Month: December 2009

1,000 letters and postcards by Joan Miró to be published

Books, Modern(ish)

Joan Miró, "Le Coq"The Joan Miró Foundation is publishing the for the first time over 1,000 letters and postcards written by artist Joan Miró to a wide variety of correspondents over the course of his life.

Joan Miró was a Surrealist painter and sculptor who garned huge fame in his lifetime. He rejected the Surrealist label which he saw as another imprint of bourgeois hierarchy. His correspondence is bound to be packed with great insights and pithy phrasing. He once famously declared himself dedicated to the “assassination of painting” and said about Picasso and Cubists that he wanted to “break their guitar.”

These letters enable us to follow the course of Miró’s life from his early years as an artist, his departure for Paris, the strategies of the 1920s, the splendour of the 1930s, the cultural wilderness of the Franco years, and the desire to start again with renewed energy after the end of the Second World War. They show the private side of the artist, a man dedicated body and soul to his art, with deeply rooted ethical, aesthetic and political convictions. They are essential reading for any study of his life and work.

We have Miró himself to thank for this. He was careful to preserve his sketches, drawings, notes, studies, anything at all pertaining to his art. He also kept every letter he received, and at some point realized he should keep copies of what he sent as well.

He donated his remarkable archives to the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, and a team of researchers has now edited the correspondence collection for publication.

Joan Miro's correspondence

More Google Street View tourism

Ancient, Modern(ish), Multimedia

Commenting on my entry about walking the streets of Pompeii using Google Maps Street View, Stuart of Free History Books asked if I knew of any other sites of archaeological note which could be browsed in Street View.

I said I’d look into and so I have. Not only are there other historical wonderlands available for virtual tourism, but Google and UNESCO have an ongoing collaboration to upload as many World Heritage Sites to Google Maps Street View as possible. So far they have 18 sites ready to roll, including Stonehenge, Santiago de Compostela, and the historic center of San Gimignano, a walled medieval wonderland of towers in Tuscany.

Just click the “Select location” dropdown menu and pick your destination. Then drag the little yellow guy from the zoom controls onto the map to talk a stroll.

Going forward, Google plans to add Street View data from many more countries.

In the coming months Google will work with UNESCO to select additional World Heritage landmarks, in countries where Street View imagery is being collected, which will be photographed for the project. The aim is to collect imagery from diverse regions throughout the world including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, US and many countries throughout Europe. With permission from the site manager/owner such places look set to one day be available to millions of people around the world who may never have the chance to visit them in person.

May that day come sooner rather than later. :boogie:

There are hundreds more World Heritage sites already on Google Maps (click the “Discover more World Heritage sites” button under the “Select location” dropdown to see them all), but they’re just in satellite view, which of course can be very cool in and of itself, but doesn’t give you that same being in the middle of things vibe.

Speaking of which, I feel like walking in the footsteps of the Druids right about now.


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Adopt a Dot!

Modern(ish), Museums

The Art Institute of Chicago has the most adorable conservation program. In honor of the 125th birthday of Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884, the Art Institute is putting up six different colors of dots from the painting for adoption.

The six options are light blue, red, green, pink, dark blue and black. The descriptions on the Art Institute are just too cute. A couple of my favorites:

Light Blue
I don’t want to brag, but some people say I set the entire scene of La Grande Jatte. You can find me nearly everywhere—working hard to give the sky its radiance, rippling through the water with a soft summer breeze. But I’m not always so obvious. Did you know I’m also a little dog’s collar and the smoke of a pipe? That’s right; I can be subtle too! Look for me in the shade under the brim of a hat, keeping cool and refreshed on this sunny day.

Red
I am bold; there is no way around it! My presence is not for the faint of heart, and I work best when used in small doses to create bright bursts of color and contrast. Found in an umbrella, an overcoat, and tiny specks on the tip of a little dog’s tail, I bring life and a bit of mystery to the scene! Look for me in the lake on the rower’s hats and in the tiny flag on top of a sailboat.

You can adopt one dot for $10, three dots for $25 and all six colors for $50. Just fill out and submit this form to become a proud parent of a precious tiny dot. You can also adopt a dot as a gift. You’ll get a button with your dot and a card describing the location of your dot on the painting. The deadline has passed, I’m afraid, for guaranteed delivery of dot adoption button and card by Christmas, but you can get them in person if you’re in Chicago.

