doc­u­ments About UFO Sight­ings Online, Plus 10 Tips for Inves­ti­gat­ing Fly­ing Saucers

Hear the Declas­si­fied, Eerie “Space Music” Heard Dur­ing the Apol­lo 10 Mis­sion (1969)

Watch a New­ly-Cre­at­ed “Epi­logue” For Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Uncanny Children’s Book Illustrations of Sigmund’s Freud’s Niece, Tom Seidmann-Freud

in Art, Education, K-12 | November 25th, 2020

In 1919, Sig­mund Freud pub­lished “The ‘Uncan­ny,’” his rare attempt as a psy­cho­an­a­lyst “to inves­ti­gate the sub­ject of aes­thet­ics.” The essay arrived in the midst of a mod­ernist rev­o­lu­tion Freud him­self unwit­ting­ly inspired in the work of Sur­re­al­ists like Sal­vador Dali, Andre Bre­ton, and many oth­ers. He also had an influ­ence on anoth­er artist of the peri­od: his niece Martha-Gertrud Freud, who start­ed going by the name “Tom” after the age of 15, and who became known as children’s book author and illus­tra­tor Tom Sei­d­mann-Freud after she mar­ried Jakob Sei­d­mann and the two estab­lished their own pub­lish­ing house in 1921.

Seidmann-Freud’s work can­not help but remind stu­dents of her uncle’s work of the unheim­lich—that which is both fright­en­ing and famil­iar at once. Uncan­ni­ness is a feel­ing of trau­mat­ic dis­lo­ca­tion: some­thing is where it does not belong and yet it seems to have always been there. Per­haps it’s no coin­ci­dence that the Seidmann-Freud’s named their pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny Pere­grin, which comes from “the Latin, Pere­gri­nos,” notes an exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue, “mean­ing ‘for­eign­er,’ or ‘from abroad’—a title used dur­ing the Roman Empire to iden­ti­fy indi­vid­u­als who were not Roman cit­i­zens.”

Uncan­ny dis­lo­ca­tion was a theme explored by many an artist—many of them Jewish—who would lat­er be labeled “deca­dent” by the Nazis and killed or forced into exile. Sei­d­mann-Freud her­self had migrat­ed often in her young life, from Vien­na to Lon­don, where she stud­ied art, then to Munich to fin­ish her stud­ies, and final­ly to Berlin with her hus­band. She became famil­iar with the Jew­ish philoso­pher and mys­tic Ger­shom Scholem, who inter­est­ed her in illus­trat­ing a Hebrew alpha­bet book. The project fell through, but she con­tin­ued to write and pub­lish her own children’s books in Hebrew.

In Berlin, the cou­ple estab­lished them­selves in the Char­lot­ten­burg neigh­bor­hood, the cen­ter of the Hebrew pub­lish­ing indus­try. Seidmann-Freud’s books were part of a larg­er effort to estab­lish a specif­i­cal­ly Jew­ish mod­ernism. Tom “was a typ­i­cal exam­ple of the busy dawn of the 1920s,” Chris­tine Brinck writes at Der Tagesspiegel. Scholem called the chain-smok­ing artist an “authen­tic Bohèmi­enne” and an “illus­tra­tor… bor­der­ing on genius.” Her work shows evi­dence of a “close famil­iar­i­ty with the world of dreams and the sub­con­scious,” writes Hadar Ben-Yehu­da, and a fas­ci­na­tion with the fear and won­der of child­hood.

In her 1923 The Fish’s Jour­ney, Sei­d­mann-Freud draws on a per­son­al trau­ma, “the first real tragedy to have struck her young life when her beloved broth­er Theodor died by drown­ing.” Oth­er works illus­trate texts—chosen by Jakob and the couple’s busi­ness part­ner, poet Hay­im Nah­man Bialik—by Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen and the Broth­ers Grimm, “with draw­ings adapt­ed to the land­scapes of a Mediter­ranean com­mu­ni­ty,” “a Jew­ish, social­ist notion… added to the texts,” “and the dif­fer­ence between boys and girls made inde­ci­pher­able,” the Sei­d­mann-Freud exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue points out.

These books were part of a larg­er mis­sion to “intro­duce Hebrew-speak­ing chil­dren to world lit­er­a­ture, as part of estab­lish­ing a mod­ern Hebrew soci­ety in Pales­tine.” Trag­i­cal­ly, the pub­lish­ing ven­ture failed, and Jakob hung him­self, the event that pre­cip­i­tat­ed Tom’s own trag­ic end, as Ben-Yehu­da tells it:

The del­i­cate, sen­si­tive illus­tra­tor nev­er recov­ered from her husband’s death. She fell into depres­sion and stopped eat­ing. She was hos­pi­tal­ized, but no one from her fam­i­ly and friends, not even her uncle Sig­mund Freud who came to vis­it and to care for her was able to lift her spir­its. After a few months, she died of anorex­ia at the age of thir­ty-eight.

Sei­d­mann-Freud passed away in 1930, “the same year that the lib­er­al democ­ra­cy in Ger­many, the Weimar Repub­lic, start­ed it fren­zied down­ward descent,” a biog­ra­phy writ­ten by her fam­i­ly points out. Her work was burned by the Nazis, but copies of her books sur­vived in the hands of the couple’s only daugh­ter, Angela, who changed her name to Avi­va and “emi­grat­ed to Israel just before the out­break of World War II.”

The “whim­si­cal­ly apoc­a­lyp­tic” illus­tra­tions in books like Buch Der Hasen­geschicht­en, or The Book of Rab­bit Sto­ries from 1924, may seem more omi­nous in hind­sight. But we can also say that Tom, like her uncle and like so many con­tem­po­rary avant-garde artists, drew from a gen­er­al sense of uncan­ni­ness that per­me­at­ed the 1920s and often seemed to antic­i­pate more full-blown hor­ror. See more Sei­d­mann-Freud illus­tra­tions at 50 Watts, the Freud Muse­um Lon­don, Kul­tur­Port, and at her fam­i­ly-main­tained site, where you can also pur­chase prints of her many weird and won­der­ful scenes.

via 50 Watts

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: Hear the Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

Ralph Stead­man Cre­ates an Unortho­dox Illus­trat­ed Biog­ra­phy of Sig­mund Freud, the Father of Psy­cho­analy­sis (1979)

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

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

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