Images: Picasso Mostly in Pencil
Taken from John Richardson’s biographies of Picasso. Click on each to enlarge:
Images: Manet’s Muse, Victorine Meurent
The French painter and model Victorine Meurent (1844-1927) appears in some of the most famous of Édouard Manet’s paintings. Click on each to enlarge:
Images: Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits
The number of Rembrandt’s self-portraits alone far outnumber the entire output of many artists. Here is only a fraction of them, but watch him grow up, change, and emerge with many moods. Click on each to enlarge:
Images: The Earliest Stone Buddhas
Among the earliest sculptures of the Buddha, from Heinrich Zimmer’s Art of Indian Asia. Click on each to enlarge:
Burned as a Witch in Ireland in 1895
From Frazer’s Golden Bough: In March 1895 a peasant named Michael Cleary, residing at Ballyvadlea, a remote and lonely district in the county of Tipperary, burned his wife Bridget Cleary alive over a slow fire on the kitchen hearth in the presence of and with the active assistance of some neighbours, including the woman’s own father and several of her […]
The Great Myths #55: An Island is Cut Away & the Prose Edda Begins (Norse)
Read the other Great Myths here The Prose Edda, one of the greatest sources for Norse mythology, begins with the following simple frame story: a king named Gylfi is tricked out of a good deal of his land, and he goes to the home of the gods to question them. His questions, and the answers he receives, constitute a […]
20th Century Poetry #5: Edward Thomas
One way to understand where poetry is now is to see where it was a hundred years ago. Every Saturday I’ll be posting not the best, but at least the most representative, poems from the last century, where we can see poetry constantly changing. You can read the other entries here. As the Team’s Head-Brass As the team’s head-brass flashed […]
Sleepwalking into World War One
From Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914: Do we really need to make the case against a single guilty state, or to rank the states according to their respective share in responsibility for the outbreak of war? In one classical study from the origins literature, Paul Kennedy remarked that it is “flaccid” to dodge the […]
Images: Watch Picasso’s “Guernica” Emerge
Scroll through this selection of preliminary studies & photos of the canvas as it was worked on & completed. Pretty astonishing, & all done in about five weeks.
The Great Myths #54: A Native American Orpheus (Tachi Yokut)
Read the other Great Myths here As the compiler of this myth notes: “The Orpheus myth is also popular among North American Indian tribes, especially in the western and eastern parts of the continent.” A Tachi had a fine wife who died and was buried. Her husband went to her grave and dug a hole near it. There he stayed […]
Marc Chagall Struck by Lightning
The artist Marc Chagall, meeting his wife Bella Rosenfeld in 1909; they were together for the next 35 years: I am at Thea’s, lying on the sofa in the consulting room of her father, a physician. I liked to stretch out that way near the window on that sofa covered with a black horsehair cloth, worn, with holes in […]
Bruce Springsteen on “Nebraska,” & When the Demo is the Album
Two passages from Bruce Springsteen talking about his 1982 album Nebraska. You can hear the entire album here: Nebraska began as an unknowing meditation on my childhood and its mysteries. I had no conscious political agenda or social theme. I was after a feeling, a tone that felt like the world I’d known and still carried inside me. The remnants […]
The Great Myths #53: Thor Goes Fishing for the Serpent that Surrounds the World (Norse)
Read the other Great Myths here Long ago the slaughter-gods were eating their hunting-prey in the mood for a drink, before they were full; they shook the sticks and looked at the lots: they learned that at Ægir’s was a fine crop of cauldrons. The cliff-dweller [Ægir] sat there, child-cheerful, much like Miskorblindi’s boy; the son of Dread [Thor], defiant, […]
20th Century Poetry #4: Laurence Binyon
One way to understand where poetry is now is to see where it was a hundred years ago. Every Saturday I’ll be posting not the best, but at least the most representative, poems from the last century, where we can see poetry constantly changing. You can read the other entries here. Here, with Laurence Binyon’s “Hunger,” is the first […]
The Hooded Lady of Brassempouy
from Randall White’s Prehistoric Art: The best known of the statuettes from Brassempouy is the 25,000 year-old “dame à la capuche” (hooded lady), carved from the dense, homogenous interior core of a mammoth tusk. She was found immediately below a fireplace and was covered by a small limestone slab. Although she has frequently been imagined to be the broken-off head […]
Philip Roth Mourns the Behemoth of Pop Culture
from a 2006 interview: “… television began in 1948, really, and Popular Culture just grew and grew and grew and grew, and by the time I was in college, or in graduate school at the University of Chicago, David Riesman was there, and he was writing The Lonely Crowd, you remember. And I used to go to his classes and […]
William Blake Chooses Eternity
A wonderful paragraph from Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Blake, where he shows how the poet slowly came to accept that if he was writing for anyone other than himself, it was for posterity; and how he charged ahead nevertheless: His independence meant that he could preserve his vision beyond all taint—and that integrity is an essential aspect of his […]
