The History Blog

Jim Henson’s widow Jane has donated the original Kermit the Frog to the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Along with Kermit, Jane Henson also gave the museum the original Sam, from the 1955 TV show Sam and Friends where Kermit first appeared, Henson’s first puppet, Pierre the French Rat, what appears to be a Ralph, a voracious purple skull named Yorick and Mushmellon, early concepts of what would become Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch respectively, plus 3 other characters from the dawn of the muppet era.

They were handed to the museum in a ceremony on Wednesday. (Fun fact: Willard Scott was in attendance. Apparently he was a weatherman and children’s host on WRC-TV in 1955, the Washington, D.C., station where Sam and Friends debuted. He also played Bozo the Clown. I did not know that.)

Jane Henson said the original characters provided five minutes of fun each night after the local news where they mostly mimed to popular music.

“I think people realized that if you put Kermit’s face up there, it was just as powerful – we were mostly just doing it to entertain ourselves,” she said.

The Smithsonian already has a familiar Kermit the Frog puppet made famous on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.

But the original Kermit looked more like a lizard, made with ping-pong ball eyes and green felt from an old coat thrown out by Henson’s mother.

The first Kermit should be on display with his more recent brethren at the Smithsonian in November.

Brazen thievery seems to be a theme this weekend. A painting by Van Gogh knows as Poppy Flowers or Vase with Flowers was stolen Saturday from the Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo. Thieves cut it out of the frame with box cutters.

The work, measuring 30cm by 30cm (1ft by 1ft), depicts yellow and red flowers and resembles a scene painted by the French artist Adolphe Monticelli, whose work deeply affected the young Vincent Van Gogh. The Monticelli painting also is part of the Khalil collection.

Van Gogh is believed to have been painted the canvas in 1887, three years before his death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Egypt’s minister of culture, Farouk Hosni, mistakenly announced yesterday that suspects had been apprehended at the airport and the painting secured, but he retracted that claim today stating he had been given false information. The painting is still at large, and authorities are on red alert to find the $50 million masterpiece before it skips town.

This isn’t the first time Poppy Flowers has been stolen from the Khalil Museum. The last time was in 1978. It was found 2 years later in Kuwait under circumstances never fully explained. There was talk at the time that the painting might have been copied during its 2-year sabbatical, and even whispers that what the museum got back was one of those copies, not the original Van Gogh.

The second theft might put those rumors to rest, at any rate, since the looters obviously thought it was the real deal. Anyway the Khalil has a lot bigger fish to fry now. Prosecutor general Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud puts the blame for this theft squarely on the museum’s security system, which is shockingly lax. None of the alarms in the entire museum are currently functional, and only 7 of the 43 surveillance cameras are working. Nor are there sufficient security guards to do thorough rounds at closing time.

Mahmoud warned the Khalil to get their act together last year when 9 paintings were stolen from the Mohammed Ali Museum in Cairo, which had similarly crappy security, but obviously that didn’t happen. (All 9 of those paintings were found dumped outside 10 days later.) The prosecutor isn’t playing this time. Mahmoud has barred 15 Egyptian officials, including the director of the Khalil museum and the head of the fine arts department at the Ministry of Culture, from leaving the country until the investigation is complete.

In a brazen smash-and-grab captured on security cameras, 2 thieves stole a 17th century gold ingot from the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum on Key West, Florida. The 11-inch, 74.85-ounce gold bar was kept in a bulletproof polymer case that had a hole in it so visitors to the museum could put their hand in and hold the bar.

“Everybody who comes to the museum is encouraged to lift the gold bar and to have a firsthand experience with history,” said Melissa Kendrick, the museum’s executive director. “This is one of the most iconic and best-known objects in the museum.”

Somehow one of the thieves managed to break through the case, lift out the bar and walk casually out the door with the ingot in his pocket. The security footage (which you can see in this CNN video) doesn’t show how they broke through bulletproof plastic. I can’t detect a weapon or device of any kind. It looks like he just reaches in and pulls out the gold bar, but they had to bust up the case to do it.

The ingot was found in 1980 by famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher. He and his team were looking for the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha galleon, a treasure ship that left Havana in 1622 along with a fleet of 27 other ships crammed to the rafters with New World booty only to be felled by a hurricane. Instead he found the wreck of one of the other 7 ships from that treasure fleet which went down in the storm: the Santa Margarita.

