Ronald Searle, Les Très Riches Heures de Mrs Mole
47 jewel-like drawings by Ronald Searle made for his wife, Monica, each time she underwent chemotherapy. On New Year’s Eve 1969, Monica Searle was diagnosed with a rare and virulent form of breast cancer. Each time she underwent treatment, Ronald produced a Mrs Mole drawing ‘to cheer every dreaded chemotherapy session and evoke the blissful future ahead’. Filled with light and illuminated in glowing colours, the drawings speak of love, optimism and hope. Like the mediaeval illuminated manuscripts such as the 15th-century Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, to which the title of this book refers, the 47 drawings are on an intimate scale and were never intended for publication.
When asked about the drawings, Searle said, “I have only my talent for drawing, so I drew.” Here’s a little more about them:
Prior to the cancer shock the couple had bought a decrepit house in the south of France and, despite her illness, Monica continued to devote her time making this house a home.
Devastated with his wife’s diagnosis Ronald did the only thing he knew how to do to cheer her up. .. draw.
Before every chemotherapy session he gave his wife a painting. Monica was depicted as a mole, a very happy mole celebrating life in their new home. (The Mole idea came after their discovery of a large celler that they made into a cosy room)
‘Everything about them had to be romantic and perfect,’ says Ronald. ‘I drew them originally for no one’s eyes except Mo’s, so she would look at them propped up against her bedside lamp and think: “When I’m better, everything will be beautiful.”
(Images via bluedoorbooks)
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From the farewell speech of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, translated and presented as the opening monologue of the recent biopic L’amour fou.
Based on what I know of Saint Laurent from only having watched this film, a comparison to Arthur Rimbaud would be apt, perhaps drawn out over a far longer stretch of life: instead of abandoning his craft at 21 and fleeing to north Africa to become a merchant, YSL simply bought a house there, kept cranking out his culture-shifting art for the next few decades, survived the alcohol and drugs that came along with the celebrity, and slowly amassed a treasure trove of art and sculpture that sold recently for close to $500M. And yet he struggled with depression and unhappiness for all but “two moments a year”, his entire life. The NY Times review of L’amour Fou has down the sense of nihilism you get from the film’s protagonists’ lives:
To be surrounded by the most concentrated beauty the world has to offer and yet be chronically depressed is to confront the sad reality that material bounty may bring fleeting pleasure but nothing resembling peace of mind. To realize that you may have the world while still feeling as if you have nothing is to experience a closer encounter with the void than most of us are likely to have.
Other recent fashion documentaries worth watching, even if you’re like me and not really well-versed (or especially interested) in fashion:
hilarious. thanks mark
This. Is. Hilarious.
(For the benefit of those who didn’t immediately laugh: 4’33”)
HAHAHAHAHAHA. Ah, John Cage humor.
Funny! But also an interesting question: 4’33” is very much about the other sounds in the performance space in the duration — who holds the copyright on the ambient sound of a crowded theater? Does YouTube’s blocking of the audio have any actual effect on the nature of the piece?
See also:
- The confusing Mechanical Copyright Protection Society v. Mike Batt lawsuit over a 1 minute track of recorded silence (or was that a hoax?)
- 4’33” in MIDI format (this piece in digital format raises some other interesting aesthetic and philosophical questions…)
These are great! My favorite is the Leisure Suit Nighthawks.
Here’s a reverse challenge for you: famous paintings found in classic adventure games. Go!
(Update: someone already made these nice screengrabs of the Lucasfilm pixel-Suerat paintings, which were the ones I was thinking of! Now I don’t have to fire up ScummVM! PS: I’ve long loved the idea of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the original pixel art piece, being further referenced via pixelation in these games, an homage to the pointillism that had come almost exactly a century before)
Famous paintings mashed up with 80s adventure gamesAled Lewis (@fatheed) mashes up historic paintings with ’80s point-and-click adventure games for @iam8bitshowYes! (Visit Aled’s Tumblr)
Gold, an acrylic + light sculpture by Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab, capturing the marker movement of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s handwriting. The way the projected light spirals through the acrylic is beautiful!
(Source: vimeo.com)
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Robert Leleux, on the time he mistook installation art for trash, quoted in this NYTimes article, “Texans Thrive in New York City” (via austinkleon)
The Texas → NYC connection seems pretty complete with the opening of Hill Country, a Manhattan BBQ joint modeled specifically after Kreuz Market, complete with bottles of Big Red and Blue Bell ice cream. If ever end up there, I’ll be sure to drop by the place to see how it compares with actual Lockhart BBQ.
There are a lot of great stories about art mistaken as trash out there (I admire Robert’s ability to use his Texas background to get sympathy!). This phenomenon has happened fairly frequently, especially to Joseph Beuys installation art, which has been swept up and tossed out of museums and galleries (ironic given that one of his well-known pieces from the 1970s was titled “Sweeping Up”), or there’s the time his bathtub piece was accidentally used as a beer cooler (I gather this is the same tub piece that was also once scoured clean in Germany by an overly-efficient custodial staff?). Compare with Gustav Metzger’s bag of trash that was tossed out of a 2004 exhibit from as prestigious a museum as the Tate Britain, which later had to be reconstructed anew by the artist. It happens.
