Banksy Strikes Again in London & Urges Everyone to Wear Masks

in Art | July 16th, 2020

The per­son who may or may not be Banksy is at it again, this time sten­cil­ing up a Lon­don Under­ground car­riage with his famil­iar rat char­ac­ters. Rats know a thing or two about spread­ing dis­ease but this time they are here to insist that the pub­lic wear a mask. (Ear­li­er in April they appeared in the artist’s own bath­room.)

As post­ed on Banksy’s social media feeds on Tues­day we can see the artist get kit­ted up like one of the Underground’s “deep cleaners”—-a pro­tec­tive face mask, gog­gles, blue gloves, white Tyvek body­suit, and orange safe­ty vest—and enter a car­riage with an exter­mi­na­tor’s spray can­is­ter filled with light blue paint. He also has some of his sten­cils ready to go. “If you don’t mask, you don’t get” reads the video’s cap­tion.

Cur­rent­ly all pas­sen­gers must wear masks on the Lon­don Under­ground, and over the last month Trans­port for Lon­don has report­ed a 90% com­pli­ance rate (take note, Amer­i­ca!). Work­ers have been san­i­tiz­ing sta­tions and trains more, and even installing UV light tech­nol­o­gy to bat­tle the virus.

Banksy’s rats are shown using masks as para­chutes, car­ry­ing bot­tles of hand san­i­tiz­er, and along one wall sneez­ing par­ti­cles across the win­dow, paint­ed using the can­is­ter spray noz­zle. Ban­sky tags the back wall with his name, urges a pas­sen­ger to stay back while he works, and then gets off at a stop. He’s left one final mes­sage: “I get lock­down” (paint­ed on a sta­tion wall) “but I get up again” (on the clos­ing doors). The line is a nod to Chumbawumba’s inescapable 1997 anthem “Tubthump­ing.”

Banksy might be a rebel­lious street artist, but he’s not an idiot: wear­ing masks is imper­a­tive.

The art­work didn’t last long, as Trans­port of Lon­don has strict poli­cies against graf­fi­ti. So few pas­sen­gers even got to expe­ri­ence the art before it was scrubbed by work­ers, long before any­body would have iden­ti­fied it as a Banksy work.

“When we saw the video, we start­ed to look into it and spoke to the clean­ers,” a Lon­don Trans­port source told the New York Post. “It start­ed to emerge that they had noticed some sort of ‘rat thing’ a few days ago and cleaned it off, as they should. It rather changes the aspect for any­one seek­ing to go down the route of accus­ing us of cul­tur­al van­dal­ism.”

The Post even sug­gest­ed that the car­riage could have been removed and then sold as a com­plete art work in itself and raised mon­ey for char­i­ty. (They quote an art bro­ker who val­ues it at $7.5 mil­lion. But where would you hang it? In your pri­vate air­plane hang­er?)

Any­way, like a lot of Banksy work, it appeared, it was doc­u­ment­ed, and it was gone. Trans­port of Lon­don did men­tion that they were open to Banksy cre­at­ing some­thing else at a “suit­able loca­tion,” but then again, that’s not how the artist rolls. Just keep your eyes open, folks, and look out for rats.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behind the Banksy Stunt: An In-Depth Break­down of the Artist’s Self-Shred­ding Paint­ing

Banksy Strikes Again in Venice

Banksy Paints a Grim Hol­i­day Mur­al: Season’s Greet­ings to All

The Genius of Har­ry Beck’s 1933 Lon­don Tube Map–and How It Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Sub­way Map Design Every­where

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Emma Willard, the First Woman Mapmaker in America, Creates Pioneering Maps of Time to Teach Students about Democracy (Circa 1851)

in Art, Education, History | July 13th, 2020

We all know Mar­shall McLuhan’s pithy, end­less­ly quotable line “the medi­um is the mes­sage,” but rarely do we stop to ask which one comes first. The devel­op­ment of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies may gen­uine­ly present us with a chick­en or egg sce­nario. After all, only a cul­ture that already prized con­stant visu­al stim­uli but gross­ly under­val­ued phys­i­cal move­ment would have invent­ed and adopt­ed tele­vi­sion.