“It is so hard to die”: An Account of Depression from 1809
One of the most heartbreaking stories I know relates the last day in the life of Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark fame). Suffering from what today we would simply call depression, signs of the illness even appear in the journals he kept while on his journey west with William Clark, when flurries of meticulous reportage are replaced by weeks […]
Joseph Campbell’s Hero Sets Out
A piece of the beginning and end of The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or […]
The Great Myths #52: Ríg Gives Advice (Norse)
Read the other Great Myths here Here is Andy Orchard’s translation of the Rígsthula, where the culture hero Ríg wanders the earth & sorts everybody out: People say that in the ancient tales one of the Æsir, who was called Heimdall, went in his travels along a certain sea-shore; he came to a farmstead and called himself Ríg. About that […]
20th Century Poetry #3: W. H. Davies
One way to understand where poetry is now is to see where it was a hundred years ago. Every Saturday I’ll be posting not the best, but at least the most representative, poems from the last century, where we can see poetry constantly changing. You can read the other entries here. The Rat “That woman there is almost dead, Her […]
How Picking Fleas Led to the Evolution of Language
From Steven Mithen’s Prehistory of the Mind: The anthropologist Robin Dunbar looked at the size of the brain of H. habilis [2.1 – 1.5 million years ago] from a very different perspective. Recall that we have already referred to his work regarding the relationship between brain size and group size—living within a larger group requires more brain-processing power to keep up […]
The Earliest Human Communities
From Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind: There is good circumstantial evidence that H. habilis [2.1 to 1.5 million years ago] would have been living in larger groups than his ancestors. If we again look at modern primates, there appear to be two ecological situations in which primates choose to live in larger groups, and suffer the accompanying social challenges. […]
We Were All Animals Once: The Beginning of Anthropomorphic Thinking
from Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind: This propensity to think of the natural world in social terms is perhaps most evident in the ubiquitous use of anthropomorphic thinking—attributing animals with humanlike minds. Consider the Inuit and the polar bear. This animal is highly sought after and is “killed with passion, butchered with care and eaten with delight.” But […]
Vermeer in Bosnia
If anyone asks you about the Why of art, especially in the face of atrocity or just its apparent impracticality—for the artist or the audience—this anecdote from Lawrence Weschler is about as good an answer as I know. I happened to be in The Hague a while back, sitting in on the preliminary hearings of the Yugoslav War Crimes […]
On Beethoven’s Deathbed
Here are two passages from Beethoven’s life. The first finds him on his deathbed, and is recorded in the memoirs of one of his friends. Beset by his final illness, the composer is rejuvenated for the last time by an astounding gift: the complete scores George Frederic Handel. The fact that Beethoven, so close to death, could still express an […]
Understanding Religious Fundamentalism
I am always thrilled to reread these two passages by Erik Hornung, and to find in them just about the wisest things I’ve ever read about religion in general, and fundamentalism in particular. Although he hopefully assumes (the book was first published in 1971) that just because fundamentalism will become increasingly “inhuman” it will lose adherents, his words are still […]
20th Century Poetry #2: A. E. Housman
One way to understand where poetry is now is to see where it was a hundred years ago. Every Saturday I’ll be posting not the best, but at least the most representative, poems from the last century, where we can see poetry constantly changing. You can read the other entries here. “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” Loveliest of […]
Humanity’s Earliest Rituals
Three passages on prehistoric religion from the book Becoming Human: One of the pervasive themes of [this book] is that spirituality and materiality cannot be separated. The roots of religion are to be found in ritual practice. And ritual practice, as documented by the material record goes back before the Franco-Cantabrian “explosion”, back indeed before the Blombos engravings [70,000 […]
Harold Bloom Discovers That What Writers Work Hardest On Isn’t What Readers Remember Most
from Bloom’s 1991 interview with The Paris Review: You know, I’ve learned something over the years, picking up copies of my books in secondhand bookstores and in libraries, off people’s shelves. I’ve written so much and have now looked at so many of these books that I’ve learned a great deal. You also learn this from reviews and from things […]
The Archaeology & Mythology of Caves
The archaeologist Jean Clottes writes that, besides the more famous paintings in the ice-age caves of France and Spain, it has also been observed that “various objects have been either deposited or stuck into cracks of the walls, or even stuck into the ground. Those apparently non-utilitarian gestures have been noticed from Asturias in Spain to Burgundy in France, from […]