For the record, the “trash as art” meme was parodied as far back as 1965, in my favorite Allan Sherman song, The Rebel:
Well, they met one day
At a pop art bash,
Between a painting of a can
Of succotash
And a high camp sculpture
Of a pile of trash -
It was groovy!
(via austinkleon)
The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime.
We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.
"— From Salman Rushdie’s op-ed “Dangerous Arts” in today’s New York Times, on Ai Weiwei’s arrest and detention by Chinese authorities, a matter of human rights urgency.
Arthouse Fissures
With the Austin Museum of Art shuttering their downtown location, the city’s crackdown on home/studio spaces on the east side, the House voting to gut the funding for the Texas Commission for the Arts, and the recent news that Art Lies is ceasing publication, what could make this a bleaker month for central Texas art?
Arthouse, the 100-year-old Austin-based organization I’ve been proud to support since the days when it was still called the Texas Fine Arts Association, is beginning to show signs of fracture, despite their beautiful new façade. You can get the bigger story over at Austin360 if you’ve missed it in the news, but to summarize: exhibited art has been mishandled and censored, their admired and successful curator was fired abruptly (possibly after having written a letter of concern to the director about the above-mentioned mishandling), and some of their prominent board members and staff members have resigned in protest. There’s also a growing collective voice of concern by the artists who were to be contributing work to the upcoming 5x7 fundraising show (myself included). So far, apart from short responses directly to inquiring reporters, I don’t believe that Arthouse has issued a statement on the matter, which isn’t especially good PR in my humble opinion.
Eric Zimmerman has a nice summary of the concerns on his cablegram blog:
No one would argue against a new building, or at very least a renovation. But when you dump truckloads of cash into a designer building and neglect to budget for a curator, the person who puts the actual art in the Arthouse, there seems to be some serious priority issues. I said it before, a building is nice and all, but what you show in that building is where the rubber meets the road. I’d love to see art organizations forgo the starchitect buldings and put money into paying artists, curators, and their staff instead.
For the curatorial angle (or perhaps, the “lack of curator”), you might be interested in Wendy Vogel’s take over on …might be good.
Here’s to hoping that Arthouse can steer itself back on track as the leading space for contemporary art in Austin.
— The incomparable Winsor McCay, quoted in a Los Angeles Times blog post that points out that this is the 100th anniversary of McCay’s short film Little Nemo. If you’ve never seen his animated shorts — they’re among the first examples of the medium, and yet still technically brilliant — you should hit up the YouTube and get started with Nemo…
— Journalist and critic Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy, quoted in an counter-point article by Michael Mirasol posted on Roger Ebert’s blog, Why video games are indeed Art.
— From number 51 in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick. I heard this quote this past week as part of the “Music of Interaction Design” panel at SxSWi presented by Cennydd Bowles and James Box. Here’s a short PBS NewsHour writeup about the panel with a video interview of the two designers.
Rembrandt van Rijn: Landscape with Three Trees, 1643
Can’t wait to see this show at the Frick when we go to NYC later this month.
In many ways, I feel that landscape etchings and drypoints by the Old Masters are even more sublime than the 19th Century paintings of the Hudson River School sort. There’s a stillness to their subtle gray tones that’s hard to capture with paint.
PS: for those around Austin (the city in Texas, not Austin Kleon!), the Blanton Museum often exhibits amazing Rembrandt etchings in their Prints & Drawings galleries, along with other incredible prints from the same era.
Movie Mountain
The New York Times wrote a nice mini-review for my favorite art duo Hubbard / Birchler’s latest piece, Méliès, in which the artists investigate a remote Texas prominence with the unexpected name “Movie Mountain”:
How this unprepossessing peak got its name is the subject of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s beautifully made two-screen, high-definition video “Méliès.” To the sound of melancholy piano music, the 24-minute film interweaves panoramic landscapes and interviews with local people who vaguely recall that someone shot a silent movie, a western, on or near Movie Mountain early in the 20th century. No one is quite sure who made that early film, but two of the interviewees say they had relatives who were employed as extras. The artists conclude that Gaston Méliès, brother of the cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, made that lost movie around 1910 or 1911 during a stopover in Sierra Blanca while relocating to California from San Antonio. […] The meandering, understated emergence of cinematic fact and fiction is captivating to watch.
— George Gershwin on Rhapsody in Blue’s inspiration, the rhythm of the city train.
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Charles Baudelaire, from The Painter of Modern Life. I often see this quoted by itself, so here’s some context:
But genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. To this deep and joyful curiosity must be attributed that stare, animal-like in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new, whatever it may be, face or landscape, light, gilding, colours, watered silk, enchantment of beauty, enhanced by the arts of dress. A friend of mine was telling me one day how, as a small boy, he used to be present when his father was dressing, and how he had always been filled with astonishment, mixed with delight, as he looked at the arm muscle, the colour tones of the skin tinged with rose and yellow, and the bluish network of the veins. The picture of the external world was already beginning to fill him with respect, and to take possession of his brain. Already the shape of things obsessed and possessed him. A precocious fate was showing the tip of its nose. His damnation was settled.