In Soci­ety of the Spec­ta­cle, Guy Debord ties the ten­den­cy toward pas­sive visu­al con­sump­tion to “com­mod­i­ty fetishism, the dom­i­na­tion of soci­ety by ‘intan­gi­ble as well as tan­gi­ble things,’ which reach­es its absolute ful­fill­ment in the spec­ta­cle, where the tan­gi­ble world is replaced by a selec­tion of images which exist above it, and which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly impose them­selves as the tan­gi­ble par excel­lence.” It seems an apt descrip­tion of a screen-addict­ed cul­ture.

What can we say, then, of a cul­ture addict­ed to charts and graphs? Ear­li­est exam­ples of the form were often more elab­o­rate than we’re used to see­ing, hand-drawn with care and atten­tion. They were also not coy about their ambi­tions: to con­dense the vast dimen­sions of space and time into a two-dimen­sion­al, col­or-cod­ed for­mat. To tidi­ly sum up all human and nat­ur­al his­to­ry in easy-to-read visu­al metaphors.

This was as much a reli­gious project as it was a philo­soph­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and ped­a­gog­i­cal one. The domains are hope­less­ly entwined in 18th and 19th cen­tu­ry. We should not be sur­prised to see them freely min­gle  the ear­li­est info­graph­ics. The cre­ators of such images were poly­maths, and deeply devout. Joseph Priest­ly, Eng­lish chemist, philoso­pher, the­olo­gian, polit­i­cal the­o­rist and gram­mar­i­an, made sev­er­al visu­al chronolo­gies rep­re­sent­ing “the lives of two thou­sand men between 1200 BC and 1750 AD” (con­vey­ing a clear mes­sage about the sole impor­tance of men).

“After Priest­ly,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review, “time­lines flour­ished, but they gen­er­al­ly lacked any sense of the dimen­sion­al­i­ty of time, rep­re­sent­ing the past as a uni­form march from left to right.” Emma Willard, “one of the century’s most influ­en­tial edu­ca­tors” set out to update the tech­nol­o­gy, “to invest chronol­o­gy with a sense of per­spec­tive.” In her 1836 Pic­ture of Nations; or Per­spec­tive Sketch of the Course of Empire, above (view and down­load high res­o­lu­tion images here), she presents “the bib­li­cal Cre­ation as the apex of a tri­an­gle that then flowed for­ward in time and space toward the view­er.”

The per­spec­tive is also a forced point of view about ori­gins and his­to­ry. But that was exact­ly the point: these are didac­tic tools meant for text­books and class­rooms. Willard, “America’s first pro­fes­sion­al female map­mak­er,” writes Maria Popo­va, was also a “pio­neer­ing edu­ca­tor,” who found­ed “the first women’s high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion in the Unit­ed States when she was still in her thir­ties…. In her ear­ly for­ties, she set about com­pos­ing and pub­lish­ing a series of his­to­ry text­books that raised the stan­dards and sen­si­bil­i­ties of schol­ar­ship.”

Willard rec­og­nized that lin­ear graphs of time did not accu­rate­ly do jus­tice to a three-dimen­sion­al expe­ri­ence of the world. Humans are “embod­ied crea­tures who yearn to locate them­selves in space and time.” The illu­sion of space and time on the flat page was an essen­tial fea­ture of Willard’s under­ly­ing pur­pose: “lay­ing out the ground-plan of the intel­lect, so far as the whole range of his­to­ry is con­cerned.” A prop­er under­stand­ing of a Great Man (and at least one Great Woman, Hypa­tia) ver­sion of history—easily con­densed, since there were only around 6,000 years from the cre­ation of the universe—would lead to “enlight­ened and judi­cious sup­port­ers” of democ­ra­cy.

