Discover Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Still-Bizarre Proto-Surrealist Book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

When the names of French poet Paul Élu­ard and Ger­man artist Max Ernst arise, one sub­ject always fol­lows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “mar­riage à trois,” as a New York Times arti­cle by Annette Grant once put it. It start­ed in 1921, Grant writes, when the Sur­re­al­ist move­men­t’s co-founder André Bre­ton put on an exhi­bi­tion for Ernst in Paris. “Élu­ard and his Russ­ian wife, Gala, were fas­ci­nat­ed by the show and arranged to meet Ernst in the Aus­tri­an Alps and lat­er in Ger­many. Ernst, Élu­ard and Gala quick­ly became insep­a­ra­ble. The artist and the poet start­ed a life­long series of col­lab­o­ra­tions on books even as Ernst and Gala start­ed an affair.”

This arrange­ment “even­tu­al­ly pro­pelled the trio on a jour­ney from Cologne to Paris to Saigon,” which con­sti­tutes quite a sto­ry in its own right. But on pure artis­tic val­ue, no result of the encounter between Élu­ard and Ernst has remained as fas­ci­nat­ing as Les Mal­heurs des immor­tels, the book on which they col­lab­o­rat­ed in 1922.

“It appears that Ernst, still in Ger­many at that stage, cre­at­ed the images first: twen­ty-one col­lages com­posed of engrav­ings cut out of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry mag­a­zines and cat­a­logues,” writes Daisy Sains­bury at The Pub­lic Domain Review. Unlike in the Dada works known at the time, “the artist is care­ful to dis­guise the images’ com­pos­ite nature. He blends each sec­tion into a seam­less, coher­ent whole.”

“Ernst and Élu­ard then worked togeth­er on twen­ty prose poems to accom­pa­ny the illus­tra­tions, send­ing frag­ments of text to each oth­er to revise or sup­ple­ment.” The result, which pre­dates by two years Breton’s Man­i­feste du sur­réal­isme, “rep­re­sents a pro­to-Sur­re­al­ist exper­i­ment par excel­lence.” In the text, phras­es like “Le petit est malade, le petit va mourir” recall “children’s nurs­ery rhymes, with a sing-song qual­i­ty stripped of sense”; in the images, “a caged bird, an upturned croc­o­dile, and a webbed foot trans­formed through col­lage into the ulti­mate sym­bol of human friv­o­li­ty, a fan, evoke the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems of mod­ern sci­ence (and reli­gion before that) as well as their poten­tial mis­use in human hands.”

It’s worth putting all this in its his­tor­i­cal con­text, a Europe after the First World War in which mod­ern life no longer made quite as much sense as it once seemed. The often-inex­plic­a­ble respons­es of cul­tur­al fig­ures involved in move­ments like Sur­re­al­ism — in their work or in their lives — were attempts at hit­ting the reset but­ton, to use an anachro­nis­tic metaphor. Not that, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, human­i­ty has made much progress in com­ing to grips with our place in a world of rapid­ly evolv­ing tech­nol­o­gy and large-scale geopol­i­tics. Or at least we might feel that way while read­ing Les Mal­heurs des immor­tels, avail­able online at the Inter­net Archive and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s dig­i­tal Dada col­lec­tion, and regard­ing these tex­tu­al-visu­al con­struc­tions as deeply strange as any­thing designed by our arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence engines today.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

A Brief, Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: A Primer by Doc­tor Who Star Peter Capal­di

Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vin­tage Doc­u­men­tary on the Two Great Art Move­ments, Dada & Sur­re­al­ism (1978)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Liszt, Beethoven, Janáček, and More

Haru­ki Murakami’s hit nov­el 1Q84 fea­tures a mem­o­rable scene in a taxi­cab on a grid­locked free­way whose radio is play­ing Leoš Janáček’s Sin­foni­et­ta. “It is, as the book sug­gests, tru­ly the worst pos­si­ble music for a traf­fic jam,” writes Sam Ander­son in a New York Times Mag­a­zine pro­file of the nov­el­ist: “busy, upbeat, dra­mat­ic — like five nor­mal songs fight­ing for suprema­cy inside an emp­ty paint can.” Muraka­mi tells Ander­son that he “chose the Sin­foni­et­ta because that is not a pop­u­lar music at all. But after I pub­lished this book, the music became pop­u­lar in this coun­try… Mr. Sei­ji Oza­wa thanked me. His record has sold well.”

