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Friday, September 29th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Émile-Antoine Bayard’s Vivid Illustrations of Jules Verne’s Around the Moon: The First Serious Works of Space Art (1870)
What does space travel look like? Even now, in the 21st century, very, very few of us know first-hand. But we've all seen countless images from countless eras purporting to show us what it might look like. As with anything imagined by man, someone had to render a convincing vision of space travel first, and that distinction may well go to 19th-century French illustrator Émile-Antoine Bayard who, perhaps not surprisingly, worked with Jules Verne. Verne's pioneering and prolific work in science fiction literature has kept him a household name, but Bayard's may sound more obscure; still, we've all seen his artwork, or at least we've all seen the drawing of Cosette the orphan he did for Les Misérables.
"Readers of Jules Verne’s early science-fiction classic From the Earth to the Moon (De la terre à la lune) — which left the Baltimore Gun Club’s bullet-shaped projectile, along with its three passengers and dog, hurtling through space — had to wait a whole five years before learning the fate of its heroes," says The Public Domain Review. When it appeared, 1870's Around the Moon (Autour de la Lune) offered not just "a fine continuation of the space adventure" but "a superb series of wood engravings to illustrate the tale" created by Bayard. "There had been imaginary views of other worlds, and even of space flight before this," writes Ron Miller in Space Art, "but until Verne's book appeared, these views all had been heavily colored by mysticism rather than science."
Composed strictly according to the scientific facts known at the time — with a departure here and there in the name of imagination and visual metaphor — the illustrations for A Trip Around the Moon, later published in a single volume with its predecessor as A Trip to the Moon and Around It, stand as the earliest known example of scientific space art. Verne went as far as to commission a lunar map by famed selenographers (literally, scholars of the moom's surface) Beer and Maedlerm, and just last year the Linda Hall Library named Bayard a "scientist of the day." As with the uncannily accurate predictions in Verne's earlier novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, a fair few of the ideas here, especially to do with the mechanics of the rocket's launch and return to Earth, remain scientifically plausible.
Whatever the innovation of the project's considerable scientific basis, its artistic impression fired up more than a few other imaginations: both Verne's words and Bayard's art, all 44 pieces of which you can view here, served as major inspirations for early filmmaker and "father of special effects" Georges Méliès, for instance, when he made A Trip to the Moon. Disappointed complaints about our persistent lack of moon colonies or even commercial space flight may have long since grown tiresome, but the next time you hear one of us denizens of the 21st century air them, remember the work of Verne and Bayard and think of how deep into history that desire really runs.
Related Content: How French Artists in 1899 Envisioned Life in the Year 2000: Drawing the Future Soviet Artists Envision a Communist Utopia in Outer Space A Trip to the Moon (and Five Other Free Films) by Georges Méliès, the Father of Special Effects Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook. Émile-Antoine Bayard’s Vivid Illustrations of Jules Verne’s <i>Around the Moon</i>: The First Serious Works of Space Art (1870) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 2:00p | How to Cook Like Frida Kahlo & Georgia O’Keefe
It’s a myth that starving artists don’t eat. They do, just not often or well. Their meals rarely rate recipes, let alone cookbooks. Those cookbooks do exist though.... The mostly conceptual Starving Artist Cookbook put together by EIDIA (aka artists Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf) comes close to the spirit of sustaining life through meager ingredients… like spaghetti or 4 pages of shredded Pravda. Not so this other title, which approaches cute overload with an abundance of Instagram-worthy illustrated fare—mojitos, an unstructured berry tart, a “manly” burger.... Do "starving" artists no longer fear being outed as posers? Successful artists may not worry about that, as they eat whatever and however they want. Andy Warhol had the taste of an eccentric child. Marina Abramović takes the ascetic route. Many have glady traded the candle in the chianti bottle for the most rarified restaurants in town. Georgia O’Keefe and Frida Kahlo, PBS Digital Studios’ series the Art Assignment informs us, took cooking—and eating—seriously. So seriously, their culinary efforts led to cookbooks, which the Art Assignment’s host, curator Sarah Urist Green, tries out on camera. O’Keefe, who grew up in Wisconsin on homemade yogurt, homemade cheese, and plentiful homegrown produce, ground her own flour in order to bake daily loaves of whole wheat bread. Green treats viewers to a brief overview of O’Keefe’s life and work as she struggles with the grinder. (You might get the same, or better, results if you take a $5 bill to a good bakery right at opening.) She also tackles the wheat germ Tiger's Milk smoothie advocated by Adele Davis, a nutritionist whom O’Keefe admired, and Green Chiles with Garlic and Oil and Fried Eggs, using recipes from the cookbooks A Painter’s Kitchen and Dinner with Georgia O’Keefe.