His­to­ry is rep­re­sent­ed lit­er­al­ly as a sacred space in Willard’s 1846 Tem­ple of Time, its prov­i­den­tial begin­nings for­mal­ly bal­anced in equal pro­por­tion to its every mon­u­men­tal stage. Willard’s intent was express­ly patri­ot­ic, her trap­pings self-con­scious­ly clas­si­cal. Her maps of time were ways of sit­u­at­ing the nation as a nat­ur­al suc­ces­sor to the empires of old, which flowed from the divine act of cre­ation. They show a pro­gres­sive widen­ing of the world.

“Half a cen­tu­ry before W.E.B. Du Bois… cre­at­ed his mod­ernist data visu­al­iza­tions for the 1900 World’s Fair,” Popo­va writes, The Tem­ple of Time “won a medal at the 1851 World’s Fair in Lon­don.” Willard accom­pa­nied the info­graph­ic with a state­ment of intent, artic­u­lat­ing a media the­o­ry, over a hun­dred years before McLuhan, that sounds strange­ly antic­i­pa­to­ry of his famous dic­tum.

The poet­ic idea of “the vista of depart­ed years” is made an object of sight; and when the eye is the medi­um, the pic­ture will, by fre­quent inspec­tion, be formed with­in, and for­ev­er remain, wrought into the liv­ing tex­ture of the mind.

Learn more about Emma Willard’s info­graph­ic rev­o­lu­tion at the Pub­lic Domain Review and Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joseph Priest­ley Visu­al­izes His­to­ry & Great His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures with Two of the Most Influ­en­tial Info­graph­ics Ever (1769)

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Pro­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Shape Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

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

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Bisa Butler’s Beautiful Quilted Portraits of Frederick Douglass, Nina Simone, Jean-Michel Basquiat & More

in Art, Creativity, Fashion, History | July 10th, 2020

Fiber artist Bisa But­ler’s quilt­ed por­traits of Black Amer­i­cans gain extra pow­er from their medi­um.

Each work is com­prised of many scraps, care­ful­ly cut and posi­tioned after hours of research and pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es.

Vel­vet and silk nes­tle against bits of vin­tage flour sacks, West African wax print fab­ric, den­im and, occa­sion­al­ly, hand-me-downs from the sitter’s own col­lec­tion.

In The Warmth of Oth­er Sons, a 12-foot, life-sized por­trait of an African Amer­i­can fam­i­ly who migrat­ed north in search of eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty, a wary-look­ing young girl clutch­es a purse to her chest. The purse is con­struct­ed from a com­mer­cial wax cot­ton print titled Michelle Obama’s Bag, which com­mem­o­rates one of the for­mer First Lady’s trips to Africa.

As anthro­pol­o­gist Nina Syl­vanus writes in Pat­terns in Cir­cu­la­tion: Cloth, Gen­der, and Mate­ri­al­i­ty in West Africa:

To wear this pattern…is both to hon­or and aspire to be rav­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and pow­er­ful like Michele Oba­ma; It is con­sid­ered a must-have fash­ion piece in the wardrobe of styl­ish women in Abid­jan, Lomé, and Lagos.

The vibrant col­ors of Butler’s mate­ri­als also inform her por­traits, par­tic­u­lar­ly those inspired by his­tor­i­cal fig­ures whose images are most famil­iar in black-and-white.

She is also deeply influ­enced by her under­grad­u­ate years at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, where many of her pro­fes­sors were part of the AfriCO­BRA artists’ col­lec­tive. They encour­aged stu­dents to think of blank can­vas­es as black, rather than white, and to throw out the Beaux Arts palette in favor of West African fabric’s Kool-Aid colors—“bright orange, bright yel­low, crim­son red, intense blue.”

As she describes in the above video:

The ini­tial start is who’s it gonna be? Then after you choose that per­son, choose your col­or scheme. The col­or scheme is based on what you feel about that per­son. Peo­ple have col­or around them, in them, that is not evi­dent­ly vis­i­ble to the naked eye.

The Storm, the Whirl­wind, and The Earth­quake, her recent­ly com­plet­ed full-length por­trait of a 30-year old Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, reimag­ines the abolitionist’s 19th-cen­tu­ry garb as some­thing akin to a mod­ern day Harlem dandy’s bold embrace of col­or, pat­tern, and style, delib­er­ate­ly chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo. The rich col­or scheme extends to his skin and the homey back­ground fab­ric.