The gold ingot was one of the more dramatic pieces Fisher recovered from the Santa Margarita. Not only is it a large and handsome, but it has a variety of unique markers including Roman numerals marking it as 16-karat gold, a symbol identifying its owner, and dots indicating the taxes paid on it to the Spanish crown.

Its estimated value is $550,000, but the weight of the gold alone is worth $75,000. The museum is offering a $10,000 reward for its return. Here’s hoping the bastards don’t just melt it down and smoke 70 grand worth of meth.

‘The March of Time’ was a series of ground-breaking short films on current events, sports, politics, society, younameit, which played before movies in theaters nationwide from 1935 to 1967. Produced by Time, Inc., publisher of Time, Life and Fortune magazines, the 20 minute documentaries first aired as radio programs on CBS in 1931. The news was delivered with professional actors impersonating public figures. (Agnes Moorehead, aka Endora on Bewitched, played Eleanor Roosevelt. So cool.)

That dramatic approach to covering events and issues of the day carried through to the film newsreels. It became a trademark, and a source of consternation to critics and journalists who didn’t know what to make of the mixture of fact, fiction and propaganda.

The film’s most unusual feature was its re‐creation or staging of events that had taken place but which had not been photographed by newsreel cameras. De Rochemont argued that he had the same right to interpret and clarify news events with staged scenes as a re‐write man on a newspaper had with words to make sense out of a reporter’s notes. He used both professional and amateur actors to impersonate famous people on the screen, and then blended the staged scenes with real newsreel footage. In time, the series became so celebrated that real celebrities were persuaded to play themselves, re‐enacting events in which they had participated.

For its production of the “Atomic Power” episode in 1946, for example, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi and other leading scientists re‐enacted the roles they had played in the Manhattan Project. In one scene, James Conant and Vannevar Bush are shown lying on the sand in New Mexico, shaking hands after the successful explosion of the first atomic bomb. In reality, they had been photographed lying on the floor of a garage in Boston. The staging of scenes was never acknowledged on the screen although, of course, professional journalists and filmmakers were well aware of the techniques employed. By 1940 the series was so well known that it was parodied by Orson Welles in his production of CITIZEN KANE, including an imitation of the voice of Westbrook Van Voorhis, “The Voice of Time.”

Or for a more recent reference, think South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut with its ‘The March of War’ (Eat Snacky Smores) newsreels covering (and exacerbating) the growing anti-Canadian war fever.

This year to celebrate the 75th anniversary of ‘The March of Time’ series, the HBO Archives, the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and Turner Classic Movies (TCM) are collaborating on showings of the films. MoMA is grouping the newsreels by theme and showing them the first 10 days of September (pdf schedule) followed by panel discussions with experts on the archives.

If that doesn’t happen to be convenient, Sunday, September 5, Turner Classic Movies will air some of the most famous titles between 8:00 PM and midnight. Some of the newsreels aired will be: “Dust Bowl,” “Inside Nazi Germany” (showed in 1937, it was the first anti-Nazi program shown in the isolationist U.S.), “Youth in Crisis,” “Palestine Problem,” and “Problem Drinkers”. This is the first time TCM has ever shown these movies so fire up your DVRs.

You can read more about planned events, view and discuss clips on ‘The March of Time’ Facebook page.

In 2006, a team from the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust found a crate of ‘Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky’ under the floorboards of Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds on Ross Island, Antarctica. The whiskey was buried in solid ice along with 4 crates of brandy. Shackleton had brought the liquor with him on his 1907 Nimrod expedition and left it behind when he went home in 1909.

Whiskey connoisseurs got excited because the original recipe for this particular brew is lost, and given the optimal preservation conditions of Antarctic freeze, this could be the resurrection of a historical liquor. Gratification had to be delayed, however. The crate was frozen solid, embedded in the ice. It wasn’t until just a few months ago that the ice melted just enough for the crate of whiskey, still frozen solid, to be taken out. It was sent to the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, for very gradual defrosting and very ginger analysis.

It took them a month to fully thaw the crate, and today they finally opened the lid. (There are some fantastic pictures and details about the long thaw on Canterbury Museum’s The Great Whisky Crate Thaw website.)

Today in a painstakingly slow and careful manoeuvre, the crate was opened to reveal not 12 but 11 bottles of Scotch whisky, carefully wrapped in paper and straw to protect them from the rigours of a rough trip to the Southern Ocean in 1907.

One of the 11 bottles was not as full as the other 10 and it was suspected the twelfth bottle might have been drunk by a member of Shackleton’s crew of the Nimrod who could not resist the temptation.