In addi­tion to being a world-famous con­duc­tor, the late Oza­wa was also, as it hap­pens, a per­son­al friend of Murakami’s; the two even pub­lished a book, Absolute­ly on Music, that tran­scribes a series of their con­ver­sa­tions about the for­mer’s voca­tion and the lat­ter’s avo­ca­tion, a dis­tinc­tion with an unclear bound­ary in Murakami’s case.

“I have lots of friends who love music, but Haru­ki takes it way beyond the bounds of san­i­ty,” writes Oza­wa, and indeed, Muraka­mi has always made music a part of his work, both in his process of cre­at­ing it and in its very con­tent. His books offer numer­ous ref­er­ences to West­ern pop (espe­cial­ly of the nine­teen-six­ties), jazz, and also clas­si­cal record­ings — fif­teen of which you can hear in the video from NTS radio above.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured NTS, the Lon­don-based online radio sta­tion known for its deep dives on themes from spir­i­tu­al jazz to Hunter S. Thomp­son, for its “Haru­ki Muraka­mi Day” broad­cast of music from his nov­els. Open­ing with Le mal du pays from Franz Liszt’s Années de pèleri­nage, the NTS Guide to Clas­si­cal Music from Muraka­mi Nov­els con­tin­ues on to “Vogel als Prophet” from Robert Schu­man­n’s Wald­szenen, and there­after includes  Beethoven’s Sym­pho­ny No. 7 In A Major, Mendelssohn’s Cleve­land Quar­tet, Wag­n­er’s Der Fliegende Hol­län­der, and much else besides. You may not be able to recall where you’ve seen all of these pieces men­tioned in Murakami’s work right away, but you’ll sure­ly rec­og­nize the Sin­foni­et­ta the moment it comes along.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Record Col­lec­tion

A 26-Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Lat­est Nov­el, Killing Com­menda­tore

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Day: Stream Sev­en Hours of Mix­es Col­lect­ing All the Jazz, Clas­si­cal & Clas­sic Amer­i­can Pop Music from His Nov­els

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized and Available Online

If you know noth­ing else about medieval Euro­pean illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, you sure­ly know the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s great­est cul­tur­al trea­sures” com­ments Medievalists.net, “it is set apart from oth­er man­u­scripts of the same peri­od by the qual­i­ty of its art­work and the sheer num­ber of illus­tra­tions that run through­out the 680 pages of the book.” The work not only attracts schol­ars, but almost a mil­lion vis­i­tors to Dublin every year. “You sim­ply can’t trav­el to the cap­i­tal of Ire­land,” writes Book Riot’s Eri­ka Har­litz-Kern, “with­out the Book of Kells being men­tioned. And right­ful­ly so.”

The ancient mas­ter­piece is a stun­ning exam­ple of Hiber­no-Sax­on style, thought to have been com­posed on the Scot­tish island of Iona in 806, then trans­ferred to the monastery of Kells in Coun­ty Meath after a Viking raid (a sto­ry told in the mar­velous ani­mat­ed film The Secret of Kells). Con­sist­ing main­ly of copies of the four gospels, as well as index­es called “canon tables,” the man­u­script is believed to have been made pri­mar­i­ly for dis­play, not read­ing aloud, which is why “the images are elab­o­rate and detailed while the text is care­less­ly copied with entire words miss­ing or long pas­sages being repeat­ed.”

Its exquis­ite illu­mi­na­tions mark it as a cer­e­mo­ni­al object, and its “intri­ca­cies,” argue Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin pro­fes­sors Rachel Moss and Fáinche Ryan, “lead the mind along path­ways of the imag­i­na­tion…. You haven’t been to Ire­land unless you’ve seen the Book of Kells.” This may be so, but thank­ful­ly, in our dig­i­tal age, you need not go to Dublin to see this fab­u­lous his­tor­i­cal arti­fact, or a dig­i­ti­za­tion of it at least, entire­ly view­able at the online col­lec­tions of the Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library. (When you click on the pre­vi­ous link, make sure you scroll down the page.) The pages, orig­i­nal­ly cap­tured in 1990, “have recent­ly been res­canned,” Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library writes, using state-of-the-art imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy. These new dig­i­tal images offer the most accu­rate high-res­o­lu­tion images to date, pro­vid­ing an expe­ri­ence sec­ond only to view­ing the book in per­son.”