But­ler, who was raised in an art-filled New Jer­sey home by a Black Amer­i­can moth­er and a Ghan­ian father, also cred­its her grand­moth­er, the sub­ject of her first quilt­ed por­trait, with help­ing her find her aes­thet­ic.

An ear­ly attempt to paint a por­trait of her beloved rel­a­tive (and child­hood sewing instruc­tor) result­ed in dis­ap­point­ment on both sides. The crest­fall­en artist’s aunt tipped her off that the old­er lady’s men­tal self-pic­ture was that of some­one 30 years younger.

Inspired by the col­laged work of Romare Bear­den, But­ler gave it anoth­er go, this time in quilt­ed form, tak­ing care to rep­re­sent her grand­moth­er as an attrac­tive woman in the prime of life. This time her efforts were met with enthu­si­asm. “I could feel an ener­gy in the room that some­thing new was hap­pen­ing,” But­ler recalls.

Whether her sub­jects are liv­ing or dead, But­ler strives to bring the same sense of “dig­ni­ty and regal opu­lence” to unsung cit­i­zens that she does when cre­at­ing por­traits of such famous Amer­i­cans as Nina Simone, Zora Neale Hurston, Jack­ie Robin­son, Lau­ren Hill, Josephine Bak­er, and Jean-Michel Basquiat:

African Amer­i­cans have been quilt­ing since we were brought to this coun­try and need­ed to keep warm. Enslaved peo­ple were not giv­en large pieces of fab­ric and had to make do with the scraps of cloth that were left after cloth­ing wore out. From these scraps the African Amer­i­can quilt aes­thet­ic came into being. Some enslaved peo­ples were so tal­ent­ed that they were tasked for cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful quilts that adorned their enslavers beds. My own pieces are rem­i­nis­cent of this tra­di­tion, but I use African fab­rics from my father’s home­land of Ghana, batiks from Nige­ria, and prints from South Africa. My sub­jects are adorned with and made up of the cloth of our ances­tors. If these vis­ages are to be recre­at­ed and seen for the first time in a cen­tu­ry, I want them to have their African Ances­try back, I want them to take their place in Amer­i­can His­to­ry. I want the view­er to see the sub­jects as I see them. 

Explore the work of Bisa But­ler on the artist’s Insta­gram, or MyMod­ern­met and Colos­sal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take Free Cours­es on African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry from Yale and Stan­ford: From Eman­ci­pa­tion, to the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, and Beyond

Too Big for Any Muse­um, AIDS Quilt Goes Dig­i­tal Thanks to Microsoft

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

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

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Does Every Picture Tell a Story? A Conversation with Artist Joseph Watson for Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #51

in Art, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | July 9th, 2020

Sto­ry­telling is an essen­tial part of Las Vegas artist Joseph Wat­son’s paint­ing method­ol­o­gy, whether he’s cre­at­ing city scenes or pub­lic sculp­ture or chil­dren’s illus­tra­tions. So how does the nar­ra­tive an author may have in mind affect the view­er, and is this dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent types of art?

Joseph is per­haps best known as the illus­tra­tor of the Go, Go, GRETA! book series and does online stream­ing of draw­ing ses­sions through Insta­gram and Face­book. On this episode of Pret­ty Much Pop, he joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to explore the pic­ture-nar­ra­tive con­nec­tion and more gen­er­al­ly how know­ing about the cre­ation of an image affects our recep­tion of it, touch­ing on Guer­ni­ca, Where the Wild Things Are, Dr. Seuss, The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, and more.