All the funds will go towards conservation costs for this spectacular piece of art and for other pieces in the museum. Seurat was a great innovator and experimented with the chemical makeup of color as much as he did with color theory. He used a newly-invented pigment called zinc yellow for the sun-drenched area of lawn, and it was already beginning to degrade during his lifetime. In the next 125 years, a lot of that yellow turned brown, so the painting really needs constant tending.

Adopting a dot from A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte is joining a great art historical and pop culture family. It caused a revolution in the late 19th century and its principles are the same ones used in 4-color printing today. The painting has been the star of a Stephen Sondheim musical (Sunday in the Park with George), a featured player in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and even recreated by Barney in an episode of The Simpsons.

Adopt a dot!

Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat

French King’s mistress overdosed on gold

Renaissance

Diane de Poitiers at her bath, François Clouet, c. 1571Diane de Poitier was King Henry II’s mistress in the 16th century. She was a renown beauty, athletic and intelligent. She kept Henry’s interest until his death, despite being 20 years older than him.

Perhaps that age difference is one of the reasons she seems to have sought an elixir of youth from apothecaries. Unfortunately for Diane, said apothecaries held to the alchemical principle that gold is the immutable and perfect element. If you want to retain your youthful perfection, therefore, ingesting some form of gold would seem to be the way to go.

A contemporary of hers historian, soldier and biographer Pierre de Bourdeille, said she was beautifully pale even without makeup, that she looked 30 when she was twice that age and took a daily dose of gold to achieve this remarkable effect. It’s only recently that anyone has been able to use modern chemical analysis to confirm his story.

Jaw bone fragment superimposed on Diane de Poitiers' last portraitDiane de Poitier died in her chateau Anet in 1566. She was buried in an elaborate tomb in a funeral chapel, but her remains were removed and thrown into a pit outside the chateau walls during the French Revolution.

Last year some of her bones were found, confirmed as hers by a healed united fracture of the tibia and fibula which she was known to have sustained during a riding accident in 1565. The remaining jaw bone also matched perfectly the last portrait of her from the school of François Clouet.

Now French scientists have analyzed tissue and hair remnants and found an extremely high concentration of gold, 500 times greater than in a lock of hair from her younger days preserved at the chateau. She didn’t wear crowns or gold fabric every day so the gold wasn’t externally applied. They also found her bones were fragile — unexpectedly so for an athletic woman who swam and rode daily — and her hair was thin and brittle. Both of those are symptoms of gold poisoning.

The British Medical Journal which has published the study has an informative video about Diane de Poiters and her gold habit here. Much to my disappointment, the BMJ is not immune to the tedious trend of historical reenactments cluttering up a documentary, but there’s a lot of great info about the science in amidst shadowy scenes of Diane looking in mirrors or visiting an alchemist.

Huge ancient pylon lifted from Alexandria harbor

Ancient, Treasures

Isis temple pylon being raised from the Alexandria harborEgyptian authorities lifted a nine-ton block of red granite thought to have been part of a pillar of the Temple of Isis in Alexandria out of the sea today.

The temple was part of a large Pharaonic palace complex from the Ptolemaic dynasty. It was in this sea-side palace that Cleopatra trysted with Marc Anthony, although the pylon most likely predates Cleopatra herself.

The block is the first major artefact extracted from the harbour since 2002, when authorities banned further removal of major objects from the sea for fear it would damage them.

It was discovered by a Greek expedition in 1998.

To retrieve it, divers had to spend weeks cleaning it of mud and scum before dragging it across the sea floor for three days to bring it closer to the harbour’s edge.

The plan is to keep it in a freshwater tank for 6 months to dissolve all the sea salt. It helps pickle artifacts when they’re underwater, but once they’re dredged up, the salt becomes a corrosive. Once the conservation process is over, the Isis pylon will be housed in a temporary downtown museum along with 200 other objects raised from the harbor over the past couple of decades.

In the long term, the plans are far more ambitious. It’s still in the planning stages, but Egypt and UNESCO are collaborating to create an underwater museum complete with tunnels that would allow to visitors to explore the ruins of the old city, felled by earthquakes in the 4th century.

Marine archaeologists have already found 6,000 artifacts under the harbor in Alexandria, including dozens of sphinxes and pieces of what they think is the famous Pharos, the lighthouse that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The underwater museum would also have an above ground building, which is where the Isis pylon would be displayed permanently. Mind you, nobody’s even sure this is strictly feasible. Not only is the projected cost a challenging $140 million which neither Egypt nor UNESCO actually has right at the mo, but the technical obstacles of building an underwater museum in a harbor known for ship-destroying storms and city-destroying earthquakes will be hard to surmount.