What makes the Book of Kells so spe­cial, repro­duced “in such var­ied places as Irish nation­al coinage and tat­toos?” asks Pro­fes­sors Moss and Ryan. “There is no one answer to these ques­tions.” In their free online course on the man­u­script, these two schol­ars of art his­to­ry and the­ol­o­gy, respec­tive­ly, do not attempt to “pro­vide defin­i­tive answers to the many ques­tions that sur­round it.” Instead, they illu­mi­nate its his­to­ry and many mean­ings to dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties of peo­ple, includ­ing, of course, the peo­ple of Ire­land. “For Irish peo­ple,” they explain in the course trail­er above, “it rep­re­sents a sense of pride, a tan­gi­ble link to a pos­i­tive time in Ireland’s past, reflect­ed through its unique art.”

But while the Book of Kells is still a mod­ern “sym­bol of Irish­ness,” it was made with mate­ri­als and tech­niques that fell out of use sev­er­al hun­dred years ago, and that were once spread far and wide across Europe, the Mid­dle East, and North Africa. In the video above, Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library con­ser­va­tor John Gillis shows us how the man­u­script was made using meth­ods that date back to the “devel­op­ment of the codex, or the book form.” This includes the use of parch­ment, in this case calf skin, a mate­r­i­al that remem­bers the anatom­i­cal fea­tures of the ani­mals from which it came, with mark­ings where tails, spines, and legs used to be.

The Book of Kells has weath­ered the cen­turies fair­ly well, thanks to care­ful preser­va­tion, but it’s also had per­haps five rebind­ings in its life­time. “In its orig­i­nal form,” notes Har­litz-Kern, the man­u­script “was both thick­er and larg­er. Thir­ty folios of the orig­i­nal man­u­script have been lost through the cen­turies and the edges of the exist­ing man­u­script were severe­ly trimmed dur­ing a rebind­ing in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.” It remains, nonethe­less, one of the most impres­sive arti­facts to come from the age of the illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script, “described by some,” says Moss and Ryan, “as the most famous man­u­script in the world.” Find out why by see­ing it (vir­tu­al­ly) for your­self and learn­ing about it from the experts above.

For any­one inter­est­ed in get­ting a copy of The Book of Kells in a nice print for­mat, see The Book of Kells: Repro­duc­tions from the man­u­script in Trin­i­ty Col­lege, Dublin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Free Online Course on the Great Medieval Man­u­script, the Book of Kells

Dis­cov­er the Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script Les Très Rich­es Heures du Duc de Berry, “the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Cal­en­dar” (1416)

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

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

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David Bowie’s 100 Must Read Books

Image by Avro, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2013, the cura­tors of the tour­ing muse­um exhib­it “David Bowie Is” released a list of David Bowie’s 100 favorite reads, pro­vid­ing us with deep­er insights into his lit­er­ary tastes. Cov­er­ing fic­tion and non-fic­tion, the list spans six decades, mov­ing from Richard Wright’s mem­oir Black Boy (1945) to Susan Jacoby’s The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son (2008). As we once not­ed in anoth­er post, “his list shows a lot of love to Amer­i­can writ­ers, from … Tru­man Capote to … Hubert Sel­by, Jr., Saul Bel­low, Junot Díaz, Jack Ker­ouac and many more. He’s also very fond of fel­low Brits George Orwell, Ian McE­wan, and Julian Barnes and loves Mishi­ma and Bul­gakov.”  You can read the full list below, and, if you choose, also explore a relat­ed book from 2019–Bowie’s Book­shelf: The Hun­dred Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life.