You can browse Joseph’s work at josephwatsonart.com, and you’re real­ly going to want in par­tic­u­lar to look at a cou­ple of the works that we con­sid­er explic­it­ly:

Oth­er sources we looked at in prepa­ra­tion for this dis­cus­sion include:

Fol­low Joseph on Insta­gram @josephwatsonart; also Twit­ter and Face­book.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This week, it includes a par­tic­u­lar­ly philo­soph­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion of the notion of escapism and how dif­fer­ent that is from so-called seri­ous pur­suits. Is this just a ver­sion of the high-low cul­ture dis­tinc­tion that we large­ly reject­ed in episode one? This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Explore the Beautiful Pages of the 1902 Japanese Design Magazine Shin-Bijutsukai: European Modernism Meets Traditional Japanese Design

in Art | July 8th, 2020

We read much about the role of Japanism in the art of late 19th Europe and North Amer­i­ca. “The craze for all things Japan­ese,” writes the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, “was launched in 1854 when Amer­i­can Com­modore Matthew Per­ry forced Japan to recom­mence inter­na­tion­al trade after two cen­turies of vir­tu­al iso­la­tion.” Britain, the Con­ti­nent, and the U.S. were awash in Japan­ese art and arti­facts and ideas about the pre-indus­tri­al puri­ty of Japan­ese forms pro­lif­er­at­ed. “West­ern­ers were… drawn to tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese artis­tic expres­sion because of its ties to the nat­ur­al world. Japan­ese artists in all media treat­ed the sub­jects of birds, flow­ers, land­scapes, and the sea­sons.”

West­ern­ers like Louis Com­fort Tiffany emu­lat­ed these pat­terns in their designs, and they appeared in the work of van Gogh and Gau­guin. We may be famil­iar with how much the admi­ra­tion for Japan­ese wood­cuts, fur­ni­ture, archi­tec­ture, and poet­ry influ­enced Impres­sion­ism, the Arts and Crafts Move­ment, and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry Mod­ernism.

We may not know that the influ­ence was mutu­al, with Japan­ese artists devel­op­ing their own forms of Art Deco, Euro­pean-influ­enced Mod­ernism and a nation­al­ist Japan­ese Arts and Crafts Move­ment called “Mingei” that was heav­i­ly inspired by ear­li­er British artists who had them­selves been inspired by the Japan­ese.

An ear­li­er exam­ple of the cross-cul­tur­al exchange in the arts between Europe and Japan can be seen here in these prints from Shin-Bijut­sukai (新美術海)… a Japan­ese design mag­a­zine that was edit­ed by illus­tra­tor and design­er Korin Furuya (1875–1910),” notes Spoon and Tam­a­go. These images come from a col­lec­tion of issues from 1901 to 1902, bound togeth­er in a huge 353-page design book (view it online at the Inter­net Archive or the Pub­lic Domain Review). We can see in the tra­di­tion­al images of flow­ers and birds the influ­ence of indus­tri­al design as well as “hints of art nou­veau and oth­er influ­ences of the time” from Euro­pean graph­ic arts.

There was a reluc­tance among many Japan­ese artists to acknowl­edge their debts to West­ern artists, a symp­tom, writes Wendy Jones Nakan­ishi, pro­fes­sor at Shikoku Gakuin Uni­ver­si­ty, of “the ambiva­lence felt by many Japan­ese towards the rapid west­ern­iza­tion of their coun­try at the cost of the loss of indige­nous cul­tur­al prac­tices.” Despite the enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty of Japan­ese art in Europe, “the ambiva­lence was mutu­al.” Many appeared to feel that “the sub­tle beau­ty of the Japan­ese art threat­ened Euro­pean claims to cul­tur­al suprema­cy” when it appeared in Vic­to­ri­an exhi­bi­tions in Lon­don and else­where.

These fears aside, the meet­ing of many cul­tures in the exchanges between Europe and Japan helped to revi­tal­ize the arts and shake off stag­nant clas­si­cal tra­di­tions while respond­ing in dynam­ic ways to rapid indus­tri­al­iza­tion. The empha­sis on folk and dec­o­ra­tive art, brought into the realm of fine art, was cul­tur­al­ly trans­for­ma­tive in Europe. In Japan, the styl­iza­tions of mod­ernist paint­ing dis­rupt­ed tra­di­tion­al scenes and tech­niques, as in the wood­block prints here and in the sev­er­al hun­dred more in var­i­ous issues of the month­ly mag­a­zine. See them all at Pub­lic Domain Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Full Issues of MAVO, the Japan­ese Avant-Garde Mag­a­zine That Announced a New Mod­ernist Move­ment (1923–1925)