The whisky is unlikely ever to be tasted and once samples have been extracted and sent to the Scottish distillery which took over the Mackinlay’s distillery many years ago, they will go back to their original home under the floor of Shackleton’s hut in Cape Royds on Ross Island near McMurdo Sound.

Whiskey expert Michael Milne was a witness to the opening. He notes that there was not much information on the label, so we don’t know if it’s a single or blended malt. Hopefully when Whyte and Mackay, the company that today owns the Mackinlay brand, get their clammy hands on the samples, they’ll be able to identify not just the basics like that but also recreate the full recipe.

Until then, nobody gets to take a sip, I’m afraid.

The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin owns the collection of David O. Selznick, the legendary producer of “Gone With The Wind.” There are 5,000 boxes of movie memorabilia in the collection, including 5 costumes worn by Vivien Leigh in the 1939 classic, including the now-iconic green velvet curtain dress.

The Ransom Center would like to put the costumes on display in its 2014 75th anniversary “Gone With The Wind” exhibit, but they need to raise $30,000 to restore and conserve the tattered gowns before they can be put on display and loaned to other museums.

“There are areas where the fabric has been worn through, fragile seams and other problems,” Morena said. “These dresses have been under a lot of stress.”

The Ransom Center acquired the costumes — including O’Hara’s green curtain dress, green velvet gown, burgundy ball gown, blue velvet night gown and her wedding dress — in the mid-1980s as part of the collection of “Gone With the Wind” producer David O. Selznick. By then, they had already been through decades of travelling displays in theatres and had been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“Film costumes weren’t meant to last,” Morena said. “They are only meant to last through the duration of filming. You won’t find them to be as finished as if you bought something off the rack.”

The green curtain dress in particular needs structural reinforcement for its loose seams. The green velvet dressing gown, burgundy ball gown, blue velvet peignoir and the wedding dress have all been abraded in areas and the fabric worn through.

To donate to the conservation of the Scarlett O’Hara dresses, go to the Harry Ransom Center website. The money will go towards restoring the gowns themselves and towards purchasing custom mannequins and protective housing so they can be displayed in controlled conditions, even on the road.

Filmmakers from the Platige Image studio in collaboration with historians from the Warsaw Uprising Museum have created a unique 3D documentary depicting the devastation of Warsaw in spring 1945, right after the end of the war in Europe.

Poland had been invaded by Nazi forces in 1939 and was occupied for 6 years. It was the German response to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising which inflicted much of the enormous damage on the city. The film was released on August 1 to mark the 66th anniversary of the beginning of the uprising.

It took 40 technicians 2 years to piece together just 5 minutes of aerial footage of the 1945 city. They first shot a contemporary view of the city from a helicopter, retracing the path that British Liberator bombers took over Warsaw when bringing supplies and weapons to the insurgents. Then they patched in images from 2,000 historical photographs and films to recreate 1945 Warsaw as accurately as possible.

Michal Gryn, from the Platige Image studio which made the film, said the team was not aware at first of the challenge before them in the form of the masses of documentary material they had to go through.

“It was a unique project to build a 3D model of authentic city ruins and make five minutes of film from it,” Gryn said. “I don’t think that anyone in the world has done this.” [...]

The result is a computer simulation that shows collapsed bridges along the Vistula River, whole districts of roofless, burned-out houses and the Warsaw Ghetto as a flat sea of rubble.

You need the polarized glasses to see the 3D movie (also you need be in Warsaw), but you can get a glimpse of the amazing aerial views in this trailer:

In November of 1943, the Berlin Tell Halaf Museum was hit with an incendiary bomb and went up in flames, all the artifacts made out of wood or gypsum were completely destroyed. Its monumental basalt statues and stele withstood the fire, but were shattered into thousands of pieces when firemen blasted the burning building with cold water.

Tell Halaf is a palace from the 3,000 year-old Aramaen civilization found in 1899 by German archaeologist and banking scion Max von Oppenheim in what is now northern Syria. Over the next 30 years (interrupted by a failed diplomatic career and a World War) and 2 excavation projects, Oppenheim scooped up all the artifacts he could ship to Berlin, eventually opening a museum dedicated to the finds.

After the firebombing, it was Oppenheim who persuaded Walter Andrae, the director of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Pergamon Museum, to salvage the 27,000 fragments that were all that remained of the basalt monuments. In August of 1944, they were able to recover 9 truckloads of basalt fragments and store them in the basement of the Pergamon Museum. Consider the wartime deprivations of 1944 Berlin and Oppenheim’s known Jewish heritage, it’s pretty amazing those fragments were preserved.