  1. Inter­views With Fran­cis Bacon by David Sylvester
  2. Bil­ly Liar by Kei­th Water­house
  3. Room At The Top by John Braine
  4. On Hav­ing No Head by Dou­glass Hard­ing
  5. Kaf­ka Was The Rage by Ana­tole Bro­yard
  6. A Clock­work Orange by Antho­ny Burgess
  7. City Of Night by John Rechy
  8. The Brief Won­drous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  9. Madame Bovary by Gus­tave Flaubert
  10. Ili­ad by Homer
  11. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkn­er
  12. Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
  13. Berlin Alexan­der­platz by Alfred Döblin
  14. Inside The Whale And Oth­er Essays by George Orwell
  15. Mr. Nor­ris Changes Trains by Christo­pher Ish­er­wood
  16. Halls Dic­tio­nary Of Sub­jects And Sym­bols In Art by James A. Hall
  17. David Bomberg by Richard Cork
  18. Blast by Wyn­d­ham Lewis
  19. Pass­ing by Nel­la Lar­son
  20. Beyond The Bril­lo Box by Arthur C. Dan­to
  21. The Ori­gin Of Con­scious­ness In The Break­down Of The Bicam­er­al Mind by Julian Jaynes
  22. In Bluebeard’s Cas­tle by George Stein­er
  23. Hawksmoor by Peter Ack­royd
  24. The Divid­ed Self by R. D. Laing
  25. The Stranger by Albert Camus
  26. Infants Of The Spring by Wal­lace Thur­man
  27. The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
  28. The Song­lines by Bruce Chatwin
  29. Nights At The Cir­cus by Angela Carter
  30. The Mas­ter And Mar­gari­ta by Mikhail Bul­gakov
  31. The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
  32. Loli­ta by Vladimir Nabokov
  33. Her­zog by Saul Bel­low
  34. Puck­oon by Spike Mil­li­gan
  35. Black Boy by Richard Wright
  36. The Great Gats­by by F. Scott Fitzger­ald
  37. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishi­ma
  38. Dark­ness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
  39. The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
  40. McTeague by Frank Nor­ris
  41. Mon­ey by Mar­tin Amis
  42. The Out­sider by Col­in Wil­son
  43. Strange Peo­ple by Frank Edwards
  44. Eng­lish Jour­ney by J.B. Priest­ley
  45. A Con­fed­er­a­cy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  46. The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
  47. 1984 by George Orwell
  48. The Life And Times Of Lit­tle Richard by Charles White
  49. Awop­bopaloobop Alop­bam­boom: The Gold­en Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
  50. Mys­tery Train by Greil Mar­cus
  51. Beano (com­ic, ’50s)
  52. Raw (com­ic, ’80s)
  53. White Noise by Don DeLil­lo
  54. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The South­ern Dream Of Free­dom by Peter Gural­nick
  55. Silence: Lec­tures And Writ­ing by John Cage
  56. Writ­ers At Work: The Paris Review Inter­views edit­ed by Mal­colm Cow­ley
  57. The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Char­lie Gillette
  58. Octo­bri­ana And The Russ­ian Under­ground by Peter Sadecky
  59. The Street by Ann Petry
  60. Won­der Boys by Michael Chabon
  61. Last Exit To Brook­lyn By Hubert Sel­by, Jr.
  62. A People’s His­to­ry Of The Unit­ed States by Howard Zinn
  63. The Age Of Amer­i­can Unrea­son by Susan Jaco­by
  64. Met­ro­pol­i­tan Life by Fran Lebowitz
  65. The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stop­pard
  66. The Bridge by Hart Crane
  67. All The Emperor’s Hors­es by David Kidd
  68. Fin­ger­smith by Sarah Waters
  69. Earth­ly Pow­ers by Antho­ny Burgess
  70. The 42nd Par­al­lel by John Dos Pas­sos
  71. Tales Of Beat­nik Glo­ry by Ed Saun­ders
  72. The Bird Artist by Howard Nor­man
  73. Nowhere To Run The Sto­ry Of Soul Music by Ger­ri Hir­shey
  74. Before The Del­uge by Otto Friedrich
  75. Sex­u­al Per­son­ae: Art And Deca­dence From Nefer­ti­ti To Emi­ly Dick­in­son by Camille Paglia
  76. The Amer­i­can Way Of Death by Jes­si­ca Mit­ford
  77. In Cold Blood by Tru­man Capote
  78. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
  79. Teenage by Jon Sav­age
  80. Vile Bod­ies by Eve­lyn Waugh
  81. The Hid­den Per­suaders by Vance Packard
  82. The Fire Next Time by James Bald­win
  83. Viz (com­ic, ear­ly ’80s)
  84. Pri­vate Eye (satir­i­cal mag­a­zine, ’60s – ’80s)
  85. Select­ed Poems by Frank O’Hara
  86. The Tri­al Of Hen­ry Kissinger by Christo­pher Hitchens
  87. Flaubert’s Par­rot by Julian Barnes
  88. Mal­doror by Comte de Lautréa­mont
  89. On The Road by Jack Ker­ouac
  90. Mr. Wilson’s Cab­i­net of Won­der by Lawrence Weschler
  91. Zanoni by Edward Bul­w­er-Lyt­ton
  92. Tran­scen­den­tal Mag­ic, Its Doc­trine and Rit­u­al by Eliphas Lévi
  93. The Gnos­tic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
  94. The Leop­ard by Giuseppe Di Lampe­dusa
  95. Infer­no by Dante Alighieri
  96. A Grave For A Dol­phin by Alber­to Den­ti di Pira­jno
  97. The Insult by Rupert Thom­son
  98. In Between The Sheets by Ian McE­wan
  99. A People’s Tragedy by Orlan­do Figes
  100. Jour­ney Into The Whirl­wind by Euge­nia Ginzburg