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

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

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

in Art, Television | July 8th, 2020

Not so very long ago, Sal­vador Dalí was the most famous liv­ing painter in the world. When the BBC’s Are­na came to shoot an episode about him in 1986, they asked him what that exalt­ed state felt like. “I don’t know if I am the most famous painter in the world,” Dalí responds, “because lots of the peo­ple who ask for my auto­graph in the street don’t know if I’m a singer, a film star, a mad­man, a writer — they don’t know what I am.” He was, in one sense or anoth­er, most of those things and oth­ers besides. But we can safe­ly say, more than thir­ty years after his death, that Dalí will be remem­bered first for his visu­al art, with its vast seas and skies, its impos­si­ble beasts, its melt­ing clocks. And what did Dalí him­self believe he had con­tributed to art?

“Noth­ing,” he says. “Absolute­ly noth­ing, because, as I’ve always said, I’m a very bad painter. Because I’m too intel­li­gent to be a good painter. To be a good painter you’ve got to be a bit stu­pid, with the excep­tion of Velázquez, who is a genius, whose tal­ent sur­pass­es the art of paint­ing.” In oth­er words, when Dalí’s ever-present detrac­tors said he was no Velázquez, Dalí’s whole­heart­ed­ly agreed.

Over the past few decades, appre­ci­a­tion of the dis­tinc­tive com­bi­na­tion of vision and tech­nique on dis­play in Dalí’s paint­ings has won him more offi­cial respect (as well as a lav­ish new col­lec­tion pub­lished in book form by Taschen), but the debate about to what extent he was a true artist and to what extent a cal­cu­lat­ed­ly eccen­tric self-pro­mot­er will nev­er ful­ly sim­mer down.

Dalí also claimed to owe his life to paint­ing bad­ly. “The day Dalí paints a pic­ture as good as Velázquez, Ver­meer, or Raphael, or music like Mozart,” he says, “the next week he’ll die. So I pre­fer to paint bad pic­tures and live longer.” That he had already entered his ninth decade by the time Are­na came call­ing sug­gests that this strat­e­gy might have been effec­tive, though he was­n’t with­out his health trou­bles. In his first pub­lic appear­ance after hav­ing had a pace­mak­er implant­ed that same year, he declared that “When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are nec­es­sary for the progress of human­i­ty.” Dalí’s kept his askew arro­gance to the end, even through the con­tro­ver­sial final years that saw him sign off on the large-scale pro­duc­tion of shod­dy lith­o­graphs of his paint­ings. About the peo­ple who made them and the peo­ple who bought them, Dalí had only this to say: “They deserve each oth­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

When Sal­vador Dali Met Sig­mund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Sur­re­al­ism (1938)

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

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

The Most Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Sal­vador Dalí’s Paint­ings Pub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful New Book by Taschen: Includes Nev­er-Seen-Before Works

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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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Thomas Jefferson’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandson Poses for a Presidential Portrait

in Art, Current Affairs, History, Museums, Photography | July 6th, 2020

We hold these truths to be self-evi­dent: that all men are cre­at­ed equal; that they are endowed by their Cre­ator with cer­tain unalien­able rights; that among these are life, lib­er­ty and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness…  —Thomas Jef­fer­son, 3rd Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca

He was a bril­liant man who preached equal­i­ty, but he didn’t prac­tice it. He owned peo­ple. And now I’m here because of it. —Shan­non LaNier, co-author of Jefferson’s Chil­dren: The Sto­ry of One Amer­i­can Fam­i­ly

Many of the Amer­i­can par­tic­i­pants in pho­tog­ra­ph­er Drew Gard­ner’s ongo­ing Descen­dants project agreed to tem­porar­i­ly alter their usu­al appear­ance to height­en the his­toric resem­blance to their famous ances­tors, adopt­ing Eliz­a­beth Cady Stanton’s lace cap and sausage curls or Fred­er­ick Dou­glass’ swept back mane.