They remained collecting dust in the Pergamon basement until after the reunification of Germany. A 1993 survey of the rubble raised the first hopes that perhaps some of the larger fragments could be reassembled into a few of the sculptures. The restoration project, funded in part by several Oppenheim charities, didn’t start until 2001 but the near decade of hard work has paid off far more than anyone expected. A full 60 artifacts have been pieced together from 25,000 of the fragments. (The remaining 2000 couldn’t be fitted back in.)

“We didn’t know how far we’d get because we didn’t know how much of the original material was recovered from the destroyed museum,” added Stefan Geismeier, the project’s chief restorer.

The team considered using computers to sort out their giant puzzle, but costs were too great, results uncertain, and they needed to show sponsors quickly that they could actually put things back together again.

“At first we thought we’d just reconstruct the outer shells and fill out the inner parts with cement. But after a couple of years we’d developed such a feeling for the basalt structure that we could also refit the inner parts so that most of the artifacts are pretty much complete,” said Martin.

“But unlike an ordinary puzzle where things get easier as you get towards the end, things just got more and more difficult as left over pieces became ever more shapeless and we had to imagine where they might fit,” he said.

“That was our biggest difficulty,” agreed Geismeier.

Some pieces were as small as a fingernail, others weighed one and a half tonnes. One of the statues, a goddess, was broken into 1,800 pieces.

“And every artifact had to be put back together in a single operation” to ensure all the pieces fitted properly, Geismeier added.

I can’t believe it only took 10 years. These are some seriously Zen people.

You can read more about Tel Hallaf, the excavations and the restoration on the project website. The restored statues will go on display starting in January at the Pergamon Museum.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., opened a new exhibit on Saturday of 60 of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s most important prints. Munch was known to change an image repeatedly over years, altering colors, lines, details and always experimenting with a variety of print media. He was a master at woodcut, lithography, and intaglio, and made constant adjustments to vary the design and impression of even his most famous pieces.

The exhibit is divided into 5 sections, each section focusing on different aspects of Munch’s modifications, grouping thematically connected pieces together and allowing visitors to compare The Scream to The Scream and Madonna to Madonna.

The prints come from the National Gallery’s own collection and two privated collections: the Epstein Family Collection and the Collection of Catherine Woodard and Nelson Blitz Jr. These images have never all been collected and exhibited together before and won’t be seen anywhere else.

“Some are unique versions with coloring; they are extremely valuable, printed with different colors each time,” [Elizabeth Prelinger, an art history professor at Georgetown University] explained.

Among the master works, a series of eight Madonnas dated from 1895-1914.

The most famous is a Madonna depicted as a nude; in 1892 when it was sent to a show in Berlin it so shocked the public that the show was shut down.

“People were shocked, they felt it was virtually pornographic,” noted Prelinger, the co-curator.

Years later when he took part in a show in New York, in 1913, Munch sent off a sweeter, self-censored version of a similar Madonna.

The exhibit builds on new research on the exact dating of all the different impressions. It traces the original print made from a given woodblock, say, then pinpoints the future dates Munch printed from that woodblock making small alterations every time. Visitors will be able to see the evolution of Munch’s art and how he reinterpreted pieces in light of new ideas.

Edvard Munch: Master Prints will be open between July 31 and October 31, 2010.

When Howard Carter opened King Tut’s tomb in 1922, he found 4 chariots in the south-east corner of the antechamber (2 more were found in the treasury room). The chariots had been dismantled at the time of the King’s funeral. One of the chariots stood out not because of any elaborate decoration, but because of its lack thereof. Unlike the others, it was small, lightweight, and entirely undecorated. It also showed signs of regular use, again unlike the other more ornamental chariots.

Carter deduced from its open design that it was used for hunting and/or quotidian exercise. Since a recent study of the king’s mummy found that he suffered from a severe leg fracture right above the knee from a fall taken shortly before his death. Septicemia from the injury might have contributed to his death, and he could even have been hunting with this chariot when he took that fatal tumble.

There’s no way of knowing, of course. Still, it adds a little spice to the artifact which for the first time in its long life has left Egypt and is now winging its way to New York City where it will be added to the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit at the Discovery Times Square Exposition.

The chariot will arrive in New York on Wednesday, accompanied by a conservator and the Director of the Luxor Museum, where the chariot is permanently displayed.