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bowie’s Book­shelf: A New Essay Col­lec­tion on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

Bri­an Eno Cre­ates a List of 20 Books That Could Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Hayao Miyaza­ki Selects His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

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Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road (1952)

This falls under the cat­e­go­ry, “If you want it done right, you have to do it your­self.”

In 1950, when Jack Ker­ouac released his first nov­el, The Town and the City, he was less than impressed by the book cov­er pro­duced by his pub­lish­er, Har­court Brace. (Click here to see why.) So, in 1952, when he began shop­ping his sec­ond nov­el, the great beat clas­sic On the Road, Ker­ouac went ahead and designed his own cov­er. He sent it to a poten­tial pub­lish­er A.A. Wyn, with a lit­tle note typed at the very top:

Dear Mr. Wyn:

I sub­mit this as my idea of an appeal­ing com­mer­cial cov­er expres­sive of the book. The cov­er for “The Town and the City” was as dull as the title and the pho­to back­flap. Wilbur Pippin’s pho­to of me is the per­fect On the Road one … it will look like the face of the fig­ure below.

J.K.

Wyn turned down the nov­el, and it would­n’t get pub­lished until 1957. It would, how­ev­er, become a best­seller and be pub­lished with many dif­fer­ent cov­ers through the years. They’re all on dis­play here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road

Hear Jack Ker­ouac Read from On The Road on the 100th Anniver­sary of His Birth

Four Inter­ac­tive Maps Immor­tal­ize the Road Trips That Inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Paint­ings:” Now Gath­ered in One Book and Exhi­bi­tion for the First Time

J. G. Ballard Demystifies Surrealist Paintings by Dalí, Magritte, de Chirico & More

Before his sig­na­ture works like The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Bal­lard pub­lished three apoc­a­lyp­tic nov­els, The Drowned World, The Burn­ing World, and The Crys­tal World. Each of those books offers a dif­fer­ent vision of large-scale envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter, and the last even pro­vides a clue as to its inspi­ra­tion. Or rather, its orig­i­nal cov­er does, by using a sec­tion of Max Ern­st’s paint­ing The Eye of Silence. “This spinal land­scape, with its fren­zied rocks tow­er­ing into the air above the silent swamp, has attained an organ­ic life more real than that of the soli­tary nymph sit­ting in the fore­ground,” Bal­lard writes in “The Com­ing of the Uncon­scious,” an arti­cle on sur­re­al­ism writ­ten short­ly after The Crys­tal World appeared in 1966.

First pub­lished in an issue of the mag­a­zine New Worlds (which also con­tains Bal­lard’s take on Chris Mark­er’s La Jetée), the piece is osten­si­bly a review of Patrick Wald­berg’s Sur­re­al­ism and Mar­cel Jean’s The His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing, but it ends up deliv­er­ing Bal­lard’s short analy­ses of a series of paint­ings by var­i­ous sur­re­al­ist mas­ters.

The Eye of Silence shows the land­scapes of our world “for what they are — the palaces of flesh and bone that are the liv­ing facades enclos­ing our own sub­lim­i­nal con­scious­ness.” The “ter­ri­fy­ing struc­ture” at the cen­ter of René Magritte’s The Annun­ci­a­tion is “a neu­ron­ic totem, its round­ed and con­nect­ed forms are a frag­ment of our own ner­vous sys­tems, per­haps an insol­u­ble code that con­tains the oper­at­ing for­mu­lae for our own pas­sage through time and space.”

In Gior­gio de Chiri­co’s The Dis­qui­et­ing Mus­es, “an unde­fined anx­i­ety has begun to spread across the desert­ed square. The sym­me­try and reg­u­lar­i­ty of the arcades con­ceals an intense inner vio­lence; this is the face of cata­ton­ic with­draw­al”; its fig­ures are “human beings from whom all tran­si­tion­al time has been erod­ed.” Anoth­er work depicts an emp­ty beach as “a sym­bol of utter psy­chic alien­ation, of a final sta­sis of the soul”; its dis­place­ment of beach and sea through time “and their mar­riage with our own four-dimen­sion­al con­tin­u­um, has warped them into the rigid and unyield­ing struc­tures of our own con­scious­ness.” There Bal­lard writes of no less famil­iar a can­vas than The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry by Sal­vador Dalí, whom he called “the great­est painter of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry” more than 40 years after “The Com­ing of the Uncon­scious” in the Guardian.