Actor and tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Shan­non LaNier sub­mit­ted to an uncom­fort­able, peri­od-appro­pri­ate neck­wrap, tugged into place with the help of some dis­creet­ly placed paper­clips, but skipped the wig that would have brought him into clos­er vis­i­ble align­ment with an 1800 por­trait of his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand­fa­ther, Thomas Jef­fer­son.

“I didn’t want to become Jef­fer­son,” states LaNier, whose great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand­moth­er, Sal­ly Hem­ings, was writ­ten out of the nar­ra­tive for most of our country’s his­to­ry.

An enslaved half-sis­ter of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha, Hem­ings was around six­teen when she bore Jefferson’s first child, as per the mem­oir of her son, Madi­son, from whom LaNier is also direct­ly descend­ed.

She has been por­trayed onscreen by actors Car­men Ejo­go and Thandie New­ton (and Maya Rudolph in an icky Sat­ur­day Night Live skit.)

But there are no pho­tographs or paint­ed por­traits of her, nor any sur­viv­ing let­ters or diary entries. Just two accounts in which she is described as attrac­tive and light-skinned, and some polit­i­cal car­toons that paint an unflat­ter­ing pic­ture.

The mys­tery of her appear­ance might make for an inter­est­ing com­pos­ite por­trait should the Smith­son­ian, who com­mis­sioned Gardner’s series, seek to entice all of LaNier’s female and female-iden­ti­fy­ing cousins from the Hem­ings line to pose.

While LaNier was aware of his con­nec­tion to Jef­fer­son from ear­li­est child­hood, his peers scoffed and his moth­er had to take the mat­ter up with the prin­ci­pal after a teacher told him to sit down and stop lying. As he recalled in an inter­view:

When they didn’t believe me, it became one of those things you stop shar­ing because, you know, peo­ple would make fun of you and then they’d say, “Yeah, and I’m relat­ed to Abra­ham Lin­coln.”

His fam­i­ly pool expand­ed when Jefferson’s great-great-great-great-grand­son, jour­nal­ist Lucian King Truscott IV—whose fifth great-grand­moth­er was Martha Jef­fer­son—issued an open invi­ta­tion to Hem­ings’ descen­dants to be his guests at a 1999 fam­i­ly reunion at Mon­ti­cel­lo.

It would be anoth­er 20 years before the Thomas Jef­fer­son Foun­da­tion and Mon­ti­cel­lo tour guides stopped fram­ing Hem­ings’ inti­mate con­nec­tion to Jef­fer­son as mere tat­tle.

Now vis­i­tors can find an exhib­it ded­i­cat­ed to her life, both online and in the recent­ly reopened house-muse­um.

Truscott laud­ed the move in an essay on Salon, pub­lished the same week that a year­book pho­to of Vir­ginia Gov­er­nor Ralph Northam in black­face pos­ing next to a fig­ure in KKK robes began to cir­cu­late:

Mon­ti­cel­lo is com­mit­ting an act of equal­i­ty by telling the sto­ry of slave life there, and by exten­sion, slave life in Amer­i­ca. When my cousins in the Hem­ings fam­i­ly stand up and proud­ly say, we are descen­dants of Thomas Jef­fer­son, they are com­mit­ting an act of equal­i­ty…. The pho­to­graph you see here is a pic­ture of who we are as Amer­i­cans. One day, a pho­to­graph of two cousins, one black and one white, will not be seen as unusu­al. One day, acts of equal­i­ty will out­weigh acts of racism. Until that day, how­ev­er, Shan­non and I will keep fight­ing for what’s right. And one day, we will win.

Watch a video of Jef­fer­son descen­dant Shan­non Lanier’s ses­sion with pho­tog­ra­ph­er Drew Gard­ner here.

See more pho­tos from Gardner’s Descen­dents project here.