Before attempting the same, you might want to watch the Kahlo-centric episode, above, in which Green discovers a much better method for roasting the poblano peppers she haplessly substituted for New Mexico chiles in O’Keefe's egg dish. Here, they’re used for Chiles Rellenos, a dish whose pronunciation the self-effacing Green butchers, along with a multitude of other Spanish phrases, a fact not lost on the video’s Youtube commenters. They also take issue with the presence of plantains, her preparation of the Nopales Salad, and her cooking skills in general. No wonder Green—a self-proclaimed wussy where serranos are concerned—seems so eager to reach for a shot of tequila as dinner is finally served. Green chose the dishes for this episode from Frida's Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo by Marie-Pierre Colle and Kahlo’s stepdaughter, Guadalupe Rivera. Kahlo herself learned to cook from her mother’s copy of El Nuevo Cocinero Mejicano, and from husband Diego Rivera’s first wife, Guadalupe (leading one to wonder if some of that cookbook's recipes aren’t misattributed to the more famous cook). As with the O’Keefe video and the cookbooks cited herein, there’s a wealth of vintage photos and reproduced artwork on display. Even though Green alludes to Kahlo's dark side, sensitive stomachs might have trouble with the inclusion of the graphically violent Unos Quantos Piquetitos. Another painting, My Nurse and I is at least related to eating, if not cooking and recipes. Those with stomachs of steel on the other hand can continue on to another Art Assignment—the supremely gross Meat Sculpture from the Futurist Cookbook. Related Content: The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Discuss Emily Dickinson with her informally at Pete's Mini Zinefest in Brooklyn this Saturday. Follow her @AyunHalliday. How to Cook Like Frida Kahlo & Georgia O’Keefe is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 5:29p | Dr. Weil’s 60-Second Technique for Falling Asleep
Give Dr. Andrew Weil three minutes, and he can teach you a 60-second technique for falling asleep. Above, the alternative medicine guru walks you through the 4-7-8 breathing method. As he demonstrates, it "takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere." And once you master it, you can use the 4-7-8 breathing technique (explained and demonstrated in greater detail here ) to lower your anxiety levels (useful these days!), navigate tension-filled moments, and deal with food cravings. Elsewhere, Weil has said, "If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly." Hence why he created an audio recording, Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing, which you can still purchase online. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: 10 Hours of Ambient Arctic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Meditate, Study & Sleep Music That Helps You Sleep: Minimalist Composer Max Richter, Pop Phenom Ed Sheeran & Your Favorites Moby Lets You Download 4 Hours of Ambient Music to Help You Sleep, Meditate, Do Yoga & Not Panic 240 Hours of Relaxing, Sleep-Inducing Sounds from Sci-Fi Video Games: From Blade Runner to Star Wars How a Good Night’s Sleep — and a Bad Night’s Sleep — Can Enhance Your Creativity Dr. Weil’s 60-Second Technique for Falling Asleep is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 6:02p | Leonardo da Vinci’s Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings
The caricature was once a highly-regarded art form, before it was cornered on the upper end by the New York Review of Books and on the more pedestrian side by boardwalk and street fair artists. During the European Renaissance and the ensuing centuries of artistic development, nearly every artist had a caricature side project—if only in the margins of their sketchbooks—and some, like Leonardo da Vinci, were widely known and appreciated for their skill in the art.
Generally renowned these days for the high seriousness of his Mona Lisa, Last Supper, and Vitruvian Man, Leonardo does not tend to be associated with grotesque humor. Yet the caricatures “were some of his most popular and influential works," writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, “from the 16th century up to the time of [William] Hogarth,” the hugely popular 18th century English visual satirist.
These caricatures connect Leonardo not only to graphic art of the future but to an earlier, Medieval world—the “hellish visions of Bosch and Bruegel.” They are “Gargoyles,” wrote critic Kenneth Clark, “the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away.” Clark tempers this characterization by noting that these drawings “in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.”
Indeed, Leonardo loved unusual faces and heads—he found odd-looking people of all kinds fascinating, and turned them into tragicomic figures fit for the stage. Giorgio Vasari, the 16th century biographer of Renaissance artists, wrote that Leonardo was “so delighted when he saw curious heads, whether bearded or hairy, that he would follow anyone who had thus attracted his attention for a whole day, acquiring such a clear idea of him that when he went home he would draw the head as well as if the man had been present.”
We can’t say that stalking exhibits much respect for the kinds of boundaries most people would prefer to maintain, but Leonardo's behavior does display a reverence for interesting human physiognomy, both a source and a foil for his idealizations of the human form. Leonardo’s caricatures resonate into the late 20th century in the work of Ralph Steadman, the gonzo illustrator and political cartoonist.
In his satirical illustrated biography of Leonardo, Steadman remarked that the Renaissance artist who ennobled the human form also found “that man was not what he appeared to be, despite the prevailing atmosphere of fine thoughts and high aspirations.” Steadman quotes a passage from Leonardo’s notebooks that sounds much more Swiftian or Rabelaisian than high-minded Renaissance humanist:
Though the caricatures may not go as far as the horrifying hodgepodge in this description, they do portray human beings with rather less classical equanimity than the serene Mona Lisa or the very composed Christ. But due to the Leonardo's skill and seemingly irrepressible love for the human form—even if he had a jaundiced view of human nature—the caricatures continue to be inspiring pieces of work. Related Content: Leonardo da Vinci’s Visionary Notebooks Now Online: Browse 570 Digitized Pages Ralph Steadman’s Wildly Illustrated Biography of Leonardo da Vinci (1983) What Leonardo da Vinci Really Looked Like Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Leonardo da Vinci’s Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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