A decade there­after, that same pub­li­ca­tion’s Declan Lloyd the­o­rizes that the exper­i­men­tal bill­boards designed by Bal­lard in the fifties (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) had been tex­tu­al rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of Dalí’s imagery. Until the late six­ties, Bal­lard says in a 1995 World Art inter­view, “the Sur­re­al­ists were very much looked down upon. This was part of their attrac­tion to me, because I cer­tain­ly did­n’t trust Eng­lish crit­ics, and any­thing they did­n’t like seemed to me prob­a­bly on the right track. I’m glad to say that my judg­ment has been seen to be right — and theirs wrong.” He under­stood the long-term val­ue of Sur­re­al­ist visions, which had seem­ing­ly been obso­lesced by World War II before, “all too soon, a new set of night­mares emerged.” We can only hope he won’t be proven as pre­scient about the long-term hab­it­abil­i­ty of the plan­et.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

What Makes Sal­vador Dalí’s Icon­ic Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing “The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry” a Great Work of Art

An Intro­duc­tion to René Magritte, and How the Bel­gian Artist Used an Ordi­nary Style to Cre­ate Extra­or­di­nar­i­ly Sur­re­al Paint­ings

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

J. G. Ballard’s Exper­i­men­tal Text Col­lages: His 1958 For­ay into Avant-Garde Lit­er­a­ture

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

When Kon­rad von Megen­berg pub­lished his Buch der Natur in the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, he won the dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing assem­bled the very first nat­ur­al his­to­ry in Ger­man. More than half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, the book still fas­ci­nates — not least for its depic­tions of cats, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Even the works derived from it have charms of their own: take the Kräuter­buch (or “Book of Herbs”) from 1462, in which Duke Albrecht III of Bavari­a’s per­son­al physi­cian Johannes Hartlieb adapts a sec­tion of the Buch der Natur with its own full com­ple­ment of 160 illus­tra­tions.

“Hartlieb’s sub­ject is plants, most­ly herbs, and their med­ical uses,” says the Library of Con­gress, on whose site you can view and down­load the book. “What makes the Kräuterbuch spe­cial is the side-by-side pre­sen­ta­tion of text and images. The high cost of such a rich­ly dec­o­rat­ed book makes it unlike­ly that it was actu­al­ly used by doc­tors or phar­ma­cists of the time.”

But even if they lack a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic prac­ti­cal­i­ty, these botan­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tions have a bright, sim­ple bold­ness that, in some respect, suits our visu­al aes­thet­ics here in the ear­ly twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry; you could call it a renais­sance equiv­a­lent of flat design.

“Each chap­ter of the Kräuter­buch fol­lows a tra­di­tion­al sys­tem of botan­i­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion derived from the Greek philoso­pher Theophras­tus,” writes Hunter Dukes at the Pub­lic Domain Review, which also offers a gallery of the book’s illus­tra­tions. “Ani­mals are por­trayed as phar­ma­co­log­i­cal­ly knowl­edge­able, such as in an account of deer rub­bing them­selves on pep­per­weed (Lep­id­i­um lat­i­foli­um) to remove hunters’ arrows”; anoth­er sec­tion holds that “dead­ly car­rots (Thap­sia) aid beg­gars in their decep­tions — rubbed on the face, they will pro­duce signs of lep­rosy, which can also be cured with vine­gar.” Dis­cussing the poi­so­nous man­drake (see image imme­di­ate­ly above), Hartlieb car­ries for­ward von Megen­berg’s sug­ges­tion “that its mag­i­cal prop­er­ties should be kept secret from com­mon­ers,” who, nat­u­ral­ly, would nev­er be in pos­ses­sion of such a lav­ish tome. Now all of us can access the Kräuter­buch — and most of us know that we’d be bet­ter off not mess­ing around with man­drake at all.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New Herbal: A Mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance Botan­i­cal Illus­tra­tions Gets Repub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful 900-Page Book