Read his­to­ri­an Annette Gor­don-Reed’s New York Times op-ed on the com­pli­cat­ed Hem­ings-Jef­fer­son con­nec­tion here.

via Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Trumbull’s Famous 1818 Paint­ing Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence Vir­tu­al­ly Defaced to Show Which Found­ing Fathers Owned Slaves

Meet “Found­ing Moth­er” Mary Katharine God­dard, First Female Post­mas­ter in the U.S. and Print­er of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence

Hamil­ton Mania Inspires the Library of Con­gress to Put 12,000 Alexan­der Hamil­ton Doc­u­ments 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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An Immaculate Copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper Digitized by Google: View It in High Resolution Online

in Art | June 30th, 2020


Roman­tic poets told us that great art is eter­nal and tran­scen­dent. They also told us every­thing made by human hands is bound to end in ruin and decay. Both themes were inspired by the redis­cov­ery and renewed fas­ci­na­tion for the arts of antiq­ui­ty in Europe and Egypt. It was a time of renewed appre­ci­a­tion for mon­u­men­tal works of art, which hap­pened to coin­cide with a peri­od when they came under con­sid­er­able threat from loot­ers, van­dals, and invad­ing armies.

One work of art that appeared on the itin­er­ary of every Grand Tour­ing aris­to­crat, Leonardo’s da Vinci’s fres­co The Last Sup­per in Milan, was made espe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble when the refec­to­ry in which it was paint­ed became an armory and sta­ble for Napoleon’s troops in 1796. The sol­diers scratched out the apos­tles’ eyes and lobbed rocks at the paint­ing. Lat­er, in 1800, Goethe wrote of the room flood­ing with two feet of water, and the build­ing was also used as a prison.

As every cura­tor and con­ser­va­tion­ist knows well, grand ideas about art gloss over impor­tant details. Art is bound to par­tic­u­lar cul­tures, his­to­ries and mate­ri­als. One of Leonardo’s most influ­en­tial fres­coes dur­ing the Renais­sance, for exam­ple, almost com­plete­ly melt­ed right after he fin­ished it, due to his insis­tence on using oils, which he also mixed with tem­pera in The Last Sup­per. Just a few decades after that paint­ing’s com­ple­tion, one Ital­ian writer would describe it as “blurred and col­or­less com­pared with what I remem­ber of it when I saw it as a boy.”

His­tor­i­cal decay is one thing. Recent fires at Brazil’s Nation­al Muse­um and Notre Dame served as stark reminders that acci­dents and poor plan­ning can rob the world of cher­ished cul­tur­al trea­sures all at once. Insti­tu­tions have been dig­i­tiz­ing their col­lec­tions with as much detail and pre­ci­sion as pos­si­ble. For their part, England’s Roy­al Acad­e­my of Arts has part­nered with Google Arts & Cul­ture to ren­der sev­er­al of their most prized works online, includ­ing a copy of The Last Sup­per on can­vas, made by Leonardo’s stu­dents from his orig­i­nal work.

More than any oth­er con­tem­po­rary descrip­tion of the paint­ing, this faith­ful copy, prob­a­bly made by artists who worked on the fres­co itself, pro­vides art his­to­ri­ans “key insights into the long-fad­ed mas­ter­work in Milan,” and lets us see the vivid shades that awed its first view­ers. Pre­sent­ed in “Gigapix­el clar­i­ty,” notes Art­net, the huge dig­i­tal image with its “ultra high res­o­lu­tion” was “made pos­si­ble by a pro­pri­etary Google cam­era.” As you zoom in to the tini­est details, facts appear about the paint­ing and its larg­er, more bat­tered orig­i­nal in Milan.

It is either a “mir­a­cle” that The Last Sup­per has sur­vived, as Áine Cain writes at Busi­ness Insid­er, or the result of an “unend­ing fight” to pre­serve the work, as Kevin Wong details at Endgad­get. Or maybe some mys­te­ri­ous mix­ture of chance and near-hero­ic effort. But what has sur­vived is not what Leonar­do paint­ed, but rather the best recon­struc­tion to emerge from cen­turies of destruc­tion and restora­tion. Get clos­er than any­one ever could to a fac­sim­i­le of the orig­i­nal and see details from Leonardo’s work that have left no oth­er trace in his­to­ry. Explore it here.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inven­tions Come to Life as Muse­um-Qual­i­ty, Work­able Mod­els: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Char­i­ot, Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine & More

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

 

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