Hor­tus Eystet­ten­sis: The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Book of Plants That Changed Botan­i­cal Art Overnight (1613)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

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

The Sur­pris­ing Map of Plants: A New Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Plants Relate to Each Oth­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Behold James Sowerby’s Strikingly Illustrated New Elucidation of Colours (1809)

James Sower­by was an artist ded­i­cat­ed to the nat­ur­al world. It thus comes as no sur­prise that he was also enor­mous­ly inter­est­ed in col­or, espe­cial­ly giv­en the era in which he lived. Born in 1757, he made his pro­fes­sion­al start as a painter of flow­ers: a viable career path in those days, at least to those with Sower­by’s tal­ent and ded­i­ca­tion. It was in 1790 that he began what would end up being the 23-years-in-the-mak­ing Eng­lish Botany, the land­mark 36-vol­ume work for which he remains best known today. Its 2,592 images cap­tured the full range of his coun­try’s flo­ra, some of them in hues that read­ers had nev­er before encoun­tered in real life.

Alas, writes Joyce Dixon at Shap­ing Colour, “as the years passed, Sower­by watched with dis­may as the bright hues of his hand-col­ored engrav­ings began to fade and decay — the inevitable action of time and chem­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty work­ing away at his water­col­or pig­ments.” This inspired anoth­er ambi­tious artis­tic-sci­en­tif­ic project: “to devel­op a stan­dard, uni­ver­sal and per­ma­nent method of rep­re­sent­ing nat­ur­al col­or.” In 1809, he invent­ed a device he called the “Chro­matome­ter,” which “pre­sent­ed a stan­dard, mea­sur­able pris­mat­ic spec­trum to the user.” Look­ing through a prism, that user could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly “pin­point spe­cif­ic col­ors in the spec­trum revealed by the prism, offer­ing a stan­dard ref­er­ence for a spe­cif­ic hue” iden­ti­fied in real­i­ty.

The Chro­matome­ter nev­er proved viable, writes Paul Sorene at Flash­bak, “because it was too fid­dly and botanists often worked at night,” but the work that doc­u­ment­ed it lives on. A New Elu­ci­da­tion of Colours, Orig­i­nal, Pris­mat­ic and Mate­r­i­al: Show­ing Their Con­cor­dance in the Three Prim­i­tives, Yel­low, Red and Blue: and the Means of Pro­duc­ing, Mea­sur­ing and Mix­ing Them: with some Obser­va­tions on the Accu­ra­cy of Sir Isaac New­ton presents a sys­tem of col­or the­o­ry based on red, yel­low, and blue (unlike mod­ern sys­tems, not red, green, and blue). At the same time that Sower­by was devel­op­ing it, his coun­try­man Thomas Young was putting togeth­er a sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry of his own about how all per­cep­tion of col­or aris­es from the eye com­bin­ing just three wave­lengths — a the­o­ry that turned out to be true.

You can read or down­load A New Elu­ci­da­tion at the Well­come Col­lec­tion or the Inter­net Archive. These dig­i­tized ver­sions include all of Sower­by’s orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions, for use with the Chro­matome­ter and oth­er­wise, which remain aes­thet­i­cal­ly com­pelling these two cen­turies lat­er. But as under­scored by the copi­ous amounts of text, they reflect a time when human­i­ty was com­ing into an under­stand­ing of not just how to repli­cate col­ors reli­ably and accu­rate­ly, but of the nature of col­or itself. Sower­by may not have had the last word on the sub­ject, despite hav­ing cor­rect­ed no less a fore­bear than New­ton, but his inves­ti­ga­tions can only have helped him look even more close­ly at the nat­ur­al king­doms he meant to cap­ture — includ­ing that of min­er­als, which was also beck­on­ing at the time.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete High-Res­o­lu­tion Dig­i­tal Scan

The Woman Who The­o­rized Col­or: An Intro­duc­tion to Mary Gartside’s New The­o­ry of Colours (1808)

Goethe’s The­o­ry of Col­ors: The 1810 Trea­tise That Inspired Kandin­sky & Ear­ly Abstract Paint­ing

A Vision­ary 115-Year-Old Col­or The­o­ry Man­u­al Returns to Print: Emi­ly Noyes Vanderpoel’s Col­or Prob­lems

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

The Book of Colour Con­cepts: A New 800-Page Cel­e­bra­tion of Col­or The­o­ry, Includ­ing Works by New­ton, Goethe, and Hilma af Klint

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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